Getting a free website might sound appealing at first. We’ve seen many people drawn to offers of free hosting, even for self-hosted WordPress. But over time, we’ve noticed the hidden drawbacks that come with these “free” options.
In this article, we will share the key reasons why relying on a free website can be risky. From limited control to unexpected costs, these free setups often come with significant compromises.
We will walk you through everything you need to know to make an informed decision about building a stable, professional online presence. Avoiding these common pitfalls can save you time, frustration, and potential setbacks.
What Do We Mean by a Free Website?
Most beginners looking to start their own website want to keep costs low, which we completely understand. When we first started, we had the same urge to cut costs wherever possible.
Typically, a quick search for ‘free website’ will show a range of companies offering free website hosting services. The idea of building your site without spending anything can feel like an easy win.
But once you dive into these ‘free website services,’ you’ll often find that the reality is different. The limitations start appearing, and in many cases, these services aren’t truly free.
TLDR: Instead of opting for a free website service, consider trusted hosting providers like Bluehost and Hostinger. They are the top WordPress hosting companies, we use them to host our own websites, and we have found them much more safe and reliable.
If you’re thinking about getting a free website, consider the potential drawbacks before moving forward.
And read these 36 reasons why free website hosting is almost always bad.
1. Extremely Slow Websites
Most free website hosting providers put hundreds of websites sharing the same server.
This makes all their websites load at very low speeds. Slow websites create a bad user experience and are bad for SEO (search engine optimization).
2. Unprofessional Web Address
Having a website address like mysmallbusiness.Freewebsite.com does not look professional at all.
Visitors and potential customers will find it difficult to take your website seriously if it doesn’t even have a proper domain name.
When you ask these companies for a custom domain name, you usually have to pay a premium—something like $19 – $25 for a domain that usually costs $14.99.
3. Trial Service is Not Really Free
Another common pitfall we noticed is that many of these free website services often turn out to be limited trials.
After a while, you are asked to sign up for a premium plan. In most cases, this price is usually way higher than that of normal WordPress hosting services. If you added a credit card during signup, they can charge it without warning you.
4. Hidden Charges for Free Website
Like any other business, these free website companies need to make money, too. During our research we learned that many of these companies have hidden charges not mentioned on their marketing site.
For instance, some charge their users outrageously high fees for additional services like image hosting, email accounts, FTP access, website transfer, eCommerce stores, and so on.
5. They Can Lock Down Your Data
Many users who start with a free website and then want to move to a paid service find it impossible to move their website data.
These service providers do not offer any tools or integrations to migrate your site easily. Many such users contact our emergency WordPress support service to recover their website data, where our WordPress experts transfer their website to the new service.
6. Irrelevant Advertisements on Your Website
Most of these free website services are supported by advertisements. You create content and build your website, but they get paid for the ads. Often, these ads are distracting, intrusive, and look ugly.
The worst part is that sometimes your savvy competitors can pay these free website hosting companies to advertise on your website. Talk about sabotaging your business.
7. They Can Shut Down Your Website
The terms and conditions of these services clearly state that they can shut down your website at any time without providing you with a reason.
If they shut down a website, they usually don’t give your data or provide you a way to save your content.
8. These Companies Can Disappear at Anytime
The free website company can decide to discontinue its business at any time. We have seen countless such companies disappear overnight.
If they shut down their servers, you would lose your website and all the data. However, their terms of service give them full legal protection to do so.
9. You Will Lose Your Site Address
If they decide to close the service or shut down your website, then you will lose your web address.
Most of the time, it is a subdomain associated with the service. You cannot replicate that address or redirect users to your new site elsewhere.
10. They Can Sell Your Information
Remember that these services need to make money to remain in business. A good rule of thumb is that if you are not paying for it, you are the product.
These companies find other ways to make money, such as selling your email address, phone number, personal information, and website address to other companies. Their terms and conditions, which no one really reads, provide them total legal immunity.
11. No Site Building Tools
Unlike real web hosting services that offer easy drag-and-drop website builders, these free companies offer their users very limited website-building tools and functionality.
With these limited tools, your website will look even more unprofessional. We noticed that they claim to offer hundreds of designs but, in reality, just give each user the same basic set of templates.
12. No WordPress
Many of these free services do not allow you to install WordPress on your free website.
You can’t install helpful WordPress SEO tools, social media plugins, eCommerce plugins, and other WordPress marketing tools to grow your business website.
WordPress powers more than 43% of all websites on the internet. It is the most powerful and beginner-friendly website builder on the market. (See our WordPress review to learn more)
However, WordPress requires a little more resources than a free website builder service can afford.
13. Limited WordPress
Even if they allow you to host WordPress, their servers are simply incapable of running it. During our research, we tested their services and found that they actively limit website traffic and frequently show 500 internal server errors.
When you encounter these errors, you may think they are caused by WordPress, which can affect your user experience. In reality, the free website company is blocking your website traffic to save money.
14. Malware Distribution
In our experience, free website services are notorious for distributing malware. This could be due to their poor security, or they could do it for monetary benefits.
In either case, it hurts your website’s reputation and SEO. It can even cause legal troubles, which may cost you a lot of money.
15. You May Become Part of a Link Farm
These services keep disappearing and then reappearing because they try to generate money using unethical methods.
Building link farms is one such practice where they sell thousands of web pages created by their users to spammers, fake drugs and gambling sites, online scams, etc.
16. Limited Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred from the server to the user browser.
It costs money, and most free websites come with very limited bandwidth caps.
17. Low Disk Storage
Free website companies host hundreds of websites sharing the same server and hard disks.
They usually give you very limited storage to store your data. You are often asked to pay for more storage when you reach that limit.
Another thing we noticed is that they use cheap data centers with older hardware. This costs them less but affects all websites hosted on those cheap servers with slow hard disks.
18. Vulnerable to Hacking Attempts
Due to poor security, free websites are often more vulnerable to hacking attempts. We have seen hackers deface these websites, steal data, or inject malicious code.
If your site is hacked, recovering it will be much more difficult because these companies give you very limited access to your files and data.
19. HTML-Only Sites with a Limited Number of Pages
We came across many free website hosting companies that offered only a limited number of pages on each free website.
If you want to add more pages, you will have to upgrade to a paid plan. Often, these plans are very pricey, and you can even get premium managed WordPress hosting service under that price range.
20. Low Credibility Among Your Users
Free websites look unprofessional and low-quality, and your users will notice that you are using a free service. When your site is hosted on a free service, users will feel less inclined to trust it.
If users are uncomfortable sharing their information, the whole purpose of creating a website will be defeated.
21. Limited Design Choices
Unlike a self-hosted WordPress site where you can choose from thousands of WordPress themes, free websites offer only a handful of poorly designed website templates or layouts.
You cannot use your own website designs or any other design from the web.
22. No Help or Customer Support
Another common trait among these free website companies is that they offer no help to the users. You will have to pay for an upgrade to get any kind of support, which is often very slow and unsatisfactory.
You will have to set up your site on your own with the help of very limited and poorly presented documentation. You are on your own if you can’t figure it out.
23. You Can’t Run Advertisements or Make Money
Even though your free website company runs its own ads on your website, they do not allow you to run ads. You will not be able to add affiliate links or add Google AdSense to your website.
Many free website services also won’t allow you to start an online store, create a paid membership site, or use other popular monetization strategies.
24. There Are No Backups
We believe that backups are your first defense against common internet threats. However, these free websites do not offer the concept of regular backups.
They do not back up your data; if your site is damaged, you cannot restore it.
We use Duplicator to back up many of our websites. It allows us to automatically back up our entire websites to secure cloud storage and comes with built-in tools to easily restore from backups.
See our Duplicator review to learn more, or check out the free version.
25. Difficult to Get Rid Off
The companies offering these services often make money from content created by users like you.
They intentionally make it difficult for you to delete your own website. This means your website will remain on their servers, and you will have a hard time removing it.
26. No Statistics or Decent Analytics
With a good hosting company, you can get built-in statistics about your site’s visitors. You can even install Google Analytics or any other traffic counter.
On free websites, they do not allow you to add Google Analytics because they run their own analytics code on your website.
27. You Will Be Targeted With Email Offers
We’ve seen firsthand that these free website companies need to make money, and one strategy they use is constant email offers.
They often send regular email campaigns with “special” offers; in some cases, they may even sell your email address to third-party marketing companies.
28. No Support for Mobile Devices
Another limitation we’ve encountered with free website providers is the lack of mobile support. Using a smartphone or tablet, you can’t easily update your site on the go.
Their dashboards are typically designed only for desktop use, making managing or updating your site from a mobile device frustrating.
29. No Responsive Designs
In our experience, most free website companies use outdated web designs that don’t work well on mobile devices.
With mobile users making up a huge part of internet traffic, using a non-responsive design means losing a big audience. Without a responsive design, growing your online presence becomes nearly impossible.
30. No Branded Email
You won’t be able to create email accounts with your domain name on a free platform.
You’re left using a generic email address like Gmail or Hotmail, which doesn’t look professional for business communications or marketing.
31. No Contact Forms or Email Forwards
Every successful website needs a contact form to engage with users. Unfortunately, free website platforms usually don’t support custom contact forms.
You’re also unable to forward emails received from their limited, often poorly configured forms.
32. Limited File Upload Features
With paid hosting, we enjoy the flexibility of uploading unlimited files via an FTP client or WordPress’s media uploader.
In contrast, free platforms restrict you to a basic, web-based interface that allows one file upload at a time.
34. No Way to Set Up Redirects
On WordPress, it’s simple to set up redirects to maintain SEO and user experience.
With free websites, you can’t set up redirects. If you move to a paid service, you also lose the ability to redirect traffic from your free site.
35. Investing Time in a Free Website is Unwise
If you’re serious about building an online presence, starting with a free website may do more harm than good.
As you can see, these free options have risks and limitations that make them unreliable for long-term growth.
36. Not Even for Practice
In our experience, free websites can be limiting and frustrating to use effectively, even if you’re just practicing.
Good Alternatives to a Free Website
The best alternative to a free website is, of course, a paid professional website. We’ve found that many hosting providers offer WordPress hosting at very affordable rates, which ensures better performance and control.
A great place to start is with Bluehost. They provide shared hosting services and are officially recommended by WordPress for hosting.
WPBeginner readers also get a generous discount with Bluehost, along with a free domain name, SSL certificate, and more. This means you can launch your site for just $1.99 per month.
Why We Recommend Bluehost?
- Secure and reliable WordPress hosting platform
- Affordable hosting plan with free domain name
- Excellent 24/7 customer support
We use Bluehost to host several websites. To learn more, see our full Bluehost review.
If you’re new to website creation, you can check out our comprehensive guide on how to make a website (the right way).
If you’d prefer not to pay and are just looking to practice, you can set up WordPress on your own computer. Installing WordPress on Windows or Mac is easy.
If you haven’t used WordPress before, our free WordPress course can guide you. This video course covers everything from installation to building professional-grade websites with WordPress.
We hope this article helped you learn why having a free website is a bad idea. You may also want to read our guide explaining why you should use WordPress or this article on why is WordPress free, what are the costs, and what is the catch?
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Jiří Vaněk
Yes, free websites are a very bad idea. If you truly want to destroy your professional reputation and your company’s name, this is exactly the way to do it. Free websites are often paid for by displaying ads, so they’re not really free. You’re paying by having ads on your site, and you’re also paying with your reputation. Today, no one trusts such sites, and many users will immediately leave because if you’re cutting corners on something as affordable as a website, they’ll feel like you’ll cut corners on them too. Nowadays, professional hosting and a domain cost around $5 a month, sometimes even less. This is something you definitely shouldn’t skimp on if you’re serious about your work, reputation, and gaining new customers. You only have one reputation and can only make a first impression once.
kzain
This article hits the nail on the head! Free websites can be a good starting point to experiment, and I totally get it, that’s how I began my online journey too. But like you say, the limitations become painfully clear after a while.
No proper support, an unprofessional domain name, and ads that benefit them but not you – it’s all true! Eventually, everyone building something serious needs to make the switch to a professional website.
Dennis Muthomi
Excellent article.
I have used them when I was getting started in blogging, and can personally relate to the slow speeds and limited resuorces.
But, the biggest risk that I didn’t fully consider was losing all my hard work if the hosting company went MIA.
Mrteesurez
Well said, you have said it all. I don’t advise settling for a free website except for experiment, one will start from somewhere as I have also used free website in the initial days of my online endeavour.
The fact is you will finally migrate to a professional website no matter how long you used free website, you will be encountering more of the problems and limitations mentioned in this post.
The worst of it are, no help or support, ugly domain and they make money off you with advertisement but never allow you to make your own. lol.
Louis
Thanks mate. really useful information.
I lover this site ❤
WPBeginner Support
Glad you found our reasoning helpful
Admin
Hannah
Could you tell me what a key word is please and how it affects personal and meaningful conversations ??!
Thank you.
WPBeginner Support
For understanding what a keyword is, you would want to take a look at our article here: https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-do-keyword-research-for-your-wordpress-blog/
Admin
Hannah
Could you give me some more information about the bluehost basic hosting account. I have chatted to them but don’t find I’m getting the right response.
Is it the best place to go for a web site total beginner.
Does it carry outside advertising ie from companies or services. I don’t want to have advertising if poss.
Do all hosting accounts charge the full term up front.
This is something I feel I might like to try but don’t want to get embroiled into a financial net.
Your information was really excellent about free web sites but I still like I’m at the beginning of a twisty labrynth.
WPBeginner Support
Where to start for a beginner is a large amount of personal preference. We have recommended hosts here:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/hosting/
Your site should only have ads that you place on it.
Not all hosts, you would need to check with the hosts for if they have a monthly plan.
Admin
Matt
Not everyone wants to start a blog to make money. In fact, real writers proabably do so to show off their work. Not for the money. This might be a reason why some people use free hosting sites.
WPBeginner Support
While not all sites are looking to monetize, 14 and 15 are major concerns for free hosting that is not official such as WordPress.com.
Admin
George
Hi Sir Thanks for sharing this post. I really need this. I am working on Blogspot and joomla demo version. I also WordPress site using free web host companies. I faced problems in installing plugins. I think that how they give us free hosting while bluehost, and other sites give us paid hosting then I searched it on google then I found your informative article.
Sir I have question…
Some companies also provide free domain .tk .cm, and many others but .com
.org are paid. Should I use their free domains..???
Sir Reply me must…plzzzzz
WPBeginner Support
Hi George,
No, such free hosting accounts are not good. Please see the article above for more details.
Admin
Jalu Kaba
If you want to be serious about blogging. To my knowledge, all professionals in the world of bloggers strongly recommend buying your own hosting and domain. Because each one is free, there is a risk in it.
I’ve read free domains sometimes used as mounts for farming cryptocurrency. And there are cases when your traffic is good, then your free domain will be claimed and you will be asked a high price if you want to have it.
It is safer and you are calm in blogging if you buying domain and self-hosting. Many trusted companies provide cheap packages, around $ 2- $3 / month.
Gareth
I’m just completely blown-away by the amount of people that have a website hosted on a free platform like Blogger/Wordpress.com and struggle to get traffic, make it successful, make money, etc.
I think it goes without saying; You get what you pay for.
I understand the need to be frugal and everything, but most of these people that start blogs on free platforms, are the same people that have read that you can make a living with a blog, simply writing dailyabout your passion. They don’t want to part wth any money.
That’s mind-boggling to me.
Here’s another relative saying; “You have to spend money to make money”.
Gareth
Hansama
thanks, it’s very good information, btw i’m using blogger so there is something that i don’t agree about your opinion. but i want to move to a self-hosted wordpress. which one must i do, blogger(free) or wordpress ? thanks before.
sorry for my english,
WPBeginner Support
Self hosted WordPress.
Admin
Ali
I try it free then if i really like it i will pay for it
Bcuz Good job deserve lot of money it is nothing to discuss about
Nessa
So I started a blog on wordpress.com about 2 years ago. For the content I deal with, it’s been fairly successful. At the time, I didn’t realize the perks to having a a wordpress.org site vs wordpress.com and would like to switch over. I’m worried that doing so will cause all of my stats and posts to get deleted though; is that the case? Will I have to copy and paste all of my posts and lose all of my comments/followers?
WPBeginner Support
You can easily move to a self hosted WordPress.org site. Please see our guide on how to move from WordPress.com to WordPress.org.
Admin
Nessa
Thanks so much! This is exactly what I need! I was worried about losing all my stats and comments! Wordpress.com already had a glitch that dropped some of them so I was was worried about it happening again!
George
No you can migrate your site wpbeginners also write article on it.
Goto the following link
https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-properly-move-your-blog-from-wordpress-com-to-wordpress-org/
Eric Snissaert
What about the free http://www.wordpress.com? I personally don’t use it. I own 2 paid WP websites which meet my needs fully. But I can imaging someone with a very low budget who want to build a website for a club or something like that could start off with wordpress.com. Or not?
WPBeginner Support
Moving websites is painful, specially if you are not a developer. Users could spend months building a following and search traffic and all of this could get affected during a move to self hosted WordPress. It’s best to start with the most flexible platform right in the beginning so that you have plenty of room to grow.
Admin
Bishal
Free Websites are need to use for only practice & Expriment perpose only..
Tejas Waghmode
How to use marquee in WordPress???
WPBeginner Support
See
Admin
GLGale
It shouldn’t surprise me that a site for Wordpress beginners which is heavily geared towards promoting nothing but Wordpress should be bashing free websites. There are probably plenty of bad free website companies out there but there are also some pretty damn good ones as well. I’ve designed professional sites using various software for over 15 years, from a basic text editor to Dreamweaver to Wordpress and many others I’ve forgotten. They all have their own quirks and bugs and different learning curves.
However, I’ve been running a number of free multi-page sites on Weebly for over 5 years now. I’ve had no problem with speed, upload limits, storage, visits, forms, customized pages or any of the numerous negatives you accuse free sites of. I’ve had almost 10x as much traffic on these sites as I’ve ever had on my Dreamweaver and Wordpress sites and I’ve had no problem setting my own SEO. I have one site that duplicates an older Dreamweaver site that gets even more traffic and both sites are still active and have the same SEO.
I don’t disagree with some of your points and they do offer fair warning to avoid free site builders with no history or track record, but I think you are unfairly tossing everyone but Wordpress under the bus for no reason. In truth I’ve found Wordpress to be far more unwieldy for handing over to clients who can’t handle the learning curve and then proceed to dismantle what was once a beautiful site. I’ve never had this problem with clients on a weebly site, they just work.
Editorial Staff
Thanks Gale. This article is for business owners who are about to start their site. Starting on a free hosting company or web page builder isn’t a good long term solution. That includes WordPress.com (free blog hosting) which we don’t recommend.
We are recommending the self-hosted WordPress and we have always done so.
Admin
Katharine
I know I should move my wp.com site over to blue, but I have a friend who did this and actually got the half price. I cannot figure out how to do that and there was not link to that info on your post. Help!
WPBeginner Support
Simply clicking on the BlueHost link in the post will give you a 50% discount.
Admin
Katharine
Thanks!
Ajmal Mp
That is regular price search on google
Why spamming?!
ZIS
Good article! Thats why I built my own website on paid domain and hosing.
Liz Bobeck
Great article, whole-heartedly agree with you, although the low cost options are really only low cost options for the initial period of time. Bluehost is bad about this, give you a deal, then screw you later by jacking up the prices. Then they screw with your site and never tell you. I’d rather use Siteground.
Dave Lum
For a small “mom and pop” business, free Wordpress.org websites are just fine. Our five pages had content uploaded from my computer, and would take about four hours to re-create. There is a free contact form, which works. There’s free Google Analytics to track activity. Yes, we do pay for a custom domain, but that’s peanuts. Free is great for some.
Your article should have a subtitle: “and ten situations where a free website is great.”
WPBeginner Support
Please see our guide on the difference between self hosted WordPress.org vs free WordPress.com blog.
Admin
Md Nazmul Islam
Thank you Syed Balkhi to find out and explain great things. So, what about the reusing themes?
Jacob Christian Glover
Excellent Article! I started out with my first WordPress website and hosting through ipage, nearly three years ago. It’s been a wonderful learning experience that I wouldn’t trade. I’ve always thought of the possible limits to having a “free website” and your article has more than confirmed some of my deepest concerns. Ten WordPress sites later and I don’t see any chance of slowing down in sight. It’s a great feeling to know that every site that I build is mine from A to Z! Thanks again, great information, be well Mr. Winney!
Jacob Christian Glover
Correction! I credited the wrong person in my comments, this is a great piece that many individuals seeking the personal gratification of building a website should read. Great job to the Editorial Staff, and many apologies for crediting the wrong person, be well!
Tim
Good article. We actually get free hosting from Bluehost, due to our nonprofit status. Had to jump through a couple hoops with Guidestar.org and update our info there, but overall, well worth it! Might be worth looking at Jason. http://www.bentleyvilleusa.org
Grant Winney
Great article. Lots of valid points here.
I use DigitalOcean with pretty low hardware specs to run a WordPress blog, and it’s been good. They’re getting paid, so they can actually offer help when people need it. If I need more bandwidth or memory or whatever, I can just up it… I’m not stuck with some bottom-of-the-barrel “free” service with a bunch of artificial limits.
The worst would be gaining some traction, attracting some traffic, having some conversations with people.. and then having the rug pulled out from under you, and the company disappears and takes your catspajamas.freewebhostproviders.com url with them. And now no one can find you.
Totally worth paying 5-10 bucks a month to save the headache. There’s more than one kind of “free”, and free providers are anything but.
Jeff Mills
Great article. I especially like the line in #10 “if you are not paying for it, then you are the product”.
Jason
Really, really great article. I’ve encouraged people to switch from these free hosting companies for quite a while. The only one I recommended to start was Wordpress.COM. However, it doesn’t pay to stay there–you’ll eventually need to move to self-hosted on Bluehost or someone similar.
The other thing I learned in the past couple years–don’t use website companies. They usually are not built on the Wordpress system and they control the site look/feel have their own tools that are proprietary to their organization.
I recently moved our church from a hosting site like mentioned above to Wordpress.ORG. It was like pulling teeth to get our domain transfered to Bluehost. They ended up selling our domain to another registrar–whom I didn’t know. It was rough.
I’m very happy with Wordpress for our church – if you want to check it out. I’ve been on Wordpress for a while – you can check it out below.
I’ll be sharing this article on my social networks. Thanks Syed for sharing this information.
Blessings,
Jason
Jan McClintock
Very nice roundup, thank you! I have a similar post from a while ago but this adds quite a few more reasons. Love this blog.
Amobi chuks
That really feel so bad. I’m running a wordpress site that always give me series of nightmares from memory limit to page not found. Currently using their shared hosting. Virtual hosting is really too high for students.
Angelica Costa
I was expecting something about a website that gives a away free stuff, but it its about a free hosted websited. My bad.
Nice article, indeed there is no reason today to to use free hosting. There are really cheap and good services out there.