Free site setup

It creates a basic site for you, which you can then customize. While this certainly makes it quicker and easier to set up, it also gives you less control over the look and feel of your website. You pick the type of website you want from 16 different categories including portfolio, blog, music and CV , before being presented with a default website design. Although you can amend the default design to some extent, SITE scored poorly for design flexibility overall 2. The result is an unprofessional, impossible to remember domain that looks like this: 5ffe3.

One of the first things we noticed about creating a website with Strikingly was how friendly it feels. It has a fun, friendly feel to it, along with a simple and uncomplicated editor.

Anyone could build a site with Strikingly, and quickly too! Strikingly would have scored higher in our ease of use testing if it offered more control — our users wished for a more intuitive editor with more creative freedom.

Strikingly creates one-page websites with a pre-formed design of your choice. The first thing you do is choose your template. Unlike many other free website builders, you can change your template as many times as you wish once your site is live. Customization is pretty limited — when building our test site, we would have liked a little more control over our page layout.

You can also only build one-page websites on the free plan. Read our Strikingly Review for an in-depth look at this top free website maker! Webflow is by far an ideal choice for web designers and those who can handle large amounts of customization. This website builder definitely has web designers in mind. Instead of the usual drag and drop functionality that Wix and Squarespace offer, Webflow works with padding and section block areas. This will be a pretty familiar format for users who are used to large amounts of customization but, to a beginner, this may be quite an overwhelming design process.

The building process did take a couple of hours because of how different it is to the popular drag and drop editor that Wix offers.

Thankfully, Webflow has a virtual design assistant which gives you an in-depth demo into how everything works before it leaves you to it! Ability to drag elements — although Webflow is designed with web designers in mind, it would be useful to include drag and drop editor functionality so that it is more beginner-friendly!

Webflow relies pretty heavily on the use of short keys and right-clicking to remove or add elements, which makes the design process a lot more streamlined. You do get thrown into navigating the dashboard which can be slightly daunting at first. With both free and premium templates, Webflow does a good job of identifying which templates are going to be better for your individual requirements.

Although, there is no actual search functionality which limits the amount of templates on view and whether it accomodates for a certain industry. Usually website builders have a set of templates for the blogging industry, for example, which provides a good indication as to what works for you. This is something Webflow could definitely include to make the overall user experience much more enjoyable.

Your domain name will look something like this lucyscupcakes. Site has an ecommerce plan that is much better suits for growing traffic and marketing tools. Account Plan offers two choices of either Individual or Team plans. You can kind of figure out which features these both entail! With Teams, you can collaborate with other team members with a shared dashboard, and is a lot more customizable.

Webnode is a popular choice of free website maker with more than 30 million users around the world. You can move elements around, but they will conform to predetermined designs. For example, if you move an image from the middle of the page to the right, the page design will change to accommodate this, rather than simply letting you drop the image where you want it.

It lends itself really well to building simple, minimalist sites — we recommend it for events websites rather than, say, business websites. One of the big drawbacks to Webnode is the limited storage you get on the free plan.

You only receive MB storage, which is five times less than most of the other builders on our list. The domain we got for our cupcake website looked like this: lucy-s-cupcakes0. Most of its templates have visuals taking up most of the page — This means its ideal for ecommerce websites that really want to show off their products! A Ucraft watermark is attached to all free websites — you can remove this when upgrading to Pro plan! The image-driven platform lets you showcase your products or services in a bold fashion from large visuals, to flashy fonts.

The main focus on aesthetics really makes this builder enjoyable for the user! The onboarding process for Ucraft is pretty straightforward. When signing up, you get asked to choose your template and to type in your business name — Ucraft then gets to work creating your site. Without a drag and drop editor, it was little more difficult to move elements around the page! The design process was, overall, super fun to play around with and you can achieve a lot of page character when using Ucraft.

With Ucraft being a very image-driven builder, its templates are really focused on large images covering the page, rather than text. Ucraft templates are pretty slick and clear with minimal content — the visuals are clearly doing all the talking! Although this may sound pricey, Ucraft does have a pretty good value for money with the array of features you get in return. You can select either the Pro Website plan which is its most popular plan , Pro Shop, or Unlimited plan.

SimpleSite lets you easily edit your site from your mobile. Its mobile editor in particular is a great feature for those on the go. If you want a builder that walks you through setting up the different parts of your website step by step, then you might enjoy using SimpleSite.

Its onboarding process uses an animated beaver character to guide you through setting up each page, before you get to enter the main editor. SimpleSite has a very thorough onboarding process, where it walks you through each step of setting up your website before you even reach the editor. SimpleSite is a mobile delight. It has a really impressive specialism — it gives you the ability to create a website to the same extent as on a desktop, but from your mobile device.

As part of the setup process, you have to choose your website layout. There were only two options to choose from, which felt extremely limiting — especially compared to builders like Wix and Weebly! Showing the mobile preview alongside the desktop view is a nice touch, but more template choice would be even better! You can sell up to five products on the free plan, and your site will be mobile optimized, too.

However, you have limited design options, and will need to upgrade if you want to remove adverts — as well as get rid of that page limit. However, there are some big downsides.

SimpleSite has two premium plans, and both are pretty expensive for what they offer. Free website builders may have once seemed too good to be true, but we set out to demonstrate that this is not always the case. A question we often get asked is just how do these free website builders make their money? Is there something sketchy going on? That said, there are some elements that you should pay close attention to when deciding on which free website builder you choose.

To create this ranking of the best free website builders, we drew upon our extensive research and user testing for each website builder as a whole, and combined this with a specific focus on their free plans, paying close attention to whether or not the builder ticked these boxes:. Our screenshots should help you evaluate the ads of each website builder, and decide on the least intrusive option for you. Most free website builders have a cap on the amount of content you can upload to your site.

If you need to sell through your free website builder, this limits your options a little. The process and learning curve differ slightly from builder to builder, but here are the steps you can expect:.

This process could take anything from 15 minutes to a few hours, depending on how much you switch up in steps three and four. Again, yoursite. As your site grows and your traffic increases, you may find you simply outgrow your free plan.

You may need to upgrade to have enough storage, and so that enough people can access your site at once. Many paid plans offer unlimited storage and bandwidth, so you can have total peace of mind. The features and tools needed to take your business or hobby to the next level will often be waiting for you in that premium plan, so make sure you at least take a look!

Our list of the top 10 free website builders ranks Wix as the best all-around builder, with tons of free features. Just remember that free website builders nearly always limit the features and functions that are available to you — you may be ok with this now, but it could prove extremely frustrating further down the line.

While we always recommend making the most of free plans to build, play, and experiment with different builders, we never recommend staying on a free plan forever. In the meantime, enjoy trying out your favorite free builders — come back and let us know which one you liked the most!

Another way for website builders to make money is through advertising on your site the ads can be removed by upgrading your plan. Free websites are not very SEO-friendly because you cannot connect a personalized domain. Yes — website builders make it super easy to create professional looking sites for no money at all. With these free platforms you get most of the features you need to get your site up and running, but, of course, upgrading your plans gives you access to better tools.

You can upgrade to a paid premium plan whenever you want to. Doing so will provide you with far more tools, templates, storage space, and other important features for growing your website.

Yes, they are totally free to use. The Plug-In Profit Site will always hold a special place in my heart as the first system that ever made me money online. It was entirely responsible for the first ever Paycheck I received from my internet efforts! Even as I am writing this, I received an email telling me that I made a new sale! Thanks again Stone for creating the Plug-In Profit Site system and giving me new found hope that I really can earn a living online!

First, you'll want to join the 5 affiliate programs listed below if you're not a member of them already. Yes, these are the SAME 5 programs that send me checks every month!

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No Inventory to buy. No selling involved. I have personally sponsored hundreds of affiliates with GDI and tremendous success has come from that. The business is easy, simple and profitable. You can be next! I love SFI for a lot of reasons. They pay me big checks each month for very little effort So if you're a little cash strapped this month, this is one you can get started with that won't cost you any money out of pocket I'm not the only one making a great income in SFI.

In fact, I have personally helped thousands of people build their own SFI business online. SFI is global and pays affiliates in over countries around the world. Here's a look inside SFI's home office with stacks of commission checks being prepared to send monthly:. They actually have millions of affiliates all over the world. Here's what it looks like A little healthy and good-spirited competition is a good thing, right!

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This means visitors that turn into subscribers that turn into sales. None have yet to produce the quantity but more so quality prospects and business partners as the Plug-In Profit Site system! I would recommend the Plug-In Profit Site to the newbies or even the seasoned veterans, like us. Over the top - turn key simple is what it is! Here's some recent feedback from the founder of Traffic Authority who is talking about how my service has helped Traffic Authority members and affiliates make money through the Traffic Authority reseller program:.

The proven system and step-by-step training Stone Evans has developed for helping our members make money with the Traffic Authority opportunity is one of the best I've seen! Don't delay and miss your chance You can start earning multiple streams of income online today!

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You can let fear and skepticism hold you back, or believe in yourself and start a profitable business TODAY! The 5th program is Builderall. Builderall is a company that provides everything needed to run a small business online or build a seven-figure Internet empire. Get Started. A stepping stone to your powerful website. Start with one of dozens of free WordPress themes and customize it with your content and brand.

Your visitors will enjoy a fast, seamless experience on any device. You can get even more site tools with a WordPress. Embed image galleries, presentations, and spreadsheets. Enjoy hassle-free updates, spam protection, and reliable hosting on servers spread across multiple data centers.

Get support when you need it through our user community forums. You can stay on WordPress. As you grow and succeed, our plans will enable your site to scale with your needs. Create your free site. A free website builder that scales with your needs. No need to hire a web developer for that. You can get help from here for free or you can hire thousands of WordPress developers from here. In fact, I built WebsiteSetup.

WebsiteSetup Homepage. WebsiteSetup Blog Page. Full Disclosure : This guide is reader-supported. If you click on our links, we may earn a commission. Thanks for supporting us. The WordPress platform itself is free, but hosting and domain name are not.

In order to look professional, you need to have your own domain name, instead of having a free domain that belongs to someone else for example, yourbusiness. So save yourself some money and get a proper web host. With your own domain name, you are also able to get a professional email account s like, yourname YourWebsite.

Already have a domain name and hosting? Domain names usually end with. My best advice? Avoid the unusual extensions and go with. For example, if you make a site about poetry then best-poetry-website. Short, punchy and clear domain names are much easier to remember. If your domain name is too fuzzy, too long or spelled in a strange way, visitors may forget it. You want a domain name that rolls off the tongue, describes what you or your business does and sticks in the head.

Do some brainstorming to come up with a unique domain name that reflects your future website, business or blog. Secure your web hosting and domain name. For this, I recommend using Bluehost.