Put simply, free web development courses are the best way to find out if coding is for you. To make getting started even easier, we’ve picked out eight of the top tutorials in 2025.
It feels like recently your friends, family, and colleagues have begun learning to code. While their reasons and motivations for this vary, an increasing number of us are taking the time to learn about programming. If you’re curious and are wondering where to begin, free web development courses are the best way to start.
Thankfully, these days newcomers face a dizzying amount of choice. That’s where we come in—we’ve rolled our sleeves up and had a thorough search to find the best free web development courses for beginners.
Table of contents
- Why take a free web development course?
- The best free web development courses
- How to choose a free web development course
- Free web development courses FAQ
- Next steps
1. Why are free web development courses useful?
You don’t have to have a life plan of becoming a web developer—nowadays there are a whole range of different jobs where people are looking to increase their understanding.
Adding some web development knowledge to your skillset can also give you mobility within your company, as well as lead to a higher salary.
It doesn’t have to be all work and no play, though—maybe you just want to learn to code for fun, or to start building websites as a pastime? In these cases especially, free web development courses for beginners are the perfect place to begin.
There are two major reasons why this is the case:
Commitment
Instead of committing to a full-on coding bootcamp, free web development courses are designed to give you an introduction to the field without going too far down the garden path.
Many are in a tutorial format, which isn’t going to take up a huge amount of your life with assignments and longer lessons. Videos are typically broken into bite-size chunks less than ten minutes long, stopping you from being overwhelmed.
For an example of this, in CareerFoundry’s free web development short course we got Abhishek Nagekar, security engineer at Mozilla, to get you started:
As well as time, you’re not getting sucked into something bigger than the course itself–if you don’t want to. Apart from creating an account or leaving your email address, this can be a no-strings coding fling.
Cost
The other reason why free web development courses are a great idea is due to the other limited resource we have—money. The majority of providers are offering these as a taster of their larger or more specialized paid programs, so they’re aiming to both educate you and woo you, at the same time.
If you enjoy the lessons and want to continue learning programming, perfect. You can now pay for a course knowing that it’s a good investment. But this also means that if you try a free web development course for beginners and find out that it’s just not your thing, you can walk away not only with no regrets but also a full wallet.
So, now that we know why it’s almost a no-brainer to try out a free web development course if you can spare some time, let’s go through some options.
2. The best free web development courses
Many of the beginners courses naturally focus on the easier programming languages to learn, but not all of them. Because of this, it’s definitely worth taking a look to see which languages, frameworks, and tools they will cover. Some languages will involve a lot of previous theoretical knowledge, which can provide a steep learning curve for beginners.
1. CareerFoundry Web Development for Beginners Course
As an online career-change provider for over ten years, here at CareerFoundry we developed a comprehensive short course for those starting out. It should give you an ideal introduction to coding, where you come away after just five tutorials with actual hands-on work to start your web development portfolio.
Instead of focusing on one or two languages, this free course has you creating a website with HTML, then styling it with CSS, and finally making it come alive with JavaScript. Together, these three are known as the pillars of the internet—so you really will be walking away with the basics covered.
Broken up into easily digestible videos taking no longer than 15 minutes each, you can work through the course at your own pace.
At the end, you’ll not only have a nice taster of the kind of professional skills you’ll develop from scratch in the the 7-month Full-Stack Web Development Program, but also your own professional-looking, mobile responsive webpage to show off.
Each day ends with a daily challenge for you to test what you’ve learned, as well as a final test—ace it and you can get a discount on the full program!
Course highlights:
- Master HTML and CSS tags
- Change and style custom fonts on web pages
- Accessing data users have entered with JavaScript
2. JavaScript Fundamentals
You’ve more than likely heard of, or already used, Udemy before. The platform features a huge wealth of courses on every single subject you could possibly imagine.
While many of them are paid tutorials, there are still a lot of free web development courses that are well worth checking out.
Clocking in at just under five hours, this free web development course gives you a gentle introduction to the world of JavaScript, a language we thoroughly recommend newbies learn. You know those little (annoying) pop-ups that appear on webpages?
Soon you’ll know how to create them! Instead of initiating you in using the language for backend (server-side) development, this course focuses on getting you to understand how to use JavaScript on the frontend (client-side).
Course highlights:
- Writing conditional and looping logic
- Debugging JavaScript
- Interact with HTML
- Object creation
3.Programming Fundamentals with Python
We’ve already discussed elsewhere why Python is a language worth learning, not just for web development but also data analytics and AI.
Clocking in at just under 2 hours, this Udemy course gives you an introduction to the world of web development and its foundations. By introducing concepts like decision-making and looping statements, you won’t be thrown head-first into coding with no context for what you’re doing.
The course then provides an excellent introduction to Python, broken down into short (under 10 minute) lectures on the different facets of the language.
While you’ll need to look elsewhere to start applying what you’ve learned here, it’s a great start and shows just how learning Python is useful to data analysts and web developers alike.
Course highlights:
- Object-oriented programming
- Python Lists, Sets, Dictionaries, and Tuples
- Solving problems algorithmically
4. Responsive Web Design in 30 Minutes
This free Udemy course aims to get you set up in a “must-have” in web development as quickly as possible—responsive web design (RWD).
It almost goes without saying that if you’re building a web or mobile application these days, it has to be able to be displayed clearly across all devices.
Also covered as part of the CareerFoundry nano bootcamp, this super-short course requires some prior knowledge of HTML and CSS, but otherwise is perfectly aimed at beginners. If you’d like a different perspective on things, Google Developers have an excellent free introduction to the basics of RWD.
Course highlights:
- Media Queries
- Only 30 minutes long in total
5. Go (Golang)
Codecademy offers a number of free courses on their site, including web development and data analytics.
Even though having some prior knowledge of C helps, this much talked-up language is a great one for beginners to learn, as well as the third most-wanted language by developers according to StackOverflow. Developed and supported by Google, it’s an open-source language that encourages you to play around with it for fun.
Smartly laid-out, Codecademy’s free Go course is broken down into four sections, with each containing lesson, quiz, and project components. The interactive nature is excellent for those with different learning styles, as well as the fact that you can walk away with some finished mini-projects to show for it.
Course highlights:
- Exploring fmt packages
- Bank heist project
- Cheatsheets
6. HTML5 and CSS3
Back on Udemy, this free web development course is one of the best because rather than being a beginner’s introduction to HTML and then CSS, it uses the most up-to-date versions of both.
This means that you won’t have to worry about learning obsolete materials or have to overhaul your knowledge immediately.
Withn over five hours of video, you will work section-by-section to construct a web page out of code. To ensure that you’re not overwhelmed, lessons are broken into 35 bite-sized pieces, and you’ll start from the very beginning—no previous knowledge or special tools are required.
Course highlights:
- HTML tags
- How to use CSS3 elsewhere online
- Coding best practices
7. Node.js and Express.js
If you try this free web development course after learning the JavaScript basics elsewhere, you’ll already be on your way to becoming a full-stack developer.
This is very, very good news—due to this skillset being high in demand, full-stack developer salaries are impressively high. Allowing you to code in the same language on the backend opens so many doors. Creating web applications will get so much smoother.
This Udemy course is perfectly designed for those seeking to become a full-stack web developer in the medium-term. Broken into 10 sections, it introduces you to the two most important JavaScript frameworks, Node.js and Express.js. From templating engines to dynamic requests, you’ll be taken through all of the different stages of building a fully scalable full-stack web application.
It’s important to repeat that you really should learn Vanilla JavaScript (the plain language) before learning how to use its frameworks like Node.js and Express.js. You could end up creating a lot more work for yourself later on down the line!
Course highlights:
- Handling POST data
- Deploying a full-stack web application
- Rendering dynamic data
8. Progressive Web Apps
Who better to learn about building successful apps than Google themselves? While that statement might bring out a variety of answers depending on who you ask, the web.dev site, where Chrome developers teach you how to make “beautiful, accessible, fast, and secure” websites is a great resource.
Their free course about how to get started with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) is ideal for beginners, taking you from the very start (explaining what these apps actually are) into how build, test, and debug these very modern web apps.
web.dev recommend that anyone getting started has a grounding in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, something provided by other courses on this list such as CareerFoundry’s.
Course highlights:
- App design installability
- Enhancing your PWA
- PWA architecture
3. How to choose a free web development course
This can depend on a variety of factors, many of them particular to your own needs: How much time do you have? How do you prefer to learn—by doing, by reading, by watching videos, or a mix?
For example, books can be really useful for those looking to learn a particular language, tool, or framework, but they do have several downsides. Firstly there is the fact that unless you can borrow from a friend or your local library (remember them?), they will cost you money. Secondly, for a lot of people this passive learning style of reading can turn out to be a bit of a slog.
There is a compromise, however—online you’ll find a multitude of free guides and written introductions to programming, notably ones by the big tech companies themselves. Mozilla, creators of the Firefox browser, have a useful frontend web development guide.
The great thing about free web development courses is that they don’t require a serious commitment—you’re able to try several of them out, Goldilocks-style, until you find the one that’s right for you.
4. Free web development courses FAQ
So, now you’ve gone through a range of options of what’s out there, let’s answer some common queries you might have:
Can I learn full-stack developer for free?
With the dizzying range of free web development courses out there, with time and dedication you can definitely become a full-stack developer for free. By using free resources to build your frontend and backend knowledge up, as well as lots of lots of practice, you can pick up the necessary full-stack development skills needed in today’s world.
However, this depends on which way you learn best—for a lot of people having the support and guidance of an experienced tutor and mentor can make all the difference to successfully launching their full-stack career.
Is Udemy for free?
One of the most popular online learning platforms, Udemy offers both free and paid courses for web development. At present they have over 50 free web development courses available on their site, although it’s worth bearing in mind in that the quality of these can vary widely.
Can I learn web development on my own?
Depending on your learning style and what resources you have available, it’s completely possible to learn web development by yourself. The amount of tutorials, books, programs, and even podcasts out there for learning to code nowadays means that you certainly won’t be short of materials. If you opt for this avenue, it’s important to establish a solid learning plan that will keep you motivated along the way.
5. Next steps
So now that you’ve gotten a look at some of the different choices available to you, dig a little deeper into how long each will take, and don’t be afraid to try them out for a few minutes to see how you like it.
Remember that you don’t have to take all of these options, tempting though it might be!
Instead, have a look at either combining two free web development courses for beginners that complement each other. For example, the JavaScript Fundamentals and Node.js tutorials fit together perfectly.
Better yet, however, is one course which gives you a grounding in multiple languages and how they intersect with each other. The CareerFoundry free web development course does just that, teaching you HTML/CSS and JavaScript over the course of just 5 simple lessons. It’s an ideal launchpad for your coding journey.
If you’re interested in reading a bit more about programming before figuring out which direction to go in, have a look at these articles: