The best free website builders, ranked by what their fine print actually says

The best free website builders of 2026 are separated less by their editors than by their asterisks. Every free plan page we read this year makes the same three promises — no cost, no commitment, upgrade whenever — and every one attaches conditions in smaller type. So we read ten of them, plan page by plan page, help doc by help doc, and ranked them on one question: how usable is the free tier, actually? Not the builder. The free tier.

Our bar for 'truly free' has three planks. Publishable: a real site reaches the public internet, not a locked preview. No forced payment: no card required, no trial that expires into a wall. Survivable: a plan you could still be on, unembarrassed, two years from now. Ten builders follow — and because one of them has no free plan at all, one row of the table simply says so.

For the theory before the rankings, see our field guide to what 'free' actually includes. The table below is for everyone who came here to choose.

The ledger: ten free tiers, ranked

Every cell comes from the vendors' own plan pages and help docs, checked in August 2026. Below, each tier gets a close reading, with the cheapest meaningful upgrade priced and the worst clause marked.

The genuinely free tier: Google Sites, Framer, Carrd

Three builders pass the survivability test outright — free tiers you could sit on for years without the plan itself pushing you out.

Google Sites — 8.5: the only $0 custom domain

Google Sites is the only mainstream builder that connects a custom domain for exactly $0 — up to five domains per site, and it works on an ordinary personal Gmail account. There are no ads and no paid tier of Google Sites to be funneled toward; the nearest upgrade is Google Workspace, from $7 per user per month, and that buys team features, not a better site. The published limits barely qualify as limits: up to 10,000 pages and 15,000 images per site.

The catches are structural rather than financial: no ecommerce, no native forms beyond embedding Google Forms, no custom code, and templates rigid enough that every Google Site looks like a Google Site. The full reading is in our Google Sites review; the domain story gets its own piece on the free website builder with a free domain.

Framer — 7.9: a real design tool, tolled in bandwidth

Framer's free plan is a working design tool, not a demo: 30 pages, ten CMS collections, 1,000 CMS items and 500 AI credits, published to yoursite.framer.website with a 'Made in Framer' badge that cannot be removed on free. The toll is bandwidth — 1 GB a month, which an image-heavy portfolio can exhaust in one good day. The upgrade is unusually clean: Framer's Basic plan, at $10/mo billed yearly, includes a free custom domain, 150 pages and 50 GB of bandwidth. One clause to note: billing is per site, so every additional project is another plan.

Carrd — 7.7: the cheapest honest exit from free

Carrd's free tier covers a genuine one-page site — three of them, permanently, at yoursite.carrd.co with a small footer link. Free excludes custom domains, forms and embeds, so the paid ladder is the real story — and it rewards careful reading: the famous $9-a-year Pro Lite does not include a custom domain. That takes Pro Standard at $19 per year, billed annually upfront — there is no monthly billing at all. Even so, $19 a year with a domain, forms and analytics undercuts every rival's monthly price. It is the cheapest honest exit from 'free' on this page.

Free, but you pay a toll: Webflow, Wix, Strikingly

These three publish real sites for $0 — and collect rent in ads, badges and URLs.

Webflow — 7.2: two pages and a lifetime form cap

Webflow's free Starter plan hands you the full designer and almost nothing to ship with: 2 pages, 50 CMS items, 1 GB of bandwidth, a yoursite.webflow.io address and a badge fixed to the corner. The clause we would mark in highlighter: the free tier's form limit is 50 submissions for the lifetime of the site, not per month. A contact form simply stops working one day; the remedy on offer is a paid site plan. That plan — Webflow Basic, $15/mo billed yearly since the May 2026 repricing — adds a custom domain, 300 static pages, 10 GB of bandwidth and unlimited form submissions, though no CMS.

Wix — 6.8: a full editor wearing a billboard

Wix's free plan pairs the most complete editor on this list with the least usable result. It is genuinely free indefinitely, no card required — and it shows Wix ads on every page and publishes to the longest URL of the ten: username.wixsite.com/yoursite. You get 500 MB of storage; you do not get a custom domain, selling, or email campaigns. The exit is Wix's Light plan at $17/mo billed annually — around $204 a year, and it appeared to be around $24 month to month when we checked — which removes the ads and connects a domain.

Before you count on Wix's free-domain offer, read the voucher terms as we did: selected yearly plans only, redeemed within two months of purchase, valid only for new domains bought through Wix, not included when a plan renews — and you must keep a card on file so the domain auto-renews at full price after year one. The complete fine print is in our Wix free plan review.

Strikingly — 6.3: unlimited sites, branded twice

Strikingly runs the only unlimited free tier on this list — as many sites as you like, five pages each, 5 GB of monthly bandwidth, 500 MB of storage per site, even a one-product store. Then it charges its toll twice: a logo in your footer, and the words 'on Strikingly' appended to your site's title in browser tabs and search results. On the free plan, your brand cannot appear alone in Google. The ladder adds a half-step trap: Limited, at $8/mo billed yearly, connects a custom domain but keeps the branding; removing it is a feature of Strikingly Pro, $16/mo billed yearly.

The funnel tier: Jimdo, GoDaddy — and the Weebly warning

These free tiers exist to move you somewhere else. One of them is about to stop existing at all.

Jimdo — 6.0: free forever, upgrade by contract only

Jimdo's free Play plan is honest but thin: 5 pages, 500 MB of storage, 2 GB of monthly bandwidth, HTTPS, a yoursite.jimdosite.com address and Jimdo's advertising on your pages. The fine print contains one small mercy — legal pages don't count toward the page limit — and one large catch: Jimdo has no monthly billing at all. Jimdo Start, the ad-free tier at $11/mo, is a 12-month contract with a 14-day cancellation window; miss the window and you are committed for the year. The free domain in year one renews at $20 a year afterward.

GoDaddy — 5.5: a trial dressed as a free plan

GoDaddy's free tier is a funnel with a publish button. You can put a page on the open web at yourname.godaddysites.com, with GoDaddy branding and without custom code, custom sections or selling. But signup starts you on a 7-day trial of the paid product, and when it lapses, the features you built with — the domain, the marketing tools — quietly stop working. Paid starts at GoDaddy Basic, $9.99/mo billed annually, typically $2–5 a month higher on renewal, with domains that renew at $21.99–22.99 a year once first-year promos as low as $0.99 expire. The close reading is in our GoDaddy free website builder review.

Weebly — 5.0: free, on borrowed time

We can no longer recommend starting anything on Weebly, and the reason is a set of dates. On June 20, 2026, Weebly — owned by Square — announced it is shutting down in 67 countries. Publishing of new pages stopped on June 29. Sites go offline on September 27, 2026. Accounts and all stored data are permanently deleted on December 26, 2026.

Outside those countries the product persists in maintenance mode: no new features in over a year, the mobile app pulled from stores in December 2025, the community forum closed. The free plan technically remains — 500 MB, a username.weebly.com address, a Square ad in the footer, with ad-free-plus-domain at about $12/mo billed annually — but a free tier you may have to evacuate is not free; it is a deadline. The full timeline is in our Weebly free plan review.

No free plan at all: Squarespace

Squarespace earns its row for honesty's sake: there is no free plan. The pricing page offers a 14-day trial — no credit card required — but the trial site cannot be shared publicly. It is a build sandbox, not a free website, and Squarespace appears to remove inactive trial sites after a grace period. If you want the site you built to exist, the cheapest path is Squarespace Basic at $19/mo billed annually — about $228 a year, or $25 month to month — which, like every Squarespace plan, is ad-free and includes a custom domain free for year one, renewing at $10–20 a year depending on the TLD. As a paid product it is a polished one; it simply has no business in a free-tier ranking except as the control group.

How we scored the free tiers

Three weighted questions, the same ones the whole site runs on. Can you publish — does a real site reach the public internet, and stay there? What's the toll — ads, badges, the subdomain, whether your own name appears anywhere. Where's the trap — the wall you will hit and what it costs to climb. The score rates the free tier only, never the builder: Webflow is a far better tool than its 7.2 suggests, and Google Sites a far more limited one than its 8.5 implies.

Every figure comes from the vendors' own plan pages, quoted with billing-cycle caveats; where a number could not be verified directly, we soften it and say so. Commissions never touch a score — the ladder is topped by Google Sites, which has no affiliate program and pays us nothing (see our affiliate disclosure). For durability, read how long you can stay on a free plan; for the pressure you'll meet along the way, the free-plan upgrade traps file.

Which free builder should you actually pick

• A one-page site — Carrd. Three free one-pagers, permanently, and the industry's cheapest real upgrade at $19 a year when you eventually want your own domain.
• A docs-style or informational site — Google Sites. The only $0 custom domain, no ads, and page limits you will never meet. Accept the rigid templates as the price of nothing.
• A designer's portfolio — Framer. The free plan is a genuine design tool; watch the 1 GB bandwidth line, and know that the $10/mo Basic tier (billed yearly) includes the domain.
• A site you already know you'll upgrade — Wix. The free tier is a rough neighborhood (ads, that URL), but if paying is already the plan, Light at $17/mo billed annually is a complete mainstream product, and building free first costs nothing but patience.

If your only requirement is 'free and no ads,' the shortlist is short and we keep it separately in free website builders without ads; students and nonprofits have their own discounts and their own fine print, covered in free website builders for students and nonprofits.