FAQs / Small Business Websites
Can I get a website for my business for free?
You can, with limits. Free plans from builders such as Wix put their own branding and ads on your site and give you an address on their domain rather than your own. Google used to offer free websites through Business Profiles but shut them down in 2024, so a free Business Profile on its own is now the closest thing to a free online presence.
By Richard Thomas-Pryce, Founder · Updated
For years Google let businesses make a simple free website from their Business Profile. Google closed that product in March 2024, sent visitors from those sites to the owners' Business Profiles for a short while, and after June 2024 the old addresses stopped working. If you had one, it no longer exists, and the website field on your profile should point somewhere else.
The Business Profile itself is still free, and for a trades business it matters more than most websites. It is what shows in the map results, it holds your reviews, and people can call you straight from it. If you have no budget at all, set that up properly first.
Free builder plans do exist. Wix's free plan, for example, shows Wix ads on your pages and gives you an address on Wix's own domain, and you cannot connect your own domain name without paying. Squarespace does not have a free plan, only a trial. For a hobby or a test that is fine. For a business, an address like yourname.wixsite.com and a banner advertising someone else does little for trust.
The minimum cost of a proper small business website is a domain name and some form of hosting, which together usually come to a modest yearly sum. Your time to build it is the other cost, and it is easy to underestimate.
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