the world's first site builder powered by code
primo is a modern alternative to WordPress that gives marketers, developers, and DIYers the power to build beautiful, lightning-fast websites in a weekend. Whether you need to customize your site or build new components, you can do it all with HTML, CSS, and JS.
Oh! And it's free.
Content / Customization
hyper-focused content management,
bare-metal customization
Whether you hand off the site or edit it yourself, primo's CMS is a distraction-free delight. And when you need more out of your site you have direct access to its source code, so you never have to worry about hitting a ceiling or getting locked in.
Focus on content
Edit content right on the page like you'd edit a document and update components from isolated fields. And build new pages with components.
Code when you need it
Use primo's built-in IDE to modify your site right from your browser and build reusable components with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Own your website
Primo gives you full control over your own hosting so your sites can scale to millions of visitors and load near-instantly for free.
"primo sets up a site-builder that handles the dev-ops stuff but leaves CSS, HTML, and front-end Javascript up to designer/developers. So you get the advantages of 2021 with the simplicity and entry-level ease of 1994."
Frequently Asked Questions
What do you mean by free?
In primo, free means publishing as many websites as you can muster, for free. You can publish fast, secure websites and edit/customize them from any device with a web browser. At your own domain name. On your own web host. Without having your visitor's data tracked and sold. And, for goodness' sake, without any banner ads.
That way, you can build and publish websites for everything in your life or business and only ever pay for the domain name.
Pretty cool, right?
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, many of the people using 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 lets browser languages be what they were meant to be - for everyone.
Get monthly updates on new features
Primo is under active development with a full-time team, so we're moving fast. We'll never sell or abuse your email address, ever.