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Choosing a website platform

Written 28 August 2026 · prices checked the same day

Most first websites do not fail at the building step. They fail at the choosing step, months earlier, when someone commits to a route before they know what they are launching.

This is a decision map rather than a ranking. There is no best platform, because the four routes below answer different questions, and which one fits is settled almost entirely by what you are launching and how often you will change it. What follows is what each route honestly costs in money and in hours, including the two numbers pricing pages tend not to lead with: what you pay in year two, and what it costs to leave.

step one

What are you launching?

Answer this before you compare anything. Nearly every bad platform decision is a sound decision made for a different kind of site.

  • 01

    A portfolio, a CV, a one-page site

    Somewhere to point people. A handful of pages, no payments, changed a few times a year.

    → a builder's free tier, or plain HTML if you can write it

  • 02

    A service business

    You want enquiries. Real pages, an obvious way to be contacted, and something a search engine can read.

    → a site builder. WordPress only if you already know it

  • 03

    An online store

    You are taking money, shipping things, and handling tax, refunds and chargebacks.

    → a hosted store. The other routes are not worth the hours

  • 04

    A blog, or a writing habit

    You will publish repeatedly for years, and you want to keep the archive when things change.

    → WordPress, or a builder with a blog. Check the export first

step two

What each route costs

Money and hours side by side. The prices are real and dated. Treat them as this month's shape rather than a quote.

Route Best for Year one Year two Hours to launch
Site builder Portfolios and service businesses. Anyone who will not maintain software. $0 on a free tier, or roughly $130–$190 on an entry plan billed annually. Domain often free for the first year. Much the same, plus the domain once the first-year offer ends. An evening to a weekend.
Hosted store Selling products, from the first sale onwards. From about $348 (Shopify Basic billed annually), plus card fees on every sale, plus the domain. The same, once intro offers such as one dollar a month for three months have ended. A weekend to a week, most of it on payments, shipping and tax.
WordPress on your own hosting Publishing a lot, or needing a plugin that exists nowhere else. From about $36 on an introductory shared-hosting rate, domain often included. Three to six times year one. SiteGround's entry plan is $2.99 a month promotional and renews at $17.99, about $216 a year. A weekend to launch, then updates and backups for as long as the site exists.
Plain hosted HTML Sites that rarely change, run by someone who will write or generate the files. $0 to host on Cloudflare Pages or GitHub Pages. The domain is the only bill, about $10–$20. Identical. There is no renewal cliff on this route. Days to weeks if you are learning. Close to zero maintenance afterwards.

fig. 01 money and hours by route, in US dollars, checked 28 August 2026 on each vendor's own pricing page

The builder route, in more detail

This is where most first sites that are not stores should land, so it is worth more than a table row. The field is crowded and the real differences are smaller than the marketing suggests. Squarespace is the design-led default and starts at about $16 a month billed annually. Wix is the most flexible and the most cluttered. Carrd is built for single-page sites and priced for them. Weblium sits in roughly the same bracket as Squarespace. All of them will produce a respectable five-page site in a weekend, and none of them will turn a weak idea into a strong site.

Build it free before you pay for it. Every builder named here has a free tier or a trial. Put the smallest real version of your site on one, with your actual words in it, before any money changes hands. An evening in the editor settles the question better than any comparison, including this one. If the free tier turns out to be enough, that is a legitimate ending rather than a failure to decide.

If you reach the paid step and want to try the builder this site has a commercial relationship with: Weblium's Starter plan is $132 a year billed annually, or $16 a month, and its free tier gives you three pages to test the editor first. Weblium Partner link
Naming it changes nothing above it. The prices, the caps and the order of this page are what we found, and the same page would be here with no partner on it.

Where the price actually lands

The number on a pricing page is rarely the number you pay in year two. Two mechanisms do most of the damage, and neither is hidden. Both are simply read after the fact.

Introductory hosting rates. Shared hosting is advertised at the price of a coffee and renews at several times that. SiteGround states it on its own plan page: the entry plan is $2.99 a month promotional, and “Renews at $17.99/mo.” Hostinger's shape is the same, with entry plans around $2 to $3 a month renewing near $11 to $17. Multiply the renewal by twelve before you decide, because that is your actual annual hosting bill from the second year onwards.

First-year-free domains. Builders and hosts frequently bundle the domain for year one, Weblium included on annual plans. It then renews at the registrar's normal rate, commonly $10 to $20 a year for a .com. That is a small bill on its own. It catches the people who budgeted zero.

The honest planning number for any route is the year-two number. Work it out before you commit rather than after.

What free actually caps

Free is a real answer for some sites and a trap for others. What separates them is not quality, it is the caps, and the two kinds of free tier cap very different things.

Builder free tiers put your site on the builder's subdomain, limit the page count, and usually display the builder's branding. Weblium's free tier, to use the one named above, stops at three pages with 100 MB of storage and 100 MB of bandwidth, and carries Weblium branding. That is enough to build the thing and judge it before paying, and enough to be a permanent home for a personal page nobody needs to find by its own name.

Static hosting free tiers are different in kind. Cloudflare Pages and GitHub Pages are free for the site itself, with your own domain and HTTPS included, and their limits are engineering limits rather than sales limits. Cloudflare documents 500 builds a month, up to 20,000 files per site and a 25 MiB ceiling on any single file. GitHub documents a 1 GB published site, a soft 100 GB of bandwidth a month, and a soft limit of 10 builds an hour. A brochure site will not come close to any of them. The catch is not the hosting. It is that you have to produce the HTML.

Free is enough when the site is small, it takes no money, and you either do not need your own domain or you are on the static route where a custom domain costs nothing anyway. Free stops being enough when you are asking someone to pay you, when you need more than a handful of pages, or when someone else's branding on your own site starts to cost you credibility.

The cost nobody quotes: leaving

Every route is easy to enter. They differ enormously in how easy they are to leave, and over a few years that difference is worth more than a few dollars a month.

  • Plain HTML has the cheapest exit. The files are the site. Move them anywhere, including to a different free host, in an afternoon.
  • WordPress exports its content in a documented format and moves between hosts routinely. The theme and plugin choices, not the content, are what make a move painful.
  • Hosted stores export products, customers and orders as CSV. The storefront design, the apps and the URL structure do not come with you.
  • Site builders are the tightest. Your text and images can be retrieved, but the site itself, its design and its pages, does not move to another builder. In practice, leaving means rebuilding.

None of that makes builders a bad choice. It makes them a choice worth entering with open eyes. Ask the exit question before the entry question: if this goes well, what will it cost me to leave in three years?

step three

Decide it in twenty minutes

The decision is smaller than the research industry around it suggests.

  1. Say what the site must do, in one sentence

    If the sentence contains the word sell, you are on the store route. Stop comparing builders.

  2. Say how often you will change it

    Weekly means you want a publishing tool. Twice a year means almost any route works, so pick on cost and exit instead.

  3. Write down the year-two number for your two finalists

    Not the advertised one. Renewal rate times twelve, plus the domain once its free year ends.

  4. Build the smallest real version free

    A free tier or a trial, with your own words in it. One evening tells you more than a week of reviews.

  5. Only then pay, and only then annually

    Annual billing is the right call once you are sure, and an expensive way to discover you were not.

Once you have chosen

The choosing is the part that goes wrong quietly. The building is the part with a checklist, and these are the ones that follow this decision:

All three are free, tickable on the page, and printable. Nothing you tick leaves your device.

faq

Common questions

What is the cheapest way to put a website online?

Plain HTML on Cloudflare Pages or GitHub Pages costs nothing to host, with your own domain and HTTPS included, so the only bill is the domain itself at roughly 10 to 20 US dollars a year. That is only the cheapest route if you can produce the HTML. If you cannot, a builder's free tier also costs nothing, at the price of the builder's subdomain and branding.

Is WordPress still worth it for a first website?

It is worth it if you will publish often or need a specific plugin, and a poor first choice otherwise. The cost is not the software, which is free. It is the hosting renewal after the introductory rate ends, plus the updates, backups and security work that never stops.

Do I need a website builder to make a website?

No. A builder buys speed and removes the need to maintain software. If your site is a few pages that rarely change, a static site on free hosting does the same job for the price of a domain, and is easier to move later.

Should I pay monthly or annually for a website platform?

Monthly until you are certain, then annually. Annual billing saves roughly a quarter to a third on most platforms, but the saving is only real once you have used the thing long enough to know you will not switch.

How much does a website cost in the first year?

On the four routes compared here, anywhere between the price of a domain and roughly 350 US dollars plus card fees for a hosted store, as of August 2026. The number that matters more is year two, when introductory hosting rates and first-year-free domains end.