Free Website Design
Free Website Design tools and companies exist. Yes, they do, and they are free, BUT they are not free. These are marketing companies that want your data to cross-sell you and upsell you other products. Free plans are severely limited, and an upgrade will be required. This will involve moving to an expensive contracted subscription plan.
Hidden Costs
These marketing companies are very good at hiding:
- Paid upgrade paths
- Paid Plugins
- Slow hosting
- Slow performance
- Advertisement removal
- Self-promotion hyperlink removal
- Ransom tactics (Ensure you own your domain name)
- No or little support (e.g. Pay for premium support here)
- Sub-domaining
Hosting and maintenance of the website
All websites need hosting and maintenance of which costs money. Free website providers offset these costs with clever schemes.
Many of these platforms, especially social media, show adverts or collect data to generate revenue. You would not want a website that advertises your competitors to your potential customers. Do you really want your customers’ data to be analysed and retargeted by marketing machines?
These companies need to make money with their paid services. One way is a link to the services they charge for in the footer of your free website. Because they are on the footer of your free website, they are on every single page. These links are valuable. Google counts them as votes. The more votes they get, the higher their paid services go in the search engines.
Free domain names
They are not free. The cost of the domain is hidden in the hosting. Be very aware that your domain name needs to be registered in your name or your company name. You don’t want to be held to ransom on a domain name you thought you owned. You may find you have the right to use the domain but don’t own it, and you can’t transfer it.
The disadvantages of one-page websites
Often, free websites are one-page websites. All your keywords are diluted on the one page. Each of your products and services needs individually optimised pages and keywords.
Poor search engine optimisation and lead generation
Free websites are not optimised for search engines, and often images are renamed incorrectly. Lead generation is always a paid add-on. Are you interested in AI lead generation? See this DesignRush article. If you are not a website designer or search engine optimiser, you should concentrate on selling your services and just learn the essentials of populating your website.
Unique Design
The free website companies offer templates. Free websites tend to look the same as each other
Sub domains
In the example below, look where the dot is
yourwebsite.otherwebsite.com This offers no credibility to your company. It also adds to the size of the otherwebsite.com, which is great for them.
Schoolboy errors and shortcuts
I have never seen a free website that has no schoolboy errors or shortcuts.
Philanthropist websites
People with considerable expertise have dedicated hours of free time to these websites. Most often, these belong to charities, educational academies, or encyclopaedias.
