How to Publish a Business Website for Free

Building a website and publishing one are different jobs, and most guides blur them. You can have a perfectly good site sitting in a draft for months because the last step involved a card number, a domain purchase, or a decision you didn't feel qualified to make.

This is how it goes on Blinko, start to finish, with the awkward bit named rather than buried: the building is free and immediate, and the publishing has three conditions on it that aren't about money.

Step 1 — Finish your business profile

Do this first, because everything downstream is built out of it.

Your Blinko profile is the name, the category, the address, the opening hours, the phone number. The website draft is generated from it, and the site keeps reading from it forever — so when your Saturday hours change, you change them once and the site follows. If the profile is half-filled, the first draft is half-filled, and you'll spend the conversation correcting things you could have avoided.

Ten minutes here saves the rest.

Step 2 — Tell Copilot about the business

Open the website setup and talk to Blinko Copilot. It asks what you do, who for, what you'd want a stranger to know before ringing you. What comes back matters more than how you say it — "domestic plumbing and bathroom fits" is a perfectly good answer.

Two things keep this short:

• Every question is skippable. Answer what's useful and move on.
• Most answers are already filled in from your profile, so you aren't retyping your own address.

Copilot drafts the site at yourname.blinkolocal.com from a template that starts in your trade rather than in a generic layout. Up to ten pages, which for a local business is usually more than you need.

Step 3 — Read the draft and change what's wrong

This is the step people skip and regret. Read it as a stranger would.

Anything off, you say so: "we don't do bodywork, take that out", "put the coverage area higher up", "swap that photo for the one of the van". Copilot makes the change and shows you. If you approve something and change your mind after lunch, one-click rollback puts the previous version back.

Nothing has gone anywhere public yet. This is still a draft.

Step 4 — Sign in from the Blinko Business app

Not "download it" — sign in.

There's a practical reason, and it isn't a box-tick. Enquiries from your website arrive as push alerts on that phone, and land in your leads inbox. If nobody has ever signed in, the site can collect quote requests that nobody reads — which is a worse outcome for you than the site not existing.

Step 5 — Get your first followers

The last condition, and the one that surprises people: your business needs its first followers before the site can publish.

A follower is someone who scanned your Blinko QR code and chose to follow you — a real customer, at your counter or your van or the end of a job. The threshold is small and it's a setting rather than a rule of physics. Leave your QR card out for a week and it tends to look after itself.

Why it exists: a published site is a first impression, and a first impression from a business with nothing behind it does damage that no-site-at-all doesn't. The milestone isn't a paywall in disguise. It's the line between a business and an idea for one.

Step 6 — Publish

With the profile complete, the app sign-in done and the first followers in, the publish button opens. You approve, and the site is live at yourname.blinkolocal.com.

What ships with it, without you asking: a sitemap, canonical tags, and LocalBusiness schema typed to your trade, so search engines understand what kind of business they're looking at. Analytics are cookie-free — you get counts of what people looked at, without following anyone around the internet, and your visitors don't get a consent pop-up between them and your contact form.

If you want the site on a domain you already own, that's a conversation with us rather than a switch you flip.

What it costs

Nothing. Building, editing, hosting, the address, the lead capture — free on every Blinko plan including the free one. There's no advert on your pages and no badge in the footer naming the tool.

The three milestones are the whole of the fine print. It's a shorter list than most free tiers give you, and it's the only one on this page.

See how the Blinko Website works → · Free website for a small business →