Free Websites Are a Bad Idea
Getting a free website is a tempting idea. There are lots of companies offering free website hosting even for self-hosted WordPress. You may be thinking “What’s the catch?” why doesn’t everyone use a free WordPress website? I’m going to list 22 reasons why getting a free website is a bad idea and something to be avoided at all costs.
What Do We Mean by a Free Website?
When starting their first website most people will, understandably want to keep costs to a minimum.
So they Google “free website” and they will find a number of companies offering a Free Website with free hosting and some sort of website builder to get the site up and running. It’s really tempting to have free hosting and to be able to build your site without paying a penny. That is until you get a reality check – remember the old saying “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
When you’ve signed up for your “free website service”, you start to discover the limitations in what you can do, the quality of the site builder, and the need for additional paid for options so many of them turn out to be not free.
If you are thinking about building a free website, then stop now.
And read these 22 reasons why a free website is almost always a bad idea.
1. Extremely slow websites
Today the speed a website loads is vitally important – if it’s slow to load people won’t stay they will click away. Generally free websites hosting providers put hundreds of websites on the same server. This means all the websites on the server are competing for resources and this makes all the websites load very slowly. As I said slow websites create a bad user experience and are bad for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
2. Unprofessional Looking Website Address
Having a hotmail or gmail account for your business, for example mybusiness@gmail.com, doesn’t look professional. In the same way a website address like “mysmallbussiness.freewesite.com” does not look professional at all and won’t help you build a brand. Potential customers, visiting your website, will find it difficult to take your website seriously when you don’t have a proper domain name.
If you ask these “Free Website” companies for your domain name, you usually have to pay a premium – around £19 – £25 when a domain normally costs £10.
3. Trial Service is Not Really Free
Beware, many free website services turn out to be limited trials. When the trial is up you are asked to pay for hosting. In many cases, the cost is much higher than normal website hosting services. Be careful if you added a credit card during signup, “for identification purposes”, then they may charge you without giving you any warning – it will be in the small print that no one bothers to read.
4. Hidden Charges for Free Website
Any business has to make money and free website companies are no different. Some of them get income by charging for “additional services” like image hosting, additional email accounts, FTP access, website transfer, etc. These charges can be disproportionately high.
5. They Can Lock Down Your Data
Many users who have started with a free website and then discover the limitations that begin to affect their ability to expand their business or online presence will want to move to a paid service. It’s at this point they find that it is impossible to do so simply. The service provider does not offer any tools to easily migrate your site. So the user ends up paying a freelancer to manually export their content and that can quickly become expensive.
6. Irrelevant Advertisements on Your Website
Another method they use to generating income is to place advertisements on your website. You have spent time creating the content and build your website, but the hosting company gets paid for the ads. These ads can be distracting, intrusive, and look ugly.
It may get worse, your marketing savvy competitor can then pay these free website hosting companies to advertise on your website. Good way to sabotage your business.
7. They can shut down your website
The free hosting companies terms and conditions of services, you know the ones you read in detail, clearly state that they can shut down your website at any time without providing you a reason. If they shut down a website, they often don’t give you your data or provide a way for you to save your content.
Additionally, the company can decide to close their business. They would simply shutdown their servers, and you will lose your website and all the data. Their terms of service give them full legal protection to do so.
If they decide to close the service or shut down your website, then you will lose your website address. Usually it is a subdomain associated with their service and you can’t replicate that address or redirect users to your new site when you set up elsewhere.
8. They can Sell Your Information
These services need to make money somehow to remain in the business. In todays online world there is a rule of thumb “if you are not paying for it, then you are the product”.
One way to make money is selling your email address, your personal information, and your website address to other companies. It’s all there in those well-read terms and conditions.
9. No Site Building Tools
Real paid for web hosting service generally provide website building tools, free website companies usually have limited tools and services for their users. Meaning that the website you create will look even more unprofessional and generic.
10. WordPress Restrictions
Many of these free services do not allow you to install WordPress on your free website – you are constrained by the tools they supply. They don’t allow WordPress because it requires additional resources than they can afford to provide for free.
Even if WordPress is supported on the free service, their servers will limit the functionality. You will not have the same access to the “back end” that you have with a paid service to configure WordPress or the version of PHP running on the servers.
11. Malware Distribution
Because they are a free website service they are notorious for distributing malware. This may be due to poor security, or they struggle to identify which sites are distributing the malware. Whatever the case, it will damage your website’s reputation and SEO.
12. You may become part of a Link Farm
The reason why lesser well known services keep disappearing and then reappearing is because they use unethical methods to generate income. One such practice is building link farms – this is where they sell thousands of pages created by their users to spammers, fake drugs and gambling sites, online scams, etc.
13. Limited bandwidth and Low Disk Storage
The amount of data transferred from a web server to user browser is called bandwidth. Good bandwidth costs money and many free websites come with a very limited bandwidth due mainly to the number of sites on each server.
Hosting hundreds of websites on the same server and hard disks means they can only allocate limited storage for your data. Reach that limit, and you’ll be asked to pay for more storage.
14. HTML only sites with Limited Number of Pages
Again associated with limited storage space free website companies may only offer a limited number of pages on your website. Want to add more pages, you will have to upgrade to a paid plan.
15. Low credibility among your users
With your site hosted on a free service, your users may feel less inclined to trust it. To some extent it implies you are cheap. If visitors are not comfortable sharing their information, then the whole purpose of you creating a website has failed.
16. Limited Design Choices
With a self-hosted WordPress site you can either choose from thousands of WordPress themes or have a design created uniquely for you. Free websites tend to only offer a handful of poorly designed templates. You are not able to use your own designs or use any other design from the web.
17. No help or Customer Service
These free websites offer limited help to users. You will have to dive into setting up your site on your own by trawling through tutorial videos and documentation. This will steal away you time and effort, plus you have a business to run as well. You didn’t want to become a website designer but you will have to become one to create a half way decent site.
18. Difficult to get rid off
Because these services often make money from content you created they intentionally make it difficult for you to delete your own website. What that means is your website will remain on their servers, and you will have a hard time removing it.
19. You will be Targeted with Email Offers
These companies need to cover their costs by using alternative methods to make money. They will bombard you with emails with special offers to upsell overpriced paid for services. They could sell your email address to other marketing companies as well – remember those T&Cs.
20. Limited Responsive Designs
The majority of visitors to your website will not be using a full size PC and that means that your website needs to be ‘fully responsive’. The templates offered by these companies may not perform as well as they could do on mobile devices and this will affect your potential customer base.
21. No Branded Email
If you don’t have your own domain name then you can’t create email accounts with your own domain name. This means you will have to continue to use your gmail or hotmail email account which does not look very professional (see point 2).
22. Investing Time on Free Website is Unwise
If you are serious about creating a presence on the web, then don’t start with a free website. As I have covered in the points above, they are unreliable, unsafe, difficult, and severely limit your growth options.
If after reading this you want to know more or want help building you site contact us.
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