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Free websites do exist, but are they worth considering? Initially, the prospect of a free website sounds promising.

You get an online face for your business, yet you don’t have to spend a penny making it. After all, it can cost thousands to get your site designed by professionals!

Surely, this is a fantastic way of saving money while ensuring your business has a website? You’d think so, but this is not the case. Realistically, businesses should never use free websites as they present a series of problems that can harm your brand. For context, here are three reasons to steer clear of free sites:

Very slow loading speeds due to ad stuffing

Ad stuffing occurs when lots of adverts are placed on a web page. Unfortunately, when you use a free website, you will see so many ads placed across it. Why? Because the free website provider has to make money somehow, and this is how they do it! You don’t get any money from the ads, but you do suffer from extremely low loading speeds thanks to the additional ad content that has to be loaded up.

As anyone with a website knows, slow loading speeds are bad for conversions and bounce rates. If your website performance is poor, people will click away before a page even loads up, leading to many missed opportunities. With a paid website, you won’t have this issue as they are optimised to load quickly.

A poor domain name damages your reputation

Secondly, free websites tend to come with terrible domain names. This means you don’t get the domain you wanted, which means it might not align with your brand at all. As such, this can do serious damage to your online reputation.

In fact, people may resist clicking on your site if the domain looks strange. They think the website is a scam because it looks so unprofessional. Plus, it is harder for you to generate traffic based on your brand name if the domain name of your site doesn’t match it.

You make a bad first impression

Ultimately, free sites are bad because they lead to terrible first impressions. As mentioned in the previous two points, the first things people encounter when they visit your free website are slow loading speeds and an unprofessional domain name. Do you think this will lead to people actually staying on your site and taking your business seriously?!

No, it won’t. The crazy thing is, there are so many web design companies, like WebX360, that can help you design professional sites in seconds. Or, if you don’t want to spend money on custom sites, you can find loads of services that charge you a small monthly fee for professional websites. This gives you a proper domain name, a brand logo, fast loading speeds, etc.

All in all, it is never a good idea to use a free website. If you want your business to be taken seriously, you have to invest some money into it. Whether this means committing to custom web design or signing up for a website building package; you need a site that creates positive first impressions.

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