Best Free Website Builders for Small Business 2026: 8 Compared

Bottom line: Wix, WordPress.com, Google Sites, Weebly, Carrd, Webador, Site123 and Strikingly all offer free plans in 2026, but only Google Sites and Carrd let you use a real custom domain without paying, and every single one of the others puts the platform's name in your web address until you upgrade. If you want a website that makes a small business look established, free is a starting point, not a destination, and you should know that before you spend a Sunday building one.

Related reading: separate google analytics account for each website.

Related reading: Where to Get AI Headshots for Free in 2026 (and What Free Really Produ.

Why "free website builder" is a slipperier phrase than it looks

I get asked this question at least once a month, usually by someone who's just started a business and is trying to spend nothing on a website in month one. Fair enough, I did the same thing when I started out. But here's what nobody tells you upfront: "free" almost always means one of two things. Either your web address will have the platform's brand stapled to it (yourbusiness.wixsite.com/yourbusiness, or yourbusiness.wordpress.com), or your site will carry the platform's own advertising on every page, sometimes both. Neither is a dealbreaker for a hobby project. Both are a problem if you're trying to win the trust of a customer who's comparing you to three other local businesses and judging you in about four seconds.

I've tested and rebuilt sites on most of these tools over the years, for myself and for clients, and the pattern is always the same. Free plans exist to get you hooked on the builder, not to give you a professional website forever. That's a completely reasonable business model on their part. It's just not how most of the marketing copy around "free website builders" frames it, and I think that's worth saying plainly rather than dancing around it.

The 8 compared

1. Wix

Wix's free plan gives you a subdomain (yourname.wixsite.com/yourname), 500MB of storage, and a small Wix ad banner on your site. You get access to Wix's drag-and-drop editor and its AI-assisted setup tool, which asks you a handful of questions and builds a rough draft site in minutes. No custom domain, no ecommerce, no removing the ads. To get a real domain you need the Light plan, which starts at roughly £10 a month billed annually. Wix is the best-looking free option out of the box and the easiest for someone who's never built a website before. I've compared it directly against Squarespace for online stores in a separate piece if you're weighing the two for retail, and the short version is Wix wins on ease, Squarespace wins on design polish. See the full Squarespace vs Wix comparison if that's the decision you're facing.

2. WordPress.com

Not to be confused with self-hosted WordPress.org, which isn't free once you add hosting. The free WordPress.com plan gives you a wordpress.com subdomain, 1GB of storage, WordPress.com's own ads on your pages, and a very limited set of themes with no custom CSS and no plugins. It's fine for a blog. It's a poor fit for a business site because you can't install the plugins that make WordPress useful, like booking forms or SEO tools. Upgrading to the Personal plan for a custom domain runs about £3 to £4 a month, and you'll want the Business plan (closer to £20 a month) before plugins unlock.

3. Google Sites

This is the one people forget exists, and it's useful for a certain type of business. Google Sites is free with any Google account, has no ads, and if your business already uses Google Workspace (from about £5.20 per user per month), you can point a real custom domain at it with no extra fee. The design options are basic, deliberately so, but it integrates cleanly with Google Docs, Sheets, Calendar and Forms, which makes it a decent choice for a simple service business that mainly needs a booking form, an address, and opening hours. It will never win a design award. It will also never nag you to upgrade.

4. Weebly (now Square Online)

Weebly was folded into Square's ecosystem a while back, and the free plan now sits under Square Online. You get a Weebly or Square subdomain, Square branding on the site, and basic ecommerce with a 2.9% plus 30p transaction fee on card payments even on the free tier. If you already take payments through Square in person, this is worth a look because your inventory and payments sync automatically. Outside that use case, it's a middling option.

5. Carrd

Carrd is the outlier on this list and it's the one I recommend most often for a specific job: a single-page site for a freelancer, a coach, or a business that just needs a professional landing page while a bigger site gets built. The free plan allows up to three sites, and unlike nearly everyone else on this list, Carrd's free tier lets you connect a real custom domain. No subdomain forced on you. There's still a small Carrd credit in the footer, and you're limited to one page per site, but for £16 a year you remove the branding and unlock more features on the Pro plan. If your entire "website" need right now is a single page with your services, a contact form, and a booking link, Carrd will get you there for free, which is rarer than it should be.

6. Webador

Formerly known as onOffice, Webador's free plan includes a Webador subdomain, ads, and 500MB of storage, with a straightforward editor aimed at people who find Wix's options overwhelming. It's a reasonable second choice if you've tried Wix and found the editor fiddly. Custom domain and ad removal require the Start plan, around £5.50 a month.

7. Site123

Site123 is built for speed rather than customisation. You answer a short setup wizard, pick a template, and it's largely done. Free plan comes with a Site123 subdomain, ads, and 500MB storage. It's fine for a one-page business card style site and one of the fastest to launch, but you'll hit the ceiling of what it can do within a week if your business needs anything beyond text, images and a contact form.

8. Strikingly

Strikingly's free plan is built around a single scrolling page, which suits a portfolio, a personal brand, or a very small service business. You get a Strikingly subdomain and branding, and the design templates lean modern and mobile-first, which matters because most of your visitors will be on a phone anyway. Paid plans start around £14 a month for a custom domain and more storage.

What I tell clients to do (a step-by-step, not a lecture)

Here's the process I run through with a small business owner who's starting from nothing, and it takes about twenty minutes:

• Step 1: Decide if you need one page or several. A tradesperson, coach, or freelancer usually needs one good page. A shop, a clinic, or a multi-service business needs several.
• Step 2: If it's one page, use Carrd. You get a real domain for free, which matters more than any template design choice you'll make.
• Step 3: If it's several pages and you want the least friction, use Wix's free plan to get the structure right, then budget £10 to £16 a month to move to a paid plan within the first month or two, once you know the site is staying.
• Step 4: If your business already runs on Google Workspace, skip the builder debate entirely and use Google Sites with your existing custom domain. It's free, it's ad-free, and it's already connected to your calendar and forms.
• Step 5: Buy your domain name on day one, even before the site is finished, from a registrar rather than the builder itself if you can, because builder-sold domains are sometimes 20 to 40% more expensive to renew after year one.

The bit nobody wants to say out loud about free plans

I had a client, a wedding florist near Tunbridge Wells, who built her first site on Wix's free plan back in 2023 because a friend had recommended it and she couldn't justify spending money before she'd booked a single wedding. Smart move at the time. The problem came eighteen months later when the business had grown, she had thirty five-star Google reviews linked to that free subdomain, and she wanted to move to a paid plan with a custom domain to match her new Instagram handle. Wix doesn't let you carry a free-plan site's URL history cleanly into a domain change without some redirect work, and she'd never set up analytics, so she had no record of which pages were driving her enquiries. She lost roughly two months of organic search visibility rebuilding what had already been working, simply because nobody had told her that the free plan was always meant to be temporary scaffolding, not a foundation.

That's the part most comparisons of free website builders skip. They'll tell you the storage limits and the ad placements, but they won't tell you that moving off a free plan later is more work than starting on a paid one from the start, if you already know the business is going to survive past month three. If you're testing an idea, free is right. If you already have a name, a logo, and a plan to run adverts, spending £8 to £15 a month from day one will save you a rebuild later.

There's also a quieter cost that never shows up in these comparison tables: a subdomain URL is a small but real signal to a customer that you might not be around next year. I've watched people choose a competitor purely because the competitor's website "looked like a proper business" and theirs was a Wix subdomain with a banner ad. Nobody says this out loud in a sales conversation, but it happens in the four seconds before someone clicks away.

When free is the right call, no caveats

I don't want this to read as "never use a free plan," because that's not true. Free is the right call when:

• You're validating an idea and don't yet know if there's demand.
• You need a one-page presence for a side project, a personal brand, or a portfolio, in which case Carrd does the job with no compromise on the domain.
• Your business is entirely referral-based and the website exists purely so someone can confirm you're real, not to generate leads on its own.

Where I push back is on service businesses that need the website doing actual work, generating enquiries, taking bookings, ranking for local search. If that's you, the free plan is a false economy within a few months, and it's worth reading through what I've written on building lead generation workflows for service businesses because a website with no way to capture and follow up leads is doing about half the job regardless of how much you spent on it.

Booking, ecommerce, and other things free plans quietly restrict

If your business takes appointments, most free plans either block booking widgets entirely or only allow a basic contact form with no calendar sync, which means you're manually replying to enquiries and double-booking risk goes up. Before you settle on any of these eight, check specifically whether your builder supports a real booking integration, because bolting one on later, after clients are used to messaging you directly, is a harder switch than it sounds. I've written a separate checklist on what to look for in an automatic booking app that's worth reading before you pick a builder, not after.

Ecommerce is the other big gap. Wix, WordPress.com, Site123 and Strikingly's free plans either block online selling entirely or cap it so hard it's not usable (Wix's free plan, for instance, has no store functionality at all). Weebly via Square is the one exception that allows basic selling on the free tier, but you're paying standard card processing fees regardless.

A quick note on AI-built websites

Several of these platforms now market an "AI website builder" feature, Wix's ADI tool being the most heavily promoted. It asks a few questions and spits out a draft in minutes. Useful for getting past a blank page, not a substitute for knowing what your homepage needs to say to convert a visitor into an enquiry. If you're new to what these AI features do behind the scenes and whether they're worth the hype, I've laid it out in plain English in what "AI tools" means for non-technical business owners, which is a good primer before you trust an AI draft with your entire first impression.

Getting found once the site is live

None of this matters if nobody finds the site. A free website builder gets your business online, it doesn't get you visitors. Once your site is live, whichever builder you've chosen, the next job is getting other websites to link to yours, which is still one of the strongest ranking signals Google uses, and it's one small businesses consistently skip. I looked at 5,000 guest post sites for a separate piece and found 18% were already dead, so if you go down the link-building route, vet the sites first rather than assuming a listing on any site helps. The full breakdown is in my guest post websites study if you want the numbers before you spend money on outreach.

My actual recommendation

If you want a single answer and not a list: Carrd for a one-page site with a real domain at no cost, Google Sites if you're already on Workspace, and Wix's free plan as a testing ground for anything bigger, with a firm plan to move to a paid tier within 60 days once you know the business has legs. Anything longer than that on a free subdomain is costing you more in lost trust than the monthly fee would.

This guide is part of my AI for Small Business: 25 Plain-English Guides to Automation, Marketing, Sales and Admin.

Writers who cover this can pitch via Free Guest Posting Sites List: Where to Get Published in 2026.

Related: dating (this site).

Frequently asked questions

Can I use a free website builder for a small business permanently, or do I have to upgrade eventually?

You can technically keep a free plan forever, but for most businesses beyond a hobby project, the missing custom domain and forced platform branding cost you more in lost credibility than a £8 to £15 monthly plan would, usually within the first six to twelve months of real trading.

Which free website builder lets me use my own domain name without paying?

Carrd is the clearest example, its free plan allows a real custom domain on a single-page site. Google Sites also works with a custom domain at no extra charge if you already pay for Google Workspace, which most small businesses do anyway for email.

Is Wix or WordPress.com better for a free small business website?

Wix's free plan is easier for a beginner and produces a better-looking result out of the box, but WordPress.com's free tier is more restrictive on plugins and design than most people expect. Neither includes a custom domain on the free plan.

Do free website builders hurt my Google ranking?

A subdomain isn't inherently penalised by Google, but the storage, plugin, and speed limits on most free plans make it harder to do the technical SEO work that helps a site rank, and moving to a paid plan or custom domain later can cause a temporary dip while search engines re-index the new URL structure.

Sources worth reading

• the UK government's business support pages