The best website builders of 2021
You’ve just decided that you want to build a website. Perhaps you run a brick-and-mortar business and are looking to take it online. Or maybe you are a professional who wants to showcase their work to prospective employers. Should you consider using a website builder?
The answer to the question would be based on your technical knowledge, time constraints, and support requirements. Website builders enable you to create web pages, blogs, and online stores without writing a single line of code. Using an efficient drag-and-drop system, you can design an entire website through a visual interface, sometimes in minutes. If that piques your interest, read on.
In this article, we explore the best website builders in the market as of 2021, discussing their specific features, pros, and cons. We’ll also give you an overview of each website builder to help you decide if it’s the right one for you.
The top 3 website builders right now
1. Wix: the best all-round choice
This is our choice for the website builder provider who can cater for all use-cases. Wix has brilliant flexibility and hundreds of templates to choose from and its drag and drop interface can be used by just about anyone with an inkling of computer literacy. Pricing is fair too.
View Deal
2. Squarespace: the one for creative businesses
Any business can use Squarespace, of course, but we found that it’s particularly suitable for creative businesses, with a choice of more than 500 professionally-designed templates and lots of customisation options. The library also includes designs for eCommerce, portfolios, blogs, and company websites.
View Deal
3. Weebly: simplicity and excellent eCommerce support
If you just want a simple eCommerce website, then Weebly is the website builder for you. Its built-in tools, such as inventory management and product variants, make it quick to develop an eCommerce shop from scratch. It also offers a handful of extensions to help you deal with shipping, and email marketing.
View Deal
What are the best website builders?
Website builders come in different shapes and sizes. Some require more operational know-how, while others boast unique features that can give your website a competitive edge. They may be more geared towards e-commerce or online blogs, or work well across multiple industries. When choosing the best website builder for you, you have to keep in mind various factors, such as purpose, ease of use, scalability, and after-sales support.
In our opinion, Wix is the best all-round website builder in 2021. It’s got the largest collection of pre-designed templates, a built-in image editor, drag-and-drop customization, the ability to connect with external apps, functional artificial intelligence technology for simple website creation, and more. Its prices are quite reasonable within the website building space, and it even offers free domain registration and advertising credit to premium customers.
Following closely on Wix’s heels are Weebly and Squarespace. Weebly appears unassuming and basic, but there are a lot of interesting features and advanced options for those that wish to delve deeper. It also offers e-commerce support in all its plans, a crucial feature that is missing from Wix. Squarespace, on the other hand, is a highly intuitive website builder that features great design and responsive templates. It costs more than both Wix and Weebly, but the output makes it worth the price.
These are only some website builders among many, with various web hosting services also throwing their hats in the ring. Hostgator, GoDaddy, and 1&1 IONOS all offer website building features with their hosting plans. Zoho, an online productivity suite for businesses, also includes its own website builder as a part of its applications package. Read on to know more about each of these products and their unique advantages and disadvantages.
The best website builders you can buy today
Wix is a drag-and-drop website builder with 180 million customers across 190 countries in the world as of 2021. It’s one of the largest website builders in the market and our top choice in this particular category.
Wix seamlessly combines ease of use with a huge amount of customizability. Its artificial-intelligence-based website creator can design a site for you within seconds based on answers to a few simple questions. Meanwhile, its powerful drag-and-drop design editor can be used to tweak and adjust any aspect of your website.
There are more than 500 industry-specific themes and templates to choose from, suitable for everything from restaurants to construction businesses. There’s also a massive app store with third-party add-ons that can extend the functionality of your site, and tools for marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). You can even add a blog or online store to your website with just a few clicks.
There aren’t many disadvantages to speak of here. However, a lot of people do complain about the lack of adequate customer support for technical issues. The user interface can be a bit tricky in the beginning but is easy enough to familiarize yourself with. Since it’s meant to serve a lot of different purposes at once, the site builder doesn’t contain many specialized tools. However, it’s good enough for general use.
Read our full Wix review.
Headquartered in San Francisco and owned by Square, Inc., Weebly was founded in 2006 and boasts a growing base of 50 million active websites. While not as powerful as Wix, Weebly prides itself on simplicity and sells on e-commerce compatibility.
Weebly doesn’t flood you with features when you start out. Instead, it lets you jump straight into the action. When you sign up for Weebly, you aren’t even required to confirm your email address. Just provide an email and password, and you are ready to go. You are then asked a few questions to help you pick a template and decide on a subscription. Once the website is set up, you can use the drag-and-drop editor to customize it at any time.
The standout feature with Weebly is the e-commerce integration, which, unlike Wix, is available on all plans, including the free plan. The e-commerce module lets you quickly add a shopping cart, checkout page, inventory tracker, and product search to your website. There’s a range of options available to further customize your fully-featured online store, including social media integration.
Weebly’s greatest advantage is its simplicity, which is also its biggest disadvantage. While the lack of a learning curve makes it extremely popular among newbies, advanced users will be put off by the lack of customizability. However, there’s a limited collection of third-party apps that can add more functionality to your website.
Read our full Weebly review.
Founded by Anthony Casalena in 2004, Squarespace is a website builder designed specifically for creative professionals. While the interface can be slightly different from what you’d expect from a typical site builder, Squarespace offers plenty of features to make the learning curve worth it.
Squarespace is built with bloggers in mind. It supports multiple authors per website and provides the ability to schedule posts for future publishing. What’s more, you can access the blogging app from any device, including mobiles and smartphones, which is useful for writing on the go. Squarespace also supports AMP, a powerful framework that helps you design seamless responsive web experiences across devices.
Need more? You can also recover deleted blog posts within 30 days of sending them to the trash. If you aren’t able to save your work due to a power outage, Squarespace will automatically recover the offline content the next time you open it.
In terms of shortcomings, Squarespace’s interface can be a bit complicated to use for first-timers. However, there’s a wealth of material available online to help you get started. It is also worth noting that, being a website builder, Squarespace’s blogging platform isn’t quite as flexible as a content management system like WordPress.
Empowering more than 1 million merchants across 175 different countries, Shopify is the ultimate e-commerce platform. While you can expect some e-commerce features from website builders like Wix and Weebly, they all pale in comparison to Shopify.
Shopify helps you create an online store in a matter of minutes. You get to take advantage of its extensive collection of third-party apps, all of which add new features and functionality to your online store. This helps the website builder stay clutter-free while also allowing you to opt for the specific features your online store needs.
Shopify comes with a built-in shopping cart and checkout manager, and offers excellent tools for marketing and security. Cybersecurity is one of the biggest concerns with online shopping, but Shopify is Level 1 PCI DSS compliant, making it extremely safe both for you and your customers.
If you’re looking to build a traditional website or blog with Shopify, you are out of luck, though. And while the platform is excellent for small businesses, larger e-commerce stores may want more dedicated solutions like WooCommerce or BigCommerce. A 2.4%–2.6% transaction fee is applicable on each purchase made through Shopify, which might be a turn-off for some.
Headquartered in Houston, Texas, Hostgator is a popular provider of web hosting services. Its site-building solution—Gator Website Builder—uses a drag-and-drop interface to help you generate simple websites.
The drag-and-drop site builder lets you easily combine simple elements like columns, text boxes, images, and videos to create mobile-friendly websites. There are more than 200 templates to choose from. Each template is completely customizable from the ground up, thus allowing for endless personalization.
There’s a built-in library of stock photographs that come packaged with the site builder. There’s also a handy series of video tutorials if you need a helping hand, plus premium customer support via phone and chat that comes packaged with the hosting plan. Free analytics is also available, which small businesses will find especially useful.
Advanced users, on the other hand, may find the lack of specialized tools annoying. There are no dedicated email marketing tools at hand, while blogging tools are relatively basic. Ultimately, Gator Website Builder is a good choice for small businesses, but not so much for bigger corporations.
GoDaddy, much like Hostgator, has a built-in website creator that it ships to users along with its hosting services. The site builder is simple and easy to use, with no third-party app market or add-ons to choose from. While that may be a bummer for some, others will appreciate the lack of clutter.
GoDaddy’s website builder boasts excellent support and powerful analytics, two must-have essentials for any growing website. The site builder is a little barebones compared to other competitors, but the lack of interface clutter means novices can focus on the important stuff.
With GoDaddy, you’ll have access to a decent drag-and-drop interface that lets you configure your website to your liking, as well as pre-built templates to choose from if you want to get started quickly. There are extensive tutorials available for new users as well as a live chat support system for technical problems.
GoDaddy doesn’t offer an app market to users, which has been the cause of some annoyance among users. However, this means that all features are built in-house, ensuring complete compatibility and greater security. It’s also worth noting that the base plan doesn’t include marketing or analytics. Those are paid addons that require a separate plan.
1&1 IONOS was founded in Germany in 1988. It’s one of the largest providers of web hosting services in Europe and currently hosts a total of 20 million websites. Its website creator features an array of templates and great functionality for businesses of all sizes.
For $10/month and $15/month, you get to choose between two yearly plans: MyWebsite Now and MyWebsite Creator. While the former comes with a free domain name and email address, the latter offers more advanced customizability for pro users. Using this website builder requires absolutely no coding knowledge—the drag-and-drop site editor allows you to make any changes you need.
1&1 IONOS has a huge collection of themes and templates, with each template categorized neatly by industry and genre. Whether you are a real-estate developer or a travel agency, you’re bound to find something here. The built-in targeted content system even allows you to display specific messages to specific visitor demographics.
The drawback here is the lack of a free plan, although a paid trial is available for new users for a period of one month. Another thing worth considering is that some themes may not be responsive to screen size.
Founded in 1996 by Sridhar Vembu, Zoho has its headquarters in India and data centers in the US, UK, and China. It’s mostly famous for its all-in-one productivity suite, à la Microsoft Office, but its website building software is just as efficient and powerful.
Zoho Sites features over 190 templates. There’s even a code editor for those who like to get down and dirty with their website’s backend. The interface is surprisingly user-friendly and therefore easy for newbies to access. There’s also a good deal of in-house add-ons for marketing and customer management, which businesses will appreciate.
While there’s no forever free plan with Zoho Sites, the subscription tiers are reasonably priced with a lot of scope for scaling. There are also paid add-ons that can be purchased as your company expands with more members, authors, and visitors. Users will also be able to take advantage of the entirety of Zoho’s massive productivity suite, including its project management and database creation software.
Unfortunately, Zoho Sites also comes with a few downsides, especially in terms of compatibility, and there isn’t a lot of support for third-party applications. Thankfully, Zoho’s in-house productivity suite is able to fill a lot of these holes with equally good alternatives.
How to choose the best website builder for you?
Choosing the right website builder can be hard, especially as there are a lot of factors to take into account. The most important consideration is, of course, the learning curve. Most people who opt for website builders do so because content management systems are too complex or time-intensive for them. With a site builder, you can efficiently launch your own website, blog, or e-commerce store within moments.
The best website builder is one that isn’t too difficult to use and helps users build stunning websites in minutes. It won’t do to compromise quality for the sake of ease of use, which is why an ideal site builder will also feature a good collection of templates and a powerful drag-and-drop editor.
After-sales support is yet another concern, as business owners from non-technical backgrounds might find it especially difficult to diagnose issues as they arise. This is why you should also look for good live chat and phone support, which ensures you’ll be able to bounce back quickly if there’s an issue.
Ultimately, you have to consider the specific nature of your business and the industry within which you operate, then decide if the prospective website builder has all the features you need for your website, blog, or online store.
These are the best photo editing apps of the year.
The best website builders for photographers.
The top 3 website builders right now
1. Wix: the best all-round choice
This is our choice for the website builder provider who can cater for all use-cases. Wix has brilliant flexibility and hundreds of templates to choose from and its drag and drop interface can be used by just about anyone with an inkling of computer literacy. Pricing is fair too.
View Deal
2. Squarespace: the one for creative businesses
Any business can use Squarespace, of course, but we found that it’s particularly suitable for creative businesses, with a choice of more than 500 professionally-designed templates and lots of customisation options. The library also includes designs for eCommerce, portfolios, blogs, and company websites.
View Deal
3. Weebly: simplicity and excellent eCommerce support
If you just want a simple eCommerce website, then Weebly is the website builder for you. Its built-in tools, such as inventory management and product variants, make it quick to develop an eCommerce shop from scratch. It also offers a handful of extensions to help you deal with shipping, and email marketing.
View Deal
The top 3 website builders right now
1. Wix: the best all-round choice
This is our choice for the website builder provider who can cater for all use-cases. Wix has brilliant flexibility and hundreds of templates to choose from and its drag and drop interface can be used by just about anyone with an inkling of computer literacy. Pricing is fair too.
View Deal
2. Squarespace: the one for creative businesses
Any business can use Squarespace, of course, but we found that it’s particularly suitable for creative businesses, with a choice of more than 500 professionally-designed templates and lots of customisation options. The library also includes designs for eCommerce, portfolios, blogs, and company websites.
View Deal
3. Weebly: simplicity and excellent eCommerce support
If you just want a simple eCommerce website, then Weebly is the website builder for you. Its built-in tools, such as inventory management and product variants, make it quick to develop an eCommerce shop from scratch. It also offers a handful of extensions to help you deal with shipping, and email marketing.
View Deal