Free Website for Small Business: The Real Terms

Every free website offer has a catch. That isn't cynicism, it's arithmetic — hosting costs money, so somebody is paying, and if it isn't you then the catch is how they get paid instead.

The catches are usually one of four. A banner across the bottom of your pages advertising the tool that built them. Adverts you don't control, on a page about your own business. A free tier that stops exactly where you needed it — the contact form, the custom address, the second page. Or the quietest one: it's genuinely free and genuinely yours, but the build is your job, and the build takes a weekend you were never going to have.

So when we say Blinko gives your business a free website, the useful thing isn't the word "free". It's being specific about what the terms actually are.

What free means here

Your business gets a website at yourname.blinkolocal.com. Building it is free. Editing it is free. Hosting it is free. There is no upgrade wall between you and the contact form, no advert on your pages, no badge in the footer telling visitors which tool you used.

You don't need a paid Blinko plan. The free plan carries it, and every paid plan inherits it — the paid plans are about capacity and connected Automations, not about whether you're allowed a website.

There is a size limit, and it's worth knowing rather than discovering: a site holds up to ten pages. For a plumber, a salon, a shop or a cleaning round, ten pages is more than most people fill. If you're planning a catalogue, it isn't the tool for you.

Your address is a yourname.blinkolocal.com one. If you own a domain already and want to point it here, that's a conversation with us rather than a self-serve toggle.

The condition is on publishing, not on paying

Here's the part that's ours and not the incumbents'. You can build and edit your site from the day you sign up. Publishing — putting it on the public internet where people can find it — waits until three things are true:

1. Your business profile is complete. Name, category, address, hours. The site is built out of your profile, so a half-filled profile makes a half-filled site.
2. You've signed in from the Blinko Business app. Not a download you never open — an actual sign-in, because the leads from the site arrive as push alerts on that phone.
3. You have your first followers. A handful of real customers who've scanned your QR code and followed you.

That third one is the one people query, so: it isn't a paywall wearing a costume. It's the difference between a business and an idea for a business. A website with nothing behind it — no hours that are true, no customers, nobody checking the enquiries — is worse for you than no website, because it's the first impression and it's a bad one.

The number of followers is a setting rather than a law, and it isn't large. Most owners clear all three in the first week without trying, because scanning your QR code at the counter is a thing you were going to do anyway.

You describe the business; the site gets built

There's no editor and no blank canvas. You tell Blinko Copilot what you do in a short back-and-forth — the trade, the services, who it's for, what you'd want a stranger to know before they ring. Every question is skippable. Most are prefilled from your Blinko profile, so you aren't typing your own address in for the second time.

Copilot drafts the site from a template that starts in your trade, so a plumber's first draft leads with call-outs and coverage rather than pretending there's a shopfront.

Then you read it, and nothing goes live until you approve it. Changing it later is the same conversation: "take the third service off", "swap that photo", "make the header darker". Copilot makes the edit, shows you, waits.

Hours, phone and address you never touch. They sync from your profile, so the site can't quietly go stale the way abandoned business websites famously do.

What the site is actually for

A brochure that sits there has never earned anybody a customer. The job is enquiries.

Visitors send a quote request or a booking enquiry from the site, photos attached if the job needs showing. Each one lands in your leads inbox and pings your phone with a push alert — so the enquiry that arrives while you're under a sink is written down and waiting, rather than garbled into a voicemail you'll half-hear on the drive home.

Underneath, the site ships search-ready: sitemap, canonical tags, and LocalBusiness schema typed to your trade, so a search engine knows a salon is a salon. Analytics are cookie-free, which counts visits without following anyone around the internet — and means your site doesn't need a cookie banner in front of it.

So what is Blinko getting out of it?

Fair question, and the honest answer is that the website isn't the product. Blinko makes its money from businesses that grow into paid plans for Automations, campaigns and capacity. A business with a website that catches enquiries is more likely to become one of those than a business without one. That's the whole trade.

Which is also why the milestones exist. We'd rather host a thousand sites for businesses that are really trading than a hundred thousand for accounts that signed up once.

See how the Blinko Website works → · What's on each plan →