13 Free Web Design Tools You Never Knew About

Free Web Design Tools

The web design space is constantly moving and whether you are a professional web designer or a novice it can be a struggle to keep up. Add value to your website by utilizing free web design tools to speed up and streamline your web design process.

I want to talk a little about what I consider to be some of the best free web design tools out there right now from the design and development community. Whether you know how to create a website or need a guide, these free website design tools are sure to come in handy.

1. Canva

Canva free design tool

Essentially Canva allows you to design almost anything for free. The system includes a ton of functionality and has everything you need to design. Canva gives you access to over a million stock photos, vectors, and illustrations. They even allow you to upload your own.

Their photo filter system gives you tons of preset filter choices and you can go a step further with their advanced photo editing tools.

They have a system full of free icons, shapes, and elements for your designs, and again, you can upload your own. Canva also has hundreds of built-in fonts that are perfect for every design.

Use Canva for design, photo editing, social media design and advertising, logo design, eBook creation and more. I have actually used them for several projects and I have to tell you I have yet to find a better free pre-built system out there.

Canva is truly one of the best free web design tools available so go check it out and give it a try.

2. Figma

Figma free web design tools

Why run three different programs for design, prototype, and feedback when this can be done and bundled in one spot? Figma is an online resource tool that lets people design, create prototypes and gather feedback all in one place.

It comes with a pretty powerful prototyping tool that supports almost every part of the design process. Perhaps one of the best aspects of Figma is that it provides the ability to collaborate between team members.

You are also able to share designs, upload all your mockups, and export CSS straight from the program (which is important for custom pages). Now some of these tools may require a small additional fee, but Figma still provides a lot of free website design tools within the no-cost version of the program.

Figma is available online for Windows, Mac or Linux.

3. Fontjoy

Fontjoy free web design tools

Font pairing can be an arduous task and is an age-old problem in the design world. We know that fonts are a vastly important part of design because they are used to draw attention and are oftentimes the foundation of brand identity.

Fontjoy is one of the best free website design tools for font pairing out there, if not the very best.

This font tool pulls a full library of fonts straight from Google Web fonts and puts them all together on one page. Sometimes it can be hard to find free fonts on the web and this helps you in that aspect as well.

The program then allows someone to choose which font or fonts they would like to test and then test size, weight, and line height and see how it all looks on your web page.

4. FontBase

FontBase free website design tool

Since I already showed you one of the best free website design tools for font pairing let me also touch on what I consider to be the best free font management tool out there.

FontBase is a completely free font management tool that is available for download on all three of the major operating systems.

It allows you to experiment with fonts right inside the application and also gives you the ability to pull dynamic web fonts from Google’s library. The program’s visual GUI organizes your fonts by collections, font foundries, and custom folders if you so choose to go that way with it.

Truly the best free website design tool for font management.

5. Vectr

Vectr design tool

Finding free web page design tools for graphic design can be challenging. This is why I have included a few of them in this article.

One of the more interesting free online graphic design tools is Vectr. They let you express your creative freedom by providing a free online design platform that can be used with a browser or by download.

Like most free web design tools, Vectr supports itself through an ecosystem of paid upgrades and add-ons, but the free version is actually very dynamic and does offer a lot of great options.

6. Color Wheel

Color wheel design tool by adoba

At first thought, you may not think a color wheel deserves a spot on this list, but think again. Color is what drives emotional appeal on everything and it is a very important aspect of design.

Yes, I know Color Wheel is from Adobe, and rarely do they offer anything free that is worthwhile, but Color Wheel really does belong on this list of free website design tools.

Color Wheel is a web-based color scheme creation tool and it is 100% free. There are several ways to use this tool but the most common way to use it is to start with a seed color, and then let the tool help you pick additional colors. Color Wheel will then combine everything chosen into a nice color scheme.

7. Pictaculous

Pictaculous

Since color tools are so important I wanted to show you one more color scheme tool that was just too great to pass on. Pictaculous is another color scheme tool but it works quite a bit differently than Color Wheel does.

Pictaculous lets you upload any picture you want and then automatically extracts the main color palette of the picture for you. This is a fantastic free website design tool if you are putting a picture in the background of a website and then using that color palette as well.

Go check out Pictaculous. It is simple but very effective, and most importantly it is free.

8. Full Page Screen Capture

Full page screen capture chrome extension

The title of this free web design tool pretty much says it all. Full Page Screen Capture is a one-click screen capture tool that turns a full web page into a single image.

This is actually a Chrome extension and all you do is head to the Chrome Web Store and download it onto your Chrome web browser. One click of a button and you get smooth, clean, professional looking full-page images.

This can be important when building a portfolio or even for showing clients preview images of a website you are building.

The extension has over 25,000 reviews and comes in at an overall 4.9 stars. Give it a look, it is a great little tool to have in your Chrome browser and of course, it is free.

9. MAMP

Mamp local server development tool

What happens when you need to test a website to see if it actually works on a live server? You can buy a hosting account or expensive program, or you can use MAMP.

MAMP is a free website design tool that uses a local server environment that can be installed under macOS and Windows with just a few clicks. Once you know you are good to go you can upload your fully functioning website to a dedicated server.

MAMP provides you with all the tools needed to run WordPress on their desktop for testing or development purposes. It doesn’t matter if you prefer Apache or Nginx or if you want to work with PHP, Python, Perl or Ruby. You can do it all with MAMP.

Go check it out and download it. There is also a pro version that includes some other tools, but for testing purposes, MAMP is unbeatable for free.

10. Zeplin

Zeplin free web design tools

Zeplin offers a number of free website design tools all in one space. Developers, designers, and the rest of the team can all work in one spot from concept to production.

Zeplin automatically generates accurate specs, assets and code snippets from designs and tailors them for the platform you’re developing for. You can export files in one-click using their Sketch, Adobe XD CC, Figma, Adobe Photoshop CC plugins. Finally, you can store full projects in the Zeplin cloud and invite team members and share links. Everyone in the team can access up to date design resources and get notified of changes.

There is a paid version as well that will allow for more projects at once, but the free version does allow one full project at a time to run.

11. Fusion.js

Fusion.js free app and web development tool

I love open source web framework. With that being said, Fusion.js is an open source web framework from Uber’s web platform team. The framework makes web development easier and produces lightweight, high-performing apps.

Simply put, Fusion.js is an MIT-licensed JavaScript framework that supports popular libraries like React and Redux, and comes with modern features like hot module reloading, data-aware server-side rendering, and bundle splitting support.

It has all the benefits of a pre-configured, optimized boilerplate. Fusion.js provides a very flexible plugin-based architecture.

12. TinyPNG

Tinypng free image compression and sizing tool

As far as free website design tools go it doesn’t get too much more important for images when it comes to sizing and compression. TinyPNG handles both of these issues so that you can then take your file and upload it to a website without causing sizing and space issues.

To be a little more technical, TinyPNG uses “smart lossy compression.” This technique selectively decreases the number of colors in an image, which means fewer bytes are required to store data.

The effect creates a huge difference in file sizes but is nearly invisible to the naked eye. Images come out looking clean, crisp and smooth. This is one of several ways to optimize images.

13. Elementor

Elementor free website page builder tool

I can’t round out this list of free web page design tools without mentioning a page builder. There are a lot of great ones out there, but I want to focus on Elementor for a minute.

Elementor is a free WordPress page builder that has over 1 million downloads and over 2,000 5 star ratings. You simply download the Elementor page builder plugin and install it on your WordPress website.

Yes, there is a pro version of this page builder, but the free version is still the best free website tools available, especially when it comes to WordPress page builders. There are so many amazing website builders out there, but this one is free and comes with so much functionality.

The page builder features 29 very useful widgets, all of which are in the free version. Elementor comes with everything you need to drag and drop your way to an amazing looking WordPress website.

If you are looking for a free drag and drop WordPress page builder give Elementor a try, you won’t be disappointed.

Where to Go From Here

Honestly, where you choose to start is up to you. There are hundreds of amazing free web design tools available these days.

Between add-ons, subscription packages, and open source projects, individuals and companies are able to offer free website design tools all the time. Keep an eye out, something new is trending all the time.

I tried to narrow them down and present to you some of the best free web design tools that I have used myself and continue to impress.

What are the best free web design tools that you have found and used either once, or multiple times for your design projects? I would be interested to know what some of your favorites might be and why.

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