Below is a list of free website hosting options. Some of these options have certain limitations while others are more customizable. I have built websites with each hosting platform, so I provided context to help you determine which option is best for your website.
Free Website Hosting Options
In no particular order, here is a list of places where you can host a free website.
- Google Cloud Platform (get $300 free credits)
- Wix
- Weebly
- Carrd
- Blogger
- Google My Business
- Google Sites
- GitHub Pages
- WordPress.com (get $25 free credits)
- InfinityFree
- 000WebHost
These free website options can be quite different from each other, so to help guide your decision, I ranked each option in the categories of:
- Customizability
- Technical difficulty
- Hosting limitations
- Whether or not you can make a blog
- Whether or no there is unremovable branding
Let’s look at each one of these categories below.
Customizability
As you can see, Google Sites, Google My Business, and Carrd are some of the least customizable options whereas you’ll have the most flexibility with your websites design when using Wix, Github Pages, and the Google Cloud Platform.
Now if you’re looking for a basic landing page or just a simple one page website for your business, then honestly any of these options will work for you, but when you want multiple pages with a specific layout and color scheme, then I would take that into consideration.
Technical Difficulty
You’ll definitely notice a correlation between customizability and difficulty because you’ll see that Google Sites, Google My Business, and Carrd are predictably amongst the most beginner-friendly ways to host a free website, but you’ll also notice that Blogger and Wix made the cut for being beginner-friendly.
The two most technically difficult free hosting options to work with that require a solid understanding of HTML and web development are the Google Cloud Platform and GitHub pages.
Hosting Limitations
They say nothing in life is truly free, and that’s somewhat the case for about half of these websites.
The options on the left have some sort of monthly bandwidth limitation, storage limitation, or prevent you from accessing all of their premium features without paying, while the options on the right are genuinely, 100% free without any restrictions.
Ads/Branding/Watermarks
Some of these options place an unremovable watermark or some sort of advertisement on all of your pages.
With the five options on the left, you can safely host your website on their platform for free and your visitors won’t know the difference, whereas the options on the right embed an unremovable link and/or logo on your websites in exchange for using their free hosting,
Here’s an example of what these branding watermarks and advertisements look like.
Bloggable
Not all hosting options have blogging functionality.
You can write blog posts on any of the options except for Google My Business, Google Sites, GitHub Pages, and Carrd as these hosting platforms do not offer blogging functionality.
Summary
Here is a table that summarizes everything from above.
As an example, if you consider yourself a beginner but you want complete control over the layout of your website, then Wix might be the right choice for you; however, if you don’t want Wix branding to show up on your site, then Weebly is going to be your best choice. On the other hand, if you’re looking for blogging functionality without any limitations whatsoever, then Blogger will be your best bet.
I have step-by-step tutorials on each one of these free website hosting options in this playlist and below.
