Having a website is a basic necessity for any modern company. And it’s no secret that a good website requires a good investment, especially if you want a professional website that wins clients.
Depending on the design and specifications, the price of each website varies. Even if you don’t pay for the design and do it yourself, you still have to pay for hosting and a domain.
It’s a fact: if you want a website, you have to incur certain costs. However, some companies let you “create a free website”. They offer design templates, free hosting and custom domain names. But however tempting that offer sounds, you should think it over carefully before accepting it.
A free website could cost you much more than money. It could make you look unprofessional, put your information at risk and lose you clients. A free website could be the worst deal for your company. And although at first it may seem you’re saving, time will prove otherwise.
It’s understandable that, as a company, you try to keep costs to a minimum. But online you have to be careful, because cheap turns out expensive.
But what is a “free website”?
Many of the companies that offer free websites assure you that you can build them yourself. They give you hundreds of templates and images so you can make “a custom website”. They claim you don’t need money to build your company’s site, much less web developers and professional programmers. Why would you, if you have all the best designers’ tools just a click away?
Many companies, to save costs or because of bad advice, have fallen for the temptation of a free website. And they have regretted the decision.
The obvious part: a website is “free” when you don’t have to pay for it. The not-so-obvious part: you don’t have to pay for it with your money. You’ll soon realize you have to pay with other things: your clients, your time, your image, your good reputation and so on.
There’s no such thing as free
As a general rule, when someone offers you something for free, be suspicious. This is especially true of websites.
Building a website takes a lot of time. Planning, design and development are just some of the stages of a working website. So why would a company offer to build you a free website?
Each company’s reasons vary, but a common one is making money in the process. Normally, the free website is the bait the company offers you. And once you’ve built your free website, the company’s efforts to generate revenue begin. This company isn’t doing charity work. Your free website is their business.
We’ll say it again: creating a free website isn’t a good idea. But if you still have doubts, these are the most common problems with free websites:
1. Your company will look unprofessional
If your website address is wix.com/mybusiness, you won’t make a good first impression.
If you don’t have your own domain, your visitors will find it hard to take you seriously.
On top of that, you won’t be able to have corporate email addresses with your company name after the @. These custom addresses help build trust with your visitors and future clients.
All the companies that offer free websites also offer custom domain names, at a “modest” price of between 4 and 16 dollars a month. Meanwhile, in real life, a .com domain can cost between 10 and 20 dollars a year.
2. Your website will be as slow as a turtle
Have you ever tried to open a free website? Even with a good internet connection, it takes forever to load.
The load times of these companies don’t meet minimum market standards. The reason is that they put thousands of free websites on the same server, which translates into thousands of slow websites.
A slow website will bring you a lot of problems. It has been shown that a visitor will leave your site if it hasn’t loaded within 3 seconds.
As if that weren’t enough, slowness also affects search rankings. So if your website is slow, forget about showing up on Google’s first pages.
3. You’ll be very limited for SEO
Everything is wonderful when you set out to create a free website, until you realize you can’t access the admin interface to do SEO. That limits you to trying to rank only by using keywords in titles and text. In other words, goodbye to the rest of on-page SEO techniques.
But not being able to access your free website’s administration isn’t your only SEO problem. Search engines give lower priority to free domains.
4. Very limited design options
It’s true that some companies let you create your own designs, usually through “intuitive editors” with drag-and-drop elements. The bad news is that these designs will have limited functionality (see point 3).
If you have WordPress on your own server, you can choose from thousands of templates. But if you’re going to create a website for free, you’ll find very few templates, and poorly designed ones at that.
The problem with these free templates is that many other people will use them too. So if you go for a free template, don’t expect your website to look any different from the rest.
Free templates aren’t just very common. They’re also the perfect example of bad web design. Add a few ads you never agreed to and you’ll have a plain ugly website.
5. Your website won’t be mobile-friendly
These free templates are usually old and don’t work well on mobile devices. That will make Google penalize you in search results on phones and tablets. And since mobile users make up most of the traffic, you’ll be left with the minority.
Want to create a free website that works well on mobile devices? Good luck with that.
6. You’ll have lots and lots of unwanted ads
Most of these companies are funded by advertising. You may build your website thinking it’s free, but they’ll charge you through ads, usually placed in the most visible parts of your website.
These ads may not be what makes your website ugly. But you could be advertising your competition on your own site. In other words: you could be sabotaging your company without meaning to!
7. You could disappear at any moment
The company may decide to stop offering the service or shut down your website. If that happens, you’ll lose your website and your domain name, which, although not very professional, was your only presence online.
And you won’t be able to ask these companies to let you recover your website. Their terms and conditions protect them legally in these cases.
8. Your data could be the currency
If you aren’t paying for a company’s products, then you are the product. These companies don’t only make money from ads on your site. They also sell your personal data, your email and your domain name to other companies.
Once again, their terms and conditions give them total immunity: the same terms you accepted when you decided to create a free website.
9. You won’t have IT security
Free websites are more vulnerable to cyberattacks. That’s because these companies don’t invest in IT security… unless you pay for it.
There have been cases where hackers accessed user lists containing data such as names, emails, addresses and credit cards.
Also, if you get hacked, it will be very hard to recover your data or your website. See point 7.
10. Technical support? Dream on
Confused while trying to create your free website? Having a problem with the template you chose? Need a feature you can’t find? Pray there’s a help forum. Technical support is expensive and would increase these companies’ costs.
A common trick is to offer premium support for a monthly fee, so you’ll be “safe” if something goes wrong or you need help.
11. You could fall victim to unethical practices
Some companies that offer free websites are known for distributing malicious software. This could be due to their poor IT security or to various financial incentives. These practices damage your website’s reputation and your search rankings.
Another frequent practice is running link farms. They sell links on thousands of user-created pages to unscrupulous advertisers. Your website could end up with links to gambling sites, scams and spam.
12. You won’t have statistics or data about your visitors
To grow your website, it’s important to know how many people visit you and where they come from. With good hosting, you can get visitor statistics completely free. You can even install Google Analytics or any other analytics service on your site.
On free websites you can’t install any analytics service. They have their own analytics system and you usually have to pay extra for it.
13. Deleting your free website will be very difficult
Remember: these companies offer free website creation as a business. It suits them to have thousands of user-created pages. The more, the better.
That’s why they make the process of deleting your website especially difficult. This means your website will stay on their servers for ever and ever.
Conclusion
Creating a free website may be fine if you’re 12 years old and doing a school project. But it’s definitely not a real alternative for your company.
If you want your company to be online, you need to think about your website’s goals. Do you want visitors to sign up on your site? Do you need to grow your list of potential clients? Are you going to sell products in an online store? Don’t improvise: hire web design specialists.
