6 Best Free Website Builder for Small Business UK

WordPress.org is the world’s most widely used website platform, powering 43.4% of all websites on the internet as of 2025, according to W3Techs. Among content management systems with a known platform, its share exceeds 60%. The software is completely free and open-source under the GPL licence.

It is important to distinguish between WordPress.org and WordPress.com. WordPress.org is the self-hosted, free software. You download it, install it on a hosting server, and you own everything. WordPress.com is a separate managed hosting service from Automattic. It offers a free hosted plan, but that plan includes platform ads, restricts plugins to users on the Business plan ($25/month), limits storage to 1GB, and uses a .wordpress.com subdomain. For any business, the hosted free plan on WordPress.com is not a practical option.

For a self-hosted WordPress.org site, you install the software on hosting from a UK provider, choose a theme from over 11,000 free themes in the official repository, and extend it with over 60,000 free plugins. These cover SEO tools (Yoast SEO, Rank Math), contact forms, booking systems, Google Analytics integration, GDPR cookie compliance, and much more.

WordPress is the strongest free platform available for SEO. You have complete control over URLs, meta titles, meta descriptions, schema markup, image alt text, and site speed. This is why it is the platform of choice for businesses that take Google ranking seriously. Tradespeople, service businesses, and local companies benefit particularly from this — a well-built WordPress site with the right SEO plugins and content will consistently outperform a site on a hosted free builder.

For tradespeople, local service providers, and professional firms in the UK, we build WordPress websites designed for local search visibility. See our website design for tradesmen and local business website design services for examples of what a professionally built WordPress site looks like.

Joomla is a free, open-source CMS that has been in active development since 2005. Like WordPress.org, the software is completely free. You download it, install it on a hosting server, and manage your own site. It powers over 800,000 live websites and holds approximately 2% of the global CMS market, according to Search Engine Journal.

Joomla sits between WordPress and Drupal in terms of complexity. It is more flexible than most hosted builders but harder to learn than WordPress. The admin interface is structured and capable, but new users typically need longer to get comfortable with it than they would with WordPress.

Joomla’s strongest features are its native multilingual support and advanced user access controls. Both are built into the core, without needing third-party plugins. For organisations that need to manage content in multiple languages, or run a site with complex user roles and permissions, these built-in capabilities are a genuine advantage over WordPress, which requires plugins to achieve the same results.

Joomla 5, released in late 2023, brought meaningful improvements in performance, security, and PHP 8+ compatibility. A biannual release schedule means updates are now more predictable for development teams. The Joomla Extensions Directory (JED) lists over 8,000 extensions, though this is considerably smaller than WordPress’s 60,000+ plugin library.

From an SEO perspective, Joomla provides good foundational tools — customisable meta tags, clean URL structures, and canonical URL support. It is less comprehensive out of the box than WordPress, and the ecosystem of dedicated SEO extensions is smaller. For most UK small businesses, this means more configuration effort to achieve the same results.

Joomla is used extensively by UK government departments, charities, and universities. It is less commonly used by sole traders, tradespeople, and small service businesses, where WordPress’s larger community and plugin ecosystem make it a more practical fit.

SITE123 is a hosted website builder designed for people who want to get online with no technical knowledge. Unlike most drag-and-drop builders, it uses a structured template system where you select a layout and fill in your content. This approach removes many of the design decisions that can slow beginners down.

The free plan gives you a SITE123 subdomain (yourbusiness.site123.me), 250MB of storage, and a basic set of features with platform branding displayed on your site. It is enough to test the editor and see how the platform works. For a professional business website, the free plan is not sufficient.

SITE123 provides 24/7 live chat support on all plans, including the free tier. This is better than most competitors at this price point. Paid plans start from around £5.80 per month on annual billing, remove the branding, and allow a custom domain.

SITE123 is particularly suited to local service businesses that need a simple, clean site quickly — a plumber needing a basic web presence, a cleaner wanting to list their services, or a small local shop with a handful of pages. See our local business website design service for an example of what a more polished version of this kind of site looks like. For cleaning businesses specifically, we also build dedicated cleaning website designs and carpet cleaning website designs.

The SEO tools on SITE123 are basic. You can edit page titles and meta descriptions, but there is no structured data support, no advanced technical SEO controls, and limited URL customisation. If ranking in Google is important to your business, SITE123 will limit what you can achieve.

Jimdo is a German-founded website builder that has been used to create over 25 million websites, according to TechRadar. It offers two separate builder experiences: Jimdo Dolphin, an AI-powered tool that generates a website automatically based on your answers to a few questions, and Jimdo Creator, a more traditional drag-and-drop editor.

The free Play plan gives you a .jimdosite.com subdomain, 2GB of storage, up to 5 pages, and Jimdo’s own ads displayed on your site. It is functional enough to test the platform and see an auto-generated design, but not appropriate for a professional business website. To remove ads and connect a custom domain, you need the Start plan at approximately $9 per month (Jimdo prices consistently in US dollars for UK users).

Jimdo Dolphin’s AI builder is genuinely fast. It can produce a basic website draft in under three minutes. The caveat is that the design choices are limited — Jimdo offers only around 16 templates and the customisation options are narrower than most competitors. Ecommerce is available on paid store plans, but Jimdo caps online shops at 100 products on most plans and supports only Stripe and PayPal as payment gateways, making it unsuitable for larger stores.

The platform’s GDPR Legal Text Generator is a useful feature for UK small businesses. It automatically creates privacy policies, terms and conditions, and impressum pages to help with GDPR compliance — something businesses operating under UK and EU data protection rules will appreciate.

Jimdo is marketed towards small and local businesses. Simple operations — a coffee shop listing their hours, a salon taking booking enquiries, a local consultant sharing their services — fit the platform’s scope well. For businesses that need more pages, deeper customisation, or strong SEO performance, Jimdo’s limitations become noticeable quickly.

Strikingly is built around a clear philosophy: make it fast and simple for anyone to create a professional-looking single-page website. The editor is drag-and-drop and beginner-friendly, and the platform delivers on its promise of speed. Most users can get a basic site online in under 30 minutes.

The free plan gives you a .mystrikingly.com subdomain, up to 5 pages, and the ability to sell a single product with a 5% transaction fee. Platform branding is displayed on the site. Like other free hosted plans, it is suited to testing the editor rather than running a live business website.

Strikingly’s primary strength is its focus on mobile-optimised, single-page layouts. These work well for freelancers, consultants, personal trainers, and other service providers who need a clean, scrollable page presenting their services and contact details. They are also useful as dedicated landing pages for specific campaigns. Our personal trainer website design service gives an example of the kind of focused, conversion-oriented site that works well in this format.

The SEO limitations on Strikingly are significant. A single-page website is structurally difficult to optimise for multiple keywords. You can edit basic meta titles and descriptions, but there is no advanced technical SEO support, no structured data, and building a content-led strategy is not practical on the platform. For any business relying on organic search traffic, this is a meaningful constraint.

Ecommerce on the paid Pro plan supports up to 300 products with a 2% transaction fee. The VIP plan removes the transaction fee and increases the product limit to 500. For businesses needing a serious online shop, Strikingly is not the right tool.

Drupal is a free, open-source CMS that has been in development since 2001. Like WordPress.org and Joomla, the software costs nothing. It is used by governments, universities, and large enterprises worldwide, including the White House, NASA, and numerous NHS organisations in the UK. It powers around 1.1% of all websites globally, according to Search Engine Journal, but accounts for 6.85% of the top 10,000 highest-traffic websites — a sign of where it is actually deployed.

Drupal’s strength is its depth. It offers exceptional security, highly granular user permissions, extensive multilingual capabilities, and API-first architecture that suits complex integrations. Drupal 11, released in late 2024, introduced a new Drupal CMS product aimed at making the platform more accessible to non-developers, with drag-and-drop tools and pre-built “recipes” for common site types.

Despite these improvements, Drupal is not a practical choice for most UK small businesses. It has a steep learning curve, requires developer expertise to set up and maintain correctly, and the community — while active — is significantly smaller than WordPress’s. Development agencies that specialise in Drupal are also less common and typically more expensive than WordPress agencies.

The key data point here: Drupal’s overall market share has declined by 31% since 2024, as small businesses and non-technical users move to more accessible platforms. This is not a sign that Drupal is poor software — it is very good at what it does. It is a sign that what it does is best suited to enterprise and government projects, not a sole trader or growing small business.