The hidden cost of a free website

A free website isn't free — it's rented. You pay nothing upfront, then pay a monthly subscription indefinitely, carry the platform's ads and branding, and own none of what you've built when you decide to leave.

If you've ever sat down on a Sunday evening determined to sort your business website out yourself, you've met the free offer. Build it in an afternoon, no cost, no developer. For a lot of businesses that's genuinely where it starts.

The problem isn't that these tools are bad. It's that "free" describes the first fortnight, not the next five years.

What the free tier actually gives you

Wix is the only major builder still offering a permanent free plan. It gives you 500MB of storage, 1GB of monthly bandwidth, and no support for a custom domain — your address becomes something like youraccountname.wixsite.com/yoursitename, and Wix ads appear on every page. Removing those ads and connecting your own domain both require a paid plan, which starts at around £13 a month.

Two of those limits matter more than people expect.

The subdomain. Your web address is doing work before anyone reads a word of your site. A wixsite.com URL tells every visitor that the business didn't invest in itself. It's also useless on a van, a business card or a shopfront window — nobody is typing that from memory.

The ads. You've built a page to sell your service and the platform is placing its own advertising on it. You're paying for that placement with your customer's attention.

Squarespace, meanwhile, no longer offers a free plan at all. There's a 14-day trial, after which every live Squarespace site is a paid subscription. Worth knowing before you start: trial sites aren't indexed by search engines, so nothing you build during those two weeks is earning you any search visibility.

Renting versus owning

This is the part that costs real money, and it isn't obvious at the start.

Squarespace's entry plan in the UK starts around £12 a month, with the next tiers at roughly £17 and £29. Call it £17 a month for a small business that needs a few proper features. That's £204 a year, and over £1,000 across five years — for a website you still don't own at the end of it.

Stop paying and the site goes offline. Not "becomes limited" — offline. There's no version of it you can host elsewhere, because the design, the templates and the page structure belong to the platform, not to you.

Compare that with a built site. You pay once for the build, then hosting, which for most small business sites is a modest annual cost. The site is yours: the code, the content, the domain. If you fall out with your designer, you take the files and go.

The bill you get when you leave

Most businesses do eventually outgrow a builder. That's when the hidden cost shows up properly.

Your content doesn't come with you. There's no clean export of a Wix or Squarespace site into anything else. The copy can be copied and pasted; the pages have to be rebuilt.

Your URLs change, and your rankings go with them. Every page that had built up any search visibility now sits at a different address. Without a proper redirect map, Google drops the old pages and starts you from scratch on the new ones.

Your email might be tangled up in it. If you bought your domain through the platform and run email off the same account, moving is no longer just a website job.

You pay twice. You've spent £1,000 on subscriptions and now you're paying for the build you could have had at the start.

Where it's genuinely the right call

It would be dishonest to say these platforms never make sense. They do, in a few specific cases:

• You're testing whether a business idea has legs at all, and need something online this week
• It's a hobby, a side project or a personal page with no commercial pressure on it
• You're a sole trader with no plans to grow, and a one-page site genuinely covers it
• You've got no budget right now, and something is better than nothing while you build up

If you're in one of those, use the free tier and don't feel bad about it. But buy your own domain separately, from a registrar in your own name, so that at least one piece of this is yours. That single step saves most of the pain later.

The moment it stops making sense is when the website has to earn — when it's taking bookings, generating enquiries, or standing in for a shopfront you don't have.

Questions worth asking about your current setup

1. Is your domain registered in your own name, with a registrar you can log into? If you bought it through a website builder, check.
2. What's your monthly subscription, multiplied by sixty? That's the five-year number. Compare it honestly to a build.
3. If you stopped paying tomorrow, what would you still have? For most builder sites, the answer is a text document of your own copy.
4. Does your web address look like a business, or like a trial account?
5. Are there ads on your site that you didn't put there?
6. How long does it take you to change a price? If you can't do it yourself, you're renting and dependent.

What we do differently at Lowe Design

Ten years in business from Coleraine, working with hospitality, tourism and local businesses along the Causeway Coast and further afield. Johnny Lowe is a qualified UX and product designer with a degree in Interactive Multimedia Design and a decade of experience across brand, web and motion work — including projects for Adobe, Jack Daniel's, Maker's Mark and Whiskas, alongside local clients like Portrush Surf School, New Row Dental and The Sandel Centre.

• You own everything. Domain, hosting, content and code, registered in your name from day one.
• No platform rent. You pay for the build and for hosting. There's no subscription that switches your website off.
• Designed for your business, not chosen from a grid of templates. Discovery first, then design decisions with reasons behind them.
• Built to be found. SEO and AEO handled properly, so Google and AI tools both understand who you are and where you are.
• Support when you need it. A monthly retainer covering updates, SEO and AEO work, or an hourly rate for one-off fixes.
• Editable by you. A CMS set up so you can change prices, add pages and update content without ringing anyone.