Free website in Morocco: what “free” really gets your business, and what it costs you

“Free website Morocco”, “create a free website in Morocco”: business owners type these searches every day, hoping to get online without touching their cash flow. Many of them are founders, managers and investors who have just set up a company here and want a presence before spending on anything else. It is a fair question, and the answer is yes: free websites exist, and one could be live tonight. What the platforms say less clearly is what “free” leaves out, and what it can cost you in clients.

This guide gives an honest answer for a busy owner. It compares the three kinds of free that actually exist (a website builder’s free plan, a Google Business Profile and social media pages), lists what each one does not do, explains when free is enough and when it loses you enquiries, sets out the real minimum for a website of your own, and shows how to move up without starting from scratch. We are an agency, Bzaf Studio: our own offer is described at the end, together with the cases where it is not right for you. We do not name any platform: their plans change from one brand to the next and from one year to the next, and the mechanics are what matter.

Free website in Morocco: the short answer

Yes, you can have a website without paying anything. Several online website builders offer a free plan: you pick a template, replace the text and photos, and the site goes live at an address supplied by the platform. As a first presence, it is real and immediate.

But for the platform, the free plan is the shop window for its paid plans. It is designed to make you want the next tier up. In practice, five things are almost always missing:

• Your own address. The site lives on a subdomain of the platform, something like your-company.platform-name.com, not your-company.ma.
• Pages that are yours alone. The platform’s branding stays visible, as a banner, a logo or an advert.
• A business email address such as contact@your-company.ma. Without a domain of your own, it cannot exist.
• The full feature set. The number of pages, storage for photos, forms and some settings are often kept for paid plans, depending on the platform.
• Someone to do the work. With free, you write the copy, crop the photos, fix the mobile layout and keep everything up to date.

So our short answer is this. Free is a sensible starting point for testing an idea or a business in its first weeks. For a company that wants to be found by clients who don’t know it yet, free often costs more than it looks: not in dirhams, but in hours spent and enquiries lost. And whatever your budget, there is one free tool that is genuinely worth it: a Google Business Profile, covered in detail below.

The three kinds of “free”, compared

Search for a way to create a website for free and you will find three types of solution. They do different jobs, and they work together more than they compete.

• A website builder’s free plan. A real website with several pages, but at the platform’s address and under its rules.
• A Google Business Profile. Not a website, but a business listing that appears in Google Search and Google Maps, with your opening hours, phone number, photos and reviews.
• Social media pages, plus the business profile of a messaging app. A feed of posts and a conversation, very effective with people who already follow you.

What you get	Website builder, free plan	Google Business Profile	Social media page	Website in your name
Address	A subdomain of the platform	A listing on Google, no website address	A page at the network’s address	your-company.ma or .com
Cost in dirhams	0 DH	0 DH	0 DH	The domain every year, plus the site, hosting and upkeep
Third-party branding on your pages	Yes, usually	Layout set by Google	Yes	No
Who sets the rules	The platform	Google	The network	You
Found on Google by strangers	Possible, but hard	Yes, on Maps and local searches	Rarely: the content is aimed at followers	Yes, if the site is well built
Business email	No	No	No	Yes, on your domain
Your time	A lot: you build everything	One or two hours, then upkeep	Ongoing: you have to post	Depends on the provider

For most businesses, the right set-up is not one or the other. It is a Google listing and social pages around a website, which remains the place where everything is explained and where enquiries arrive. We have covered that division of roles in our article website or Instagram page. Here the question is different: how far can you get without paying?

What a website builder’s free plan doesn’t give you

Take the free plan of an online website builder, the most direct answer to “create a free website”. Here, point by point, is what it gives you and what it keeps for paying customers. The details vary between platforms; the mechanics are the same everywhere.

An address that isn’t yours

Your site sits at an address like your-company.platform-name.com. That is a subdomain of the platform, and the platform keeps it. Three practical consequences:

• It is hard to say out loud. Try giving it over the phone, or painting it on a van, a business card or a quote. A short .ma address sticks; a long subdomain does not.
• It inspires less trust. A corporate buyer, a contractor or a client abroad spots a free address at a glance. To them, it signals a business that has not yet invested in its presence.
• It doesn’t move with you. The day you switch to your own domain, the old address stays with the platform. If the platform does not let you forward visitors automatically to the new one, every link, share and business card pointing to the old address is lost.

Meanwhile, the national extension keeps filling up. According to the ANRT, Morocco’s telecoms regulator, which manages .ma, 133,977 .ma domain names were registered at the end of 2025, including 38,536 new ones in 2025 alone. Some of your competitors already have their address. The name you want may be free today and gone in six months.

The platform’s branding on your pages

On a free plan, the platform pays itself in visibility: a banner, a logo or a credit on every page, sometimes an advert. You choose neither its position nor its content. For a client comparing three companies in five minutes, that detail often separates “professional” from “amateur”.

Limits you hit quickly

Free plans are capped, and the caps tend to fall exactly where a business needs room: a limited number of pages or limited photo storage, a restricted contact form, no way to connect your own domain, advanced settings reserved for paid tiers. Before you spend your evenings building, open the platform’s pricing page and write down what the free plan lacks. It is usually the list of what you will need three months from now.

No business email address

An address like contact@your-company.ma requires a domain in your name. Without one, you write to clients from a free webmail account, with an address that looks like a private individual’s. On a quote, an invoice or a tender response, the difference shows. The ANRT notes that 57% of .ma domain names are set up to receive email: for many of those who own a domain, the email address comes with it.

Being found on Google: what really matters

You will often read that a free website “can’t rank”. That is not accurate, and it is worth being precise. Google itself says that keywords in a domain name have hardly any effect on rankings, and that the extension (.ma, .com and so on) only matters if you target users in a specific country, and even then it is usually a low-impact signal. A free subdomain is not penalised as such.

The real obstacles lie elsewhere, and they are very concrete:

• Search Console, Google’s free tool for monitoring your site, is harder to connect. A “Domain” property, the one that covers your whole site, is verified through a record at your domain name provider: you need a domain of your own. The other methods require adding a tag to the home page code or a file to the site’s root, and Google warns that on website hosting platforms some methods may not be available.
• Your efforts don’t belong to you. Google finds pages mainly through links from other pages. Every link you earn to your free site points at the platform’s address; if you leave without being able to redirect, that value stays behind.
• The content is thin. A site built over a weekend usually fits on one or two pages, with template copy. Yet someone searching “air conditioning Casablanca” or “accountant Rabat” finds pages that answer that exact search: one page per service and per city, with prices, real photos and answers to common questions. That work is what creates visibility, and no free plan does it for you.
• Mobile comes first. According to the ANRT, at the end of March 2026, 89.82% of internet subscriptions in Morocco were mobile. A template loaded with animations and heavy photos can be slow on 4G, and a free plan does not always let you slim it down.

To see what actually moves a site up in Google, read our SEO guide for Morocco, or see what our SEO service covers.

You do all the work

Free costs nothing in dirhams, but you pay in hours: choosing a template, writing every page, sorting and cropping photos, checking the mobile layout, setting up the form, then keeping opening hours, prices and services up to date. For an owner who has never built a site, several dozen hours in the first year is a realistic figure. Those hours come out of your business, usually in the evening. That is why so many free sites stay frozen at the version built on the first weekend, with information that is no longer right.

The platform keeps the hosting, and the keys

On a free plan, your site exists only on the platform. Its terms of use decide what you may publish, what it may display on your pages, and what happens to an inactive account or to a plan it decides to change. As a rule, you cannot take the site elsewhere: the day you switch, it has to be rebuilt. For a business in its first months, that hardly matters. For a company that has built its reputation on that address for three years, it is a real risk.

7 questions to ask before building on a free plan

If you still choose this route, which can be reasonable, look for the answers in the platform’s terms and pricing page before you spend your evenings on it:

• What exactly will the site’s address be, and can I connect a domain in my own name later?
• What branding or advertising appears on my pages, and where?
• How many pages, photos and form messages does the free plan allow?
• Can I edit the title and description of each page as they appear in Google?
• Can I verify the site in Search Console?
• If I leave, can I export my text and photos, and redirect the old address to the new one?
• What happens to the site if I don’t log in for several months, or if the platform changes its plans?

Three “no” answers out of seven, and free will cost you time twice: once to build it, then again to rebuild it.

Google Business Profile: the free step to take first

If you only do one free thing this week, make it this. A Google Business Profile is the panel that appears in Google Maps and in search results with your name, opening hours, phone number, photos and reviews. Google’s own help pages state that you can add or claim your business at no charge, and manage for free how it appears on Maps and Search.

What the profile lets you do, according to Google:

• appear on Google Maps and in Google Search;
• send customers to your website, social media or booking links;
• collect and reply to customer reviews;
• post photos and videos of your business, products and services.

The conditions to know

• You must deal with customers in person. Google reserves profiles for businesses that meet their customers: premises that receive them, or a service that travels to them. A purely online business, with no customer visits and no call-outs, is not eligible.
• The profile must be verified. Depending on the case, Google offers verification by phone or text, by email, by live video call or by post; the options offered depend on several factors. The verification review can take up to five business days.
• A verified website helps. Google says it sometimes verifies a profile instantly, for example when the business’s website is verified in Google Search Console. It is one of the places where a website in your own name and your profile reinforce each other.

Filling in the profile in an hour

• Your real business name, as it appears on your storefront, website and paperwork, with no added keywords or city names: Google’s guidelines require it.
• The right business category, then your services, one by one.
• Your address if customers visit you. If you work at your customers’ premises, Google asks you to hide your address and state the area you serve.
• The phone number you actually answer, and your opening hours, including Ramadan hours and public holidays.
• Ten real photos: the front, the inside, the team, finished work. No stock images.
• The “website” field, as soon as you have an address worth putting there.

What a profile does not replace

A profile is short by design. It says where you are and when you are open. It does not present your services in detail, answer questions before the call, or show your references to a corporate buyer, and its layout is whatever Google decides. Above all, it has a “website” field. When that field is empty, or leads to a half-finished free page, a prospect who wants to know more stops there. So the right order is: the profile first, then the website, then the link between the two. Our guide to local SEO on Google Maps covers each step.

Social media pages: a shop window, not a website

A social media page is free, quick to set up, and often a Moroccan business’s first presence online. It has real strengths: showing photos and videos, building a community, replying fast by message. For a neighbourhood shop, a caterer or a salon, that is sometimes where most enquiries come from.

Its limits are those of rented space:

• The network sets the rules: the layout, how far your posts reach, and what happens to a suspended or hacked account.
• Information gets lost in the feed. Your prices, service area or terms are in a post from eight months ago; visitors cannot find them.
• Strangers rarely find you there when they search Google for a service: these pages are built for people who already follow you.
• Some clients never go there. A purchasing department, a property developer or a client abroad looks for a website, not a profile.

A social page complements a website: it does not replace it, and it gives you neither an address nor an email in your own name. The right approach is to use it as a front door: a link to your website in the bio, and posts that point to the relevant service page.

When free is enough, and when it costs you clients

Free is not a bad choice in itself. It becomes one when it stays in place after the business needs something more. Here is how to tell where you stand.

Free is enough when…

• You are testing an idea: a new service, a side business, a product you are not yet sure will sell. A Google profile and a free page are enough to see whether demand exists.
• All your clients come by word of mouth and your diary is full: the site is then little more than a business card.
• You have no budget this month. A complete Google profile and a simple page are better than nothing.
• The project doesn’t have its final name yet. Don’t register a domain for a name that will change in three months.

Free costs you clients when…

• Corporate clients check you out before calling: a purchasing department, a developer, a hotel, a public body. They look at your website address and your email address.
• You send quotes or answer tenders: a free address in the letterhead weakens a serious bid.
• Your clients don’t know you yet and search Google by trade and city.
• You work with tourists, the diaspora or overseas clients, who want to read about your services in their own language before writing.
• You are hiring: good candidates look at your website too.
• You spend more time tinkering with the site than serving clients.

A simple rule: if two of these six situations apply to you, free is probably already costing you more than it brings in. The worked example below lets you check that with your own figures.

Your situation	What is enough today	What you miss if you stay on free
New business, no budget	Google profile, plus a free page or a social page	Nothing urgent; register the domain as soon as the name is final
Trade or shop that wants to be found locally	Google profile and a website in your name, one page per service	“Trade + city” searches, trust, a business email
SME selling to other businesses	Website in your name, business email, Google profile	Credibility with purchasing departments and in tenders
Hospitality, tourism, overseas clients	Bilingual website in your name, Google profile, social pages	Direct enquiries, in French, English or Arabic
Online-only business	Website in your name	Everything: a Google profile is not open to you

If you stay on free: do it properly

A badly kept free site is worse than no site at all: a prospect who finds a wrong number or out-of-date hours moves on to the next company. If you are staying on free for now, at least do this:

• One clear page beats six empty ones: what you do, where, for whom, and how to reach you.
• A tap-to-call phone number and a WhatsApp link at the top of the page.
• Real photos of your work, not the template’s.
• The same name, address and phone number as on your Google profile.
• A review every three months: hours, prices, services, phone number.
• Your domain name registered in your name, even if it is not used yet, so that it is yours the day you go professional.

The real minimum for a website of your own

If free is no longer enough, what is the minimum for a website in your own name? Four components, plus a fifth that everyone forgets.

1. The domain name

This is your address: your-company.ma or your-company.com. In Morocco, the .ma extension is managed by the ANRT, but you don’t buy it from the ANRT: you register it through a registrar. At the end of 2025, 50 .ma registrars were declared to the ANRT. The price depends on the registrar and its offer, which is why we don’t quote one here. What matters more than the price:

• The domain is registered in your name. For the ANRT, the holder of a domain name is the individual or company that registered it through a registrar. The ANRT notes that most of the complaints it handles concern names registered by intermediaries in their own name rather than the business’s.
• The renewal price, not just the first-year price. A domain that is “free” in year one is paid for every year after that.
• The expiry date. According to the ANRT, 93.5% of .ma names are registered for one year only. A domain that is not renewed on time becomes available again: note the date, or hand it to someone who tracks it.
• Are you a foreign company or a non-resident? .ma registration is open to foreigners, provided they appoint an administrative contact based in Morocco.

To check whether your name is available, in .ma or .com, use our domain name search: it queries the official registries directly.

2. Hosting

This is the server that runs your website, day and night. For a showcase site, what matters is not raw power but loading speed, regular backups, and someone who answers when the site goes down. Our hosting and maintenance page explains what we monitor.

3. The SSL certificate

It encrypts the connection and shows the padlock in the address bar: a contact form without a padlock puts people off. This should not be an expensive item. There are free, automated certificate authorities such as Let’s Encrypt, a service provided by a non-profit, the Internet Security Research Group. What takes care is the installation and the automatic renewal.

4. The website itself

The pages, the design, the copy, the photos, the form, the WhatsApp button. Either you build it yourself, on a builder’s paid plan or with software installed on your hosting, or you hand it over. Typical Moroccan market prices for a showcase website: from around 5,000 DH with a freelancer, 15,000 to 45,000 DH with a traditional agency, with hosting and maintenance often billed separately. Our comparison of freelancer, agency or website builder sets out the strengths and limits of each option.

5. Time, and what comes next

A website is not finished on launch day. Someone has to keep the information current, add pages as the business evolves, watch Search Console, renew the domain and apply security updates. That someone is you, or a provider.

Item	What it is	What to check in any offer
Domain name	Your .ma or .com address, renewed every year or for several years	Registered in your name; renewal price; expiry date
Hosting	The server that runs the site	Speed, backups, who answers when it breaks
SSL certificate	The HTTPS padlock	Included and renewed automatically
Business email	contact@your-company.ma	Included or extra; number of mailboxes
Website build	Pages, design, copy, photos	Number of pages, languages, who writes the copy
Maintenance	Updates, security, small edits	What is included, response time

A worked example: what “free” costs over a year

Take a fictional example. Samir runs a small air-conditioning company in Casablanca: three technicians, with private households and a few building management companies as clients. He is torn between a free website he would build himself and a professional one. The figures below are working assumptions, chosen to show the method: replace them with your own.

The cost of time

First year	Free website, built by Samir	All-Inclusive Plan
Subscription	0 DH	4,788 DH incl. VAT (12 × 399 DH), or 4,550 DH incl. VAT paid yearly
Building the site	25 hours of Samir’s time	Filling in the brief and approving each page
Updates	2 hours a month, i.e. 24 hours	Small edits included
Value of one hour of Samir’s time	150 DH (assumption)	—
Time, valued	49 h × 150 DH = 7,350 DH	A few hours
Address and email	Platform subdomain, free webmail	.ma or .com domain in his name

This calculation has a limit, and we will say so: if your spare time costs you nothing, because business is quiet or because you enjoy building websites, free stays free. But an owner with clients to serve rarely has 49 hours to give to a website.

Break-even: how many clients must the site bring in?

The useful question is not “what does the website cost?” but “how many clients must it bring me to pay for itself?”. Divide the annual cost by the margin you make on one client. With the All-Inclusive Plan, 4,788 DH incl. VAT over a year:

Business (example)	Margin per client (assumption)	Clients needed per year
Repairs or installations for households	400 DH per job	12, i.e. one a month
Maintenance contract with a building manager or company	3,000 DH a year	2
Guesthouse, direct booking	600 DH per stay	8
Consultancy, client on an annual retainer	6,000 DH a year	1

For Samir, two maintenance contracts signed through the website, or one call-out a month, and the site has paid for itself. Conversely, a free website that brings in no enquiries is not a saving: it is time spent with no return. To compare the options over three years rather than one, read our article on what a website costs in Morocco.

Moving from free to professional without starting over

Already have a free page, a Google profile and a social media account? Nothing is lost. Here is the order we recommend.

• 1. Register your domain name now, in your name, even if the website does not change straight away. It is the easiest thing to lose and the cheapest to protect.
• 2. Use the same name everywhere: domain, Google profile, social pages. Clients should recognise the same business from one channel to the next.
• 3. Save your content: the copy that works, photos at full size, your list of services and prices. They will be the starting point for the new site.
• 4. List every place the old address appears: your Google profile, your social bios, your email signature, business cards and quote templates. Each link will need changing on launch day.
• 5. Check whether the platform allows a redirect. If it does, the old address will forward to the new one. If not, leave a short page on the old site announcing your new address, while your clients and links catch up.
• 6. Verify the new site in Search Console, as a “Domain” property now that the domain is yours, and submit your list of pages, the sitemap.
• 7. Change the “website” link on your Google profile on launch day. It is the most visible link of all.
• 8. Only close the old site once the new one is checked: every page, the form, the WhatsApp button, the mobile layout.

Your Google profile reviews stay where they are: they belong to the profile, not to the website. If your free site is a few years old and gets visits from Google, the move needs more care; we cover it in our article on website redesign in Morocco.

The All-Inclusive Plan at 399 DH a month: the step after free

Many businesses stay on free not by choice, but because the next step looks like a 15,000 DH quote to pay up front. That is who we built the All-Inclusive Plan for: a professional website with no build fee, paid monthly.

• The price: 399 DH incl. VAT a month, with a 12-month commitment, then month to month. Or 4,550 DH incl. VAT a year, 238 DH less than twelve monthly payments (4,788 DH). The first month is paid when you order, by bank transfer: our bank details (RIB) are sent with the order confirmation, within 24 hours. No build fee.
• What is included: a showcase website of up to 30 pages, a custom design built for mobile first, a blog, an FAQ, a contact form, a WhatsApp button, SEO on every page, a second language (French and Arabic, or French and English), your Google Business Profile created or optimised and linked to the site, legal pages, a .ma or .com domain name, hosting with SSL and backups, maintenance and small edits, and one blog article written for you every month.
• The timeline: 5 working days from your complete brief. You approve every page before launch, and nothing goes live without your agreement.
• The domain is registered in your name: you are the declared holder, we are only the technical contact. Under our terms and conditions, once the 12 monthly payments of the commitment period are paid, the website, its content and the domain name belong to you.
• No copy and no photos? That is the most common case. We write your copy from a conversation about your business, and guide you on photos.

The 12-month commitment is firm: if you cancel before it ends, part of the remaining monthly payments is due, under article 10 of our terms and conditions. If you order as a private individual, Moroccan Law 31-08 gives you 7 days to withdraw.

It is not the right choice in these cases, and we would rather say so up front:

• You are still testing an idea, with no final name and no budget: stay with a Google profile and a free page, and come back once the business is up and running.
• You want to sell online, with a basket, payments and stock: the plan is a showcase website, not an online shop.
• You want to pay once and manage everything yourself for years: a fixed-price build from a good freelancer will cost less over time, provided you handle hosting and updates.
• You need custom development: a client portal, a link to your management software, an app.

We work from Marrakech, since 2021, for businesses all over Morocco, from Casablanca to Agadir, and we reply within 24 hours on WhatsApp. Start with your Google profile, run the break-even calculation with your own margins, then compare: everything is on our offer page, and the order page takes five minutes.