Free tool, free hosting, borrowed address
A website is three separate things: the tool you build it with, the hosting that serves it around the clock, and the address people type or scan to reach it. Free options give you the first two and lend you the third: your site lives at the platform’s address —a subdomain like yourbusiness.platform.com or a path like platform.com/yourbusiness— not at one you own.
Hosting costs money, so before you pick a tool it is worth asking who is paying. There are three usual answers. Your visitors pay, by looking at ads or at the platform’s logo sitting above yours. You pay later, when a limit nudges you onto a paid plan. Or the company pays, because the free tool is the shop window for something else it sells. None of these is wrong, but each one lands differently on your business.
What happened to Google’s free business websites
For years, a Google Business Profile could spin up a simple website straight from the listing, which is why so many people still search for a free Google website for their small business. Google switched that feature off in March 2024: the sites stopped loading, redirected to the profile for a few months, and since June 2024 they lead nowhere. If a sign, a van or a business card still carries an address ending in .business.site, that address is dead.
What is still free, and well worth having, is the Business Profile itself: the listing that shows up on Google Maps with your hours, photos and reviews. It is not a website, but it has a field for one, and the two work together: the profile puts you on the map and the website explains what a listing cannot.
Three ways to get a free website today
Site builders on a free plan. You drag blocks onto a template and hit publish. It is the most flexible route, but the free tier usually comes with the builder’s branding in plain view, sometimes ads, a long subdomain and limits designed to move you up a plan: no custom domain, no way to remove the badge, a trimmed-down contact form. And you start from a blank page, so the layout and every word are on you.
Link-in-bio pages. The stack of buttons that sits in an Instagram bio. Handy for people who already follow you, but they don’t say what you do, what it costs or who it is for, and search engines have almost nothing to read on them. They complement a website; they don’t replace one.
Tools built for one kind of business. Instead of a blank page, you start from a site already planned for your trade, with its sections and sample copy in place. Less flexible than a builder, but the result looks right even if you know nothing about design, which for a one-person business is usually what matters.
A worked example: QRprofessionals
QRprofessionals is a free website builder for independent professionals: personal trainers, therapists, physiotherapists, nutritionists, tutors, photographers, hairdressers, plumbers and the like. We make it at Always Matters Agency, and it is here because it is exactly the case this guide describes, not because it is the only option.
You pick your profession and a one-page site opens, already written for it: services with prices and durations, how you work, who it is for, reviews, qualifications and registration numbers, where you work and a contact form. You edit your own details with a live preview, with no sign-up, and only sign in with Google when you publish. You end up with a link (qrprofessionals.com/your-name) and a QR code for business cards, flyers or the front desk.
Messages from the form land in a private dashboard where you mark them as contacted or client, add notes, set follow-up reminders and export your list to CSV. No card, no ads and no paid tier. Its limits are worth stating too: it is one page per account, the address belongs to the platform with no custom domain, and it does not take bookings or payments.
The hidden cost is the address
The biggest cost of a free website never shows up on an invoice. If you ever switch tools, the address stays behind: the printed QR codes, the business cards, the links other people gave you and whatever search engines had learned about that page all start again from zero. With six months of history it hardly matters; with years of cards in circulation, it hurts.
A domain of your own is cheap by comparison: a .com runs about $10–20 a year and a .co.uk about £8–15, as we break down in how much a domain name costs. Domains are not what makes a website expensive; what gets built on top is. And a domain brings the other thing free sites can’t give you: a business email on your own domain instead of a Gmail address on your card.
Free doesn’t mean exempt
In the UK, the Electronic Commerce Regulations 2002 require any business website to make its name, geographic address and email address easy to find, plus its VAT number if it has one; a limited company also shows its registered name, company number, place of registration and registered office. If the site has a contact form, UK GDPR calls for a privacy notice saying who handles the data, why and how people can exercise their rights, and PECR means asking before setting non-essential cookies such as analytics.
In the US there is no general imprint rule, but California’s CalOPPA requires a clearly posted privacy policy on any commercial website that collects personal information from California residents, and a contact form asking for names and email addresses is enough to count. The FTC, for its part, holds you to whatever that policy promises. None of this changes because the tool was free: the business on the page is responsible, not the platform. Check that the tool you choose lets you publish these texts.
When paying starts to make sense
A well-made free site beats a half-finished expensive one, and for getting started it is usually enough. Paying makes sense once the site gets too small, and that shows up in specific ways: you want to rank for each service and a single page can’t carry them all, you need your own domain and email, you have customers in another language, or the site has become your main source of clients and should carry your brand rather than a platform’s.
A sensible order: set up your free Business Profile, publish a free site with your services and a contact form, and watch for a few months whether messages arrive. If they do and the site feels cramped, the next step is a multi-page website on a domain registered in your name: our website packages list what each one includes at a fixed price, and website design by trade shows the pages we recommend for yours.
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