How do I start a practice website for free?

You can always get a text editor such as notepad++ or sublime. All you have to do is create a folder and save all of your files in it for any specific project. Say you create music store website for personal use to test your skills. You would create a folder on your home desktop maybe named Music Store Website? Then you would create your css , html files in notepad++ and save it in there folder. Then you would also save any images you would use in that folder also. All you have to do is click run and choose a browser to see your work. This route is free.

You don't need to pay to make a website, you can make it with any text editor, even with the notepad from Windows or Mac, just build the document structure and save it with the .html extension and you're ready to go. You can try it double clicking on the file and it will open on your browser. If you need to test some features that required a server, you can use local servers such as Xamp and Wamp.

If you want to make a website with Wordpress it's a little bit more complex to set it up. You need to download and install a local server, download the wordpress files from www.wordpress.org, run the local server, create a data base and then run the wordpress set up. Here is a tutorial of how to http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/how-to-install-wordpress-locally-for-pcwindows-with-xampp/.

After you finish your website you can upload the files to a hosting service using a FTP server.