If your business is not on the internet these days, consider it simply nonexistent for the vast majority of your potential customers. Your brand needs an online presence. After all, most people look for products and services namely on the web. This is the simplest and quickest way to get information. So, if you don’t get in front of your audience in the right moment, consider you’ve lost your chance to acquire a new customer.
Today, most businesses use website builders to establish their online presence. They are cheaper than hiring a team of web designers, and they allow you to get your business online in hours. Thanks to these online tools, coding is simply not necessary. You can design your own branded website with a unique appearance by using customizable templates and a drag and drop editor. But which website builders are the best for small businesses and startups?
Below is our brief overview of the most effective solutions available on the market today!
Wix
Wix is one of the most popular tools for website creation. It is best suited for simple solutions, such as small business sites, online stores, and landing pages. Wix offers more than 500 templates created on HTML5 and optimized for mobile devices.
You can simply select your preferred layout, change colors, insert content – and get a ready-made website. But if you want, you can also build a more complex site with multiple tabs, columns, animations, forms, and more.
Wix uses a drag and drop editor, which makes it easy to create a website even for a beginner. However, inexperienced users may as well be overwhelmed with the variety of editing options. It does take time to master the entire variety of Wix’s tools.
On the downside, Wix is known for its SEO issues. Due to specific technical reasons, Wix websites may experience problems with content indexing. This might affect your online visibility. Plus, the overall loading speed of Wix websites is quite low, which may also undermine your Google rankings.
Wix offers a free plan with limited features and ads enabled. Paid plans range from $8.50 to $24.50.
Weebly
Weebly is a well-known web builder with which you can create different types of online presence, including small business sites, online stores, blogs, and landing pages.
The key advantage of the Weebly platform is an extensive set of built-in widgets that allow you to easily compile a functional site using a visual editor.
Although the website builder cannot boast such a large collection of ready-made templates like Wix, those that are available feature a modern and stylish design. Each can be customized in a variety of ways. The customization options range from changing images to editing CSS styles. All Weebly templates have a responsive design, but, unfortunately, you cannot edit the mobile version separately from the desktop.
In the page editing mode, you can make use of a convenient drag and drop interface, which greatly simplifies the process of adding new elements to the page and changing the position of existing ones. There’s also a built-in app store, which offers a variety of useful plug-ins.
Weebly has a free version that offers basic feature set, 500 MB of storage, and a free SSL certificate for your domain, which enhances security. Paid plans start at $12 per month and allow you to create online stores and integrate eCommerce tools.
However, Weebly’s functionality is considered slightly inferior in comparison to the competitors. Also, Weebly is criticized for its inconvenient content management system and lack of advanced SEO tools.
Shopify
Shopify can be safely called the best website builder for online stores. It is well suited for both small shopping sites and large-scale eCommerce projects.
Shopify allows you to integrate a large list of sales channels including Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest, and many others. It also provides a broad variety of payment and delivery options, enabling you to sell your products worldwide.
Shopify can also be commended on its functional and at the same time convenient drag and drop editor that allows you to create a comprehensive online store from scratch without any technical knowledge or skills. You can also add a number of paid or free widgets from the inbuilt application store, as well as choose between a few dozens of customizable templates. Furthermore, Shopify has tons of effective tools for advertising and SEO, including detailed analytics.
However, Shopify comes at a price. The costs of creating a website, as well as acquiring additional modules or templates, can get quite daunting. Besides, the service will charge a commission from all of your transactions unless they are made through their native payment system.
The Basic Shopify package costs $29 per month. But if you’re going to open a large online store, be ready that your spendings will skyrocket up to the whopping $299 per month!
Volusion
As an alternative to Shopify, you may consider another website builder with powerful eCommerce features. It’s called Volusion.
Its entire toolkit is tailored for eCommerce, so those who are going to use the platform to develop their own online store will find everything they need: reliable data protection, a powerful toolkit for analytics and SEO promotion, a wide selection of add-ons for an online store, convenient drag and drop editor, and a mobile application for viewing and managing website content. Besides, Volusion offers a set of elegant ready-made themes with a mobile responsive design, high-quality technical support, and a 14-day trial period.
But, like most eCommerce-oriented web builders, Volusion is not cheap. Apparently, this can turn off some small businesses and start-ups. Basic monthly subscription plan costs $29, allowing you to sell up to 100 products. However, this plan sets a maximum turnover cap at 50 thousand dollars a year. For $79, you can sell up to 5,000 products and achieve the turnover of 100 thousand dollars. The ultimate plan costs as much as $299, but it lets you sell an unlimited number of items and raises the turnover cap to 500 thousand dollars. There’s also a custom plan, but you’ll need to negotiate personalized conditions with Volusion representatives by phone.
Tilda
Tilda is yet another versatile website builder with extensive functionality, allowing you to create a business site, online store, blog, landing page, or promotional page.
Thanks to Tilda’s convenient editor, you can quickly and easily build a website using so-called “blocks”, which are essentially modules and extensions you can add to your pages (there are more than 450 of them available altogether).
Tilda provides ample opportunities to add animations and videos to pages, and its built-in visual editor enables you to create an original design from scratch. Alternatively, you can choose one of 180 ready-made templates sorted across multiple business categories. Furthermore, Tilda allows you to conveniently create and edit catalogs and product cards. There is also a set of tools for SEO promotion.
The essential drawback of the website builder is its limited ability to create multi-page sites. Thus, most design templates offered by Tilda are suitable for “one-pagers” only. Besides, you are only given 1GB of storage, regardless of your plan, which makes creating complex business websites almost impossible.
Tilda offers a free plan with a limited set of blocks available. The basic paid plan will cost you $10 per month. It will give you access to the entire collection of blocks and will allow you to connect a custom domain name. If you want to create more websites on Tilda (up to five), choose a more advanced plan, which costs $20/month.
GoDaddy
Being essentially a hosting provider, GoDaddy also offers a decent website builder for businesses with the ability to connect a custom domain and email. It is suitable for creating simple online stores as well.
GoDaddy offers a wide selection of ready-made templates (about 120 pieces). For each of them, several color schemes are available. All you need to do to create a website is to add your original content, company name, and contact information. However, it is easy to notice that some of GoDaddy’s templates are a bit dated.
Users can customize a lot of design elements to their needs and preferences (although not all). GoDaddy’s multimedia library is quite solid too: there are built-in photo albums, videos, audios, and animations.
Unlike many other site builders, GoDaddy does not have a free plan, only a free trial. With the basic package, you can build a mobile friendly website with an SSL security and custom domain. By subscribing for the most expensive plan, you get access to higher-quality templates, advanced eCommerce features, SEO tools, more disk storage, and other bells and whistles. Thus, maintaining, upgrading, and promoting a business website with GoDaddy can get quite expensive if you’re serious about growing your business.
Weblium
Weblium is yet another drag and drop site builder that offers decent functionality for businesses in need of an online presence. Its editor is really easy to master, and the variety of templates will not leave you disappointed. The quality of themes is commendable, too. They look really modern and sleek. By the way, the Weblium homepage is powered by their own platform, and it looks pretty amazing – you can check it out yourself.
Another distinctive feature that sets Weblium apart from the competition is its AI assistant. It ensures that your website design is at its best when you’re working in the editor. It automatically adjusts content blocks and design elements so that you don’t get any glitches or incompatibility issues.
However, Weblium has its downsides as well, just like any other site builders out there. For example, it has a very basic blog feature, so if you’re planning to rely on blogging to promote your site or to increase your brand awareness, Weblium is not the best choice.
The library of widgets provided by Weblium covers all the essentials, but don’t expect to find any special or particularly advanced tools for specific businesses or niches. Luckily, the platform supports code editing, so it is possible to add the lacking features through HTML.
Also, the platform doesn’t offer any eCommerce functionality, which means that you can’t open an online store with its help.
Weblium has a solid free plan. But if you need a custom domain, the code embed feature, and SEO tools, then paid plans start at $8.25 per month.
Website.com
Website.com is a nice and simple website builder that delivers pretty much all you need for a small business website in one package: a free lifetime domain name, free hosting, eCommerce functionality, and a range of useful marketing tools.
The library of templates is large enough to offer something for everybody. There are around 60 templates you can choose from, and their quality is really good. The editing process shouldn’t cause any trouble even for absolute beginners thanks to a clean and user-friendly drag and drop interface, which allows you to build a good-looking site really quickly.
Another competitive advantage of Website.com is the possibility to create multilingual sites. This will empower your business to effectively reach out to a global audience and positively influence your SEO, if done right.
Unfortunately, sites built on Website.com are known to be quite slow, which is bad for your UX and online visibility. This issue is related to the platform’s shared hosting.
Very limited customization is another concern you should take into account. Despite the variety of excellent templates, their editing options come down to simply changing images, backgrounds, fonts, and color schemes. The image editing tool is very basic, too. In addition, you cannot switch templates without losing your content. So, if you decide to update your design at some point, you will have to insert the content all over again.
The free version of the website builder is available, as well as three paid plans ranging from $9 to $26.
Jimdo
Jimdo positions itself as a website builder for small businesses that is particularly easy to use. Indeed, you can make a visually appealing site with Jimdo in almost no time. It has recently updated its entire host of templates, so the designs look fresh and totally relevant. The editor is convenient, but you should be aware that it saves all the changes directly online. In other words, you cannot preview the site before publishing it.
For absolute beginners, Jimdo offers the Dolphin editor, which allows you to quickly build a website with the help of an AI assistant. A style editing tool is another great addition that saves time, enabling you to apply design changes to the entire site. For advanced users, there’s a possibility to access HTML and CSS code.
Jimdo boasts a comprehensive eCommerce feature, so you can deploy a full-fledged online store right on your site. To promote it on the web, a set of SEO tools will come in handy, allowing you to edit meta titles, descriptions, ALT tags, and URLs, as well as set 301 redirects.
However, if you are looking for a site builder with flexible customization, perhaps Jimdo is not the solution you seek. Its layouts are somewhat rigid, so there are not as many options to personalize your design.
To the list of shortcomings, we could add a very limited blog feature. It is not so easy to set up, and it only has basic functionality. Also, Jimdo doesn’t provide a newsletter tool, which might be a problem if your business relies on email marketing. Besides, Jimdo is not really suited for large scale projects. It only supports up to two sub-navigation levels. Also, Jimdo eCommerce only accepts payments through PayPal and manual transfers.
Jimdo offers a free plan, but it comes with ads and restricts your site from showing up on search engines. Paid plans start at $10. For $20, you get access to the eCommerce functionality.
Boxmode
If you haven’t ever heard about Boxmode, it’s because it hasn’t been around before. The website builder is currently in development, but judging from its smooth and intuitive drag and drop editor, which is now available as a test version, it’s going to become one of the best website builders for business on the market.
Although Boxmode is still a work-in-progress, it already allows you to create a simple business website in a blink of an eye completely free of charge. All you need to do is put together a few widgets (depending on your needs) and insert your content.
There are 30 ready-to-use templates available off the bat, but more are about to arrive as the platform evolves. Boxmode developers claim there will be an unmatched library of templates, integration with TemplateMonster, and the possibility to import third-party templates (which sounds particularly awesome). The same goes for widgets. Their variety will expand greatly with new updates.
Currently, you may consider using Boxmode to create a website and promote your business online thanks to its solid set of advanced SEO tools. Soon, when the eCommerce functionality is added, users will be able to sell products or content directly on their sites.
For advanced users, Boxmode is going to offer pro editing tools and the ability to work directly with HTML and CSS code, which will ensure almost unlimited customization capabilities.
Which website builder for business will you choose?
So there you go – our brief review of the best website builders for business. Needless to say, there’s no ideal option. Each platform comes with its set of pros and cons. Thankfully, most site builders these days offer either a free plan (albeit with limited features) or a free trial period. Once you set your priorities and decide which solution is the best for your individual needs, go on and test it yourself. The hands-on experience will show you whether the product is worth investing in at the end of the day.
