How To Build A Website For Free In 2023

We believe that Square is the overall best choice for small business owners, especially business owners who sell in person. The Square Online web builder integrates with Square’s in-person point of sale (POS) software and the $49 Square card reader, which allows you to take debit, credit, and mobile wallet payments. Square also offers a free magstripe swipe card reader with new accounts, or you can use Square Online checkout links to sell via text message, URL, and/or QR code.

The platform also allows you to sell on social media channels, manage shipping and delivery, run marketing campaigns, and build an appointment booking page, making Square the most comprehensive (free) sales solution for many small business owners.

If you’re looking to consistently sell goods or services online and on-location for free, Square is the right website builder for you.

Related: These are the best free POS systems to take in-person payments while you’re on a budget.

While Square’s free plan is very generous, small business owners may need to upgrade to a paid plan as their business grows.

Square Online has the following pricing plans:

• Free: $0/month
• Performance: $29/month, billed annually
• Premium: $79/month, billed annually

Note: The pricing above is for Square Online stores. Square also offers Square for Retail, Square for Restaurants, and Square Appointments, all industry-specific sales and business management software.

To sell in-person with a card reader (which will lower your payment processing fees), you’ll need the $49 Square card reader.

Square is an eCommerce and point of sale giant, specifically because it offers such a great free plan for small business owners. You’ll find the following features on the Square Online free plan:

• Free website builder with Square subdomain
• In-person selling capabilities with affordable Square POS hardware
• Online ordering for shipping, delivery, or in-store pickup
• Marketing and social media sales, including selling on TikTok and making shoppable Instagram posts
• Built-in inventory and shipping management
• Physical, digital, and subscription product sales
• Sales and coupon codes to run marketing campaigns
• Online forms so customers can fill out requests and contact your business
• Online appointment booking page (great for stylists, consultants, etc.)

Square contracts are straightforward and month-to-month, with a discount on annual contracts. There are no early termination fees, penalties, or hidden fees.

We are impressed by the fact that Shift4Shop’s free End-to-End eCommerce plan comes with more features than just about any other free website builder software. You can sell everything from subscriptions and custom creations to dropshipping products with a fully functional website.

However, it is important to note that you must process at least $500/month with Shift4 Payments, the company’s in-house payment processor, to qualify for the free plan. Shift4 does not offer the most transparent payment processing fees, and unlike providers like Square, you get locked into long-term contracts with early termination fees.

If you believe the free eCommerce plan is worth the potentially poor merchant agreement involved with getting software and hardware from Shift4, then Shift4Shop could be the free online store builder for you.

Shift4Shop offers a completely free plan for businesses that process at least $500/month through Shift4 Payments. If you process less than this amount, you’ll pay $29/month to use the Shift4Shop web builder.

Shift4 Payments offers custom payment processing fees for companies, and this payment processing model tends to be more expensive than flat-rate payment processing for smaller, newer businesses.

If you do not want to use Shift4 Payments, you can pay $29/month to use PayPal for accepting online payments.

Shift4Shop offers enterprise-level eCommerce store builder features, including the following:

• Free customizable website builder (with no Shift4Shop ads)
• Websites are SEO-driven, which means your site is more likely to get found in search results
• Free domain name (for the first year, then you are billed annually)
• One-page checkout, which makes checkout faster (and increases online sales)
• Physical item, digital download, subscription, print-on-demand, dropshipping, and gift certificate sales
• In-store pickup and delivery (with real-time delivery tracking)
• Sync products with sales channels like Amazon, eBay, Google, and Facebook
• Coupons, discounts, and reward points program
• Email marketing capabilities

Shift4, the company that owns Shift4Shop, also offers merchant services (Shift4 Payments) and hardware from Harbortouch. You can contact Shift4 for pricing on hardware purchases and leasing information (although Merchant Maverick typically doe not recommend leasing, as you’ll end up paying more over time than if you purchase your POS equipment outright).

If you can’t afford to purchase point of sale equipment outright, read our post on equipment financing.

Shift4Shop offers the End-to-End eCommerce plan, complete with enterprise-level eCommerce website builder features, on the condition that you process payments using Shift4 Payments, the company’s in-house payment processor.

Square also requires you to use its in-house payment processor, but Shift4 Payments doesn’t have the good reputation that Square has. Some Shift4 Payments customers have reported lengthy contracts, unexpected fees, and poor customer service, so make sure to read any contracts and test out the customer service for yourself before building a website with Shift4Shop.

We appreciate that Mobirise does not require you to sign contracts or work with any specific web hosting provider or domain name registrar the way that cloud-based platforms do. You can make your entire website from your desktop and publish it with a Mobirise subdomain, or you can pay for a custom web domain and hosting provider.

If you’re not sure what you want your website to look like, what you want it to do, or where you want your website to be hosted, start with Mobirise. You can create your entire website and upload it to any web hosting provider later.

You can also consider using Mobirise as a quick landing page builder if you’re just looking to get customers from somewhere like a social media platform to somewhere else like an online course platform (e.g. a landing page for a graphic design course on Skillshare or for a special event). Mobirise landing pages look sleek and professional, which can help build your brand.

Mobirise is free to download, with no contract required. You can publish your site for free with a Mobirise subdomain and web hosting, or connect to your own custom domain and web hosting provider. If you want to move your website away from Mobirise hosting, just save your website as an FTP file and upload it to another hosting provider.

You can build a website for free with Mobirise, but most of the features you’d expect to have for your website cost extra. For example, most of Mobirise’s pre-built industry-specific templates cost $49/year, the smart shopping cart extension costs $59/year, and the code injection extension costs $69/year.

You can get all of Mobirise’s extensions and themes for $149/year, which is actually a pretty good deal compared to other “all-in-one” website builder packages.

Mobirise is not a cloud-based website builder like the other options on this list. It is a desktop app that’s completely free to download and use.

The Mobirise desktop app offers excellent features, including:

• Free offline desktop website builder app
• Mobile-responsive drag-and-drop blocks
• Custom form builder for customer contacts and requests
• Built-in blogging feature
• Built-in chat feature
• Insert external links to other websites such as mobile ordering systems, social media feeds, phone numbers, emails, and PayPal

Mobirise does not require you to sign any contracts.

Paid extensions and themes are purchased on a yearly subscription basis through 2Checkout (also known as Verifone). If you want to cancel your subscriptions, you must do so using 2Checkout.

We believe that WordPress is the most versatile cloud-based website building software, with more website themes and customizations than any other web builder. This is because the platform is so popular that an entire community of developers is constantly working on new themes, blocks, and plugins to add more functions to websites.

There are several blocks for general websites, blogs, custom code, and links to external web pages. Anyone can use WordPress sites, including affiliate bloggers, artists, freelancers, and social media users.

Note: WordPress offers two separate products. WordPress-hosted websites made by software from WordPress.com are completely free because they are hosted by WordPress. However, there are much fewer customization capabilities than websites made with WordPress’ open-source software (found on WordPress.org).

WordPress open-source software allows for complete customization, but you have to find your own web hosting to launch your website online. Web hosting typically isn’t expensive but does technically disqualify WordPress.org as a 100% free product.

WordPress’ downloadable open-source software (found at WordPress.org) is completely free. To get your website online, you’ll have to pay for web hosting. This can cost as little as $2/month or as much as $20/month, depending on your web hosting provider and the features you’re looking for. You may also need to pay for a custom domain.

WordPress.com offers free and paid plans, which range from $9/month to $70/month (billed monthly) or $4/month to $45/month (billed annually.) We recommend just paying for a web hosting provider and using WordPress open-source software instead of paying for a WordPress-hosted site.

Most of WordPress’ power comes from the almost unending number of add-on free and paid plugins that you can add to your website.

The majority of eCommerce functionalities come from WooCommerce, WordPress’ most popular commerce plugin. This plugin is free, but the plugin provider also has paid extensions available.

The majority of websites are built using WordPress, probably because the website builder is so versatile and easy to use. The free version of WordPress offers the following:

• Drag-and-drop website builder
• Excellent blogging features
• Lots of social media integrations
• Eventbrite Checkout, reservation, and event calendar embed
• Appointment booking, contact, and newsletter subscriber forms
• Custom URLs with buttons
• Custom CSS code to modify the style of your website
• Several free themes to choose from
• Custom HTML and Javascript code embed

Free WordPress sites require nothing but your name and email address.

Paid WordPress plans are month-to-month or annual. If you opt into a paid plan, you may get a free domain or web hosting (usually only for the first year).

Most importantly, you cannot add WordPress plugins until you’re on the Business plan. Keep this in mind when considering whether you need plugins to make your website work for you.

We love that Brizy Cloud allows you to create an unlimited number of projects and work with an unlimited number of collaborators to make landing pages, company bios, present projects or initiatives, and make personal portfolios. Users get a lot of blocks of the drag-and-drop website builder for free, and the free templates are beautiful, mobile-responsive, and relatively customizable.

Brizy is easy to use, completely cloud-based, and never asks for anything more than your email address to get started.

Note: You may create an unlimited number of projects, but you can only have one website published at a time. If, for example, you wanted to create unique landing pages for a quarterly event signup, you would just unpublish the previous landing page. You can even duplicate the previous landing page, then just update the dates and signup link.

Brizy Cloud offers a complete “free forever” plan but also has paid tiers ranging from $13/month to $89/month ($9/month to $69/month with annual billing).

Brizy’s cloud-based web builder includes these great features:

• Create an unlimited number of projects from one user account (great for creating individual landing pages for announcements, different events, product launches/updates, etc.)
• Collaborate on projects with multiple users with different levels of user access (great for students and coworkers to create, present, and comment on projects)
• Add blog posts with custom post layouts that you can save and reuse
• Edit individual parts of blocks on-page with a visual editor (e.g. zooming into images with a slider bar instead of having to type in scale/pixel dimensions)
• Embed forms, images, videos, audio, maps, buttons, real-time increasing counters (great for donation pages), real-time countdown timers (great for event signup pages), and more to your website
• Inject custom HTML code in any part of your website
• Save blocks, layouts, colors, fonts, etc. as global assets that you can use throughout your site to effortlessly maintain brand consistency

Brizy offers free forever, monthly, and annual accounts.