Did you know you can set up a website for free? That you don’t have to register your own domain and buy web hosting? Yes, you can set up your website on a subdomain of one of the many portals that offer free web presence.

Among the best known are Weebly, Wix, Webs, Jimdo, Yola and Webnode. In addition to these, blogging platforms such as Blogger, WordPress.com and Tumblr are also very popular. What all of these have in common is that you can set up a website for free on a subdomain only (example: mojadomena.weebly.com).

Although the idea of a free website probably sounds great at first glance, we have to face the fact that you can’t expect much from a free service. Read on to find out why setting up a website on a subdomain of any of the portals that offer it is a bad investment.

1. Unprofessional looking web address

Can you imagine if a well-known company, e.g. Petrol, had a website accessible at petrol.wix.com? Surely you would agree with us that such a choice would look far from professional. If you want to build a recognisable website, you also need a great web address that visitors will remember and trust.

Domain registration gives you the option to choose the domain name you want, and as the prices of the most popular TLDs are very low (you can see domain prices here), this reason alone convinces many people to choose their own domain rather than the free option of setting up a site.

2. Limited graphic templates and functionality

If you decide to opt for a free subdomain, you will quickly see that the choice of graphic templates is anything but varied. In most cases, you will only have a few dozen templates to choose from, which means that your site will be far from unique.

However, if you choose to own your own domain, you can opt for a completely unique design, or perhaps an even better option is to install a CMS system such as WordPress and install one of the many free or paid graphic templates.

In terms of functionality, you will also be quite limited on a subdomain. For an average presentation website, you will most likely have enough tools, but for a slightly more complex and elaborate website, you can just forget about it.

3. Ads and links you can’t remove

The adage that nothing is free is very true here. You’ll pay for a free service by seeing ads and/or links that you can’t remove or move to a less visible location. On some pages, the adverts will appear right at the top, but in most cases you will only see a link or banner ad in the footer. Perhaps not such a noticeable disadvantage, but still something that a professional website simply cannot afford.

4. Low response times and slow page performance

Since the sites on which it is possible to build a website on a subdomain are hosted on servers in foreign countries, especially in the USA, response times from other locations are very high. What does this mean? If your website is visited by users from Slovenia, they will have to wait at least a few seconds for the content of the page to be displayed each time they click on it.

Slow websites are a turn-off and certainly do not leave a good impression. Read more about the importance of website speed in this article. If you read this article, you will also find out what Google has to say about slow websites.

5. Other disadvantages of free website layout

One of the disadvantages that we have seen many times, e.g. on Yola.com, is the limitation on the number of pages that your website can consist of. For a concrete example, there is a limit of three pages. This means that you can only build a very small website, and you will have to pay for anything more than that. And not just a little.

Another disadvantage is that some online platforms that allow you to set up a page or blog on a subdomain have restrictions on the indexing of the pages. A good example of this is the Webs.com platform, where you can set up a free site very easily, but it is not visible in Google search. Why? Because Webs.com has decided to add a robots.txt file to new websites with a command that prevents web spiders from crawling the site. It’s definitely a weakness you need to watch out for.

Still no end to the downside? Unfortunately, no. One of the extremely important ones is that it is much more difficult to achieve a prominent position in Google and other search engines than with your own domain. So if you choose to build a free website on a subdomain of one of the many platforms, you can expect lower search engine rankings and therefore less organic traffic – i.e. fewer people visiting your website via search engines.

We hope we’ve given you enough good reasons why a free subdomain website is a bad investment. You can use this solution to run tests or set up support pages and blogs, but for a serious project, especially of a business nature, be sure to register a domain and lease quality web hosting.