Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks
Best Overall
Wix Website Builder
- Remarkably intuitive Editor X interface
- Numerous widgets
- Hundreds of templates for specific businesses and other uses
- Good mobile-site-building tools
- Rich web-store features
- Excellent uptime and customer service support
- Many commerce options, including the ability to sell digital downloads
- Cool, AI-powered site design tools
- Free option
- Third-party apps offer better analytics
- Doesn’t let you switch templates
Wix has nearly everything you could want from a website builder. An intuitive interface lets you create beautiful pages from hundreds of available templates. Widgets and mobile-specific tools add flexibility and functionality. Robust e-commerce tools let businesses sell memberships and digital downloads. And excellent uptime ensures that your site will be online.
In addition to all its powerful, business-friendly features, Wix also offers a free tier. You’ll give up some premium features and must tolerate on-site ads, but Wix is far and away the best option for anyone looking to build great sites without paying monthly fees.
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Best for Integrating SaaS Platforms
Duda Website Builder
- Features a top-tier editor
- Flex templates offer truly responsive designs
- Strong tools for crafting phone and tablet sites
- Powerful traffic analysis and AI SEO assistance
- Capable web store tools
- More than 100 templates
- Lets you use custom CSS and HTML code
- Strong e-commerce options, with support for digital downloads and memberships
- Unlimited storage and monthly data transfers with all plans
- Relatively expensive, and no free option
- Limited widget catalog
- Doesn’t let you easily switch templates
Duda is a relatively expensive website builder, but at least you get what you pay. In this case, that means a top-tier editor for building desktop and mobile sites, powerful analytics and ecommerce tools, and unlimited storage and monthly data transfers. You can even write your own custom CSS and HTML code to customize your site even further.
Duda is pivoting away from individual users and more toward enterprise organizations. You can see this not just in the price, but also in its features. Duda’s top tiers focus on increasing your team members, integrating software as a service, and detailing client management options. This makes the website builder attractive to web design agencies.
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Best for AI-Powered Tools
Hostinger Website Builder
- Easy drag-and-drop interface
- Cool AI-powered tools
- Excellent uptime
- Logo maker
- Free SSL certificate
- Useful photo repository
- Unlimited storage and bandwidth in all plans
- Comes included with Hostinger Web Hosting
- Doesn’t let you switch templates
- Photo editing could still use more options
- Lacks a free tier
Hostinger’s website builder has a growing list of new features and welcome improvements that help it stand out in the crowded space. For example, you can easily drag and drop elements to make attractive pages and functional e-commerce shops. We also appreciate the included extra touches, such as its logo maker, free SSL certificate, and photo repository for uploaded images. Just note that there is no free tier.
Arguably Hostinger’s most intriguing feature is its suite of AI-powered tools. You can tell the builder what your site is generally about by selecting entertainment, small business, or another category. Then, Hostinger generates site designs, writes website copy, and predicts how users will navigate your site based on heatmaps. Hostinger is great for anyone who wants an easy website builder that provides significant help and guidance.
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Best for Easy WordPress Site Creation
Bluehost Website Builder
- Eases you into learning the WordPress CMS
- Large library of templates and stock photography
- WooCommerce storefronts
- Excellent uptime
- WonderSuite AI tools
- Free SSL
- Helpful customer service
- Lacks a free option
- Limited image editing
- Doesn’t let you switch templates
- Sections could be better organized
The best website builders streamline the site-creation process so that anyone can do it. Bluehost achieves this with its highly accessible, alternative interface to the already popular WordPress platform. Using it, you can leverage WordPress’ power and strong e-commerce options without learning the full CMS. And if you do want to learn more, Bluehost helps you make the leap.
Bluehost’s WordPress focus means it’s more suited for users eager to join that ecosystem, rather than go with something more standalone. Given how proven and capable WordPress is on the web, that’s not a bad choice at all. Bluehost is also already a quality, traditional web hosting service, so these site-building tools just sweeten the deal for existing users.
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Best for Marketing and SEO Tools
GoDaddy Websites + Marketing Website Builder
- Good-looking sites on desktop and mobile
- Unlimited storage and monthly data transfers
- Great marketing and SEO tools
- More than 100 templates
- Excellent uptime and customer service
- AI tools
- Free tier
- Limited layout customization
- Ecommerce not available with all tiers
GoDaddy’s website builder helps you create a great website to pair with a GoDaddy domain. With GoDaddy Websites + Marketing, you get unlimited monthly data transfers and unlimited storage at every tier, including the free one. Select premium plans let you tap e-commerce features for creating an online store.
This tool puts marketing right in the title. GoDaddy’s builder not only helps you create sites, but gives you the features needed to get that site in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Thanks to powerful marketing and SEO functionality, this is an excellent builder for people who want to promote their sites, businesses, or general online presences with mathematical efficiency.
Best for Website Customization
Squarespace Website Builder
- Beautiful, responsive designs
- Fluid Engine makes designing a site more intuitive
- Deep e-commerce capabilities, including digital downloads
- Lets you use custom code
- Blogging tool lets you schedule posts
- Good help and analytics tools
- Free SSL certificate
- Unlimited storage and monthly data transfers with all plans
- Can’t switch templates
- No free tier
- Lacks phone-based customer support
Squarespace is another well-known website builder, and for good reason. It lets you build truly eye-catching websites with its wide array of templates, as well as responsive design for mobile screens. Squarespace sites are more than just pretty, though. Custom code, blogging tools, and deep e-commerce capabilities gives sites all the powerful functionality serious users need.
Squarespace has so many good-looking templates that we created an entire separate article highlighting the best ones. Some templates cater to nerds and photographers, while others focus on restaurants and other specific small businesses. Of course, templates are just the starting point. Squarespace is an ideal choice for those who want to customize sites to fit their unique needs.
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Best for Free Personal Websites
Dorik Website Builder
- Capable free version
- Intuitive interface with no coding required
- Suitable for individuals and organizations
- Easy to import and export code
- Excellent uptime
- AI tools
- Few e-commerce features
- Limited bespoke elements
- Basic image editing
Dorik’s free tier is a stable and capable website builder that anyone can use. Forget coding, you simply add and customize the templates and interactive UI elements until you like what you see. The service’s premium tiers unlock valuable perks for individuals and organizations, including custom domains to paid subscription membership features.
Dorik’s lackluster e-commerce features make it a poor fit for businesses selling online products. However, if all you want to do is make a great personal website without spending money or learning any complex coding, Dorik is a good option.
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Best for Website Building With Hosting Options
Web.com Website Builder
- Intuitive interface
- Useful e-commerce and WordPress tools
- Large library of templates and stock photography
- Hosting included
- Excellent uptime in testing
- Terrific customer service support
- No free option
- Basic image editing
- Lacks cloud, dedicated, or VPS hosting plans
- Doesn’t let you switch templates
- Tiny refund window
Web.com includes e-commerce and WordPress tools, along with a large library of templates and stock photography. It has extensive AI tools, too. In addition, you can enjoy traditional hosting functionality. The site builder plan includes a free domain and hosting and gives you the option to buy additional shared hosting tiers.
If you don’t want to deal with two separate services when building and hosting your site, Web.com does a decent job of giving you both at once.
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Best for Easy CMS Management
Webflow Website Builder
- Impressive CMS
- Third-party app store
- Useful AI tools
- Strong community assistance
- 24/7 live chat
- Free tier
- Many templates cost extra money
- Tight bandwidth and storage limits
- Separate e-commerce tier
- Lacks phone customer support
Webflow is a well-designed website builder with intuitive, modern tools that let novices create capable sites. Its more advanced features push sites even further. For example, its AI helpers assist in the site-building process, the CMS tool efficiently manages content, and third-party apps expand functionality.
Webflow is for anyone who wants many options for how much or how little they want to pay for their site. Webflow has an entirely free tier. If you’re willing to spend more cash, you can unlock everything from e-commerce features to increased bandwidth to premium templates. Webflow’s upcharges can feel annoying, but having choices is nice.
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Best for Easy Page Editing
Weebly Website Builder
- Attractive, responsive-design themes
- Full commerce options, including the ability to sell digital goods
- Site stats included
- Lets you switch themes without rebuilding your site
- Unlimited data transfers with all plans
- Excellent uptime
- Free tier
- Limited theme customization
- Lacks reusable photo storage
- No interface-wide undo feature
- Slow-responding customer services in testing
Some users are more than happy giving up certain advanced features if it means having an easier overall experience. Weebly doesn’t have the most customization options, but you can still make quality sites with its many attractive themes. The website builder lets you monitor stats to see how your site performs, and sell physical and digital goods.
Weebly appeals to people who value convenience. You don’t need to tinker with themes to create a good-looking website. It’s one of the few builders that let you switch themes without rebuilding the site, which is a big plus. And it offers unlimited monthly data transfers across the board.
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Best for Previewing Sample Sites
Strikingly Website Builder
- Easy-to-use site-building tools
- Attractive themes, with responsive designs
- Lets you switch templates without rebuilding your site
- Excellent uptime
- Free tier
- Less customization than competing website builders
- Many standard features require a premium account
- Free and cheap tiers limited to five pages per site
Strikingly doesn’t offer many templates, and it lacks robust site customization, but what’s there is responsive and attractive. If you choose Strikingly, though, at least you’ll rest easy knowing that your site is online, thanks to the service’s excellent uptime.
Despite its limitations, Strikingly has a surprising amount of flexibility. With its easy-to-use tools and ability to switch templates while designing, you can preview your site and quickly make changes without committing to a lot of extra work. With its free tier, you don’t even have to commit to paying before seeing if the website builder is right for you.
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Best for Selling Digital Products
Simvoly Website Builder
- Friendly drag-and-drop interface
- E-commerce functionality, with digital download sales
- Lets you easily switch themes
- Includes site stats
- Excellent uptime
- Lacks photo-editing tools
- No widget marketplace
- Lacks shipping service integrations
- No free tier
Social media serves as a way to express yourself online, which has undercut the appeal of blogging. These days, people who need a full-blown website are folks who wish to sell something. Fortunately, Simvoly’s easy interface lets anyone put together a responsive e-commerce store for digital or physical goods. Just note that it lacks shipping integration.
If your website is your business, you’ll need to pay attention to the numbers. Simvoly’s site statistics make it useful for users who want to know the best ways to target potential customers. If you need to alter your marketing strategy, you can easily switch your site’s theme to try a new approach.
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Best for Free E-Commerce
Ucraft Website Builder
- Strong mobile site customization
- Modern site templates
- Image repository
- Collaborative site editing
- Good web store options
- Placing page objects can be awkward
- Limited free version
Ucraft is a serviceable website builder made much more competitive thanks to recent Ucraft Next improvements. While it doesn’t sport the most intuitive interface, it does let you and your collaborators design attractive custom sites for desktop and mobile.
Ucraft’s free tier makes it a good pick for anyone looking to try building a website or even an online store without fully committing. If you like what you see, you can subscribe to a premium tier to remove all limitations and really go for it.
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Buying Guide: The Best Website Builders for 2024
5 Things You Need to Know About Web Hosting
What Is a Website Builder?
A website builder is simply any service that lets you create your own website. Why do you need a website in the social media age? On a personal level, you wouldn’t want to send prospective employers to your Facebook page, so a website makes more sense as an online, customized resume. On a business level, you can quickly spin up a site so you can focus on sales. Another reason worth considering, for both personal and business purposes, is that building your own site gives you endless design choices. You have total control over the products and services you sell (and how they’re delivered, too).
Further, having a real, dedicated site makes a business seem more authoritative and trustworthy than a Facebook or Tumblr presence can on its own (though you should certainly also consider those services as elements of your online presence). It’s as much an opening ante in the business world as having a business card for your company.
How Does a Website Builder Work?
Building your own website used to require a lot of tech wizardry, including knowledge of servers, HTML, FTP, site registrars, and web hosting services. Thankfully, website builders make the process super simple. The services included here let you make a well-designed, mobile-friendly site with minimal technical knowledge. They can take a small or sole proprietor business to profitability via buy links, online stores, and other money-making options.
Larger businesses spend thousands of dollars on custom-designed and programmed sites. While still a strong choice for basic users, Duda is pivoting toward teams and agencies needing custom, expensive enterprise software as a service. However, there’s no need for smaller organizations and individuals to go to that kind of expense. For about $10 per month (or around $25 if you’re selling products) and a few hours of your time, the DIY services included here can help you create a unique, eye-catching website.
With all these services, you build everything yourself, starting with a template you choose from a (hopefully) wide, well-categorized selection. Most use simple drag-and-drop interfaces that let you include social share buttons, photo galleries, blogs, media players, and other items. Some website builders let you restrict viewing by implementing a password and offering site memberships.
What Are the Best Free Website Builders?
Several of the website builders included here offer free options, too. If you choose that path, your site will include branding from the provider, which makes your site less impressive to savvy surfers and shoppers. Free offerings vary greatly in the storage, bandwidth, and site options they allow, so read the small print to find out how much you get with each web host. Strikingly, Weebly, and Wix are among the most generous with their free offerings. For more, check out the best free website builders.
How to Register Your Domain
Before you start building your home on the web, you need an address for it. Most of the site builders let you register a unique domain, or give you a web address using the provider’s URL (yourname.sitebuilder.com, for example). Some include a custom domain name with their plans, usually requiring a year’s commitment. The services also let you use a URL you’ve acquired from a third-party registrar, such as pairNIC, but you often must pay the site builder for that privilege.
Key Features to Consider in a Website Builder
All the web services listed here require you to start by choosing from a selection of templates for your site. The better ones use templates that automatically reformat your site for viewing on mobile devices. Squarespace, in particular, has many useful and attractive templates. These services also offer specifically targeted templates based on your site’s purpose, such as for promoting a bakery’s sales, getting gigs for a musician, or keeping wedding guests informed.
Most site builders let you tweak the color scheme, fonts, and page layouts, as well as add new pages. A good site builder offers sub-templates for the most commonly used page types, such as About, Blog, Contact, FAQ, Galleries, and Products.
Of course, you’ll also want to add custom content to those pages. You do this by adding text areas, photos (see Photos and Galleries section below), buttons, and other widgets. The better site builders offer a marketplace of third-party widgets for things like forms, chat, reservations, and social feeds.
Some site builders restrict you to placing page objects in spots that won’t make your site look garish, which can be an advantage if design isn’t your forte. Other builders offer more freedom; if that’s what you’re looking for, check out Wix. Squarespace enables pockets of freedom in an otherwise ordered grid.
Many website builders offer AI-powered tools. They let you enter social accounts and other personal or business info and automatically deliver a no-work website. Wix’s ADI (artificial design intelligence) tool even impressed a professional designer acquaintance with its results. These tools are only growing more capable as they implement generative text functionality similar to ChatGPT.
Site builders, including Dorik, GoDaddy, Hostinger, Squarespace, and Wix, have AI tools that let you enter a prompt to create themed designs, blocks of descriptive text, effective marketing strategies, or even the entire site. You can (and should) tweak the elements from there, but AI can save you time and money.
How Important Is Mobile Site Design?
Responsive design is a popular web design strategy used by some website builders. This approach reformats the web page content to fit different screens. But in terms of search engine optimization (SEO), the search engines only care about whether a site suitably displays on mobile screens. Bing and Google have pages where you can enter your URL to see if your site functions well on mobile.
Simvoly, uKit, and Weeby’s strict response approach means you have no control over the mobile view. Ucraft and Wix, by contrast, offer a mobile site preview and let you make customizations that only apply to mobile viewing. For example, you may want a splash page to welcome mobile viewers or leave out an element that doesn’t work well on smaller screens.
The Best Website Builders for Photography
The highlighted website builders offer some degree of photo and gallery display. Some, like Squarespace and Wix, include stock photography. Others let you touch up images with editing tools such as cropping, brightness, and Instagram-like filters.
Photo gallery options widely vary. For example, Weebly offers a good selection of styles for your online galleries, while GoDaddy has more limited visual options.
The Best E-Commerce Website Builder for Businesses
Of course, if you want to go all out for sales, you need to move up to a dedicated web shopping cart service like Shopify, but that’s a step you might not be ready to take. Many services highlighted here offer the ability to sell items from your site, if only in the form of a PayPal button (for some platforms, the option is limited to premium accounts).
More advanced options found in some builders let you process credit card payments and add your cart and checkout pages. They include product promotions, email marketing, and inventory and shipping tools. Some let you sell digital downloads, while others don’t; see the table to find out which do. Only a few website builders let you put ads on your site, though most of them allow some degree of custom HTML code insertion.
Recommended by Our Editors
Which Website Builder Has the Best Social and Site Stats?
The site builders included here let you put Facebook Like and Twitter/X Follow buttons on your pages, and some even let you display feeds from social networks. Many products offer SEO tools, but too often, this is just a form for entering meta tags. You’re mostly left to wrestle with that black magic known as SEO for yourself. It’s important to submit and verify your site to the search engines unless you don’t want anyone to find it!
Most of the products here can tell you about your site traffic, though the amount of detail varies greatly among them, and it’s often tied to premium account levels. For example, Weebly displays page views and unique visitors for each day of the month, as well as search terms used to get to the site, referring sites, and top-visited pages. Wix and uKit, on the other hand, have little or even nothing in the way of built-in site stats, instead encouraging you to create your own Google Analytics account (and that requires a paid website builder account). Another drawback of that approach is that you can only see traffic from the preceding day and earlier; it’s not up-to-the-minute or even the hour.
What Is WordPress Hosting?
WordPress is a big name when it comes to creating websites. But you should know that WordPress.com is not what most people are talking about when they mention WordPress. What most internet-savvy people mean by the term WordPress is the free, open-source blogging platform that comes from WordPress.org. Using this requires you to find your website hosting service. WordPress.org software is such a popular site-building platform that many web hosting services even offer managed WordPress hosting plans. WordPress.com, on the other hand, is a service that deploys and hosts that software for you, so you don’t have to find a hosting service.
WordPress (either version) is a blog-focused content management system that accepts plug-ins and themes that extend its capabilities. In fact, WordPress.com uses plug-ins such as JetPack to provide many of its features. As a whole, WordPress (either .com or .org) is not as easy to use as the other options in this roundup. If blogging and site transferability are important, and you don’t mind digging into its weeds a bit, you should consider the platform—especially WordPress.org. Furthermore, WordPress familiarity is valuable, as some estimates say that WordPress powers 40% of the internet.
Note that we reviewed WordPress.com as a website builder, but its three-star rating doesn’t quite qualify it for inclusion in this roundup. Instead, consider a WordPress-centric site builder like Bluehost.
How to Move to Another Website Builder
These services have a major downside. You’ll likely be out of luck if you want to move to another web host due to the website builders’ custom code. Only a few services let you take your site to another web hosting service. The most complete example of this is Weebly, which lets you download the standard site server folders. Squarespace offers some transferability by letting you output your site in standard WordPress format. As you might expect, the same transferability holds for WordPress.com.
The Best Website Builder Support Options
Website builders offer varying customer support options. Wix has a telephone callback service, for instance—even for free accounts! Many site builders have rich online support knowledge bases and FAQs, so there’s a good chance you won’t need to contact the company. We test each service’s support as part of the review process by asking about some less common site-building procedures.
The Best Website Builders for Small Businesses
The best website builders help individuals and businesses create and maintain a web presence. Small business owners already have plenty to deal with, so trusting these builders to make a great website is a huge relief. You should look for robust e-commerce options, like Wix’s, to sell products. Generative AI tools, such as Hostinger’s, may help save valuable time for other important tasks. And the marketing and SEO tools in GoDaddy Website Builder can help spread the word about your brand.
