I'm sure you've been tempted at some point to bet on a free website after finding those juicy "your website" advertisements effortlessly in minutes", "creates a free website in 5 steps" or "create your website for free, with free web hosting and web address".
It is curious that the attributes "effortless". and "free of charge". are used as claim These are the very features that we should avoid in any professional environment in which we want to achieve something of value for our clients. quality.
What are we talking about when we talk about 100% for free?
Before starting with the analysis, it is important to be clear about what we are talking about, as many people confuse, for example WordPress.com and WordPress.org. They are two worlds that have nothing to do with each other because, while the former is a free 100% online service (we don't have to download anything), the second one is a CMS (Content Management System) practically without limitations that you can only start using after obtaining a domain and hosting (not free) and installing it on that server.
So, a free website is one that you can build on certain platforms that offer you:
- All free of charge
- In this way online
- Under his management (hosting and domain included).
Well-known examples:
- WordPress.com
- Wix
- Weebly
- Yola
- Etc.
This list grows and grows as these platforms seem to continue to grow in popularity (perhaps a symptom of the worrying trend of wanting "everything for free").
Disadvantages of a free website
Free is just the beginning
In reality, many of these platforms use the hook of free to offer you a free very basic plan after which they will then start charging you additional costs for "advanced" features that are actually basic and insurance you need (such as your own domain, removing advertisements, professional email addresses or image hosting). Therefore, it is advisable to read carefully what is included the free plan and what not. You will end up paying a higher monthly fee than you think at the beginning.
In short, take a good look at the details of the plan, what it includes and for how long.
In the following table we can see how services such as indispensable as security copies of the site or remove the advertising The platform's rules are not included until the third level of the plan:
It is also important to verify that what they describe as free is not in fact a probationary period for X months after which you will have to pay if you want to maintain your website over time. Some platforms even ask for your credit card in advance (for the free plan).
No right to own domain
In a free plan like WordPress.com your domain will always be something like this: mimarca.wordpress.com, which looks unprofessional and detracts from your name. The same is true of Wix (mimarca.wixsite.com) or any other similar company. If you want a your own web address (which only includes your brand name) will make you pay and those prices will be much higher than what you can find when registering a domain on your own outside that platform.
Advertising on your website
A free website will show platform advertising on your website as soon as they enter, which generates rejection among surfers and detracts from the seriousness of the site. This first impression is transferred to your brand and entity.
Professional templates to be completed
When we dive into the templates offered by these sites, we do indeed come across eye-catching previews and a very professional look whose visual weight rests primarily on the opening picture or "hero".
They are obviously templates whose content has been filled in by a designer. This content is difficult to reproduce by someone who does not have a background in design, as we are talking about perfectly integrated images or backgrounds that have most of the time been previously retouched with Photoshop or similar professional programmes. They are, for example, photos without background remaining aside of the main headline (for which it is necessary to know how to calculate how to place the photo and make it adaptable to mobile phones), or images with integrated drawings.
The look will be very different when we upload our own images without retouching or considering the composition.
In addition, photographs for the web must be optimised before uploading them, and this is something that few people who do not work in the web ecosystem know how to do properly (nor do they need to).
Many websites we come across have images uploaded as they were taken with a mobile phone or exported from an image bank. It is immediately detected as they are photos that load "in fits and starts" due to their excessive weight. This can only result in a slow website, which affects the user experience and SEO. We are talking about a process that must be carried out image by image to reduce their weight without losing quality and adapt them to the optimal size.
Page speed
The speed and performance of a web page is largely conditioned by the characteristics of the server o accommodation, so this is not a trivial aspect. The free plans we are talking about here generally offer a hosting with limitations both in space as in speed but this does not mean that your website will be slow in all cases.
The capacity that your website needs depends very much on its peculiarities and of the visits it is going to have. If we are talking about a very basic web site with 5 images well optimised and that you are going to have few visitors, the bandwidth offered by the free plans (from 500Mb to 1GB generally) will probably be enough, but if you consider adding for instance galleries of images or grow in number of visits, you may not have enough of this capacity.
Without Analytics
The free plans do not include never the setting of the Analytics cookie in order to be able to measure visits (and thus also not a legally compliant cookie banner).
The traffic assessment of a website is essential to know if we are doing well, if the people who visit our website coincide with our target audience, which pages are the most visited, etc. With a free plan we lose all this information and we will not know where to correct or what is going well and what is not.
As we can see in the following Wix pricing table, in order to measure visits we will have to upgrade our plan to the third level and pay €12.50/month (€150/year which will be converted to €150/year). 180 incl. VAT) for a website very little customisability.
Minimum support
It is obvious that a free plan is not going to offer you the same technical support as if you are paying for a service. Nor should it. People work for a salary (which in any case should be a decent one), so you can't expect to have people working 24 hours a day on your website for €0.
Free plans do offer tutorials and all the information necessary to maintain the website yourself, but it is necessary to know that the moment you have to contact a person, it will cost you and you will not get a premium customer service.
It is advisable in this case to have some web knowledge and minimum resources at your disposal so that you do not encounter problems that you do not know how to solve.
Your website will no longer move
Generally, once you have set up your website on these free platforms, there is no option to migrate it if you ever want to do so. What's more, if any of these companies close or cease their activity, your website will die with them.
All of this condemns your free website to a permanent immobility and a lifetime contract with the platform you are using, which is not the case when using a CMS and software such as WordPress.org (which we mentioned at the beginning of the article), as in this case, the website can be migrated without any problem from one hosting to another.
What if we want something basic?
From experience, we know that what starts as "something basic", It almost never is. Simple is not always easy (in fact it is often the other way around). Without web experience it is very difficult to distinguish what is basic and what is not. There are features that seem basic but have a more complex configuration behind them. Maybe for you a testimonial carousel is something basic but it requires a certain configuration that these pages can't offer you.
You may now think that you don't need much and that a simple website is enough for your brand. The reality is that when we look at our online creation, we always think of a simple website. new ideas and customisations more advanced that we will not be able to carry out, so our brand will always be limited.
In addition, no matter how simple a page is, it always requires a previous communication work so that the site is aligned with our objectives and serves a purpose.