What a free website actually includes — and what it doesn't
Free is a price, not a specification. Five things worth checking before you build a business on somebody else's free tier.
Free website offers are everywhere, they vary enormously, and the word tells you nothing about what you are getting. Here is what to look at instead — and what the difference means a year later, when the site has customers arriving on it.
1. Whose address is it?
The single most important question. A free plan almost always puts you on a subdomain of the provider's own domain — yourbusiness.theirplatform.com. That is fine as a starting point and it is a real, indexable website. But the address belongs to them, and an address you do not own cannot be taken anywhere.
Business owners learned this the hard way when Google retired the websites it generated from Business Profiles: the addresses ended in business.site, and when the product was withdrawn the addresses went with it. Nobody could move them, because nobody owned them. That is the argument for a domain in your own name, and it is a small annual cost against a permanent risk.
2. Can search engines index it?
Some free tiers quietly discourage indexing, or bury your pages under a structure search engines struggle with. This one is worth checking directly rather than taking on trust, because a site nobody can find is decoration.
The test is simple: publish, wait a few days, then search Google for site: followed by your address. If nothing comes back, either it is too early or something is blocking it. On Pagebuilder every published site is crawlable on every plan, free included — being findable is the point of the product, not an upgrade.
3. What happens to your content if you leave?
Ask before you start, not after. Can you export the text and images? If the site is generated from a source you control — your Google Business Profile, for instance — this matters much less, because the material was never trapped inside the website in the first place. That is one of the quiet advantages of building from a profile: your hours, photographs, services and reviews stay yours, in Google's hands, whatever happens to the site.
4. What does it look like on a phone?
Most people who find a local business are on a phone, standing somewhere, deciding quickly. A free plan that produces a desktop layout squeezed onto a small screen is worse than no site, because it makes a real impression and the impression is bad. Load your site on your own phone before you tell anybody about it. Is the number tappable? Does the map open? Can you read the opening hours without pinching?
5. What is actually held back?
Every free tier holds something back — that is how it funds itself. What matters is which things. Some limits are reasonable on a small site; others quietly cost you customers.
Usually fine to live with:
- A provider badge in the footer
- A limit on how many photographs you can show
- Fewer designs to choose from
- One page instead of several
Worth paying to remove:
- No custom domain
- Anything that stops you being indexed
- No way to be contacted except a phone number
- Advertising for other businesses on your page
A reasonable way to think about it
A free site that is fast, mobile, indexable and honest about what you do is a real asset, and starting there is sensible. The upgrade worth making early is the domain, because it is the part that makes everything after it portable. The rest — extra pages, more photographs, removing the badge — can wait until the site is bringing in enough work to pay for itself.
Our own split works that way: see what each plan includes, or start on the free one and move when it earns it.