16 Best Website Builders To Build Your Own Small Business (A Comparison)

Creating a website has never been so easy, especially when you are not a coder. It’s not necessary to be a code enthusiast while building a website be it for you or your organization. We have tested all the builders to bring out the best website builder for you, so you need not to invest time on that or on learning languages like HTML, CSS, and PHP.

A proper comparison between the website builder has been shown in this blog, to bring out the best you require for your website.

First of all, let’s have a brief about what actually Website builder is?

What Is Website Builder?

A website builder is basically a tool or a platform, that let users built a site quickly without needing to know any coding or site designing skills. It doesn’t need a lot of efforts as well as provide low-cost options to make a good-quality website.

There are two types of Website builders

  1. Online Website Builders
  2. Offline Website builders

1) Online Website Builders: It is a web-based service that runs on the provider’s service. There is no requirement of downloading or installing the software on your computer. All that you require is a web browser and an internet connection, which makes possible for you to work from anywhere through any device. Moreover, these online website builders come with web hosting services thus there is no need of purchasing it or setting it up separately.

2) Offline Website Builders: These are the software programs that you download or install separately on your computer. You just have to build your website and save your files on your computer then upload it to a web host and your website is all set.

Since your software is running on your system so you can work on your website even while you are offline. But you will require some technical skills as well to upload our files to a web host.

Here is a list of some of the best Website Builders, go through them to get the detailed information about them.

12 Best Website Builder For Small Business

WordPress.com

wordpress best website builder

WordPress is one of ideal blogging platform offering features like social bookmarking, an RSS feed, and archives. It is a simpler form of WordPress.org which doesn’t require much coding. It provides a lot of features like high-quality blogging tools on sensible prices, making it a wise choice.

WordPress is not an easy platform for the beginners since it is not just a simple drag and drops work like Wix or Weebly, you properly need to edit the layout. Customizing WordPress templates is really a tough job if you’re using it for anything other than blogging. Moreover, you require to perform basic coding in order to expand your site. It is perfect for those bloggers who are a bit technically sound.

Pros:

WordPress.com is ideal for blogging, offers social bookmarking, RSS feeds and archives. You can also select details like display author bio on a single post, or wherever you want the featured image to appear.

There are thousands of pre-built WordPress themes that you can use to design your website. There are also amazing drag and drop page builders such as beaver builder and devices that allow you to easily create your page layout.

It gives you access to more than 50,000 plugins. These WordPress plugins act like apps to add extra features and functionalities to your Website. WordPress can be fully translated into different languages and thus can be used to create multilingual websites.

Cons:

You have to manage your own website, which means that you have to familiarize yourself with a new system. This minor learning curve is easily removed by most users, but in the beginning, it seems a little difficult.

But this is not the easiest platform to use. Early editors or beginners can fight with layouts, which are not as simple as drag-and-drop builders like Wix and Weebly.

Something other than blogging is really hard to customize to the WordPress.com template. In addition, if you want to extend your site, you will need to do basic coding.

Wix

wix - best website builder

Wix a simple drag and drop work which is easy and convenient for anyone to make their website quickly. This makes it the most recommended website builder platform. It has a lot of customization tools that can make your website totally stylish and personalized.

Pros:

Wix hosts more than 100 million users around the world.

It is one of the excellent e-commerce stores providing many facilities starting from simple products, booking online to online registrations and more.

Wix offers a free plan with a certain bandwidth and storage. Which you can give a try to test this drag and drop website builder and if you like it you may even keep your website and buy a domain name by upgrading to a premium plan.

It has a comprehensive support database and over-the-phone support as well.

Cons:

Wix has no built-in statistics feature. It strictly forbade using the responsive design for their site.

All the free and connect domain plans show the Wix branded ads on your website, which can only be removed by upgrading to a premium plan.

There is no live chat feature in it and using wix to built website can be a bit costly.

Its e-commerce and online stores are only available on more expensive plans, which may start from 20$ per month.

Squarespace

Squarespace comes up with the best quality designs for any website. It has some of the really creative, sophisticated, modern and sleek templates to make a truly stunning website. It gives a 14days free trial that lets you test Squarespace according to your requirement in a website builder.

Pros:

Squarespace has beautiful responsive designs that accommodate mobile screen as well.

It provides free SSL certificates. Have deep selling capabilities including digital downloads, providing instantaneous help and analytics tool.

You can easily drag and drop the items on the page and add contents by pointing on anywhere on your website and start typing to creating your layout easily.

It offers a great interface to manage your products, orders, coupon discounts and many more in its e-commerce plan which allows you to add an online store to your website.

Cons:

It’s a bit costly as compared to other website builder platforms. It starts from 12$ per month and 18$ per month whereas its online store starts from 26$ and 40$ per month.

Squarespace doesn’t let you fully customize the title of your blog or the product pages.

It allows you very limited integration with any third-party service that can result to be a hurdle in your growing business.

GoDaddy

It is one of the simple user-friendly and easy platforms to create some really professional looking websites. Here you just have to enter the details and GoDaddy will automatically customize your website.

Pros:

It has an integrated photo gallery having the professional images from Getty photographs to be used in your website.

It also allows you to upload your own photos and create your image gallery.

This website builder can work on smaller screens as well. Thus it allows you to use your website even on your mobile phone or tablet.

It has a clear interface with generous storage and bandwidth.

It offers a one-month free trial, giving you more time to test things before taking an annual commitment. Giving a really solid performance by offering 99.99% uptime, only going down once for two minutes.

Cons:

It doesn’t hold much feature’s as other website builders and not flexible as well, only offering a limited set of features with fewer design options.

Emails can get very expensive. And this time, they are integrated with Microsoft, but not with Google. So that you can go in this way, depending on which you prefer.

E-commerce plans are more expensive, starting from $ 19.99 per month, which is paid annually (which means that you are looking at $ 239.88 / year low end).

Weebly

Weebly is easy to use a website builder with tons of great design. It has some beautifully designed page builders that allow you to edit your website without learning any coding skills. This website builder has maintained a long-standing reputation as one of the most popular website builders on the market.

Pros:

Since Weebly is a fully hosted platform you are not required to install and manage any software. They take care to host your website and manage all the software running in the backend.

Weebly also comes with built-in support for e-commerce. This can help you easily create online stores and start selling.

Each web site comes with features for contact forms, photo galleries, sliders and much more. This helps you easily add features to your website without any requirement of a complicated setup process.

It has numerous fully editable website designs which can be done through the Weebly’s live page editor.

Cons:

Due to Weebly being a fully hosted platform so you are only allowed to use the features they offer. You can not appoint a developer or designer on your own in order to add new functionality to your website.

Weebly charges a 3% transaction fee on each purchase made through your e-commerce store. In order to avoid these extra charges, you must upgrade to their business plan.

Weebly, unfortunately, came to the site for the last performance. In the past few months, I only saw an uptime of 99.64% – below 99.99% and 100% others.

Gator by Hostgator

Gator is new in market website builder and proves to be one of the most popular web hosting provider worldwide. It gives a perfect solution, being the all-in-one website building and hosting platform.

Pros:

It’s an intuitive website builder that lets you choose from 200+ professional website design templates. There is a special customization option with each design that you can configure from the builder itself.

It gives you access to the built-in stock photo library to let you find and add beautiful photos on your website.

You can simply drag and drop commonly used items like images, video, photo gallery, text, columns, maps and contact form and can edit any item on a page simply by pointing and clicking its interface.

All payment plans include a free custom domain name for your website. The eCommerce Plan comes with an online store setup and the ability to sell your products online.

Cons:

Gator doesn’t have a free plan, neither does it provide a free trial to their users.

Like other proprietary builders in the list, you can not appoint a developer to help you modify the design of your website or to add new features to your website.

Duda

With a structured and stylish template, it is easy to provide drag-and-drop functionality. Duda is perfect for any person who cares about the design but is not ready for total creative freedom on your site.

Pros:

There are more than 90 templates to choose from, which include many industries from business to lifestyle. You get creative control over optimization within the range of the template – you are very guided by your chosen design.

You will be able to optimize with adding additional features and even creating personalized apps and widgets.

It’s easy to use a website builder with its stylish templates and unique site personalization tools and we can say Duda is second to none for multilingual website.

Cons:

There is no app store for easier integration of third-party applications.

Prices are quite high compared to the competition.

There is no third party widget store and no email newsletter integration, thus no ability to port site to another host.

Shopify

Shopify is one of the perfect website builder specially designed for online stores and e-commerce websites. It gives rights to more than half a million businesses with 1 million active users. Shopify’s products worth over $ 40 billion have been sold on the platform of Shopify.

Pros:

There are around hundreds of apps that add specific features to your online store. These apps may be covering shipping, marketing, retention, SEO, customer support and many more things. This App Store permits Shopify to maintain a simple core, while still allowing you to add sophisticated features when you need it.

Shopify is an all-in-one fully hosted solution, that means you do not need to worry about setting up software, installing updates, or backing up. Shopify does all that for you.

It provides an integrated payment solution called Shopify Payments. You can also add a third-party payment gateway to accept payment.

Cons:

If you are just starting now, then the price of shopping may be slightly higher than some other website builders in this list.

It is quite difficult to move your website away from Shopify

Site123

The editor is not only available in more than 20 of them (including languages like Turkish, Arabic, Romanian), they also offer multilingual websites. The editor is relatively restrictive, like GoDaddy’s GoCentral. If you just want the website to work, it can be enough even without being creative. But you have to be aware that their template system may be a little bit on the restrictive side.

Pros:

Its great customer support is the main strength of this builder. Live chat feature means that if you get caught while making or editing your website, you can easily get help. If you’re starting a new one or want to set up your site quickly, then SITE123 is a safe option.

SITE123 makes it easy to create simple websites. Its live chat support and direct design mean that you can publish your website in real-time.

There is a range of hundreds of design templates to choose from. They are visually easy to navigate both.
Site123 is another website builder that provides strong uptime at 99.99%, which is slightly more than site build.

Cons:

With only two pricing plans – Free plan or premium plan of $ 10.80 per month – SITE123 is not the right option to increase your site or business. Despite its easy-to-use and comprehensive app market, SITE123 cannot compete with the facilities offered by other builders only.

What is more of the lack of quality in the tools in the proposal? SITE123 is good for creating an original site, but if you are looking for more than this, it will be very limited.

You can not change the template when your site is live, but all the templates are mobile and desktop responsive. You can edit your pages according to any format to ensure that your site looks at its best on all devices.

Strikingly

Striking is your focus on a page layout. This can be particularly interesting if you want to create a landing page, ask for the event registration. Their responsive designs are really striking (no punishments) and they look great on mobile devices. You can either start with their ad-sponsored free plan or upgrade to a limited ($ 8) or pro plan ($ 16 per month). Ltd. also includes a 5-product online store, while PRO extends this limit to 300 products.

Pros:

Strikingly’s relationship with Wix for the best price for money. Like Wix, there is a free plan in it that you can stay as long as you want. There are some great features in this plan, which makes it easy to stay in the long term.

It offers a series of blogging features, which include RSS feeds and a comment section. This makes it a great choice for WordPress, especially for beginners.

Strikingly is a very simple builder for which you do not need a code, moreover adding elements such as text is super easy.

Changing the template is very easy. Even once your website goes live, you can switch to your template and your content will be automatically reformed to keep your pages beautiful.

Cons:

Sometimes, this simplicity actually limits the level of your creative control on your site. Striking is designed to make it easy for everyone, which means that pushing your template’s range can be frustrating very quickly.

Since Strikingly is a single page web builder, it is not good for Google as Google might not favor it thus its ranking will get affected.

For adding an external code snippet you need to upgrade to Pro Plan, which is comparatively expensive (unless you actually include the full three websites).

1&1 IONOS

1 & 1 IONOS has everything necessary to create a functional, standard website. It will not look like a SquareSpace site or it will not get a reward for its designs, but it will be done. 1&1 IONOS comes with all the basic features that you need, especially when it comes to small corporate businesses. It belongs to web hosting giant 1&1 and the site builder features based on Duda system.

Pros:

1 & 1 IONOS is a multilingual facility, available on both business and pro plan. It’s great to widen your visitor base and create a modern website.

Each of its plans comes with a free domain name and your own branded email addresses. 24/7 support is available via phone, live chat or email.

It comes with hundreds of professionally designed templates to create a fully functional business website

All templates are mobile friendly outside the box and your website will look great on all devices.

Cons:

1 & 1 generally do not offer a free trial – you only have a money-back guarantee. They have a few sales and we found that support quality compared to other website builders is often poor.

You cannot install any third party installations as well as there are no integrations to add new features to your Website.

Website Builder and Online Store Builder are two different products. If you want to start an online store, you will need to sign up for their online store builder.

Jimdo Creator

Jimdo is a German website manufacturer with more than 20m websites in its name. Ease of use is also their credit. That’s why he introduced Jimo Dolphin, which is a new system that prompts a website that works with his main product JimDo Creator in just 3 minutes.

Pros:

You can optimize your website (SEO) very well for search engines. Even their free plan is relatively powerful, which provides features like password protection and a small e-commerce website with 5 products.

Like many other builders in this list, Zimdo is a very simple and intuitive site builder. With a few clicks of a button and some tap on your keyboard, you can quickly run a website.

The best part of Jemo’s pricing schemes is how cheap it is to remove ads from a free plan. You only need to upgrade to the most affordable Pro Plan for $ 7.50 per month. This is the lowest price to make your site ad-free.

Cons:

You may notice a lack of features while comparing it to other website builders like Wix and Weebly.

With only 17 themes and highly rigid site builder, Jimdo is probably the most limited tool in this entire list. Outside of changing colors, adding text and uploading images, Jimdo makes it difficult (even impossible) to create a unique and well-designed website.

Constant Contact

Well, Constant Contact is a well-known email service provider. But Constant Contact also offers one of the best small business website builder that is not just a reliable tool but also very easy to use for you.
Because Constant Contact’s website builder software comes with artificial intelligence features.

Therefore this software is very handy and quickly builds an elegant custom website. That is based on your Facebook Business Page. However, to do so all you have to do is just enter the business page URL your Facebook account. After that, the AI tool of this website builder will generate the content of your website for you in a moment.

Therefore you will be able to customize the website design and text from there, as per your preference. But if you do not have a Facebook business page? Then you will not have to worry about it at all. All you have to do is just enter your business industry or niche, and Constant Contact will recommend you the best images and content that will help you to get started.

Although you can also use the automatic drag and drop website builder of Constant Contact. Thereafter you can create your own custom web design. In addition, you can also write your own website content from scratch. Besides that, the Constant Contact website builder is the best software if you desire to build a simple and attractive business website within a few minutes.

Pros:

Basically, the Constant Contact website builder can make it very easy for anyone to create a professional-looking and mobile-friendly website in just a few minutes, even if you are not technically very sound. However, you are able to completely customize the look of your website with the help of drag and drop page builder, and no coding needed.

Although the website builder is also integrated with the Unsplash. So that you will get free access to thousands of images. In addition, you can upload your own selected images for an extra unique look. However, the Constant Contact website builder will also load quickly with the help of its super-fast content delivery network (CDN).

Besides that, this will help your SEO optimization and it can also boost your search engine rankings. Therefore it will generate higher traffic for your website. In addition, your site will also be more secure with the help of the free SSL certificate. Because that certificate will keep your customer’s data safe from hackers.

Certainly, the Constant Contact website builder is well known for its customer support. In addition, they are ready to help you 24/7 by email, live chat, or on the phone. However, the best thing is that you can get started with Constant Contact’s website builder software for free of cost.

Cons:

Well, the Constant Contact website builder software basically offers you a reasonable free plan. Even this plan provides you a 24/7 support and an online store. But if you need to access more advanced features such as the advanced analytics or custom domain name. Although you will need to upgrade to a paid plan which costs you $10 per month.

Since the website building tool of Constant Contact is newer than WordPress. Thus there are not any third-party extensions that you can install on your own website to add some new features. Therefore, if you need more advanced features. Also, if you may want to add them later on, then WordPress is the better choice for you.

Squarespace

Squarespace is one of the best and useful website builders software among others. Basically this website builder tool can backs up its great looking style with a large number of integrations and capabilities. In addition, this tool provides you support for Mailchimp, PayPal, and Apple Pay.

However, all of these websites built with this tool will get domain registration, and free SSL too. Although it says that, Squarespace has moved to the latest version of 7.1 which splits the user base. Therefore one must make a decision to rebuild sites in the new version to access fresh features or stick with the older version as well.

However, the famous website building service breaks a bit from its past with the help of the Squarespace 7.1 version. Although The update introduces new and streamlined options for styling your website and adding the content. However, the changes are numerous, But Squarespace 7.1 version has many new options with version 7.0.

So in the need of that, Squarespace produced a user guide to provide you insights at glance into the new features of Squarespace. So if you are new to Squarespace, then the version 7.1 builds will be available for you from the jump. However, people are using version 7.0. But, they must need to rebuild their websites in version 7.1 if they desire to get the new features.

Basically, that is very annoying, but the Squarespace website builder tool also offers a guide for you to understand this. Besides that, the Squarespace 7.1 version is still in a work in progress state. Therefore it can exist alongside Squarespace 7.0 version, at the moment. Although we will jump into some of the version variations in a bit.

Besides that, as with approximately every website builder tool, that you can start the actual design process just by picking a template first. Although Squarespace offers you a lot of attractive and useful options. Such as many featuring scrolling interfaces, and some offering full-photo backgrounds.

However, in a very nice impression, all the templates of Squarespace 7.1 can share the same capabilities. That is including the style options and other features. In fact, you must consider your chosen template design as a starting point. Because of that, you can customize everything now.

In conclusion, Squarespace has the capacity to switch the templates into version 7.1. However, still you can switch the templates in version 7.0, though. Also, if you are interested in customizing your website manually. Then the switching of template loss will not be a drawback.

Certainly, those people who just simply need to push one button to obtain a new and fresh website look. They will regret on version 7.1’s inability to switch between templates. Besides that, you can also choose a category, such as Travel, Music, Media, and so on. After that, you can select the goals for your website.

Such as showcasing art, announcing events, selling products, or blogging, etc. Besides that, the next step within this initial step-by-step startup is just deciding whether your website is for yourself, business, a client, a friend, or others. However, then you can enter a website description, and finally a title for the website.

Pros:

Basically, it is not free of cost, but the basic plan of it will allow you to set up a website of 20-pages. Certainly, it is the best way to get started for a small size business.

In addition, you can also use the Squarespace tool with a custom domain. That is available for you at free of cost for the first year. Although it is fully hosted, that means Squarespace keeps your website updated for you.

Also, if you need more strong features for your online store, then Squarespace provides you some more advanced functionality via its online store plans. It totally depends on the plan that you choose, so you will get access to its accounting, inventory management, abandoned cart recovery, checkout, and eCommerce reporting too.

Although the Squarespace will give you a variety of functionality at a very affordable price. So that small business owners can also get an SSL certificate, eCommerce features, and web analytics, within the basic package. Also, you can accept donations and sell unlimited products.

Certainly, the Squarespace website builder tool is very user-friendly. And even if you are a complete beginner here, then also you will have dozens of designs and templates to choose from.

Cons:

Well, if the eCommerce feature is important to your business, then you will need to choose one of the more expensive plans to get the desired features that you need.

Although some people find there is a training curve for building your website, Thus with Squarespace’s excellent support you will get help to solve any issues.

One more disadvantage for any small business owners is that this website builder tool is not free to use. Also, if you get your own domain name through Squarespace, then you will have to pay renewal costs after the very first year.

BigCommerce

Well, if you are a website developer or an individual person and want to build your own website or any other business site. In addition, to do so you are in search of an eCommerce website builder tool. Therefore the BigCommerce website builder tool for eCommerce is one of the great choices.

That is because this software is particularly created to help many small businesses to handle their online sales. However, the BigCommerce website builder platform is powered by Ben and Jerry’s, CamelBak, Skullcandy, and other famous online stores.

Pros:

BigCommerce is a great option to launch an online eCommerce store and then you can sell the services and products, without need to worry about the technical aspects of managing this tool. However, the essentials plan of this tool has everything that you need to run, build, and scale on an online store, without having the knowledge of any coding.

Besides that, you can easily customize your online store with BigCommerce apps. They allow you to unlock more excellent features to grow your online stores, like inventory solutions, and shipping, email marketing automation tools, built-in customer reviews, and much more.

Besides that, it is also very simple for complete beginners to create their first online store with their impressive website templates, so you can have a fully professional eCommerce online store up within minutes. They offer more than 80 designs for all various industries, and all of them are fully responsive and seem good on mobile devices.

BigCommerce provides you your choice of over 55 payment gateways, including Stripe, Amazon Pay, Square, PayPal, and many more. Since you are managing financial transactions, you have the added privilege of built-in security features to have your customer data safe.

BigCommerce has 99.99% uptime, which means you will not lose customers to glitches that bring your website down. They also have security from hackers and DDoS attacks, which are becoming more and more obvious even for smaller websites.

BigCommerce website builder integrates with Google Shopping so you can deliver new customers to your store through Google. You can also attach many other features with the help of apps from their app store.

they also offer educational video courses and 24/7 live support to help you to get started, via chat, phone, and email. They answer all calls in under 2 minutes, so you will not waste your time while waiting around on hold.

Cons:

The biggest disadvantage of BigCommerce for a few small businesses is that it is not free of cost. Thus you will need to upgrade to more expensive plans to get: Google customer reviews, Stored credit cards, Abandoned cart recovery features, Advanced product search, and filtering

MemberPress

Well, if you wish to build a membership website, That will help many visitors, so that they can register to access the exclusive content of your website, then you will have to go for the MemberPress website builder tool.

Basically, the MemberPress website builder tool is actually a WordPress plugin that can help you to create beautiful membership websites. In addition, you can accept payments for memberships, sell digital downloads, and control who sees all the content on your site.

Pros:

As you know that MemberPress works on WordPress, it originates with all the versatility and other benefits listed below. you can do the following with a MemberPress site:

  • You can set up a membership website within minutes
  • No coding knowledge require
  • Build a business with revenue of recurring subscription
  • Maintain your website members and provide them access to specific content that depends on the level of membership
  • Combine with other plugins to create your email list, build forums
  • Use any WordPress theme you require for a different custom design
  • MemberPress is well recognized for giving great-quality customer support and help you to maintain or build your membership website.

Cons:

There is one major drawback for owners of small business is that this website builder software is not free of cost. MemberPress provides a basic plan that will cost $149 per year. Also, due to its runs on WordPress, you are accountable for software updates and backups.

Conclusion

Based on the overall experience, different website turns out to be good at their own place depending upon the criteria they are being used for. We will recommend WordPress to most of the users out there because of its overall performance, flexibility, and ease of use.

It is being used by some of the world’s top brands. To know more about WordPress or if you’re interested to make your own website dial our WordPress support number to get immediate help, providing all the necessary details regarding WordPress.



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