Every small business owner has heard the offer: "My cousin/nephew/friend can build you a website for free" or "for a couple hundred quid." It sounds like a win. Often, it isn't.
What usually goes wrong
The site gets built, looks fine for a few months, and then the person who built it gets busy, changes jobs, or loses interest. Nobody updates it. Nobody's monitoring whether it still loads properly on a phone, whether the contact form still works, or whether it's actually showing up on Google at all.
The ownership problem
A common issue: the domain, hosting, or site itself ends up registered under the builder's personal account, not the business's. If that relationship ever sours, the business owner can lose access to their own website entirely — domain included.
The invisible cost: lost customers
A slow, outdated, or badly structured website doesn't just look unprofessional — it actively loses customers. Google penalises slow-loading sites in search rankings. Customers on mobile (the majority of local searches) leave a site that doesn't load properly within seconds. A "free" site that quietly costs you customers every month isn't actually free.
What to check, at minimum
- Do you own the domain outright, under your own business's details?
- Does the site load in under 3 seconds on mobile?
- Is there a way to easily update it, or does it require the original builder every time?
- Is anyone actively monitoring it, or is it "set and forget"?
The bottom line
A free website isn't free if it's costing you customers, control, or peace of mind. It's worth asking honestly whether the "free" option is actually the cheaper one — or whether it's just deferring the real cost to later, when it's harder to fix.
Want this fixed for your business?
Get my demo