Gone are the days when building a website was a tedious and expensive job. It required you to either know all the coding and programming yourself or hire someone who would cost you a fortune and had good coding skills. Even then, you would have to sit with them to explain your requirements to them. Any changes to be made once the website was ready was another headache!
Although web development continues to be a well-renowned profession and business, companies and individuals have started exploring and using smarter ways to get their websites built. Many people now use website builders to create new websites.
These website builders come with tons of ready-made website templates. Whether you want a personal website, a corporate website, a blog or an online store, you can simply create an account in one of the free website makers and there you go!
Most of these free website builders follow the drag and drop style, whereby you can add any elements you want on your web pages using the drag-and-drop feature. In other words, you can be a web designer yourself!
Benefits of Using a Free Website Maker
In the presence of many tech-savvy IT specialists around us, free website builders received a lot of skepticism when they first came into the market. However, businesses gradually realized the benefits of using a free website maker as opposed to building a full-fledged website from scratch.
Following are some of the advantages of using a free website maker.
- It saves you a lot of time. If you are into making money in any way, you would probably agree with the notion that time is money. The more time you save in doing one task, the more tasks you can accomplish within the same time bracket.
- Carrying forward from the previous point, when you save a lot of time in building a website, you have more time, energy and resources left to focus on the content of your website. Your website content is your sales copy. It is the most important stuff you would ever say to your viewers or potential customers, which will determine whether or not they gain interest in your product or service. Thus it’s crucial for you to create great website content.
- Using a free website maker will save you a lot of money. All free website builders come with different pricing packages, but they almost always have a free version that is sufficient enough for you to get started, try out the features, and have a simple website up and running for free for at least the first 30 days. Once your website is ready, you may want to consider upgrading to a paid package, which wouldn’t cost you more than what you pay for your coffee in a month!
- Free website makers come with tons of ready-made website templates, which are professionally designed, simple to insert, easy to use, and beautiful to look at. That saves you from all the headaches of having to design your website on your own. This is a bigger benefit than you think because, before these free website makers were available, many people or even businesses would think of getting a website built, but would back off due to the overwhelm they faced in getting their website designed. Now with numerous free templates available, you can simply choose a web design based on your website needs, and launch your website in minutes!
Image taken from Strikingly
Let’s look into the features of 10 best free website builders.
1. Strikingly
Strikingly is a free website maker that allows you to create a one-page or a multi-page website. It comes with awesome themes that allow you to insert clear call-to-actions into your webpages.
Image taken from Strikingly
With Strikingly, you can have your website ready and launched in just a few minutes, without requiring any programming or coding skills. Anything on your website can be edited by just clicking on the area that you want to edit.
Strikingly also has mobile apps for iOS and Android, which allow mobile website editing. So you can even make changes to your website while you’re on the go.
We have great live chat support, available 24/7 even in our free plan. If you have any queries before purchasing their paid plan or face any technical issues, you can straight away contact us and have your issues resolved. Customers of Strikingly rarely have problems learning the tool though. It’s a very easy to understand and easy to use free website maker.
Strikingly free plan offers a monthly bandwidth of 5GB and unlimited free websites. If you want your website to be on your own domain instead of strikingly.com, you can upgrade to one of their paid plans which start from only $12 a month.
Image taken from Strikingly
A great feature in Strikingly websites is that you can attach a blog to your site, where you can publish all your marketing content and enhance your brand’s SEO. You can also create a blog website from a template.
2. Wix
Image taken from Wix
If you have ever considered building a website or using a free site builder, you must have come across a Wix advertisement many times in your social media.
Like Strikingly, Wix is another drag and drop free site builder that provides web hosting, domain names, and customizable website templates. It is the best free website builder for small businesses, online stores, photographers, musicians, artists, restaurants and catering services.
The paid packages of Wix start from $14 a month.
3. Webnode
Image taken from Webnode
Webnode is a fairly well known free site builder that revamped its editor a short while ago. Its themes or templates are modern looking, responsive and stylish. However, it doesn’t allow you to change your theme once you have started building your site.
It’s paid plans begin from only $3.9 per month, and this cheapest plan allows you to use your own domain and gives you access to their premium support.
Like Strikingly, Webnode also allows you to attach a blog to your website, but its blog features are very basic.
4. Weebly
Image taken from Weebly
Weebly is one of the best free website builders available out there, with very decent and responsive templates that give you options to make separate SEO settings for each webpage, which overall helps you to increase the search engine ranking of your website.
Its free version, however, is not too impressive due to the prominent ad in the footer that has a mouseover effect. Its paid plans begin from $6 a month.
5. Wordpress
Image taken from Wordpress
Wordpress is by far the most popular free website maker in the world. About 41% of the websites on the Internet are powered by Wordpress. It is an open source platform that features thousands of web designs and templates.
The best thing about Wordpress is that it is very flexible and is compatible with almost any third-party tool that you may need to use to add features to your site.
6. GoDaddy
Image taken from GoDaddy
You must have heard the name GoDaddy in the domain name and hosting market. But what you might not have heard is that GoDaddy is also a free site builder.
It is suitable for those who are beginners in not just building but also running a website. Its templates are mobile-friendly and offer add-ons that include email marketing, attaching a blog to your site, setting up an appointment scheduler and adding membership to your website.
Any website built with GoDaddy will display a GoDaddy banner on top. The SEO options are limited. In its free plan, editing options are also quite restricted.
7. Webflow
Image taken from Webflow
Even though we’re including Webflow in this list of free website builders, it is slightly different from the rest in terms of its usability and pricing. Using Webflow as a free website maker requires the user to have a little bit of know-how of coding skills. That’s why it is most suitable for web designers, web developers and advanced users.
There is more design freedom in Webflow as compared to Weebly, GoDaddy or Webnode. There’s a lot of material available too to help you learn how to use it.
8. Mozello
Image taken from Mozello
Mozello is a Latvian company and is less popular than the other free website builders that we discussed above. The unique feature about Mozello is that it allows you to create a multilingual site for free. That’s why it’s known as a multilingual free website maker.
Websites built with Mozello come with a blog and e-commerce options, and also offer SEO settings. It offers a free storage space of 500MB which is more than enough for its free users.
9. Jimbo
Image taken from Jimdo
Jimdo is based in Germany. This free site builder is suitable for international companies, as it offers you to build a site in nine different languages. Websites built in Jimdo are very compatible with smartphones and tablets, and can be edited via a mobile app too.
The free plan of Jimdo, the free website maker, provides a storage space of 500MB and unlimited number of webpages. However, you might face problems with your site’s SEO because search engines do not index the free websites built in Jimdo.
10. IM Creator
Image taken from IM Creator
IM Creator has millions of clients worldwide. It is among the best free website builders and is popular for a few unique reasons.
i. It offers a very wide range of images and templates.
ii. Its web hosting is unlimited.
iii. The websites built on IM Creator are scalable.
iv. It has built-in e-commerce features, which makes it a great online store builder.
v. It offers extensive Google Analytics and SEO options.
Image taken from Strikingly
So if you want to build the best free website, wait no longer. Strikingly has many users/customers who built a website without even having the basic coding skills, and are happily running those websites to sell their services. If they ever face any technical issues, instead of hiring a web developer, they simply ask the Strikingly live chat support for help.
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