A surprising number of clubs have no website. Not small clubs either: forty year old cricket clubs with three senior teams and a colts section, running clubs with two hundred members, swimming clubs with a waiting list. They are not badly run. They simply never got past the first quote.
That is usually how it goes. Someone volunteers to sort out a website, gets a price from a local designer, brings it back to the committee, and the committee decides that £900 plus hosting is not what this year's subs are for. Or a member builds one, it works well for two seasons, then they move away and nobody else has the login. Either way the club carries on without one, and the training times live in a pinned post somewhere.
This post is the practical version: what a club website has to do, which of the free options actually stay free, and how to get one live without paying anyone.
What a club website actually has to do
Before comparing platforms it is worth being honest about the job. A club website is not a marketing site. For most clubs it answers four questions, and if it answers them clearly it has already done its work:
- Who are you and where are you? The ground, the pool, the meeting point, on a map rather than as a postcode buried in a paragraph.
- When do you train? The single most searched thing about any club, and the thing most likely to be out of date.
- How do we join? Not "email the secretary". A link that a parent can follow on a phone at nine on a Sunday evening.
- Who do we contact? One address that still works when the person who set it up steps down.
Everything else, the history page, the gallery, the sponsors, is genuinely optional. Clubs that never launch a website usually stall because they are trying to write all of that first.
The free options, honestly
There are several ways to get a club website for nothing. They are not equivalent, and the differences only show up once you are committed. Prices and terms below were checked on 10 September 2026.
| Option | Address you get | Adverts | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wix free plan | username.wixsite.com/sitename | Wix branding on your site | No custom domain, and you cannot take payments at all |
| Google Sites | A Google subdomain | None | Custom domain needs a paid Google Workspace plan, and there is nothing club-specific in it |
| Squarespace | None, 14 day trial only | None | Not free. The trial ends and you pick a paid plan |
| Pitchero free plan | A Pitchero address | Third party adverts shown to your visitors | One team only, and no payment processing |
| ClubPal | yourclub.clubpal.app | None | Custom domain is £25 a year if you want one |
Two of those deserve a closer look, because they are the ones clubs actually land on.
Wix and Squarespace are general website builders, and they are good ones. What they are not is a club system. Nothing on the site knows what a session is, so your fixtures, training times and membership list live somewhere else and get copied across by hand. That copying is the job that quietly stops happening around November, which is why so many club websites show last season's timetable.
Pitchero's free plan is genuinely free and genuinely sport specific, which makes it the closest thing to a like-for-like comparison. The two limits to know before you build on it: it covers one team, and it shows third party adverts to your visitors. For a single-team club that does not mind adverts, that is a real option. For a club with a colts section, a second XI or a ladies team, the free plan runs out on day one, and the Standard plan is £38 a month, up to twenty teams, with further teams at £2.50 a month each.
Where free stops being free
The pattern across nearly every free tier is the same. The website itself is free. The moment the club needs to do something with it, it is not.
The three things that trigger it, in the order clubs hit them:
- Taking money. Subs, match fees, event tickets. Most free website tiers cannot take a payment at all, so this is usually what pushes a club onto a paid plan.
- Adding the second team. Caps are typically set at one team, which is a comfortable limit for exactly as long as your club has one team.
- Wanting your own web address.
www.yourclub.comon a shirt or a fixture list reads differently to a builder's subdomain, and it is nearly always on a paid tier.
None of this is a scandal. Free tiers exist to become paid tiers, and that is a fair trade if you know it is coming. It is worth knowing before you spend a weekend building on one.
What ClubPal does here
ClubPal gives every club a website at an address like yourclub.clubpal.app, free, with no adverts, no team cap, and no trial counting down. There is no subscription: ClubPal charges 20p + 3.5% per transaction on money your club actually collects, and nothing at all in a month where you collect none. The fixed part of that fee varies by country, and clubs in 26 countries can use ClubPal in their own currency.
The site is live before you have written anything. Your homepage arrives with a welcome message, Register and Sign in buttons, and a list of your next sessions and events that keeps itself current as you add them, because it is reading the same sessions your coaches already set up. Pages are built by choosing a column layout and dropping in blocks: headings, text, images, a Google map of where you play.
The one charge anywhere on the club website is a custom domain, at £25 a year including the SSL certificate, and it is optional. Plenty of clubs never use anything but the free address.
Worth being clear about what that is not. This is not a design tool. If your club wants an art directed website with custom animation, a general builder will take you further. What ClubPal is aiming at is the club that has nothing, needs the four questions answered well, and does not want the site drifting out of date the moment the volunteer who built it gets busy.
Getting one live this week
The clubs that succeed at this treat it as a two hour job, not a project. A workable order:
- Create the club account. The website exists from that moment, at your free address. Nothing to install, host or buy.
- Write the welcome message. Three or four sentences. Who you are, what you play, who is welcome. It can be improved later and usually is.
- Add one page called Where we train. A heading, a paragraph, and a map block with your postcode in it. This single page answers more visitor questions than anything else you will write.
- Check your sessions are in the system. If they are, your homepage is already showing them, and that part of the site now maintains itself.
- Add a contact page. One club address, not a personal one, so it survives a change of secretary.
- Stop there and publish. The history page and the gallery can wait. A live site answering four questions beats a perfect site that never launches, and every club that stalls does so at step seven.
Once it is up, the parts that go stale on a normal website, the fixtures, the training times, the joining form, are the parts ClubPal keeps current on its own.
If your club has been meaning to sort out a website for a couple of seasons, this is a weekend job rather than a budget line. You can see what the club website includes, or get started and have the address live today.