A Website With No Monthly Fees: What It Takes

Yes, a website can have no monthly fees. The hosting (the computer that serves your pages to visitors) can cost nothing: as of November 2026 the hosting company Cloudflare says that on its free plan, requests to static files are "free and unlimited". What stays on your bill is the domain name, once a year, and anything extra you add, such as a mailbox. Changing the site later costs time, or an AI assistant plan if you ask an assistant to do it (SiteFree's homepage mentions Claude Pro at US$20 a month).

"Static" means the site is a set of finished files, sent to visitors as they are. A five-page business site, a portfolio or a club page usually fits that description. A shop with a cart or a member login needs more than static files.

What is free and what is not

Cloudflare's free plan has limits, and for a small business site they are generous. As of November 2026, Workers, the Cloudflare hosting product used for static sites, allows up to 20,000 files per version and files up to 25 MiB each (a MiB is about a megabyte), and Workers Builds gives the free plan 3,000 build minutes a month. A build is one round of publishing a change.

Will I lose my site, or have to start over?

Building a new site does not change the old one. Cancelling the old plan is a separate step you take, and it can take the site offline: Webflow, for example, says cancelling a paid Site plan unpublishes the site from its custom domain and its webflow.io address. How much you can copy across depends on the platform. Wix says a Wix site needs to be hosted and operated on Wix's servers, so the site itself stays there. You build the new site yourself (route 1), or someone else does (routes 2 and 3). What you can take with you is its own question. The guides on Squarespace, Webflow and WordPress cover what each one hands you when you leave.

Whatever the route, keep the old site and its plan until the new site is checked and your domain points at it. Check what your plan includes (a domain, a mailbox) before you cancel it.

Your domain

Your domain is the address people type. You rent it, and the rent goes to the registrar, the company you bought it from. It does not come with free hosting, and it keeps costing money after the hosting is free. Some builders include a domain for the first year only; WordPress.com says so on its pricing page, for example.

Moving a site does not mean moving the domain. You can keep the domain registered where it is if your registrar lets you change nameservers (the settings that say which company answers when someone looks up your domain; some site builders do not allow it, and Cloudflare names Shopify and Block as examples). Cloudflare Workers, the platform it now points new projects to, does not support a domain whose nameservers are not managed by Cloudflare. So for a Workers site, the one change you make at your registrar is pointing the domain's nameservers at Cloudflare, which makes Cloudflare answer for the domain. Your DNS records (the entries that tell the internet where your website and email live) are not guaranteed to come along on their own, so read the Email section before you do it. Your registrar's renewal page shows what the domain costs next year.

Moving the registration is a separate, optional step. Cloudflare Registrar sells and renews domains at cost, and a transfer has waiting periods: the domain must be at least 60 days past its registration and past its last transfer. The guide on transferring a Wix domain to Cloudflare walks through it, and stopping Squarespace while keeping your domain covers the other common case.

Email

Your email can stop working if the domain settings change carelessly, so check it before anything switches. Email at your own domain has two parts: the address, and a mailbox that stores the messages. Cloudflare's Email Routing is available on both the Workers Free and Workers Paid plans, needs your domain on Cloudflare DNS, and forwards mail sent to your domain to a mailbox you already have. It is not a mailbox. If you pay Google or Microsoft for mailboxes now, that cost stays.

Cloudflare can scan and copy your existing DNS records, but warns that its scan is not guaranteed to find every record, so email records need a manual review before you switch. Wix, for one (MX records are the entries that tell the internet which service receives your email), says that after a nameserver change its mailboxes stop working unless the new DNS provider has the correct MX records.

Three routes to a no-monthly-fee site

1. Do it yourself. You set up a free Cloudflare account, put the site's files somewhere Cloudflare can read them (a Git repository, an online folder that keeps every version of your files; GitHub is one host, and Cloudflare Pages deploys from it on every push), and point your domain at it. Cloudflare's own Pages page now says to start new projects with Workers, so read the current docs before you follow an older tutorial. This route costs the most time and suits someone comfortable with files and settings.
2. Hire a web developer. A developer rebuilds or converts the site and sets up the hosting. They set their own price, so ask for a quote and ask what you will own at the end: the files, the Cloudflare account and the domain.
3. A one-time-fee move. A service does the rebuild and the hosting setup for a single payment. SiteFree is one; it is described at the end of this post.

If you have no site yet, routes 1 and 2 still apply. Route 3 is for sites that already exist on a platform.

Google and old links

Every page on your old site has an address, and other sites, bookmarks and search results point to it. When the site moves, each old address needs a redirect (an instruction that sends visitors to the new page). On Cloudflare Pages, the redirect file holds up to 2,000 static and 100 dynamic redirects. Nobody can promise you a search ranking after a move, but a full set of redirects is what keeps old links working.

Editing afterwards: site builders and SiteFree

On a typical site builder you open the editor, change something and publish. A site on free hosting has no built-in editor, so how you change it depends on who set it up. On a SiteFree site the steps are fixed; with routes 1 and 2, editing works however you or your developer built it.

How the builders handle a change:

• Wix: saving does not make a change live; you click Publish, and a Preview button shows the site first. Site history lets you restore a saved version, which erases later changes.
• Squarespace: in version 7.1 you save, exit the editor, then use the preview icon. Squarespace says after saving your changes, you can't automatically undo them.
• Webflow: the publish dialog lets you publish to a webflow.io staging address, your custom domain, or both; paid Site plans keep unlimited backups you can restore.
• WordPress.com: edits to a published page do not show until you click Save, and each page keeps revisions you can restore.

On a SiteFree site:

• Every change starts on a copy of the site, and you get a private preview link.
• Nothing goes live until you look at the preview and say yes.
• After you say yes, the live site updates a few minutes later.
• Every change is kept, so going back to an earlier version means asking your assistant to undo it.

The cost is real. You make changes by asking an AI assistant in plain words, for example "change the opening hours" or "add this photo". You subscribe to that assistant yourself: SiteFree's homepage mentions Claude Pro at US$20 a month, or the AI plan you already have, and you can stop paying between edits. You also need a free GitHub account, and the assistant does the technical work, so you never run Git commands. A developer can edit the same files instead.

That answers the worry about editing afterwards. You are not locked into an editor, and an undo is available because every version is kept.

Done-for-you: SiteFree

SiteFree is the business behind this blog, and it sells this move. It is a Canadian (Montreal) migration service with prices in CAD. It rebuilds your Wix, Squarespace, Webflow (in beta) or WordPress site to match its design closely, and hosts it free in your own Cloudflare account, with the files in your own GitHub account. Cloudflare serves static files from the location closest to each visitor, from your own Cloudflare account.

A shop, a member area or a site over 100 pages gets a fixed quote. You get a private preview within two business days of payment (three to four for WordPress), and nothing switches over until you approve. Every old address is redirected to its new page, and your contact form keeps working. For the form to send to your inbox you set up your own free Resend account; its free plan allows 100 emails a day. You keep the domain, and your email settings are checked before anything switches. You get up to two rounds of fixes, and a full refund any time before you approve, with the old site live until then.

You can check your site to see your price. You pay SiteFree once, and the monthly bill for hosting goes away. The domain and any mailbox or assistant plan keep billing, as the table near the top shows.