the world's easiest CMS, powered by code

Frequently Asked Questions

What do you mean by free?

In primo, free means publishing as many websites as you can muster, for free. Fast, secure websites that you can edit and customize from your phone, laptop or fridge. At your own domain name. On your own [free] server. Without having your visitor's data tracked and sold. And, for goodness' sake, without having half of it be an ad.

That way, you can build and publish websites for everything in your life or business and only ever pay for the domain names*. Pretty cool right?

*.com's are around $13 a year

What's the catch?

No catch. But if you want to customize your site's design or functionality and you've never learned basic HTML/CSS, you'll probably have to spend a couple hours learning it to unlock full creative control of your site. But once you're past the shallow learning curve, you'll be able to build beautiful, bespoke website for anything, for free.

How does this compare to WordPress?

WordPress is still the most popular tool for building and managing websites 20 years on because it can be self-hosted, doesn't lock you in, and enables custom development (it's not easy, but it's possible).

Compared to WordPress, primo offers a much more approachable content editing experience while enabling instant customization with the built-in IDE. At the moment, primo isn't self-hostable like WordPress, but we're working towards that and making self-hosting primo a thirty second process.

How does this compare to no-code site builders?

No-code site builders like Wix and Squarespace make websites more approachable by abstracting away code. primo makes them more approachable by organizing it into blocks made of editable HTML, CSS, and occasionally JavaScript.

If you've never written code before, this seems a lot more daunting than just using buttons and sliders to customize, but you may be surprised at how quickly you start making sense of it. And once you get comfortable with it, you have the entire browser's potential at your fingertips; so you can rest assured your site will scale.

Don't I have to be an actual web developer to write code?

Nope. In fact, most of the people who use primo have only written code a few times in their life, if ever. That's one of its biggest advantages over WordPress. In WordPress, you have to do a lot of legwork to either build custom components or modify an existing theme's source, which just about takes it off the table for marketers, bloggers, and everyone else who doesn't have 'WordPress Developer' on their Linkedin. primo makes browser languages what they were meant to be - for everyone.

How approachable is it, really?

Even users that never have never touched code before find it significantly easier to get up and running with primo than existing no-code options and rave about the content editing experience.

But that leaves customization, which is a bit more daunting in primo than in no-code tools. Here's a state-of-the-art test see if you have what it takes do some of the same formatting you'd do in a design tool.

Read these three cryptic computer symbols in order. If you can decipher them, you're in.

font-size: 20px;
font-weight: 500;
color: red;

We can't pretend it's easier to write a line of code than it is to push a button. But as soon as you can code, even a little bit, primo becomes a massively better option for just about any and every type of website.