5 best free website builders for small businesses

If you’re looking to create a business website, cost is going to be one of your key concerns. Paying a developer can run into the thousands, but, thanks to website builders, you can make a professional-looking website for very little – or even, completely free.

Out of the five best free website builders for small businesses on our shortlist, our top choice is Wix because it offers the most features to its non-paying users out of any web builder.

Earning an overall test score of 4.8 out of 5 in our own product trials, Wix made it to the top of our list as the best website builder for small UK businesses. The fact it offers a free plan that gives you access to an abundance of great features, market-leading design functionality, and excellent customer support also makes it our number one choice for those businesses wanting to create a website and keen to use a free website builder to do so.

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BEST OVERALL
Wix	Squarespace	GoDaddy	Weebly	Jimdo
BEST FOR Best all-round website builder for small businesses	BEST FOR Design flexibility & businesses looking to scale	BEST FOR Ease of use and simplicity	BEST FOR Value for money	BEST FOR Creating a website in under an hour (thanks to its ADI platform)
Free plan	Free plan	Free plan	Free plan	Free plan
Free trial	Free trial	Free trial	Free trial	Free trial
Cheapest paid plan Light – £9 per month	Cheapest paid plan Personal – £12 per month 10% off with code SU10	Cheapest paid plan Basic – £6.99 per month	Cheapest paid plan Connect – £4 per month	Cheapest paid plan Start – £9 per month
Try Wix	Try Squarespace	Try GoDaddy	Try Weebly	Try Jimdo

Squarespace isn’t far behind in second place, offering an array of relevant features for those with small site offerings, earning an overall score of 4.6 out of 5.

Each website builder has been subjected to our rigorous user testing and then ranked on the six key factors that our small business audience told us matter most: ease of use, features, value for money, design flexibility, help and support, and customer score (i.e. how likely a user would be to recommend the product to a friend).

So, whether you’re looking for a low-cost way to get your business online or a free version of a website builder to test your options before committing, this guide will tell you everything you need to know about choosing the best free website builder for your business.

What is a free website builder?

A website builder allows you to create a website without coding. Free website builders let you do this without any payment. While a free website builder can create a professional-looking website for you, there will be certain limitations. your site may have a URL that includes the website builder’s brand name, for instance, or the mount of traffic it can handle could be capped.

Nonetheless, free website builders are a great solution for small businesses who want to get their site live without having to invest a lot of money or time. Website builders are an intuitive solution to putting together a site through its drag-and-drop interfaces, flexibility, and wealth of features.

You can either use an online or offline website builder. An offline website builder is a software you download to create the site on your personal computer. The more popular option, however, is an online website builder. With this approach, you create and edit your website directly over the internet, with everything safely stored in the cloud.

How much does it cost to upgrade to a paid plan?

Wix has a range of pricing plans for those looking to upgrade:

• Wix Light plan – £9 per month
• Wix Core plan  – £16 per month
• Wix Business plan – £25 per month
• Wix Business Elite plan – £119 per month
• Wix Enterprise plan – Bespoke quote

As you can see, you won’t have to spend much in order to upgrade from the limitations of a free Wix plan. See our full Wix pricing guide to understand what each tier offers.

How much does it cost to upgrade to a paid plan?

When you’re done with the Squarespace trial, there are several pricing plans to pick between:

• Personal: £12 a month – not recommended for business sites
• Business: £17 a month – includes ecommerce functionality with 3% transaction fees
• Commerce Basic: £23 a month – ecommerce functionality with 0% transaction fees
• Commerce Advanced: £35 a month – advanced functionality for online selling and shipping with 0% transaction fees

3. GoDaddy

There are plenty of reasons why GoDaddy is our third favourite web builder, but its array of small business-centric features and user-friendly design make it the ideal choice for those startups and micro businesses requiring small site offerings.

It certainly offers the quickest and most efficient website building experience, and its free plan comes with 100s of modern, professional templates and built-in tools for SEO*, social media and email marketing to help your business grow at zero cost to your business.

This is unlike Jimdo’s free plan offering, which offers little marketing functionality and zero SEO guidance, leaving you struggling to grow your online presence before you’ve even upgraded to a paid plan.

Similar to Wix, with GoDaddy you’ll be subject to a branded domain until you begin paying for its service. You also won’t be able to open an online store or use any ecommerce functions on the free plan.

GoDaddy free plan pros and cons

How much does it cost to upgrade to a paid plan?

GoDaddy has a good selection of pricing plans from which to choose:

• One month on the GoDaddy Basic plan costs £7.99 per month (annual rate is £4.99 per month).
• One month on the GoDaddy Standard plan costs £11.99 per month (annual rate is £7.99 per month).
• One month on the GoDaddy Premium plan costs £16.99 per month (annual rate is £11.99 per month).
• One month on the GoDaddy Ecommerce plan costs £19.99 per month (annual rate is £13.99 per month).

How much does it cost to upgrade to a paid plan?

Here’s the run down on Weebly’s pricing plans, each based upon an annual payment setup:

• Personal: £5 a month
• Professional: £9 a month
• Performance: £19 a month

5. Jimdo Dolphin

Jimdo Dolphin is a great option for small business owners that want to get their website up and running quickly and with little fuss. However, its lacklustre features and below-par help and support for its customers have kept its scoring low, achieving only 3.3 out of 5 stars in our most recent round of research.

Its ADI functionality means it will ask you a series of questions to figure out the type of website you want before you select some simple options (such as colour palettes). From this it will create your website for you, saving you tons of time and effort dealing with complex designs and editing processes before you can even get going.

The ADI functionality is available on the free plan, which is great for those businesses who want a simple, basic website that does the job. This automation, unfortunately, makes Jimdo’s website builder capabilities limited compared to its competitors, especially when it comes to customisation and feature offerings that you get with the likes of Wix.

The free plan also comes with a dedicated mobile editor view to help optimise your site for mobile formatting. But it lacks the all-important free plan features that other competitors provide, such as Weebly’s lead capture and contact forms – limiting its users to how much they can do on Jimdo’s free plan.

Jimdo Dolphin free plan pros and cons

How much does it cost to upgrade to a paid plan?

Jimdo Dolphin has a selection of payment plans to consider when upgrading from the free taster tier:

• Start: £9 a month
• Grow: £15 a month
• Grow & Legal: £20 a month
• Unlimited: £39 a month

How does a free website builder work?

Free or paid, website builders are usually very intuitive and easy to use. You start out by choosing a template. Next, you star dragging-and-dropping elements into your editor to build your website piece by piece. You can add headings, texts, images, videos, sub-pages, and an inventory of products if you’re an ecommerce website. What you see is exactly how your website will appear when it goes live.

With a free website builder, you can publish the site live, even without paying. But, it’s unlikely to be perfect – you may have to put up with having the builder’s branding in your URL, or displayed as advertising banners across your site. To get rid of these elements, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.

More advanced website builders will let you code bits of your website if you’d like. You can also get your hands on ecommerce website builders which work very similarly to standard website builders, except they have a whole series of ecommerce specific.

What types of businesses are free website builders suitable for?

Website builders are perfect for businesses with little or no technical experience. You can easily design and change your website design without having to resort to an expert.

However, free website builders are arguably a bad choice for most businesses, because of the limitations on the free tiers. These can include:

• the website builder name being part of your URL
• branding or banner adverts for the website builder appearing on your site
• a cap on the number of site visitors or amount of data you can store, including images and videos

Understandably, for businesses wanting to give a professional impression to their customers, these drawbacks may be a no-go. The good news is the paid-for website builder plans are great value, and they can immediately do away with the above issues.

Paid plans start with very small fees – typically under £10 per month. This makes them great for small businesses because they’re so affordable and easy to use.

How we test website builders for small businesses

We tested 10 website builders to evaluate them in terms of functionality, usability, accuracy, and aesthetics so we can make the most useful recommendations to small UK-based businesses.

Our rigorous testing process means these products have been scored and rated in six main categories of investigation and 33 subcategories – in fact, we covered 251 areas of investigation in total. We then gave each category score a ‘relevance weighting' to ensure the product's final score perfectly reflects the needs of our Startups.co.uk readers.

Our main testing categories for website builders are:

Website Features: the capabilities and functionalities offered by a website builder, e.g. blog functionality, SEO capability, and marketing capacity.

Design: the aesthetic appeal and visual layout of a website created using a website builder. It encompasses aspects such as page templates and customisable themes.

Customer Score: external customer opinion; the feedback and ratings given by customers who have used a particular website builder – the market position and reputation a website builder holds.

Ease of Use: how user-friendly and intuitive a website builder is for people with varying levels of technical expertise.

Value for Money: the balance between the cost of a website builder and the benefits it provides. It considers factors such as pricing plans, subscription models, and available features.

Help and Support: the assistance and resources available to users when they encounter issues or need guidance while using a website builder.

The Startups product testing process

Final thoughts: the best free website builders

From our review of each free website builder, it is clear to see why Wix is the best free web-building option.

You get to enjoy the vast majority of excellent features that make Wix the best website builder for small businesses without upgrading to a paid plan.

You also get the option of a free trial once you do make the decision to upgrade; Wix is the only provider on our list to do this.

Squarespace, although a brilliant website builder when it comes to aesthetics and design functionality, doesn’t offer a free plan, let alone one with such excellent features. However, it does offer a free trial, plus you can use the code SU10 to save 10% off any Squarespace premium plan.

As you’ve seen, whichever option you choose, you’re going to be limited in some way if you opt for a free web builder plan. Depending on your ambitions for your online presence, this may or may not matter. But if you want to build a professional-looking website, and access to all the tools and features you need to scale the online side of your business, then it’s worth upgrading to a paid plan sooner rather than later.

This is especially important if you need an online store; you can’t sell your products and services online until you upgrade to a premium, paid plan with any of the builders on this list.

Whether you think a free or premium plan is the way to go for your visit, the next step is to visit Wix or the best-sounding web builder from this page (just click their links) to find out more and choose a plan that suits you.