How to create a free website for your business in 2026

A site that has to take enquiries needs a form that reaches your inbox and a phone number in the first screen. A site that exists so people can read your menu needs the menu as text on the page, not a PDF. A site that exists because a supplier asked for one needs almost nothing.

Write down the single action you want a visitor to take. Every decision below is easier once that sentence exists, and most of the time it is either "call us", "book a table" or "send an enquiry".

You buy the name for roughly €12 to €20 a year, then host the pages for nothing on one of the static hosts that have a free tier. The hosting really is free at small traffic, and the result is fast.

The catch is that you have to produce the pages. Someone has to write the copy, choose the photos, make it work on a phone, and keep it working. If you already build things, this is the cheapest good outcome available. If you do not, this is the option that quietly never gets finished.

The big drag-and-drop builders all have a free plan. You get a template, an editor and a subdomain. It is genuinely usable and you can have something live the same day.

Two things to check before you commit an afternoon. First, what the free plan puts on your page — most add their own branding, and some add adverts. Second, what sits behind the upgrade wall: a custom domain almost always does, and so do forms on several of them, which matters if enquiries are the point of the site.

The real cost here is not money, it is the blank template. You still write every word, and a builder with two hundred fonts does not tell you what your about section should say.

The newer approach is to describe the business — or hand over a link to your Instagram or Google listing — and have the tool draft the page for you. You review and correct rather than start from nothing, which removes the part most people stall on.

Judge these tools on what they hand back. Generic copy that could belong to any business in your trade is worse than three honest sentences you wrote yourself, and you will end up rewriting it anyway. A useful draft names your town, your actual dishes or services, and your real opening hours.

Before you pick, get straight answers to these. They are the difference between a free site and a site that becomes a subscription three weeks in.

For the sake of full disclosure: this is our tool, and this is precisely what the free plan includes. Paste a link or answer a few questions and it writes the copy — tagline, about, services or menu, and an FAQ — into one of six industry templates, then publishes it at yourname.urlifly.com. No credit card.

The parts most free plans hold back are included: contact and booking forms that email you, legal pages generated for you, a sitemap, robots file and structured data so search engines and AI assistants can read the site, and pageview numbers so you can tell whether anyone came.

Premium exists, at €14.90 a month or €149 a year, and the only thing it really buys is your own domain and a few extras on top. If you never want a domain, the free site is not a trial that expires.

Publish something free this week, with a working phone number and a working form. Send it to ten customers and watch what they ask you anyway — those questions are your missing page sections. Only once the page has produced a single enquiry is it worth spending money on a domain.

Doing it in that order means the site earns the domain, rather than the domain waiting on a site you have not written yet.