Cheapest Professional Website in Málaga — Why €290 Beats Free

Málaga has changed. Ten years ago it was a tourist city with some tech jobs. Today it is one of the fastest-growing tech hubs in southern Europe. Google has an office here. Vodafone moved its European R&D centre here. Startups, freelancers, digital agencies, and international businesses are setting up every month. The demand for affordable website design in Málaga has never been higher.

And yet, when most of these businesses go looking for a website, they land on the same question: why would I pay for a website when I can build one for free?

It is a reasonable question. The answer is that you cannot build one for free. You can only build a bad one for free — and then pay more to fix it later.

The "Free" Website Illusion

Let's look at what "free" actually means on each major platform, because the marketing is deliberately misleading.

Wix Free Tier

Wix gives you a website on a subdomain like yourname.wixsite.com/businessname. It displays Wix ads on your pages. You cannot connect a custom domain. You get 500MB of storage and 500MB of bandwidth — enough for about one good month of traffic before your site goes down or gets throttled.

But the real damage is under the surface. Wix free sites are slow. They routinely score below 40 on Google's PageSpeed Insights for mobile. They load 2-4MB of JavaScript before your visitor sees anything useful. They inject tracking scripts, analytics code, and promotional overlays that you cannot remove.

SEO control is minimal. You cannot edit meta tags properly. You cannot add structured data. You cannot control your URL structure. You cannot submit a proper sitemap. Google will index your site, but it will rank it exactly where a slow, ad-covered, subdomain site belongs — nowhere near page one.

WordPress.com Free Tier

WordPress.com free gives you a yourbusiness.wordpress.com subdomain with WordPress.com ads displayed on every page. You cannot install plugins. You cannot install custom themes. You get 1GB of storage.

The bigger problem is that WordPress.com free and WordPress.org (self-hosted) are completely different products, and most people do not realise this until they have invested weeks building their site. When you inevitably need a contact form, an SEO plugin, or a custom design, you hit a wall. The upgrade path costs €4-€25 per month, and even the paid plans are bloated and slow compared to modern alternatives.

Self-hosted WordPress has its own issues — plugin bloat, constant security updates, database-dependent page loads — but at least it gives you control. The free tier gives you nothing useful for a professional business.

Google Sites

Google Sites is genuinely free. No ads, no subdomain tricks. It is also genuinely terrible.

The design options look like a corporate intranet from 2012. There is no SEO control beyond page titles. No analytics integration beyond basic Google Analytics. No forms beyond Google Forms embeds. No responsive design controls — it is responsive in the way that a stretched JPEG is responsive. It technically works on mobile. It looks like no one tested it on mobile.

For a Málaga business competing for attention from international clients, a Google Sites page signals one thing: you are not serious.

Canva Websites

Canva now offers "websites." They are single-page designs published to a Canva subdomain. There is no navigation, no multi-page structure, no SEO, no forms, no analytics. It is a poster on the internet. Calling it a website is generous. Calling it a professional website is fiction.

What "Free" Actually Costs

Here is the part that surprises people. Let's add up what a "free" website actually costs when you try to make it functional for a real business.

Custom domain: €10-15/year. You need this because yourbusiness.wixsite.com is not a domain — it is an embarrassment.

Remove ads: €5-17/month on Wix or WordPress.com. That is €60-204/year just to stop your website builder from advertising on your site.

Professional email: €5-7/month per user for Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, because you need hello@yourbusiness.com, not a Gmail address. That is €60-84/year.

SSL certificate: Free on most paid plans, but on some platforms this requires a premium tier. SSL is not optional — browsers mark non-SSL sites as "Not Secure" and Google penalises them in rankings.

Premium features: Contact forms, SEO tools, analytics, e-commerce basics, more storage, more bandwidth. On Wix, getting all of these requires the Business plan at €17-32/month. That is €204-384/year.

Total annual cost of a "free" website made functional: €334-687/year.

After two years, you have spent €668-1,374 on a slow, template-based site that still does not rank on Google and still looks like every other Wix template in your industry.

Meanwhile, a €290 professional website costs €290. Once.

What €290 Gets You at QPC8

Let's be specific about what the cheapest professional website in Málaga actually includes, because vague promises are what got us into this mess.

A real Next.js website. Not a template builder. Not a drag-and-drop page with a thousand dependencies. A static-generated site built on the same framework that Netflix, Twitch, and Nike use. Server-rendered HTML. Minimal JavaScript. Fast by architecture, not by accident.

Up to 3 pages. Home, Services, and Contact. Enough to present your business professionally to anyone who finds you.

Custom domain setup. Your own .com, .es, or whatever TLD you need. We handle the DNS configuration.

SSL certificate. HTTPS from day one. Non-negotiable.

Mobile responsive. Not "it kind of works on a phone." Designed for mobile first, because 65% of your visitors will be on one.

Basic SEO. Proper meta tags, Open Graph data, structured data markup, semantic HTML, XML sitemap, and a robots.txt that actually makes sense. The foundations that let Google understand and rank your site.

No monthly platform fees. Hosting on Vercel's free tier or a comparable service costs nothing for a site this size. You pay for your domain renewal each year — about €12 — and that is it.

The Speed Difference Is Not Marginal — It Is Brutal

This is where cheap web design in Málaga typically falls apart. Agencies build on WordPress or Wix because it is easy for them, not because it is good for you.

A Next.js static site loads in under 1 second. The HTML is pre-built at deploy time and served from a CDN edge node close to your visitor. There is no database query. There is no server-side processing at runtime. The page is ready before the browser finishes asking for it.

A typical Wix site loads in 4-6 seconds on mobile. WordPress with a page builder and a handful of plugins: 3-8 seconds. That is not a small difference. That is the difference between a visitor reading your services page and a visitor hitting the back button.

Google quantifies this through Core Web Vitals — three metrics that measure loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. Sites that pass all three get a ranking advantage. Sites that fail them get pushed down. A Next.js static site passes Core Web Vitals by default. A Wix or WordPress site has to fight for it, and most lose that fight.

For a Málaga business trying to rank for local searches — "restaurant Málaga centro," "abogado extranjería Málaga," "coworking space Málaga" — this performance advantage is the difference between appearing on page one and being invisible.

Why This Matters Specifically in Málaga

Málaga's market has a few characteristics that make website performance more important than average.

International competition. Unlike smaller Spanish cities, Málaga businesses compete with companies that have professional digital presences. A British expat looking for a lawyer, a German company looking for a co-development partner, a Nordic startup looking for office space — these people Google first and visit second. If your site is slow or looks amateur, you lose to a competitor whose site is fast and professional. They will not even know you existed.

Growing but not saturated. The Málaga tech ecosystem is growing fast, which means the SEO landscape is still winnable. Ranking for "affordable website design Málaga" or "cheapest professional website Málaga" is achievable now. In two years, when more agencies have established domain authority, it will be harder. The businesses that build proper websites now will have a durable advantage.

Multilingual demand. Many Málaga businesses serve Spanish, English, and sometimes German-speaking clients. A proper website handles multilingual content cleanly — separate pages with correct hreflang tags so Google serves the right language to the right user. Template builders handle this poorly or not at all.

Cost sensitivity. Málaga is not Marbella. Budgets are tighter. Startups, freelancers, and small businesses need real value at a real price. That is exactly what the €290 tier is built for — professional output at a price point that makes sense for the local economy.

When €290 Is Not Enough

We are not going to pretend that a three-page static site solves every problem. It does not.

If you need a blog with a content management system, where non-technical team members can publish and edit posts, you need more than a static build. You need a headless CMS integration — Sanity, Contentful, or similar — which adds complexity and cost.

If you need e-commerce, even basic product listings with a checkout flow, you need Stripe integration, inventory management, and order processing. That is a different category of project.

If you need lead generation automation — forms that trigger email sequences, CRM entries, and follow-up workflows — you need our automation layer on top of the website.

If you need multilingual content with separate pages for each language and proper SEO for each locale, the scope expands beyond three pages.

For all of these, we offer the Business Pro tier — a full website with CMS, automation, and the infrastructure to scale. It costs more than €290 because it does more than €290 worth of work. But it is still priced for Málaga, not for Manhattan.

The €290 site is the starting point. It gets you online professionally, ranking in Google, and converting visitors — today. When your business grows and your needs expand, the architecture is already modern. Upgrading is straightforward, not a rebuild from scratch.

The Real Cost Comparison

| | "Free" Wix (2 years) | WordPress.com Paid (2 years) | QPC8 €290 Site (2 years) | |---|---|---|---| | Setup cost | €0 | €0 | €290 | | Annual platform fees | €204-384 | €96-300 | €0 | | Domain | €24-30 | €24-30 | €24-30 | | Email | €120-168 | €120-168 | €120-168 | | 2-year total | €348-582 | €240-498 | €434-488 | | Page speed (mobile) | 4-6 seconds | 3-5 seconds | Under 1 second | | Core Web Vitals | Fail | Usually fail | Pass | | SEO control | Limited | Moderate | Full | | Custom code | No | Limited | Yes | | Ads on your site | Yes (free tier) | Yes (free tier) | No | | Ownership | Platform-locked | Platform-locked | You own the code |

The two-year cost difference is small. The performance difference is enormous. And after those two years, the Wix and WordPress sites are still slow, still template-bound, and still costing you monthly fees. The QPC8 site is still fast, still ranking, and still yours.

Next Steps

If you are a business in Málaga looking for a professional website without the agency markup, here is what to do:

1. Check your current site (if you have one) at pagespeed.web.dev. Note your mobile score. 2. List what you need. Five pages? Ten? Blog? E-commerce? Be specific. 3. Get in touch. We will tell you honestly whether the €290 tier fits your needs or whether you need something more. No sales pitch. No upsell. Just a straight answer.

We are based in southern Spain. We build websites for businesses in Málaga, the Costa del Sol, and across Europe. If your budget is €290 and your ambition is a site that actually performs, we should talk.

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QPC^8 is a software development company based in southern Spain. We build websites, mobile apps, and automation systems for businesses that need professional digital infrastructure without enterprise pricing. Learn more about our web development services.