PUBLISHING A PERSONAL website was once costly and complicated. But not any longer. User-friendly platforms such as WordPress and Wix enable you to publish online for free—you might not even need to pay for hosting. They give you everything you need to design and populate your site, maintain it, and interact with visitors. It’s estimated that nearly half a billion sites are built on WordPress, while upward of 200 million people use Wix.
If you want to get started for free, WordPress enables you to host a site as a subdomain of which means you don’t need to worry about configuring databases or keeping your site up to date. The downside is that by default your site lives within a subdomain, such as . If you want your own domain to point to a site, you need to pay $48 per year (or $4 per month) for the Personal plan; this also lets you remove ads, collect payments, perform basic design customization, and benefit from unlimited email support.
