How to Create a Free Website on Wix: A Beginner's Guide

Wix is one of the most popular website builders in the world and offers a genuinely free plan that lets you create and publish a website without paying anything. The free plan gives you a site at an address like username.wixsite.com/yoursite. And it includes access to hundreds of design templates and a drag-and-drop editor.

The drag-and-drop editor is Wix's signature feature: you can click on any element — a text block, an image, a button — and drag it anywhere on the page. This gives you more layout freedom than most website builders, which follow fixed column-based layouts.

Wix also offers an AI-powered website builder called Wix ADI that asks you a few questions about your site and then creates a personalized starting design. This can be a faster starting point if you don't want to select and edit a template manually.

The free plan does have limitations: your site address will include "wixsite.com" in the URL, Wix ads appear at the top of your site, and storage space is limited to 500 MB. To remove the ads, get a custom domain, and increase storage, you'll need to upgrade to a paid Wix plan starting around $17 per month.

For hobby sites, personal portfolios, community pages, or testing a business idea, the free plan is perfectly functional. Many people run their sites on the free plan for years without needing to upgrade.

Wix has an extensive help center, tutorial videos, and a community forum where you can get answers from other users. The platform has been around since 2006 and is reliable and well-maintained.