WPEditor-Admin October 29, 2020How to Choose the Best Website Builder?
Website Builders are the best option to design your dreamy Website without even hiring a Website developer. A lot of options are available in the market regarding Website Builders. So WP Editor is here to help you decide which one is best for your requirements. In this article we will cover pros and cons of most popular options. It will help you to find the best option for you as a beginner.
Let’s have a look at detailed explanation of different website builders which can help you design your website without hiring a Website developer.
WordPress:
WordPress.org is a CMS known as the world’s most widely used website building platform. More than 38% of all websites on the internet are being powered by WordPress. WordPress provides two versions including WordPress.org and WordPress.com
WordPress.org is a free and self hosted version of WordPress and is popular owing to its amazing features, security and ease of use. It provides you maximum control over your website when compared to other online website builders.
Pros:
Using WordPress you get a free hand on every aspect of your website and online presence. Using WordPress you can let your creativity run freely and can design a website of your choice. For example, you can design an eCommerce store, community forums, a social network, a membership website, personal website, and more.
Thousands of high quality pre-made WordPress themes are openly available and you can use them to design your website. It also allows you to use different page builders like Beaver builder, Elementor Pro, and Divi which gives you full control of designing your website pages and customizing designs.
Using WordPress you get more than 57,000 free WordPress plugins at handpicked. They work as apps and add additional features to WordPress and enhance functionality of your website.
You can easily design a multilingual website using WordPress. Using WordPress you get access to different powerful SEO tools and can rank your website in search engines. The most interesting fact about WordPress is that it is by far the cheapest website builder in market. And that’s the reason it is a website builder preferred by business owners, bloggers, web developers, and web designers.
Cons:
As WordPress.org is a self hosted version, it means you have to familiarize yourself with a new system. You can find it slightly difficult in the beginning if you don’t know how to get started.
You will also have to regularly update WordPress, plugins and create backups also.
Pricing:
WordPress is a free website builder, but you will need to buy domain name and web hosting to get your website live. This process can cost you $14.99/year and $7.99 per month respectively. With this special pricing, WordPress holds its place as one of the cheapest website builder in this list for small business.
For more details, see our guide on how to make a website with step by step instructions.
2. Constant Contact Website Builder
Constant Contact website builder is widely used to build up custom websites within minutes. It is an intelligent A.I. powered website builder and is perfect solution for non-techy small business owners.
Pros
Constant Contact is famous for being the world’s best email marketing service. Owing to small business concerns, they have created a world class artificial intelligence powered website builder. Using this website builder you create a website in minutes (without writing any HTML code).
They provide 550,000 professional quality images that you can use freely to create stunning website. You can easily customize you website design using their drag-and-drop facility. Their templates are mobile friendly and make your website have great look both on desktop and mobile. They provide 24/7 customer support. Using Constant Contact you can design logo, lead capture forms, website analytics, eCommerce, and more. And with all such amazing features it’s a free website builder but to make your website live you need to upgrade to paid plan.
It is user-friendly, comes with good editing tools, and SEO features at a great price.
Cons
It is still in developing procedure which means you can’t use any third party tools. You have to rely only on the tools offered by Constant Contact.
Pricing:
Constant Contact allows you to create a website, blog, and even an online store of your own. You can add unlimited web pages free of cost. You just need to buy a domain name to get your website live. It costs $10 per month (or $8.50 per month if pre-paid annually).
They also provide 24/7 live chat and phone support.
3. Gator by HostGator
Gator is an online website builder offered by HostGator. This is an all in one solution for designing a website for small businesses.
Pros
Gator is a fully hosted platform and provides you 200+ professional website design templates. Using simple options you can customize any design of your choice.
You can use drag and drop for customization of items like images, videos, photo gallery, text, columns, maps, and contact forms.
It provides free domain name, and you can built an eCommerce website for you products.
Cons
Gator doesn’t offer a free plan, not even a free trial. And also you cannot hire a developer to assist you in modifying design of you website or add new features to enhance functionality of your website.
Pricing:
Gator offers paid plans ranging from $3.84 per month, $5.99 per month for premium, and $9.22 for eCommerce plan. It is a cheapest website builder and you can build a small business website, create online store with limited products or even design a photo gallery.
4. Domain.com Website Builder
Domain.com is an easy to use website builder. It lets you create a small business website, blog, and even an eCommerce website with just a few clicks.
Pros
Domain.com is simply drag and drop website builder. They provides hundreds of professionally designed templates. You can easily customize anyone of your choice using a simple drag and drop functionality. All templates are optimized for mobile, tablets, and desktop computers to make your website look great on all devices.
It provides website analytics, eCommerce functionality, ability to add a blog to any website, and a free SSL certificate with all plans.
Cons
Domain.com does not offer free website building option. They also do not offer a free trial but you get a money back guarantee if you don’t like their service. Migrating your website away from Domain.com website builder is a difficult task.
Pricing:
Domain.com Website Builder offers plans ranging from $1.99 per month for Starter, $6.99 per month for Business, and $12.99 per month for eCommerce plan.
All plans include a free SSL certificate, unlimited storage, blog features, and phone support.
5. BigCommerce
BigCommerce is considered the best eCommerce website builder in the market. You can create an online store with all the essential features built-in. It makes you website designing process a way easier.
Pros
BigCommerce is a fully hosted solution, with features like speed, security, or updates.
BigCommerce has a native integration with WordPress. This amazing feature allows you to leverage the flexibility of WordPress while taking advantage of BigCommerce.
It integrates with all popular payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay, Square, Amazon Pay, Visa Checkout, Chase Pay, Ayden, and more. Interesting thing is that you don’t have to pay to use these payment gateways.
Along with amazing features their dashboard lets you see the metrics to help you grow your business easily.
Cons
For small business owners the price may feel bit higher. Owing to its proprietary platform, migrating away from BigCommerce is a difficult task.
Pricing:
BigCommerce offers a 15-day free trial for all plans. Their basic plans at $29.95 per month includes all important features that you need. You can upgrade to the plus plan which costs $79.95 per month for additional features. Their pro plan costs $249.95 per month include advanced features.
These features make BigCommerce listed as high in our best website builder list.
6. Shopify
Shopify is also popular eCommerce website builder. It is designed specifically for online stores and ecommerce websites. With 1 million active users it powers more than half a million businesses. Over 40 Billion dollars’ worth of products have been sold on Shopify platform.
Pros
Shopify managing software, installing updates, or keeping backups.
It offers integrated payment solution and can also add third-party payment gateways to accept payments.
Shopify offers full inventory management, unlimited products, powerful stats, easy marketing solutions. You get hundreds of designs to choose from for your store.
They offer features like drop and down and in-store POS, which allows you to sell products at your location.
You can even integrate Shopify into WordPress, it will allow you to use both great solutions side by side.
Cons
For new starters Shopify’s pricing a bit higher. Migrating from Shopify to other website builder is also an issue
Pricing:
Shopify’s basic plan costs $29 per month, upgrade to $79 per month and Advanced to $299 per month. It also offers a Shopify Lite plan for $9 per month to add a buy button on any website.
7. WordPress.com
WordPress.com is an Automatic blogging and website hosting service.
However, WordPress.com is different from self-hosted WordPress.org. Please see our comparison of WordPress.com vs WordPress.org for more details.
Pros
WordPress.com is a website hosting service built on custom user experience. It provides security and backups at it’s on. Features can vary from their free to paid plans but they allow you to use hundreds of free and paid themes. You can use features like widgets, add navigation menus, and so on.
Although customizing is easy on WordPress.com to a certain extent but drag and drop feature is not available. WordPress.com is something special for bloggers.
Cons
Basic plan does not include installation of custom plugins or themes. For using advanced features you have to unlock their business plan.
WooCommerce feature is available only in business plan. You have to follow WordPress.com’s terms and conditions.
Pricing:
The free plan is very basic, personal plan starts with $4 per month and premium plan costs $8.25 per month billed annually. It gives you the ability to monetize your site. Business plan costs $24.92 per month with features like Ecommerce and custom plugins.
8. Weebly
Weebly is an easy website builder software. It provides lot of beautiful designs and functionality. It also have an amazing page builder which allows you to edit your website. You don’t need any coding skills to deal with it.
Pros
Weebly is a fully hosted platform, with built in features and provides beautiful design for your website. You can edit those designs according to your requirements easily.
Weebly provides built-in ecommerce support. You can easily create an online store for your products. Their features include contact forms, photo galleries, sliders, and more.
These amazing features make Weebly rank high as DIY website for beginners.
Cons
Weebly.com offers a fully hosted platform, which means limited options for customization. If you don’t upgrade to business plan, you will have to pay 3% transaction fee per sale.
Pricing:
Weebly offers a very basic free plan. Paid plans costs $8 per month. The pro plan costs $12 per month, while their business plan costs $25 per month.
9. Squarespace
Squarespace famous as professional website builder. It provides fabulous designs and is really easy to handle.
Pros
Squarespace provides enterprise-grade infrastructure for hosting your website. This system is secure and don’t let you worry about hosting.
Squarespace offers fully editable beautiful designs ready to be used for any type of content. The most amazing feature is that you can use multiple templates for same website at once.
Adding content on website is very simple task while drag and drop facility is also available. You can create your designs within minutes.
Squarespace offers an ecommerce plan to create online store. Its interface is nice. You can easily manage your products, inventory, orders, coupon discounts, and more.
Cons
Limited options are a hurdle in working according to you own choice. You can only use already integrated payment options.
Pricing:
Squarespace websites plan ranges from $12 per month to $18 per month. Their online stores can costs $26 or $40 per month according to functionalities.
It can be the best option if you want to quickly build a website.
10. Wix
Wix.com is an equally famous cloud based website builder software. You can create your website very quickly using it easy interface and features.
Pros
Wix website creator is a fully hosted platform. There are hundreds of templates that you can choose for your website’s design. These templates are fully editable and it gets even more easy with drag and drop method.
It offers you many free and paid apps that you can install on your website. You can enhance the features and functionality of your website.Wix offers a free plan which is limited. In order to get a domain name you have to upgrade your plan to premium.
Cons
Free Domain plan show Wix ads on your website. You’ll need to upgrade your plan to remove those ads.
Migrating your website will be quite complicated to do so. You’ll have to buy a domain name separately.
Pricing:
Wix offers a free plan which is a sub domain. You can connect a domain for $9.16 per month. Their combo plan can get you free domain and will cost $14.95/month. The ecommerce plan costs $26.25 per month.
11. DreamHost Website Builder
DreamHost website builder is a new website builder software. It is cheapest website builder in our list. It is available as part of all DreamHost hosting plans. It starts as low as $2.59 / month with a free domain.
Pros
DreamHost WP website builder is built on top of WordPress. It provides a lot of theme designs that you can customize according to your requirements. It also provide drag and drop facility.
You can easily change colors, fonts, layouts, navigation menus, and widgets with ease.
DreamHost’s BoldGrid builder allows you to create a staging website with a single click. You can test out your new designs, layouts, plugins, and themes before you make it live. Using WYSIWYG page editor allows you to see every change on your page editor window. Using GridBlocks, you can simply drag and drop elements to your page.
As it’s built on WordPress, it provides blogging functionality with powerful SEO and social media features, eCommerce features, and more.
Cons
Along with DreamHost you will still need a self-hosted WordPress.org website to use it.
WordPress is already installed on all plans.
Although DreamHost does not provide free plan, you get 97 day money back guarantee.
Pricing:
DreamHost WP website builder costs $2.59 per month for 1 website.
DreamHost is one of the most affordable website builder in the market.
12. GoDaddy Website Builder
GoDaddy is a large domain name and hosting service. You can get a simple online website builder with hosting included.
Pros
GoDaddy Website Builder provide facility of creating a professional looking website. It provides ready to use blocks and you can use them by drag and drop to build different layouts.
It has large built in library and you can use a lot of images freely. Besides using those image you can also upload your own images.
Its interface is friendly not only on desktop but also on tablet and mobile.
Cons
The main issue with this website builder is that it offer very limited feature. Designs list is also limited.
Migrating your website from GoDaddy is a difficult task.
Pricing
Personal plan costs $5.99/month, business plan for $9.99/month, and business plus plan for $14.99/month.
A basic website with a few pages is easy to build using GoDaddy. But for large websites WordPress is the best choice.
Our Pick for The Best Website Builder
After having a brief view of all famous Website Builders, we can conclude that WordPress.org is the best option for beginners as well as professionals. It provides flexibility, ease of use, and overall price. Creating a website using WordPress.org is the best option in our point of view.
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