A free website for your barbershop, salon, studio or shop

What you get without building anything

Every business with a location gets a draft site automatically, with a free address ending in .nextupshops.com. Open Website in the dashboard sidebar. If the draft has not appeared yet, pick a style kit and press Create website, or press Create with an AI draft to have the first version of your home page written for you. The AI draft is a builder feature: it writes from what is in your account, is checked for made-up claims such as awards, ratings or prices, and you can change every word.

Nothing goes live until you press Publish. You can edit, preview on a desktop, tablet and phone, and leave it for a week.

A site that stays right on its own

The part that is hard to keep up by hand is already connected. Your site can show the live wait and who is being served, your services and prices, your team by first name, and your opening hours and map, all read straight from your NextUp Walk-in account. Change a price or your hours in the dashboard and the site shows it. The Join the line button on the site puts a visitor in your line. Switch on the live wait in the headline to show the wait right now and “Open now, closes 7 PM” next to the buttons, and the Booking times block (Pro) shows your next open times as buttons.

If you want a block to stay as you typed it, Detach turns a linked block into plain words you edit by hand. Team photos stay private: team members show by name only.

Pages, in a few clicks

Under Pages you can add a ready-made page, laid out and filled in from your account: Locations (address, hours, map and the wait now), Team, Services (with prices), Contact (a message form, hours and a map) or Gallery (pictures from your media). Or add a blank page for an About page of your own. A site can have up to 20 pages, and you can rename, reorder, hide from the menu or delete any page except Home.

A page is a stack of sections made of blocks: a top section with a headline and the live wait, services, team, hours, a contact form, a newsletter sign-up, questions and answers, your real reviews (never made up), big numbers, a video, a before and after slider and more. Click to add, drag to move.

Pick a look that fits the business

A style kit sets the fonts, button and card shapes and spacing in one choice: Classic, Bold, Minimal, Warm, Studio, Noir, Clinic, Bistro, Garage or Playful. A barbershop might take Bold or Noir, a nail salon Warm or Playful, a restaurant Bistro, an auto shop Garage and a clinic or spa Clinic. You can change colours, fonts and corners on top, or copy the colours from your Branding page so the site matches your check-in screens and lobby TV.

Pictures get a focus point so the face or the work stays in view when a photo is cropped on a phone, plus a crop and a treatment. Each picture needs a short description, which helps screen readers and search engines. Uploads are PNG, JPEG or WebP, up to 2 MB each.

Under Fonts you can pick your own headings and body fonts from ten families. They are served by your own site, so visitors’ devices make no request to Google. Each section also has a layout (a photo beside the words, a full photo, a photo collage, cards, tabs, a carousel and more), a background, spacing and a gentle fade-in, and you can save a finished section to reuse on another page.

Getting found on Google

Each page has its own search title (up to 70 characters) and search description (up to 160), with a preview of how the result will look, and a checklist that points out what Google or a visitor might find missing. Keep titles plain and include your town. Your published site gets a sitemap and a robots.txt automatically, and you can hide any page from search engines.

To add the site to Google Search Console, publish first, then follow the steps under Settings, Google: the editor shows what to copy and where to paste the verification code. Pair it with the habits in how to get more Google reviews as a walk-in business and the AI-search tips in getting found when people ask an assistant.

Your own domain, and what happens when you publish

The free address keeps working, and you can connect up to 2 domains you own, such as www.yourbusiness.com. The editor shows the two records to add at your domain provider, checks them for you and sets up a secure https certificate. DNS can take a while to spread, so NextUp Walk-in keeps checking for 14 days and emails you reminders.

A new site’s first publish is checked before it goes live; the status says Held for review, it usually takes a few minutes, and you can keep editing. After that, every publish goes live straight away. The last 30 publishes are kept, so you can restore an earlier version, and you can download your whole site as a file.

What it costs, and what needs Pro

The website builder is on every plan, and while it is in early access, building a site, publishing it and using your own domain cost nothing. Settings, then Plan, in the builder shows “Free during early access” and will show any price before one applies. The one Pro piece is the Booking times block, which shows your next open appointment times as buttons; it needs online booking and hides itself when nothing is free. For plans, see pricing.

Once it is live, Settings, then Insights, shows your page views for the last 30 days, your top pages and the messages and sign-ups the site brought in. The Contact form emails you, and the Newsletter block records each person’s consent. To bring in people who already follow one team member, see a booking page link for every team member.