A free website for your business: when it works and when it costs you

What you actually get for free

Platforms like Wix let you build the site without paying, with conditions:

• The address isn't yours. Your site lives at something like yourbusiness.wixsite.com/home. To use your own domain you have to move to a paid plan.
• You carry their advertising. The free version shows the platform's ads on your site. Your customers see the Wix logo before they see yours.
• The site can't be moved elsewhere. A site built on Wix only runs on Wix. If you ever want to switch, you don't take it with you: it gets rebuilt.

Google Sites is another free option, with no ads, but very limited design-wise: fine for an information page, not for a site that has to win someone over.

What isn't free even though it looks it

• The paid plan. As soon as you want your own domain and no ads, you pay a monthly fee, every year, for as long as the site exists.
• Your time. It's the biggest cost and the one nobody counts. The hours spent wrestling with the editor, choosing a template and moving boxes around are hours you're not spending on your business.
• Speed. Templates ship with everything just in case, and the phone has to load all of it. If you want to see how yours does, I explain it in how to read your PageSpeed Insights report.
• The customers who never arrive. A site that doesn't show up on Google when people search for what you sell in your area doesn't cost you anything on an invoice. It costs you the calls that go to someone else.

When a free website does the job

• You're testing an idea and don't know yet whether it'll work.
• It's for an event, a season or something temporary.
• Your customers come through word of mouth, Instagram or Google Maps, and the site just needs to confirm you exist.
• You have the time and the appetite to learn to build and maintain it yourself.

If any of those is you, go for it. A simple site you built yourself beats no site at all.

When it ends up costing you

• When customers compare you. If people look at your site and a competitor's on their phone before calling, yours has to win that comparison.
• When you need to show up on Google for searches like “[what you sell] in [your area]”. That takes a fast site, built properly underneath, on your own domain.
• When you're already paying for the plan and the hours. Run the numbers: monthly fee × 36 months, plus the hours you put in. Compare that with a site built once that's entirely yours.

The three-year sum

A custom-built brochure site for a local business starts at €145 excl. IGIC, is paid once, the domain is in your name, and you can take it wherever you like. If you want to see how that compares with what others charge on the island, it's all in what a website actually costs in Gran Canaria.

Switching doesn't always pay off. But it's worth running the numbers with your own figures instead of assuming free means cheap.

If you already have a free website

Send it to me. I'll tell you whether it's holding you back or whether, for what you need, it's fine as it is. If it's fine, I'll say so and I won't try to sell you anything.

Jean Ayala — web development in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Websites from €145 excl. IGIC.