The combined search for free website builders and free web hosting has reached its highest level in nearly two years as people grapple with the cost of living crisis and the broader economic downturn.
From May to June 2022 alone, the search volume for free web hosting doubled, with a sharp increase in the number of people looking for free website building services.
This is reflected in the site visits received by some of the best web hosting and website builder services.
Shift To Free Web Hosting
There is also some evidence to suggest that this shift may have been occurring over a number of years.
According to data shared exclusively with TechRadar Pro from a similar site, GoDaddy has lost nearly 20 million site visits in the past two years while cheap web hosting provider Namecheap has gained around eight million.
It’s not just GoDaddy that has received success; Popular hosting providers like Bluehost and HostGator have also seen a significant drop in their website visitors from May 2019 to May 2022.
Besides Namecheap, affordable hosting provider Hostinger has also seen an increase in site visits with monthly visits steadily increasing from over two million visits in 2019 to 8.2 million in 2022.
Interestingly, the search for cheap web hosting dropped significantly in June 2022 as free web hosting became an increasingly popular search. Although in the last 12 months there has been a 30% increase in the number of searches for cheap web hosting, a 44% increase in searches for cheap web hosting, and a 20% increase in search volume for cheap website builders.
Last year, our research found that Web hosting and website builder traffic plummeted after COVID. The combination of damage from the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has amplified the slowdown in the global economy, which is entering what could become a prolonged period of weak growth and high inflation, according to World Bank statistics, and is reversible. In the shift in web hosting needs of online users.
