Why We Build Free Websites (And What the Catch Is)

A web design company giving websites away sounds like the start of a scam, and you're right to treat it that way. Most free things on the internet come with a hook in them somewhere, whether that's the free trial that bills you in month two or the free build where the company quietly keeps hold of your domain.

So before any explaining, here is the entire bill for a starter website, in full:

That's it. You'll never get an invoice from us for the page, and the hosting stays at £0 for as long as it's up. The rest of this article is the long answer to the two questions everyone asks us on the phone: why on earth would you do that, and what's the catch?

Why would a web design company work for free?

Because telling you we're good at this is worthless. Somebody has already told you that, and if you're like a lot of the business owners we talk to, they took a deposit off the back of it and delivered a template, or poor communication, or something that never quite got finished. We've written before about why so many cheap websites bring in no work, and the short version is that the industry has burned a lot of people. Every claim we could make, someone has already made to you dishonestly.

A finished website is different. You watch us build it, it goes live on your own domain, and you judge the work itself rather than the pitch. It's the one form of selling that can't be faked. That's the whole idea: instead of asking you to trust us, we'd rather prove what we can do first.

How do we actually make money from £0?

This is the question that decides whether you believe the offer, so it gets the full answer. There are exactly three things in it for us.

The footer credit is our advert, and it only works if the page above it is good, which keeps our incentives pointed the right way. Genuine reviews and word of mouth help people find us, the same way your reviews help people find you, and free builds done well earn both. And the biggest one: some starter clients later pay us for more, whether that's separate service pages, Google Business Profile work, automatic review updates, or a bigger site with a proper SEO campaign behind it. That last group is where WAT actually makes its money.

Plenty never spend a penny with us and keep the free page forever. That's a fine outcome, not a failure. The maths works because enough businesses come back, not because every business has to.

That's the full ledger. There's no fourth line hiding under it.

What £0 actually gets you

The starter is one properly designed page, custom coded and built around your business rather than cut down from a template. It's also deliberately limited in scope, and we'd rather show you the limits here than have you discover them on a call.

One round of changes is included after you see the build, and once we have everything we need from you, your first version is ready within a week. We also cap it at five free builds a week. That's not manufactured scarcity, it's the honest bottleneck: every build gets real design time from one of us, and there are two of us.

If what your business needs on day one is bigger than a starter page, this is the wrong product, and the honest move is to read what websites actually cost in the UK and weigh up a paid build instead.

Your domain, and why you buy it

The one thing you pay for is the domain, the address customers type in, like yourbusiness.co.uk. It costs about £12 a year from a registrar, you buy it before the build starts, and it's registered in your own name. No domain, no build.

People sometimes read this rule as the catch. It's the opposite. A web company that controls your domain controls your business's address on the internet, and plenty use exactly that to trap customers who want to leave. Because yours is registered to you, you can point it at another host or another agency whenever you like. If we're worth paying later, the work will make that argument, not a contract. The £12 also quietly tells us you're serious, which matters when we're giving the build away.

The same team that builds our client sites

The free starter isn't a stripped down template service run on the side. It's built by the same two people, to the same standard, as the full client sites in our portfolio. Here are three of them.

Nottingham Landscaping Services

Nottinghamshire · View the build →

Goldswan Bathrooms

Nottingham · View the build →

First Plumb Solutions

Kirkcaldy & Fife · View the build →

One thing we're straight about wherever these sites appear: the results attached to them, like the 550 plus enquiries Nottingham Landscaping Services has had since we rebuilt their broken site, come from full paid builds with months of SEO behind them, not from one page starters. They're shown here so you can judge the team behind the starter offer, not as a promise of what a free page will do. A one page site won't rank you top of Google on its own, and anyone who tells you theirs will is lying to you.

What if I never upgrade?

That's the bet we're making, with our eyes open: do good work, stay useful, and enough businesses will want more over time. If you're one of the ones who doesn't, the footer credit and the goodwill were still worth the build. When people do come back, the things they buy are the ones you'd expect: separate pages for each service, Google Business Profile optimisation, automatic review updates, or Hosting & Care for businesses that want us actively maintaining and updating the site rather than only hosting it. The prices for those extras are listed openly on the offer page, not hidden behind a call, and the bigger work, like an ongoing SEO campaign, gets talked through properly before you commit to anything.

Who the free build is for

The starter is aimed at established UK trades and local service businesses. It's a good fit if you're already trading, you've got real completed work and photos of it, your web presence is letting you down, and you're happy to buy and own your own domain.

It isn't designed for online shops, for businesses that haven't started trading yet, or for anyone expecting a ten page website with unlimited revisions for £0. That's paid work, and we'd rather tell you so in the first ten minutes than waste a build slot proving it.

If that sounds like you, the application takes about a minute: apply for your free starter website here. We reply within one working day, and once we have your logo, photos and details, your first version is ready within a week.

Still think there must be a catch? Read the full offer, the scope and the application questions for yourself, then decide. The application takes about a minute and we review it within one working day. See exactly what the free website includes.

Written by

Will Gadsby, Co-founder, WAT Websites

Will co-founds WAT Websites, where the team builds fast, custom websites and runs local SEO for UK service businesses, so their phone rings more often.