I’ve been doing a lot of scrolling through Reddit lately. Most of it has been looking for funny/entertaining clips of people doing silly things but I’m also trying to help out on the /web channels.
Someone had posted that they wanted to build a site but didn’t want to pay monthly hosting. They had some prior PHP, HTML, and CSS experience and a the first comment recommended using WordPress and paying for Elementor Pro.
This was my response:
You will need some kind of hosting to keep the website live which will either be a one off annual fee or a monthly fee. You don’t need Go Daddy for that, if you’re using WordPress then you could look at SiteGround, Media Temple, WPEngine, WordPress.com which offer WordPress configured hosting, or spin up a digital ocean droplet and manage it all yourself.
If you don’t want to pay hosting, use something like GitHub Pages which will provide free hosting for you, but it’s static site hosting so you could just build the site out using html & css (this should be fine for a 4-5 page site).
Another option is using Netlify for static hosting which has a free tier and provides some dynamic components like forms. I found using StackBit to choose your theme, static site generator, and host was a really simple way to get something up and running for no cost (except your time).
To be honest, if I have these requests from friends/family I usually set them up on SquareSpace. It’s the simplest thing I’ve found for family to update, looks great, and has enough features.