The most straightforward way to launch a free small business website is through WordPress.com's free tier, Wix's free plan, or Google Sites. These platforms let you build and publish a basic site within hours without paying anything upfront. You'll get a subdomain like yourname.wordpress.com or yourname.wixsite.com, basic templates, and enough storage for a handful of pages. The practical reality is that free plans cripple your business in several ways. You can't use your own domain name, which immediately signals amateur operation to customers. Most platforms inject their own ads or branding onto your site. Storage caps at 500MB to 1GB mean you can't host quality images or any meaningful media. SEO tools are either locked or extremely limited, making it nearly impossible to rank in Google for anything competitive. You also lose access to essential features like contact forms, e-commerce functionality, and analytics. For an actual business trying to generate revenue, the better approach is spending $50-120 CAD annually on a domain plus $60-180 annually on basic shared hosting through Canadian providers like CanSpace or WHC. This gets you WordPress self-hosted with full control, proper email addresses, SSL certificate, and no platform restrictions. The total first-year cost runs $110-300, which any legitimate business should recover from a single customer. At Ottawa SEO, we see free websites as useful only for two scenarios: testing an idea before committing money, or creating a temporary placeholder while building the real site. If you're validating whether there's market demand for your service, a free Wix site for 30 days works fine. But the moment you're taking customer money or competing for local search visibility, the limitations cost you more in lost revenue than the $200 annual investment in proper hosting. The free-to-paid migration also creates technical headaches with URL changes and lost SEO equity that you avoid by starting right.