Free website builder, or free website build?
Looking for a free website builder? Have the website built for you instead.
A builder gives you a tool and a template and leaves the evenings to you. We give you a designer. You tell us about the business, we design and build the site, and you see it before it goes live. No build fee, no design fee.
No template. No evenings lost. No obligation.
- No build feeno design fee
- About 7 daysto launch
- No contract
- You ownthe site
The honest difference
A free website builder is a tool. What you actually want is a website.
If you have typed “free website builder” into a search engine, you probably want two things: a professional website for your business, and not to pay a designer for it. Those are reasonable things to want. The builders that come up promise both, and to be fair to them, they can deliver something. But it is worth being clear about what that something is.
A website builder is software. You pick a template, then you spend evenings dragging boxes around, choosing fonts, resizing photographs and wondering why it looks fine on your laptop and wrong on your phone. The free versions usually keep the builder’s own name in your web address and a badge on your page, and the site lives inside their system, so leaving means starting again. The result, after all that time, tends to look like what it is: a template with your name in it.
We do the other thing. A designer reads your brief, designs a site around your business, builds it properly so it is fast and works on phones, and shows it to you before it goes live. You say what you want changed. The domain is in your name, the site is yours to keep, and there is no contract. The design and the build cost you nothing. It is not a builder. It is a build.
Built for you, or built by you. The difference in one table.
| Compare | FreeSiteCrew | Typical free website builder | DIY from scratch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who does the work | A designer, from a brief you give us in plain English | You, in the evenings | You, from a template |
| Starting point | A blank page and your business | A template, then hours of adjusting | A template with the name swapped |
| Your address | Your own domain, in your name | Often the builder’s name in the address on the free tier | Your own domain if you sort it |
| Branding on the page | Yours only | Frequently the builder’s badge on the free tier | Yours |
| Can you leave with the site? | Yes, it is files you can take | Rarely; a builder site lives inside the builder | Depends on what you built it in |
| Time from start to live | About a week, once we have your content | As long as your evenings last | Weeks, usually |
Skip the evenings. Tell us about the business instead.
Get started nowWhy people who start with a builder end up here.
The same three reasons, told to us in different words.
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It looked like a template, because it was
A template can only ever look like a template. A designed site looks like your business, and customers can tell the difference even when they could not say why.
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The evenings never ended
Most owners underestimate the time by weeks. Every hour on the builder is an hour not spent on the business, and the site is still not finished.
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It was never really theirs
The address had the builder’s name in it, the page carried their badge, and moving away meant starting from nothing. Ours is files in your name.
What you get instead of a template.
Everything a proper small-business site needs, designed for your business rather than dragged into place.
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Bespoke homepage
Designed around your business and your customers, not chosen from a gallery.
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Service pages
Clear pages for what you offer and who you help, in the words people search for.
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Contact forms
Simple forms that reach you, plus a tappable number where it counts.
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Mobile-first
Designed for the phone first and given more room on a desktop, not squashed down from a big screen.
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Fast loading
Lightweight, hand-built pages. No builder bloat slowing every visit.
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Search-ready structure
Titles, headings and structure set up so search engines can read and file the site properly.
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Launch help
Domain, hosting and going live, handled with you rather than left to a help article.
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Easy future edits
Changes in plain English, done for you. No dashboard to relearn every time.
Two minutes to apply. About a week to launch. Zero evenings.
Get started nowFrom apply to live in four simple steps.
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1
Apply in two minutes
Tell us what your business does, what pages you need, and who you are trying to reach. Send any photos or wording you have, or leave that part to us.
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2
We design your site
Real people plan and design it around your business and your offer. Never a template, and built to work properly on phones from the start.
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3
You review it
You see the real thing before anyone else does, and tell us what to change in plain English. Nothing goes live until you are happy with it.
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4
We launch it
We handle the technical side of going live, check everything works as it should, and get you set up to be found. From there the site is yours to keep.
That is the whole process.
Apply in 2 minutesQuestions people ask when they arrive from a builder.
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The design and the build are free because our business is long-term relationships: a business that gets a good site from us tends to come back for bigger work and to recommend us. Every website has running costs to stay live, a domain and somewhere to live, and we go through exactly what those are with you before launch. There is no contract.
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No. Nobody hands you a tool. A designer reads your brief and builds the site, and you review it before it goes live. If you would enjoy building it yourself, a builder is a fine choice. If you would rather run your business, this is the other option.
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Yes. Tell us what you have and we will take what is useful, the words, the photographs, the structure that works, and build properly from there. Nothing you have written is wasted.
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It loads faster, works properly on their phone, carries no badge or advert that is not yours, and looks like your business rather than a template they have seen before. Those are the things that make a stranger trust a small business.
Claim your free website
Someone is searching for you right now.
Make sure they find you.
Tell us what your business does and we will design something worth sending people to. You see the site before it goes live, and you say what changes.
Takes about two minutes. No awkward sales call.