Building a website with free tools: what is actually enough
Editor, hosting, quality checks, search visibility: there is a serious free tool for every step. Here are the ones worth using, and where free stops working.
You are just starting out, money is tight, and you wonder whether a website can be built without spending anything. For a simple presentation page, the answer is yes. Free tools exist for every step, and several are the same ones professionals use. What you pay instead is your time, plus a few limits worth knowing before you start.
Writing the site: an editor and, if needed, a CMS
Visual Studio Code is a code editor that Microsoft distributes for free, including for commercial use, on Windows, macOS and Linux. There is even a version that runs in the browser at vscode.dev, with nothing to install. If you write your own HTML and CSS, start there.
If you would rather manage pages without touching code, WordPress is still the reference. The software is free and open source, released under the GPL, and downloadable from wordpress.org. One nuance matters: the software is free, but it needs hosting that runs PHP and a database. That hosting almost always costs money.
Putting it online: GitHub Pages for a static site
For a site made of fixed pages (HTML, CSS, JavaScript), GitHub Pages publishes the contents of a GitHub repository for free. The limits are documented: on a free account the repository has to be public, the published site cannot exceed 1 GB, and bandwidth has a soft cap of 100 GB per month.
Most importantly, GitHub Pages runs no server-side code, neither PHP nor Python. A contact form cannot store inquiries on its own there: it has to be wired to an outside service. For a showcase page with your contact details, that is enough. For an online store or appointment booking, it is not.
Checking quality: Lighthouse and WAVE
Lighthouse is an open-source tool from Google, built into Chrome (developer tools, Lighthouse tab). It audits a page for performance, accessibility, best practices and search visibility, and each flagged issue links to an explanation of how to fix it. It is the same engine behind PageSpeed Insights, which we walked through in an earlier article.
For accessibility, WAVE, from WebAIM at Utah State University, is free and installs as a Chrome, Firefox or Edge extension. It marks errors to fix in red. WebAIM itself warns that finding no errors does not mean a page is accessible: an automated tool only catches part of the problems. Treat it as a first filter, not a certificate.
Getting found: Google Search Console
Once the site is live, Google Search Console, which is free, shows how often your pages appear in search results, for which queries, and how many people click. Its performance report shows the last three months by default. You first have to prove you own the site, a guided step that takes a few minutes.
It is the first tool we open when a client asks why their site does not show up on Google: it tells you what Google actually sees, not what you assume.
Where free stops working
These tools cover a first version very well. The limits show up when the site has to work for you: storing inquiries reliably, handling real consent for tracking tools under privacy laws such as Quebec's Law 25, selling online, or staying fast as content grows. At that point the cost is no longer the tool, it is the time you spend assembling pieces that were never designed to fit together.
Our view: start free if your needs fit on one page, and measure. The day inquiries start coming in and the site becomes a sales tool, it deserves real investment.
In the meantime, the next step costs nothing: run your current site, or a competitor's, through Lighthouse and WAVE this week, and write down the first three issues they flag.