Top 12 Best Free Web Design Tools You Need in 2025

Top 12 Best Free Web Design Tools You Need in 2025 - Let's paint a very popular picture. You want to create a website, but you don't know where to start and you have zero budget. So what are your options? Well, in fact, you have lots of great options and that is exactly what this article is all about. 

I'm going to give you 12 recommendations for tools to help you build your website for zero cost. Then you can make a little bit of cash and invest into the pro versions if you want to, or expand your toolkit. But let's take a look at the first option and get the ball rolling. 

1. CMS Platform - WordPress

There are two flavors of WordPress, so let's not get confused. There's WordPress.com, which is the paid platform. So this is WordPress and the hosting and everything else included. But there are some limitations. There's a free plan, but that limits what you can install. So you have to go for paid. 

My preference and my recommendation would be to use the free WordPress.org version. This allows you to install it on whatever hosting you want to and have full control over WordPress. This is, in my opinion, the better option. So that's what I'd recommend. We're going to use WordPress as the main platform for building everything. 

2. Image Mockups & Screenshot - Shots.so

This is one of my favorite websites, one that I use every single day. So if you want to create screenshots, mock-ups, or you want to just sort of use this for your portfolio to hand off to potential paying clients to show them what you're going to create, this is a fantastic way of being able to make things look absolutely amazing. 

You can easily come in and choose from a range of pre-designed layouts. You can choose different kinds of options to display, things like your browser, desktop. You want to use things like phones, laptops, anything like that. It can all be done for free inside this platform. 

3. Free Photoshop Alternative - Photopea

This is basically Photoshop in a browser for free. Now there is a paid option if you want to use it, but you don't need to. You have full access to everything you can do to edit in your browser using this application. 

So if you want Photoshop without paying for Photoshop, this is going to be the nearest thing you can get to it. It's very responsive. It's easy to work with. And you can open up all manner of different file formats, including native Photoshop file formats, and a lot of the things you can do with Photoshop itself. 

This is one I would highly recommend if you don't have the budget or you don't have any software on your system itself to be able to work with photos, images, text, all those kinds of good things. 

4. Prototyping Tools - PenPot

If you want to work with images on your computer and you want to prototype web designs and set those up across all different kinds of devices, you'd like to work that way. Obviously, Figma is probably going to be the first option you think of. And Figma is a fantastic tool.

However, it is a paid tool. And while you have a relatively generous free plan, you may want to take a look at an alternative. This is PenPot. Now PenPot will give you pretty much everything you can do inside Figma. But this is totally free. You can also self-host install this if you want to. 

So if you want to be able to prototype your designs, have all the tools you kind of need available to you, and you have zero budget, and you want to collaborate with different team members, clients, and so on, PenPot is one I would highly recommend you check out.

There's also Lunacy. If you want to take a look at that, that's another really solid tool. But PenPot has had a lot of money injected into it. It is getting a really solid reputation. And I think it's one you may want to check out for yourself when you want to create mock-ups or create images and graphics and so on. 

5. Best WordPress Theme - Blocksy

Now once you've decided on building with WordPress, you're probably going to need a theme. Yes, you could obviously use the standard native themes that come with WordPress. And there are tens of thousands of themes out there. But the one I would recommend is going to be Blocksy. 

Now I've used Blocksy for several years and I've been recommending it for several years. Why? Because there are so many great options available inside this. The free version, which is what we're going to talk about today, has so many great options. There's a solid platform for building blogs, websites, listing websites, WooCommerce websites if you want to work with e-commerce.

And then if you have a client that wants more and they're willing to pay, the pro version allows you to install additional functions inside it for working with WooCommerce and other things that make it so powerful that you don't need to have lots of extra third-party plugins. 

Plus, if you're not design-orientated, the free starter themes that you can get with Blocksy are fantastically well designed. Very clean, very pro, very up-to-date. I recommend taking a look at Blocksy, take a look at the free version, install it, try it, have a little bit of fun with it, and take a look at those starter sites because I think you may well be impressed if you want to hit the ground running super quickly. Check out Blocksy. 

6. Free CSS Framework - Core Framework

Now sticking with using the native WordPress core functionality. If you want to open up the ability to work with design changes, right there across the board really quickly, you may want to check out Core Framework. You can use this for zero cost whatsoever and you get integrated natively with Gutenberg. Again, for zero cost, there's a free plugin that allows you to do just that.

You can just head over to the marketplace, simply come over to the WordPress Gutenberg integration option, download, install that onto your site, and benefit from having this framework that allows you to globally style, change, manage all your typography, your images, your layouts, all those kinds of good things, all in one location for the princely sum of zero cost whatsoever.

So I would again 100% recommend you take a look at Core Framework and the potential to integrate this into your workflow just to make designing and updating an absolute breeze across all of WordPress. 

7. SEO Tools - SEOPress

Okay, so now we've built the site for ourselves or for our client using the tools that I've talked about, there are some other things that we absolutely need to have as part of a standard website. One of the most important things is SEO or search engine optimization.

Now there are a bunch of options available when it comes to WordPress, but my personal recommendation, and again one that I've been using for multiple years and paying for the pro version for multiple years, is SEOPress. Now the free version has more than enough to get your website ranking and have all the information you need to have on there.

The pro version opens up some additional options, but you absolutely do not need this to get up and running and get your website gaining traffic, being found and being search engine optimized. Take a look at SEOPress. I think you'll be quite impressed. 

8. Securing Your Website - Solid Security

So your website's built, your SEO is done, people are finding your website. What's the problem with that? Well, the last thing you want is your website to be compromised because you have weak passwords or you have people logging in with poor passwords and usernames or a million other reasons why security is, well, let's just say, when it comes to WordPress, it should be one of your priorities.

And one of the easiest ways to get things set up, and again another tool that I've been using for many, many years since before it was even called Solid Security, is, yeah, Solid Security. Why? It's really easy to get set up. It's a wizard that'll get you up and running in a couple of seconds, and then you can go in and tweak it.

So if you want things like two-factor authentication, you can do it. You want to make sure that passwords are restricted to be hardened passwords with set sort of like parameters, you can do it. Well, this could kind of do all those kinds of things for you. And the best part is, you don't need the paid version to do all of that.

I use this on every single site that I have, including client sites. Check out Solid Security, try the free version, get set up and running in a couple of minutes, and everything is going to be a lot safer on your website. 

9. Website Analytics - Independent Analytics

Okay, so we've got the SEO ticked off, we've got the security in place. What's next? Well, we need to have some way of being able to track whether our site is being found. If it is being found, what's being viewed on there, where traffic's coming from, and all those other kind of important things. Now, you could go and install Google Analytics on your website, and that would probably be the first choice for many, many people.

However, if you're used to this with clients or with yourself, chances are you're probably going to find that's absolute overkill. So I recommend taking a look at independent analytics. Now, I've been using this on my own sites, and I found it to be pretty reliable when it comes to the data that I get, and allows me to make informed decisions on what's going on, what my SEO efforts are actually paying off, and things like where traffic's coming from, and so on.

The other thing that's really important for me personally is that this is GDPR compliant out of the box. Being in the UK or in the EU, if you're in the EU, GDPR compliance is an important thing. And this is like it straight out of the box. The other thing I like about this, and it may not be for everybody, but for me, I do like this. It's self-hosted. So this is installed on the website that it's tracking.

So you don't have to have accounts over in the US or anything else like that, where your information is being stored in that centralized place. This is all being done on your own machine. So you are then responsible for the security side of things, and you don't have to worry about Google having access to that data. Check it out. 

10. Email Deliverability - FluentSMTP

We need to send email from our website in so many different use cases. And while you can do it with the native functionalities built into WordPress, it isn't the most reliable way of working. So this is where you may want to use a plugin like an SMTP plugin that allows you to connect up to your email servers and have much higher deliverability rates when it comes to the emails, especially if it's key important information for you or a client.

This is where FluentSMTP comes in handy. Again, everything is completely free. There's no paid or Pro version of this. There's just one free version. You can use this, install it, set it up, and then you've got access to more information. Things like email logs, intelligent email routing. You can work with Amazon SES, Microsoft 365, or Outlook.

There's so many different use cases here that you can use this. I've been using this on some of my sites, especially when it comes to grabbing people's information via contact forms and so on, and then sending things out reliably. This has made it an absolute breeze. Connect this up to one of the email services like Mailgun and so on, or Brevo.

Use their free account to start off with for your transactional emails, and you should have much higher deliverability rates using FluentSMTP. I'd recommend it. Install it, set it up, and you're good to go in a matter of minutes. 

11. Code Snippets - FluentSnippets

Now, sticking with the Fluent products, we've got Fluent Snippets. Again, totally free. No paid version for this at all. Now, there can be times where you want to make changes to WordPress. You want to add some code into your functions PHP. You want to add some JavaScript in, some CSS, all manner of different things. But you don't want to go to the hassle of editing the actual WordPress files for many different reasons.

This is where a tool like FluentSnippets comes in. It allows you to insert snippets of code into the relevant part of your website. There's conditional logic available in here, so you can control exactly where, when, and how this code is actually executed. But the one reason why I recommend FluentSnippets over some of the alternatives, which are already solid products, is the fact that this is a file-based snippets manager.

It doesn't store data in your database, which means that the code is external. This improves security, but also has many other benefits. And like I say, it's absolutely free. It's super easy to use. If you need to add code to your website, this is what I would recommend you use if you want a snippets plugin on your site. 

12. Multi-website Management Tools - MainWP

Okay, so you build your site, and then you build another site, and several other sites, and you've got multiple different WordPress sites. You'll very quickly come to the realization that keeping everything up to date and being notified of things can be a little bit of a headache. This is where MainWP comes in really handy.

Now, I've been using MainWP for multiple years, and what this allows you to do is have a connected location, either on a website of your own, or you can actually run this on your own machine and only open it up and start using it when you need to. So you could use a service like LocalWP or something like that to be able to run this on your local machine. It gives you an added level of security.

But what this does is this will monitor the sites. You can log into them with one click. You can see what plugins, themes, WordPress core need to be updated, how many need to be updated. You can run backups from here. There are so many different things you can do with MainWP for zero cost that when you've got multiple websites that you need to manage, this is going to come in super, super handy for you.

And I would recommend, whether you use MainWP or a paid service or something else, this just makes your life easier because you've got one location to go and check out what needs to be updated, check out basic security information, see about backups and run all manner of different things, all for zero cost. MainWP would be my choice for you to test out and just make your life a lot easier.

Final Thoughts

And there we go. These are my 12 recommendations for free tools that give you all the things you should need to be able to build effective WordPress websites and then manage those with all the different tools, services, plugins, and so on along the way for absolutely zero cost whatsoever.