Best Free Website Builders:

We Expose Their Strengths and Weaknesses

best free website builder

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Creating a website has become a fun, relatively pain-free experience in recent years. Forget coding, cryptic words like HTML and FTP. These days, the main challenge is to find the right website builder among the enormous selection available on the market.

 

As you can guess, plenty of site builders offer free plans for you to build your own website. And because they are hosted in the cloud, you don’t even have to worry about webspace. All you need is a computer and a web browser like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

Sounds like a pretty good deal, right? But it’s worth taking a closer look at the web builders’ pros and cons. We decided to save you some work and do it for you in this research.

https://www.bluehost.com/track/tarekhadedy456/

 

Table of Contents   

Free Website Builders: Our Favorites

Video introduction: our 4 favorite free website builders

Free Website Builders: Find your favorite with 5 simple questions! (Updated Jan. 2022)

The full list: 21 Free Website Builders

Free Site Builders: Table

How do I create a free website step by step?

Who really pays for these plans?

What about domain names in free websites?

Can I get free email addresses, too?

Are there any other downsides of free website builders?

What about SEO?

Is it possible to create an online store too?

Conclusion

Free Website Builders: Our Favorites

Here’s our list of the 10 best free website builders:

 

1. Webnode – Modern Editor with Some Limitations

2. Wix – Excellent Business Features

3. Ucraft – Connect Your Domain for Free!

4. Weebly – A Great Website Builder with One Downside

5. Webstarts – Access to (Almost) All Features

6. Site123 – Easy as 1-2-3?

7. Jimdo – Website Editing Powered by AI

8. GoDaddy – The Easy All-Rounder

9. Webflow – An Editor That Feels like a Cockpit

10. Mozello – Free Multilingual Websites

 

Who wrote this guide?

 

This guide was researched and written by Robert Brandl and his team of digital experts, including Josep Garcia and Inka Wibowo. We’ve tried out all the providers we mention in here and continuously update the article. You are welcome to leave a comment if you have any questions or found anything that’s inaccurate.

 

Quick note: if you have been to review sites similar to ours, you may have noticed that our list contains website builders you won’t often find elsewhere. The reason is simple: companies like Ucraft, Webstarts, or Zoho don’t pay huge commissions, but still have interesting free offerings. At Tooltester you can always be sure you get the full picture.

 

Video introduction: our 4 favorite free website builders

In only 4 minutes we’ll show you our top picks:

 

 

Found your favorite? Try out Webnode, Ucraft, Wix or Weebly.

 

Now it’s time to find the website builder that is right for you!

 

Feel give our Smart Finder Tool a try, which will determine the best free website builder for you in 5 questions. Or you simply scroll down and read the profiles.

 

Free Website Builders: Find your favorite with 5 simple questions! (Updated Jan. 2022)

The full list: 21 Free Website Builders

And here’s the full lineup of 21 free site builders including pros and cons. The ranking is based on criteria like designs, the size of the ad, website functionality and SEO options.

 

1. Webnode – Modern Editor with Some Limitations

webnode

https://www.bluehost.com/track/tarekhadedy456/

 

A while ago Webnode completely revamped their editor, making it very modern. The themes they added are stylish and responsive. A pity you can’t choose a completely new theme after your initial choice. Working with Webnode is very intuitive and also here (surprise) you have the option of upgrading to a paid plan. Webnode is not the most feature-rich site builder ever, but it covers the basics pretty well: contact forms, Google Maps integration, plenty of themes and very decent SEO options.

 

Webnode offers a low-cost variant at $3.90 per month (which they fittingly call Limited) essentially allowing you to use a domain name you already own and to contact their premium support. The small ad will stay with this option. Unfortunately, there is no ecommerce option in the free plan and also the blog is very basic.

 

Screenshots:

https://www.bluehost.com/track/tarekhadedy456/

 

The URL you will get for free: customname.webnode.com

 

Our demo website: Coffee Shop

 

What we liked: the non-intrusive ad of the free plan and their selection of stylish, responsive templates. There’s no page limit and SEO settings can be changed for all pages.

 

Where they should improve: adding/improving their features (blog, ecommerce). Also, storage isn’t very generous, at only 100 MB in the free plan. Also, there is no app store for additional site features.

 

Webnode Video Review

 

 

Free Trial: webnode.com

 

Detailed Webnode Review

 

2. Wix – Excellent Business Features

wix

 

The biggest of them all is Wix. They have more users than any other site builder, and it’s easy to see why. It’s packed with unique features and great templates. According to our tests, it’s the best website builder to create a paid site – but what about a free one? Does it fare just as well in this arena?

 

Well, it depends on what you are looking for. It’s great that they hardly have any restrictions on the free plan in terms of features and templates. On desktop computers, they place a pretty visible ad at the top of your website that is sticky (i.e. it will stay even when you start scrolling the page). Fortunately, on mobile phones, it far less visible and also not sticky.

 

Next to the classic Wix editor you can also give ADI (artificial design intelligence) a try. ADI is an alternative web creator that uses a series of questions about your project to create your website automatically. Definitely an interesting approach for beginners and also completely free to use.

 

Only if you want to use a custom domain name or go ad-free, you’ll need the Combo plan at least, which is $14 per month.

 

https://www.bluehost.com/track/tarekhadedy456/

 

 

What we liked: their spectacular selection of themes and the flexibility of their drag and drop editor. Also, they have an extensive app market and 500MB free webspace. No page limit. Full SEO customization, free SEO tools (SEO Wiz), and plenty of free apps in Wix’s App Market. In terms of functionality, it’s definitely the strongest free website builder.

 

Where they should improve: the Wix ad is very visible and should not be sticky. Also, the free URL is far too long and not easy to remember, unfortunately.

 

Wix Video Review

https://www.bluehost.com/track/tarekhadedy456/

 

3. Ucraft – Connect Your Domain for Free!

ucraft

This is an interesting product as they are the only ones that allow you to connect an existing domain name for free! They also include SSL security at no extra cost but note that you will be limited to 15 pages on the free plan. Their cheapest paid plan is called Pro, starts at $10 per month and includes pro features such as multilingual sites.

 

Ucraft is a relatively advanced website builder, allowing you to fine-tune your styles such as fonts, colors, and spacings. Overall, we found it more complicated, though, than other free website builders as the editor isn’t quite as self-explanatory.

 

Let’s hope that this business model can work long-term. They are giving away quite a lot for free (which is great!) but it makes us wonder if this is sustainable.

 

Ucraft Screenshots

The URL you will get for free: customname.ucraft.net

 

Our demo website: Wedding RSVP (runs on a custom domain name)

 

What we liked: the ability to connect a proper domain name for free (which is unique!). Their free templates look pretty modern and there is a decent selection available. Their support was helpful and the size of the advert on free websites is acceptable. SSL and unlimited storage (!) is included in free sites.

https://www.bluehost.com/track/tarekhadedy456/

Where they should improve: you are limited to only the Basic Elements in the free plan. That excludes anything to do with articles, social media or ecommerce. The editor was sometimes a bit slow loading and felt a little buggy (but nothing too bad) and generally more complicated than other

site builders. The page limit is 15, and you won’t be able to use the SEO options.

 

https://www.bluehost.com/track/tarekhadedy456/

 

4. Weebly – A Great Website Builder with One Downside

weebly

Weebly is one of the largest site creators out there and hits the top spots in our ranking table. But since we are mainly looking at the free plans here, we have to judge our contestant with slightly different criteria. The free plan is where Weebly doesn’t shine quite as bright, mainly due to the very visible ad in the website’s footer that even sports a mouseover effect.

https://www.bluehost.com/track/tarekhadedy456/

 

weebly ad

In general though, it’s a very decent product, which offers great usability thanks to the drag and drop editor. There’s even an App Center with additional features. Paid plans start at $6 per month.

The URL you will get for free: customname.weebly.com

 

Our demo website: Yoga Business

 

What we liked: their responsive themes and the app center with third-party add-ons. Also, there’s 500MB of free webspace. No limit on pages. SEO settings can be edited for all pages.

 

Where they should improve: the only downside is the very visible footer ad. Oh, and the cookie notice they show is just as annoying there is no way to switch it off (also it interferes with Google Analytics visitor tracking).

https://www.bluehost.com/track/tarekhadedy456/

 

Weebly Video Review

5. Webstarts – Access to (Almost) All Features

WebStarts free website builder

When it comes to Marketing, Webstarts is not exactly shy. With almost 4m users, they claim to be the #1 Rated Free Website Builder (without actually saying who rated them). To be fair, Webstarts’ free plan is a solid choice. It includes access to all the important features such as the blog, and you can even activate the online store.

The product feels similar to Wix – in that all the elements can be moved around quite freely. In the feature and template departments, though, you’ll find a lot less variety. They also added an AI-based editor next to the classic one. But trying out the ‘artificial intelligence‘ builder left me with a rather ugly site. It’s a great idea to offer such an assistant, but it still needs a bit of work I would say.

https://www.bluehost.com/track/tarekhadedy456/

 

The URL you will get for free: customname.webstarts.com

 

Our demo website: Business Coaching

 

What we liked: Generous 1GB storage space, online store includes 10 products for free, SEO settings can be edited for all pages. The footer advertisement isn’t very intrusive and can be closed by your website’s visitors (it doesn’t disappear when scrolling though).

 

Where they should improve: The templates are a bit hit-and-miss, although you definitely can find a few nice ones. And while it’s not a terrible editor, in many respects it feels a bit old-school and not as modern as Wix or Jimdo, for example. The renewal rate for paid plans isn’t exactly clear, a bit more transparency would go a long way.