I run three fan sites that have been online since 2000 and 2001. They predate Facebook, most of Wikipedia, and nearly everyone currently posting about their subjects. So understand that this page is not neutral: the fan site is my favorite kind of website, the purest thing the web ever produced, one person saying "I love this thing, here is everything about it" with no business model in sight. Here's how to build one in 2026.
What makes fan sites special (and what they need)
A fan site wins by being complete and current where the official presence is corporate and stale: the full discography or filmography, the tour history, the interview archive, the news the fandom actually cares about. That means the builder question is really a maintenance question: the right tool is whichever one you'll still enjoy updating in year three. Cost matters too, because a fan site should cost as close to nothing as possible; it's a labor of love, and the fastest way to kill the love is a $200 annual bill for a hobby.
One more thing separates fan sites from every other kind of site on this site, and it drives the whole recommendation below: fan sites get big. An episode guide, a discography, a tour archive, a gallery: these are page counts, not paragraphs. Most builders price by page, and that is where the labor of love meets the invoice. Check the page limit on the exact plan you intend to buy, not on the brand, because as the Framer entry below shows they do not always move in the direction you expect.
The picks
The spiritual home: Neocities
If you want the true old-web experience, hand-coded pages, web rings, a guestbook aesthetic, Neocities is the direct descendant of GeoCities and costs nothing. You'll be writing HTML, which in 2026 means asking an AI to write it with you, and honestly that's how my own sites run. No affiliate link here because there's nothing to sell; it's just the right answer for a certain kind of fan.
The modern-looking free option, and it is better than I said: Framer
Framer's free tier is the best-looking $0 site available: real editor, real galleries, 1,000 pages and 10 CMS collections, on a framer.website subdomain. I had this wrong on this page until October, and the correction matters most here. I previously said the free tier capped you at 30 pages and told you a big fan site would outgrow it. It does not. A thousand pages is an episode guide, a discography and a tour archive with room spare.
The real catch is the opposite one: the $10 Basic plan is where the 30-page cap lives, so paying Framer for a custom domain shrinks your page ceiling by a factor of thirty, and a large fan site that wants its own domain needs Pro at $30 a month. For a fan site that is happy on a framer.website address, free is genuinely the best-looking option available at any price. See the full review and the correction log. Free tier here.
My actual stack, and still the right answer for a fan site on its own domain: static files on free hosting
All three of my fan sites are plain HTML on free static hosting, total cost one domain renewal a year each. It's the cockroach of web stacks: nothing to hack, nothing to renew except the domain, no page limit to ever collide with, and it survives decades of platform churn, which fan sites uniquely need to do. The case for it over Framer's free tier is the domain, not the page count. In 2026 the old objection to it (you have to write the HTML) has mostly evaporated, because an AI assistant will write it while you make the decisions. The path is in the main guide.
The two rules that keep you out of trouble
Be unmistakably unofficial: say "fan site" plainly in the header or footer, don't use official logos as your own branding, and never impersonate the subject or sell merch with their name on it. And credit your sources: scans, photos, and quotes came from somewhere, and the fandoms with long memories are the ones you're publishing for. Respect both rules and fan sites are the friendliest corner of the web; ignore them and you're one cease-and-desist from losing years of work.
Got the itch? A fan site is the perfect weekend project.
Use the launch checklist