about us

When we started in 1999, our idea was to build a website directory of every business website in Canada. People would be able to search by word, category, or location, and it would be free to use and free to add a business. We also created a website building software for people to set up and update their own website without needing to know anything about programming.

Now, 20 years later we’ve built more than 5,000 websites in Winnipeg and across Canada in over 800 cities, towns, and communities and in every industry imaginable.

Our directory of Canadian business websites has also gone through a lot of changes. It is now bigger and better than ever, gets over 3 million pageviews per year, is still free to use, and you can still add your business for free if it isn’t in there yet: https://websites.ca/signup

Our website management service has changed a lot too. We found that most businesses are too busy to update their website themselves and would rather have us just take care of everything for them. Now they just call or email for help or with changes and we take care of everything – usually within a day or two. We also take care of their domain names, email, hosting, and SEO.

In 2012, we switched to WordPress for building and managing websites for our customers. More than 30% of all websites are built with WordPress now so there’s a huge development community helping us make our customers’ websites better and better. As of 2020 we’ve built more than 1,500 WordPress websites!

We’ve recently gone a step further and have built our own Managed WordPress Hosting platform and service. Now we can host our own websites and offer WordPress hosting services to other companies, freelancers, developers, and individuals who are looking for hosting fine-tuned for WordPress, optimized for lightning fast page-load speed, with 24/7 security monitoring and automatic nightly backups, and enabled for easy WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates.

From our home office in Wolseley in 2000, to an office in Osborne Village in 2001, and with our head office still in the Exchange District in Winnipeg since 2004, we’ve now expanded our team from Winnipeg to and around Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Kelowna, and Halifax and we’re ready to keep growing. Not a customer yet? You can switch to Websites.ca for free!

Looking forward to another 20 years,

John Hart
Co-Founder
Websites.ca