How to Make a Free Website (and When It's Actually Worth Paying for a Domain)
Yes, you can have a free website. Design, hosting, and a link to get started don't cost anything. Your own domain runs 200 to 500 pesos a year, and it's worth buying once you print materials or start getting traffic from Google.
You search for how to make a free website, open the first three results, and they all say the same thing: free, free, free. You spend the whole Sunday on it, arrange the photos, pick the colors, and when you click “Publish” a little screen pops up: enter your card. You close the laptop. Another Sunday gone.
The right question isn’t “is there something free?” There is, and it works. The question is what they’re actually charging you for, and when — because once you know that, you’re the one making the call, not the pop-up.
How do you make a free website?
Making a free website is possible because three things no longer cost anything: designing your page, hosting it, and the link to publish it — the only ongoing cost is a domain of your own, and that’s optional, for later. Here’s exactly what you get without paying:
The page. The design, the sections, the copy, the photos laid out. None of this costs anything anymore.
Hosting. This is where your page lives, running 24 hours a day. It used to be rented separately; today it comes included. If a tutorial tells you to hire a server on the side, that tutorial is ten years old.
The starter link. Here’s the trick almost nobody explains well: you get a free link that works perfectly, but it carries the tool’s name inside it. Something like yourbusiness.thetool.com. Your page is on the internet, you can send it to anyone on WhatsApp, Google can find it. It works. It’s just not yours — I’ll explain later why that matters.
With that, you already have a website. Zero pesos. Seriously.
Where does a free website start charging you?
A free website starts charging you in four places: your own domain, an email with your name on it, taking payments online, and removing the platform’s branding. Let me lay it out plainly:
A domain of your own. yourbusiness.com instead of the borrowed link. It runs between 200 and 500 pesos a year; .com.mx domains cost a bit more. It’s an annual fee, not a one-time purchase.
An email with your name. contact@yourbusiness.com instead of yourbusiness2019@gmail.com. It needs the domain first, and it’s almost always billed separately.
Taking payments online. If you’re going to accept card payments, the payment gateway charges a commission per transaction. That’s not the website’s doing — it’s the bank’s — and any tool you use will charge you the same.
Removing the branding. Some platforms leave a little “made with…” tag in the footer. Some remove it for free, others charge you for it. Ask before you invest the weekend.
Why does “free” sometimes end up expensive?
It gets expensive in two ways: it costs you the time you spend building the page, or it costs you a cheap domain that spikes when it renews. Two traps I see all the time.
The first is your time. Making a free website with a template is free in pesos, not in Saturdays. You drag the block, the logo overlaps, you fix it, you open it on your phone and the hours are covered up. Again. If your time is what you spend serving customers, that “free” is costing you the most expensive day of the week.
The second is the cheap-domain trap. They offer it to you for 50 pesos the first year, and the next year it renews at 700 and you don’t even notice, because it’s on autopay. Before buying any domain, check the renewal price, not the intro price. It’s on the same page, further down, in small print. That’s the real price.
When is it worth paying for a domain?
It’s worth paying for a domain the moment you’re going to print it, you want an email with your name on it, or you’re already getting traffic from Google — before that, the free link is enough. This is the part you came here for, so here it is, straight up.
Don’t buy it yet if:
- You’re still just testing whether this works. Publish with the free link, send it out, see if people show up. The domain will still be there waiting for you.
- You haven’t settled on a final name. Buying the domain before you decide is paying for a whole year on a name you’re going to change in March.
- You sell 100% through WhatsApp and Instagram and the page is just so people can find you. The borrowed link does that job just as well.
Yes, buy it now, the day that:
- You’re going to print it. Cards, the banner, the menu, the sign on your delivery van, flyers. This is the exact moment, and it’s the one people miss most: paper doesn’t update itself. The second you print a thousand cards with a link on them, that link can never change again. Make sure it’s yours.
- You want an email with your name on it. When you send a 30,000-peso quote from a Gmail address, people notice. When you send it from
contact@yourbusiness.com, they notice too. - You’re already getting people from Google. If your page has spent months collecting visits and reviews, that work is tied to the address. You don’t want to start over from zero.
The free link is borrowed; the domain is yours
The free link is borrowed because it lives inside the tool you used; the domain is yours because you can take it wherever you want. This is the one real reason behind all of it, and it has nothing to do with looking nicer.
If one day you switch tools, prices go up, or the company shuts down — that link dies, and it takes everything you handed out with it: the cards, the banner, the link in your bio, the months it took Google to get to know you.
With your own domain, you carry your address wherever you go. You change what’s behind it and your customers never notice, because they’re still typing the same thing. That’s what you’re paying for: you’re not buying a pretty website, you’re buying ownership of your address.
Which is where the rule comes from: as long as the link only lives on WhatsApp, it can wait. The moment it goes on paper or starts working seriously on Google, buy it.
What this looks like in practice
You describe your business to Proyecta the way you’d tell a friend:
“I have a coffee shop in Puebla, called Café Nube, we’re at 4 Oriente 210 in the Centro. I sell café de olla, lattes, cappuccinos from 45 to 70 pesos, and homemade sweet bread. We’re open Monday to Saturday, 8am to 8pm, closed Sundays. There’s wifi and outlets, a lot of people come to work here. I have 6 photos of the place and the bread. Make it look good on mobile and add a WhatsApp button to 222…”
Your page comes out published, with its free link, that same afternoon. You send it to your group chat, show it at the counter, tweak it as you go (“bump the cappuccino to 75,” “take out the Sunday hours”). Zero pesos so far.
Two months later you already know if it’s working for you. If you’re going to get cards and a banner made for the entrance, that’s the day: you buy cafenube.mx, connect it, and whatever you print already carries your address for good. And if it turns out it didn’t work for you, you didn’t spend anything finding that out.
Three mistakes that cost you
- Buying the domain before you have the page. You pay for it and it just sits there for a year, pointing at nothing, reminding you of the to-do.
- Buying five domains “just in case.”
.com,.mx,.com.mx, the hyphenated version, the one that looks similar. That’s five annual renewals. One is enough. - Picking a name you can’t say out loud. If it has hyphens, numbers, or a word everyone spells differently, you’ll be spelling it out over the phone for the rest of your life.
The phone test
Before you pay for any domain, do this: call someone and say your web address out loud, just once, without spelling it out.
Did they get it right and type it correctly? That’s your domain. Did you have to repeat it three times and clarify “with a hyphen, no accent, the S at the end”? That domain is going to cost you customers every single day. Find another one before you pay for the year.
Start without paying
Describe your business to Proyecta, see what comes out, and publish it with the free link. Use it for a few weeks. If it brings you customers, you’ll know exactly when it’s time to buy the domain — and it’ll be because you decided it, not because a pop-up asked for your card.
And if it doesn’t bring you anything, you haven’t lost anything. That’s information too, and it was also free.
Describe it at proyecta.dev and see what comes out.