9 Best Free Website Builders 2023: The Definitive List

Wix had the highest customer score of any builder we put through user testing, meaning it was the platform people were most likely to recommend. It’s simple and intuitive, and scored 4.4/5 for ease of use.

With its selection of more than 800 templates – most of which are free – and a huge choice of tools and elements, like galleries, buttons, and social media icons, Wix makes creating a website easier than ever.

Wix guides you through the setup process. You choose the type of site you want to create, your industry, and your template before starting to build.

We chose the Restaurants & Food industry during setup, which gave us 68 tailored templates to pick from. (We chose the Ice Cream Parlor template).

Our chosen template came with the Wix Restaurant feature pre-installed, which made editing the example menu quick and easy.

Most Wix templates are available to users of its free plan – including the one we used to create our demo website, ‘Ice Cream Parlor.’

You can’t use a personal domain (aka a custom website address) – your domain will follow the format yourusername.wixsite.com/yoursite. So instead of lucyscupcakes.com, you’ll be stuck with a much lengthier domain, like this one: carnagelucy.wixsite.com/lucyscupcakes

Make sure to choose a professional username, and a short brand name – you’re restricted to 20 characters for the ‘yoursite’ part of your address.

With the free plan, storage and bandwidth are both capped at just 500MB. This will prevent you from using too many images or videos on your site, as well as potentially limiting how many visitors you can get. You also can’t sell any products through Wix on its free plan.

Premium plans start at $16/month. Although this may sound pricey, Wix is one of those builders where you get what you pay for. It has the highest features score out of all the builders we tested – an impressive 4.9 out of 5 – and its prices reflect this.

Among other things, Wix’s $16 per month Combo plan removes any adverts from your site, lets you use a custom domain, and increases your storage to 3GB instead of 500MB.

Wix’s most popular paid plan is its Unlimited plan, aimed at entrepreneurs and freelancers. For $22/month, it removes all ads, lets you use a personal domain, and provides unlimited bandwidth – as well as 20x more storage space than the free plan!

You will find limitations to Wix’s free plan, though. For starters, there’s a banner ad for Wix which stays in place as you scroll down the site. It’s not too in-your-face, and it’s pretty subtle compared to other builders, but still – it’s a tad intrusive and hard to miss.

The banner says “This site was designed with the Wix.com website builder. Create your website today.” Which signals to your website visitors that your website is not as professional as others. So it might be worth investing a little to remove the banner when you can.

Although you can start creating a Wix website for free, you’ll need to upgrade if you want your website to take secure payments. To sell products you’ll need to get the $27/month Business Basic plan. For the price you’ll get unlimited products to sell, 50GB of storage space, and the ability to sell via your social media channels.

In short, GoDaddy is quite easy to navigate through. The ADI functionality means anyone can create a quick, sleek site without needing any coding skills. You have a business contact page available in each free template, but it’s definitely more limited than other website builders out there in terms of creative freedom. It’s ease of use really depends on how unique you want your site to be. If you’re not too sure how you want your site to look and are pretty happy to stick with the template’s design, GoDaddy will work in your favor.

You get 22 different templates to choose from when building your free website with GoDaddy. This is pretty limited compared to Wix, which offers more than 500 templates (most of which are free), but the selection range is pretty broad in terms of overall design. Whether you’re looking for a more urban style, or something more formal, GoDaddy does have a lot on offer with its templates. You’re also free to switch up the colours depending on your brand style once you’ve chosen your preferred template! 

The only downside would be that the templates aren’t that personalised to the industry you’ve chosen. For example, with our demo website, Lucy’s Cupcakes, the templates didn’t seem very food-related compared to the templates you can find on Wix.

Essentially, you get what you pay for! If you’re going for a free GoDaddy plan, there are quite a few features you won’t have access to compared to a paid plan. For example, you’ll have to deal with on-site adverts, such as a ‘Powered By GoDaddy’ banner in the footer of your website. 

Additionally, GoDaddy’s free plan doesn’t come with a custom domain. Instead, it will look something like this: https://lucyscupcakes.godaddysites.com/. You also won’t have access to the full suite of customization tools, either. 

If you want to get your hands on a custom domain and a no-ad website, you’ll have to upgrade to its premium plans which we’ll talk about in the next section! 

GoDaddy’s cheapest plan is its Basic plan for personal use, starting at $9.99 per month. This is a discounted price if you choose to be billed yearly – the usual price is $11.99 per month. You get access to a custom domain, and the ability to send 100 emails per month for your business. 

For businesses that are looking to expand, the Premium plan will work in your favor. From $14.99 per month, your visitors can book online appointments through the website, and you’ll have an impressive limit of 25,000 emails sends per month! 

If you want to expand in the digital world of commerce, the dedicated Commerce plan from GoDaddy is your go-to at $16.99 per month. It has everything you need from selling on Facebook and Instagram, to connecting to marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy. 

With your free GoDaddy website you don’t need to worry about pesky GoDaddy banners clogging up your website. The only mentions of GoDaddy in a free website are in your URL and at the footer of the page where it says “powered by GoDaddy.” Which we think is fair enough for a free website! Compared to Wix’s big banner that follows you as you scroll the page, this feels less intrusive.

This example shows the website and has a tiny mention of GoDaddy and no ads despite it being on the free plan! That’s really exciting news if you want your website to take center stage and stop website visitors clicking off to the website builder’s page.

The short answer is no. GoDaddy’s cheapest plan with sales features is its Commerce plan at $14.99/month. This plan has basic sales features, allowing you to sell up to 5,000 products. If you need to sell unlimited products it will cost $29.99/month (Commerce Plus plan), plus you can send up to 100,000 emails per month. In terms of transaction fees you’re looking at fees of 2.3% + 30¢ when using GoDaddy Payments.

To put it briefly, Weebly caters to all abilities but it’s not always the most user-friendly or intuitive system. It uses drag-and-drop building tools like Wix, meaning anyone can create a site using Weebly without needing to know how to code.

That said, Weebly is more limited, offering less creative freedom than Wix – which can cause problems when you’re trying to make your site look exactly how you want it. Weebly is easiest to use when you’re sticking pretty closely to your template’s design.

Weebly has seen quite a big reduction in our design scores when looking at aspects like templates, flexibility, UX design and mobile editor.

When testing out the platform with everyday people, we found a a commonality in the frustration users felt. The templates stood out to be pretty bland and lacking style. The blocks can be sticky and tough to play around with, which is a pain point for anyone trying to let their creativity flow!

Our main gripe with Weebly’s templates is the lack of creative freedom they allow. In short, Weebly’s customization options are more limited than Wix’s.

The Weebly free plan limitations are that you don’t have a custom domain, and limited storage at 500MB. Without a custom domain, your website will be named something like this: yournamehere.weebly.com. It’s fairly basic and not too clunky, but it’s not as professional-looking as a custom URL.

But Weebly also reserves phone support for paying customers – you only get access to a community forum, chat, and email support on Weebly’s free plan.

Weebly’s cheapest plan is the Personal plan, which costs $6 per month when billed annually.

We have to be honest, though – we don’t recommend the Personal plan. It won’t remove adverts from your site, and you don’t get a free domain or access to phone support. Its main attraction is that it lets you connect your own custom domain.

Weebly’s $12 per month Professional plan offers much better value for money, which is why we recommend skipping the Personal plan and heading straight for this one. You’ll get unlimited storage and remove ads from your site, among other things!

Weebly comes with the usual free plan drawback – a small slide-up on-site ad for the builder, but it’s not as a banner on your website. It’s more like a little box that takes up a small space on your actual website page.

Weebly’s adverts come in the form of a bright blue slide-up box that opens when you hover it. It depends on your perspective if this is better than a banner. On the one hand it takes up space that could be used for content, but on the other it isn’t a banner that scrolls down with you.

Yes you can! Weebly offers free unlimited products to sell, plus selling on Facebook and Instagram. The only charges are the transaction fees of 2.9% + 30¢.

If you want to sell online, Weebly is owned by Square Online. When you create a free online store via Weebly, you’ll be taken to Square Online’s site to create an account so you can access the full range of ecommerce features for your free Weebly site.

But if you want a custom domain and to remove all Weebly ads, you’ll need to get on a paid plan from $12 per month.

Jimdo is generally very easy to use – it was pretty smooth, but didn’t knock our socks off. It’s easiest when you’re simply replacing and adding content in the template, rather than trying to reformat it or customize it too much.

In user testing, 56% of users said they’d recommend Jimdo to a friend. We enjoyed its simplicity, while simultaneously growing frustrated at its limitations.

If you’ve tried out Wix and Weebly, you’ll find Jimdo a bit lacking in comparison. The template selection is also much more limited.

For example, we chose our industry during setup, and were then provided with a selection of templates. But the designs weren’t all relevant to the food industry we’d picked – it would have been nice to receive more tailored designs, like you do with Wix and Weebly.

The prompts at the beginning do mean you can get a website set up really quickly, and avoid the problem of being overwhelmed with choice.

The domain name format is fairly standard: your-site.jimdosite.com. For this site, for example, ours was lucys-cupcakes.jimdosite.com. This is nice and simple, but it does signal to all your visitors that you don’t have a personalized domain name. Also it’s worth noting that “jimdosite” is quite long and if your website name is also long then your URL will look unnaturally large.

Jimdo has two sets of plans – one for its ADI builder, and one for its Creator editor. We used the Creator editor when testing and building with Jimdo.

The ADI editor plans range from $9 to $39 per month, billed annually.

The Creator plans range from $10 to $40 per month, billed annually.

Upgrading guarantees you faster support response times, a free custom domain, more storage and bandwidth, the removal of adverts, and more features, such as adding email accounts.

There are also no banner or pop-up Jimdo ads with the free plan, just a tiny note in the footer. This is great news! Your website visitors won’t be bombarded with heading over to the website builder to create their own website. It also comes across as more professional.

On Jimdo’s free plan, you can sell up to five products, but you’re limited in terms of SEO functionality. You also don’t have access to the helpful analytics dashboard that comes with premium plans. Plus, your storage is limited to 500MB.

One thing that makes SITE123 so easy to use is its design-assisted technology. All you have to do is choose your industry from the 16 options provided, enter your website name, and SITE123 does the rest. It creates a basic site for you, which you can then customize.

When customizing, you don’t need code – SITE123 is suitable for beginners with zero building experience.

An immediate drawback of SITE123 is that it doesn’t give you a choice of templates. So unlike Wix, Weebly, and other free website makers, who let you choose a template that takes your fancy, with SITE123 you can’t choose from various pre-populated designs.

While this certainly makes it quicker and easier to set up, it also gives you less control over the look and feel of your website.

Design assistant

Instead, you’re relying on SITE123’s design assistant. You pick the type of website you want from 16 different categories (including portfolio, blog, music, and CV), before being presented with a default website design. Although you can amend the default design to some extent, SITE123 scored poorly for design flexibility overall (1.5/5).

SITE123’s customization options aren’t the most attractive or exciting around – if you want a stunning website, SITE123 isn’t really for you.

Not being able to connect a custom domain is a common drawback with free website builders, but with SITE123, it’s an even bigger problem. That’s because SITE123’s free domain is a randomly generated jumble of letters and numbers – and you can’t customize it.

The result is an unprofessional, impossible to remember domain that looks like this: 5f35237f568e3.site123.me

As you can see under domain here, there’s that ghastly jumble of numbers and letters that screams “this is not a professional website!” It doesn’t even have the name of your website in there, which if potential customers see before, might not even bother clicking on.

When you view SITE123’s plans on its website, you’ll see two options: its free plan, and a premium plan that costs $12.80 per month billed annually.

Once you’ve created a free account, however, you’ll discover a wider range of four plans, ranging from $12.80 to $34.80 per month (billed annually). SITE123 often has a sale running, so it’s worth checking for discounts if you do decide to upgrade.

SITE123 has a bottom banner ad that isn’t quite as loud on the eyes as other builders. The price you pay for a free SITE123 website is a banner that says “I built my site using SITE123” that scrolls down the page with the website visitor.

It is a super subtle banner as it blends into the bottom of the website page design, making it less in your face than other builders.

No, you can only have a store and sell products when you buy the SITE123 Premium plan. You can create a website and store for free, but to sell you will need to spend a very reasonable $12.80/month. This plan will also allow you to connect a better domain than the free jumble SITE123 offers on the free plan.

Strikingly has a fun, friendly feel to it, despite being basic. It has a simple and uncomplicated editor that can be quite clunky at times. Anyone could build a site with Strikingly, and quickly too – as long as you don’t expect too much control. Our users wished for a more intuitive editor with more creative freedom.

Strikingly creates one-page websites with a pre-formed design of your choice. The first thing you do is choose your template. We chose the template ‘Grace’ for our practice site.

Unlike many other free website builders, you can change your template as many times as you wish once your site is live.

You’ll find editing Strikingly’s templates a piece of cake – as long as you don’t want to change things up too much. In just a few clicks, we’d customized our template to look like this:

Customization is pretty limited – when building our test site, we would have liked a little more control over our page layout.

With Strikingly’s free plan, you can create as many free websites as you please. You’ll also get a 5GB monthly bandwidth, 24/7 customer support, and the ability to sell one product per site through the Simple Store function.

Strikingly’s advertising is arguably the most subtle of any builder so far, and the domain name format – yoursite.mystrikingly.com – is especially decent.

Don’t worry if your free domain looks odd to start with. Our domain for Lucy’s Cupcakes started out as site-2866940-7308-879.mystrikingly.com – but we easily changed it to lucyscupcakes.mystrikingly.com

If you don’t want the “mystrikingly.com” part of your domain, you can try a custom domain for a 14-day trial. You will have to pay to keep it after, however.

Another downside, however, is that – unlike all the builders listed above – Strikingly’s free plan doesn’t include an SSL certificate (unless you connect a custom domain). This means your site will be flagged as ‘Not secure’ to anyone trying to visit it – not good!

In addition to this, your storage will be capped at 500MB and you can also only build websites with up to five pages on the free plan. If you want more, you’ll need to upgrade.

We’d suggest trying out Strikingly’s free plan, then upgrading to the ‘Limited’ paid plan for just $8 a month once you’re happy. You’ll get a custom domain, up to 50GB of bandwidth per month, and the ability to sell up to five products on your site, making it very good value for money.

Strikingly has a mini purple banner that pops up, bottom middle of the web page, that says “create a site with Strikingly.” We’d argue it’s a little bothersome that the banner is purple as that will stand out of a lot of page designs. However if you have a predominantly purple website it might blend in nicely.

It is an incredibly small ad for Strikingly which is good! It doesn’t even take up half the page, just that little purple box that can open up.

You can sell one product per site on your free Strikingly website using Simple Store. Then for $8/month you can sell five products, but that comes with a 5% transaction fee. The next plan up is $11.20 and you can sell up to 300 products, remove Strikingly branding, and the transaction fee goes down to 2%.

Idf you’re not familiar with section block areas and overlays, you may find Webflow a little tricky to get your head around!

Webflow relies pretty heavily on the use of short keys and right-clicking to remove or add elements, which makes the design process a lot more streamlined. You do get thrown into navigating the dashboard which can be slightly daunting at first. It’s great if you’re someone who has prior knowledge with padding functionality and won’t feel too overwhelmed with large amounts of customization.

With both free and premium templates, Webflow does a good job of identifying which templates are going to be better for your individual requirements . Although, there is no actual search functionality which limits the amount of templates on view and whether it accomodates for a certain industry.

Usually website builders have a set of templates for the blogging industry, for example, which provides a good indication as to what works for you. This is something Webflow could definitely include to make the overall user experience much more enjoyable.

Unless you upgrade to Webflow’s premium plans that start at $12 per month, you won’t have access to a custom domain name or advanced design tools.

Your domain name will look something like this lucyscupcakes.webflow.io, with the free plan which doesn’t look the prettiest!

Webflow offers two types of paid plans; General Plans and Ecommerce Plans.

There are four general paid plans which are Basic, CMS, Business and Enterprise, ranging between $14 – $39 per month billed annually (Enterprise plans you need to contact them). We’d recommend site plans for content-driven websites or blogs because it gives you creative freedom but doesn’t allow much room for large amounts of traffic. Site has an ecommerce plan that is much better suits for growing traffic and marketing tools.

Ecommerce Plan offers three choices of Standard, Plus, and Advanced plans. These plans range from $29 -$212/month billed annually.

Essentially, you’re get a lot more with paid plans, but if you just want to play about with the platform, it’s always good to give the free plan a try before you decide to buy!

Webflow’s advertising will not appear on your free site, it only shows up at the very bottom of the page in small writing.

All you’ll get is the small writing here that says “Powered by Webflow” and describing the template creators, which is really awesome for a free website!

The short answer is no. You can start an ecommerce store with Webflow by integrating certain apps that help you sell your products. But the apps themselves will cost money and they vary in transaction fees too.

It’s really easy to get set up with Webnode. The whole website building process could be done in about five minutes – now that’s quick!

There’s no real learning curve with Webnode – it’s easy to quickly find your way around and start editing your template. Some design controls are located in the settings dashboard, which can take a minute to find, but other than that, everything is where you’d expect to find it.

There’s nothing in Webnode that’s likely to cause you headaches – unless you try to do too much with it.

Webnode has clean, minimal template designs to choose from during the setup process.

You can’t change your template, so make the most of Webnode’s preview feature before you commit to a template and start building.

Webnode’s editor is very easy to use, but a lot less flexible than other free website builders like Weebly or Wix. It’s almost a drag-and-drop editor, but not quite.

You can move elements around, but they will conform to predetermined designs. For example, if you move an image from the middle of the page to the right, the page design will change to accommodate this, rather than simply letting you drop the image where you want it. It lends itself really well to building simple, minimalist sites – we recommend it for events websites rather than, say, business websites.

That said, we chose the ‘Joe’s Coffee Palace’ template for our cupcake website, and were pleased with the results.

One of the big drawbacks to Webnode is the limited storage you get on the free plan. You only receive 100MB storage, which is five times less than most of the other builders on our list.

Webnode has a helpful storage tracker in the settings dashboard, which shows you just how much storage you’ve used. This is good for knowing when it’s time to upgrade.

Your free Webnode domain will represent your brand to a certain extent, but you can’t customize it like you can with Wix.

The domain we got for our cupcake website looked like this: lucy-s-cupcakes0.webnode.com – not so bad as the SITE123 free domain, but not ideal either.

Also the Webnode free plan doesn’t provide password protection, backups, or ecommerce – you’d need to upgrade to unlock these features.

Webnode’s cheapest paid plan costs $3.90 per month – this is a basic plan that’s main benefit is letting you connect your own custom domain.

To increase your storage you’d need the $7.50 per month Mini plan, and to remove the small Webnode ad from your site you’d need the $12.90 per month Standard plan.

Luckily, Webnode’s ad is very small and subtle, placed in the footer of your website.

No, you’ll need an ecommerce plan to start selling with Webnode! Its Standard ecommerce plan begins at $12.90/month and goes up to $31.90/month.

Ucraft isn’t the easiest of platforms to use when comparing to other builders! It can be pretty restrictive when it comes to changing up the content blocks, and if you’re looking to amend the sizing of images and text blocks when creating galleries, you may be better with Wix which gives you a lot more creative freedom.

With Ucraft being a very image-driven builder, its templates are really focused on large images covering the page, rather than text. What’s great is that the templates are provided with an information button to allow users to identify what/who the template is designed for. Ucraft templates are pretty slick and clear with minimal content – the visuals are clearly doing all the talking!

As you can expect, you definitely get what you (don’t) pay for!

Ucraft’s free plan only limits you to 15 website pages, and there are a bunch of things that you end up missing out on.

You don’t get access to SEO tools, designer or blogging tools, and you can’t do any selling on a free plan! If you’re looking to sell online, you’re better off upgrading to any of its pro plans which opens up the doors to data management services and access to Ucraft 24/7 support.

The design process itself is a lot more limiting on the free plan, even if you’re just trying to create an online presence.

In terms of your domain name, though, Ucraft is one of the better ones. It’ll look something like this: yoursite.ucraft.site. This still allows you to put your brand front and center.

Premium plans start at $10 per month when billed annually. Although this may sound pricey, Ucraft does have a pretty good value for money with the array of features you get in return.

You’ll receive a free domain with all three of its pro plans and gain access to all the Advanced tools, such as multilingual options, custom fonts, and more than 20 integrations.

You can select either the Pro Website plan (which is its most popular plan), Pro Shop, or Unlimited plan. The more premium you go, the bigger the price tag, so make sure you have a rough idea of the tools you’ll need before selecting one.

In addition to only getting a 14-day free trial, your website will have Ucraft banner running along the bottom of any free website. The only way to get rid of this is to upgrade to a Pro plan.

You can’t sell on Ucraft’s free plan. Instead, you need the $10 per month Pro Website plan to sell up to 15 products. However, data management tools don’t creep in until you upgrade to Pro Shop for $21 per month, so that might be your best option if you want to build an online store.