How To Build a Website for Free in 2024: Use a Free Website Builder (2024)

Vault’s Viewpoint

• Wix, Weebly and WordPress offer free website building platforms.
• Free website-building platforms may have limited features compared to premium plans.
• Choose a free plan that has the best templates and features that meet the objectives of your website.

How To Build a Website for Free

Here’s how to build a website for free in six easy steps.

Step 1: Define Your Website’s Purpose

What your website needs to accomplish is essential in designing and building it. You should research other websites similar to yours or competitors to see what they do well and what you want to change. As you define the website’s purpose, think about the ideal visitor. What will they want to get out of their visit to your site? This is important in creating the right layout with the right content and backend elements.

Here are some types of websites for you to consider:

• Online stores: An online store selling products should be laid out so that consumers can easily see what’s for sale and buy within a few clicks. You can utilize design elements such as carousels to rotate products on the home page. The website should also be easy for consumers to navigate so that they can easily find what they are looking to buy.
• Business websites: Business websites help customers engage with the business and its products and services. They may provide a history of the business, highlight key products and services and make it easy for customers to buy a service or make an appointment with the business. Business websites are more than just digital business cards; they are tools to excite customers about working with the company.
• Portfolio websites: A portfolio website displays quality samples of a person’s or business’s work. Its goal is to showcase talent and ability. This can be done with artistic images, links to content or case studies of successful jobs. The layout should be simple and make it easy for visitors to navigate through various samples.
• Blogs: The purpose of a blog is to educate and entertain readers. A blog website makes the content the center of attention, drawing readers to new articles on the home page and making it easy for them to find other related topics of interest.
• Event page: An event page shares critical details about an upcoming event. This includes the date, time and details about the event’s purpose. It also provides insight on how to attend and sells tickets where appropriate. An event page may also branch out to location details that highlight places to stay or dine while in town for the event, making it a one-stop shop for those interested in attending.

Step 2: Pick a Website Builder

Website builders are platforms that make designing and building a website easy, and there are a lot of website builders to choose from. The free options include Wix, Weebly and WordPress. Wix comes out on top as Newsweek Vault’s overall best website builder platform, but Weebly and WordPress’ free services also provide helpful services. Keep in mind that you can start for free and upgrade to a premium service later to get more benefits from the platform.

When picking a platform, you want to consider certain aspects it offers, including:

• Templates: Some platforms, like WordPress, have tens of thousands of templates, while Wix has just under a thousand. You’ll want a platform that has a template option that fits your needs and helps make your website stand out from the rest. It should feel unique while offering the features you need for your website, such as a shopping cart or blog page.
• Customizability: Even though you are starting with a template, you’ll want to be able to customize things to fit your unique needs. Some platforms and solutions are more customizable than others. You may run into some limitations when choosing a free option, but you still want to consider whether or not you can tailor the site to meet your needs.
• Business tools: Depending on the purpose of your website, you’ll want access to certain tools to achieve your goals. These may include a shopping cart, a customer relationship management system, inventory management or appointment scheduling.
• AI tools: AI is on the tip of everyone’s tongue these days. Some website-building platforms offer AI solutions that help you build your website quickly. Check out the platform features to understand how AI can help you launch your website.
• Third-party integrations: Integrations help your website do more and function better. These integrations may be apps or plugins. Research what types of integrations your free website builder offers to help ensure that your website meets its overall goals and objectives.
• Security: Free website builders may not offer the highest level of security. You may need to use a third party to integrate an SSL certificate on the site to help ensure trustworthy browsing.
• Speed: Don’t expect the fastest websites when using a free service. Compare the website speeds of different platforms to determine which will give you the best performance. Fast loading and surfing speed help keep visitors on your website, so it’s important the images and content load quickly.
• Support: You may run into problems when developing your website, and some people need more support than others. Each free website builder provides its own customer support services, which may take the form of knowledge bases, email or chat support.

Step 3: Choose a Template

As mentioned, free and cheap website builders offer a wide range of templates to choose from. However, the free plans may limit you to general templates, while premium templates are available only with paid upgrades.

When choosing a template, think about the layout and how your readers will experience it. Returning to your purpose and objective, find a template you can implement as a solution. You’ll be able to customize the template later on, but you’ll want to start with one that is as close to your ideal layout as possible. This will limit the work you have to do later. Most of the free website builders have a drag-and-drop editing feature, making customizations easy once you have your design elements.

Step 4: Gather Your Website Elements

The website won’t go from template to personalized without you putting your content and images in place. Gather all photos and prepare them for the site. Remember that you want the site to load quickly, so you’ll want to optimize your images so they aren’t too big. You can use an online image optimizer such as TinyPNG or ImageOptim to do this.

Review the components of the template and create content that will make it your own, based on the titles, subtitles and blurbs provided for you. While gathering your elements, consider any font changes that you want. You can often upload new fonts to the editor, allowing you to customize the content further.

Step 5: Implement Your Design Elements Into the Template

Once you have collected your images and written your content, you’ll replace the templatized elements with your unique items. You may need to upload all the optimized images into the image library and then replace the template images with the new ones. For text, highlight the content you want to change and replace it with your own text.

You can also update the color scheme if you want. The menu should have a color selection tool that allows you to change the primary color and add two complementary colors that fit the new color scheme. This step is where you really personalize your website and set the look and feel of it.

Step 6: Test and Launch the Website

Once the website is customized, you want to test it out. Read through the website to ensure you have entered all the content you want that differs from the template. Click through all links to ensure that they go where they are supposed to. Broken links give readers a bad experience and will cause them to leave your site. You can do all of these preview steps in draft mode on the website before you publish, or make the site “live.”

You can publish the website when you are ready and confident that everything is working correctly. Then, you will want to launch a marketing strategy to attract people to your website. This may involve SEO content, ads or social media posts.