Pros and Cons of building a website for free
Pros
1. Low cost, low investment. Your time is the only thing you risk.
2. Simpler and shorter development time. A custom website can take months. In situations where you need a functioning website fast (such as an online store), a website builder is a quick fix.
3. Ideal for smaller scale website projects. If you just need a website capable of basic functions only and you don’t need it to look unique, getting one built from scratch would be an unnecessary expense.
Cons
1. No professional oversight or help. DIY means you are on your own.
2. Unregulated advertising space. Some free website builders often recoup their cost through advertising on your site, which means you may have no control over the number or nature of ads displayed.
3. Subdomain hosting. Your website may be attached to the builder’s site rather than an independent one, which can impede SEO and branding (look to the next section for an explanation of hosting).
4. Limited site capabilities. More complicated features such as user profiles or sophisticated admin & analytic tools may be hard to accomplish without spending at least some money.
5. Limited data storage. There may be limits to the amount of data your site can contain and the speeds at which that data loads.
Steps to build a website from scratch
Going from nothing to a live, working website can be a complicated undertaking with many steps involved. While most free website builders negate many of these steps, you still need to verify that their process goes beyond creating the website to fully publishing it.
Here is a rough list of the basic steps you’ll need to account for, but be sure to check our ultimate guide to creating a website for more details.
1. Preplanning and strategy– Define the overall site goals and what you want your users to be able to do
2. Layout and site mapping – Define the number of pages, as well as their purpose, how they interact and the wireframe layout for each
3. Content creation – Create the design assets, text copy and multimedia that goes on your website
4. Front end web design – Put together the front end visual design of the web page
5. Back end web development – Implement the design into a functioning web page with coding
6. Testing and iteration – Check for bugs or broken display
7. Domain registry – Secure a unique domain name and address that includes your business name (like Johnnysbakery.com)
8. Hosting setup – Store your website files and data onto a secure server (note: most will involve storage or bandwidth limits)
9. Content management – Regularly use admin tools (included in the Content Management System, or CMS) for editing content and site maintenance over time
10. Analytics – Regularly check tools for monitoring user behavior, SEO and general marketing performance of the site over time
Some of these steps are inevitably going to depend on you (planning, content creation and testing). Others are taken care of by website templates (layout, design and development). The rest may vary depending on the quality of the website builder you choose, whether it provides hosting/domain services, a reliable CMS and analytic tools. Many may require third-party providers or plugins to fill in gaps in tools and functionality, which can come at a cost.
When researching free website builders, make sure that each of these steps is handled. If some steps are missing or inadequate, look into free or low-cost solutions ahead of time to be better prepared.
