How to get a free portfolio website

Free hosting for a personal site is normal and not a trick, but it is never unconditional. The condition is almost always one of four things: your URL is a subdomain of the host, the host puts a badge or banner on your page, some capability is held back for paid plans, or your time is the payment because you are assembling the thing yourself.

None of those is automatically bad. They just land differently depending on what you need the site for, and picking badly is annoying to undo once you have put the link on a resume.

Static hosting from a repository, such as GitHub Pages, Netlify or Cloudflare Pages, is free, fast and yours. The cost is that you write the site. If you are comfortable in HTML and CSS this is an excellent answer, and it is a poor one otherwise, because "free" here quietly means a weekend.

Site builders with free tiers, such as Carrd, Wix or Squarespace, give you a visual editor and a template. You will get something presentable, and you will spend the time on layout rather than on writing, because the template arrives empty and expects you to fill it. Free tiers typically brand the page and hold custom domains back for paid plans.

A single-page document, like a public Notion page, is the fastest route to a URL that exists. It reads as a document rather than a site, which is fine for sharing with a few people and weaker as something you put at the top of a resume.

Resume-driven builders, which is the category DebutPage is in, start from the PDF you already have and draft the page from it. Free publishing to a subdomain, a badge on the free tier, and a custom domain on paid plans. The trade is the reverse of static hosting: much less of your time, less control over the markup.

In practice it is rarely the feature list. It is the URL. A free subdomain is completely fine while you are testing an idea, and it starts to matter the moment the link goes on an application, into an email signature, or on a business card, because at that point the address is part of the impression.

So the useful question when comparing free tiers is not which has the longest feature list. It is how much work it is to move to your own domain later, and whether your content comes with you when you do. A builder where upgrading is a setting is a very different proposition from one where it means rebuilding the site somewhere else.

Publishing is free on a yourname.debutpage.com subdomain, with a "Made with DebutPage" badge on the free tier. Paid plans remove the badge and add a custom domain, either one you already own or one registered for you in the app. The content is the same either way, so moving to your own domain later does not mean rebuilding anything.

The part worth knowing before you spend any time: you can build the whole site without an account. Upload the resume, see the drafted page, restyle it by describing what you want, and only sign up if you decide to publish it. If it is not for you, you will know inside two minutes and you will not have handed over an email address to find out.