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Inflating supplier costs and wavering consumer demands have made 2024 a tough year to run a business. Fortunately, despite challenging circumstances, affordable website builders are providing a lifeline to businesses wanting to get their names out there without breaking the bank.
If you’re in the market for a low-cost website builder, our research found that Webador is the best cheap website builder, thanks to its surprisingly impressive free forever plan and its affordable packages that start at just $5 per month, while Hostinger is the best AI website builder for building a site fast.
If you’re keen on discovering the best website builder for your business, we list six cheap builders, in order of the price and affordability of their cheapest premium plans. We’ve also tested and compared these products against other crucial criteria like features and functionality, to ensure you’ll get the best deal possible.
The best cheap website builder for 2024 is:
Read on to learn about these affordable solutions, or take our 1-minute web builder comparison quiz to receive personalized recommendations based on your needs.
In this guide:
You may also be interested in our guide on how to build and make money from a profitable website.
Webador
Hostinger
Pixpa
Elementor
GoDaddy
Free to $24/month
$2.99 to $9.99/month
$8 to $25/month
Free to $33.25/month
$10.00 to $16.99/month
Best for businesses on a budget
Best for uptime reliability
Best cheap website builder for creatives
Best cheap website builder for beginners
Best for SEO guidance
50+
Over 150
150+
100+
22
The affordability of these products was the key criterion in our evaluation process when ranking the best cheap website builders. However, our research and product testing insights will also help you compare the builders in terms of feature richness, how easy they are to set up and maintain, and how well they score for design flexibility, among other things.
Although a lot of website builders offer serviceable free plans, they still come with some serious limitations. What’s more, some will display ads on your site that you can’t remove, and many won’t let you edit your domain name either. If you think you’ll find that infuriating, your best bet is a cheap paid plan from one of the website builders featured in this article.
Webador is a stripped-backed yet user-friendly website builder that lets you get from $7 per month, with a free version available as well. Webador offers just about every feature you need to build a high-performing site, including customizable templates, a drag-and-drop builder, blog and portfolio options, and in-house SEO capabilities. Yet, what separates Webador from the competition is its ability to host websites for absolutely free – a perk that most other providers charge a premium for.
However, compared to other providers on this list, Webador’s suite of design and web building features are quite limited, and with no app store available, the builder may struggle to meet the needs of larger businesses with specific site needs.
Webador has just over 50 website templates to choose from, which is a much smaller selection compared to premium builders like Wix and Squarespace. Source: Tech.co user testing
Webador lets you choose between 50+ pre-built templates, which you’re able to customize to your liking. You’re also able to edit the layout of your site later down the line, which is a boon if you love regularly switching up your site’s style. However, compared to premium builders like Wix, which offer over 1,000 website themes, this selection will feel quite limited.
Webador’s drag-and-drop builder isn’t the most intuitive tool we’ve tested, either. When we tried it for ourselves, we found it hard to edit and move around elements to specific locations on the page. Ultimately, the clunky nature of the drag-and-drop builder will probably make it harder for users to build a highly unique site. However, for those wanting to create a basic website profile on a budget, with useful sub-pages like FAQs, and Contact Us forms, Webador should be able to meet your needs just fine.
Webador’s drag and drop lets you customize the layout of your website, but I found its functionality a bit clunky, and not super intuitive. Source: Tech.co user testing
If you want to optimize your website for search engines, Webador also offers a free SEO tracker to help users take action to improve the ranking of your site. The website builder also lets you add SEO-friendly page titles and descriptions but lacks more advanced features you’d find in more premium builders like Wix, such as canonical tags and a dedicated app.
If you want to learn even more, check out our guide to the best web builders for SEO.
Pros:
Cons:
Webador offers three different paid plan, as well as a forever free version.
All in all, Webador is definitely a good deal for small businesses that want to build a basic business profile website for less. Whether you opt for its entry-level paid plan or its free tier, the builder will allow you to build a fully functioning website, and will even give you access to useful capabilities to help you improve its performance and manage high levels of traffic.
However, if your business is established, or growing fast, Webador’s relatively basic in-house offering and lack of an app store may end up costing your business in the long run – especially for online stores. If this is the case, we’d recommend spending a little more a month for a more premium product like Wix or Squarespace.
If you’re looking for a no-frills website builder won’t cost you an arm and a leg, you just found it. Hostinger (formerly known as Zyro) is certainly not one of the more well-known website builder options out there, but our research suggests it has a lot of potential, and it is certainly very affordable.
Its pricing is very competitive, it offers a few advanced features, including an AI logo maker, and it provides a lot of very easy-to-use templates that make website building simple.
Check out our Hostinger vs Wix comparison guide for more info.
Hostinger offers a wide range of cool additional features that can really help you when it comes to building your site, including an AI writer, which provides unique, engaging written content on your site without you having to lift a finger.
Hostinger offers great AI features, but I found it’s customization features lacking, which makes it less ideal for users who want a super unique website. Source: Tech.co user testing
You’ll also be able to utilize the platform’s logo maker to better establish your brand. From an analytics standpoint, Hostinger offers a comprehensive heatmap, which will help you better understand how your users interact with your website. However, if you’re not fussed about the design, don’t have a lot of experience (or money), and just need to get your website going, Hostinger, for its cost alone, is certainly worth a try.
I was impressed with Hostinger’s AI heatmapping feature because it lets you gain valuable insights into user engagement on your website. Source: Tech.co user testing
Just like Wedabor, Hostinger has no app store. This places a ceiling on the builder’s potential and makes it less suitable for businesses that may require more advanced capabilities down the road. Hostinger doesn’t offer POS integration either, so omniseller businesses with brick-and-mortar locations would be better off choosing Square instead.
Pros
Cons
The most attractive feature of Hostinger is the price. It’s cheaper than your average website builder, by a lot, so if you’re looking to save some money, Hostinger is a great place to start.
What’s more, Tech.co’s unique code, “TECH”, reduces Hostinger’s original price by 78%, Hostinger’s joint website and ecommerce builder is available for $2.69 per month for the first term, down from $11.99 if you pay monthly.
Check out our Hostinger review for more information.
There’s no doubt about it, Hostinger is a solid, cheap website builder. The starting price of only $3 per month, and you can lock in that price for a few years if you so choose. When you end up renewing, the price does go up, but not by much, with the renewal prices costing between $7 and $12 per month, which is better than both Wix and Squarespace ($16 per month).
Overall, Hostinger is a good cheap website builder if you’re a business only focused on price, and not functionality, but if you care about the design, ease of use and customizability, you might want to look elsewhere.
Pixpa is an affordable website builder designed specifically for creative users like photographers and artists. However, while Pixpa is primarily marketed as a website builder for portfolios, it also offers advanced blogging features and a seamless ecommerce platform for businesses to sell online, extending its use to a wider demographic of users.
If you run a creative business and don’t want to splurge on slightly more premium design-friendly builders like Squarespace, Pixpa should definitely be on your radar. The website builder offers a selection of visually engaging, responsive templates that are perfect for showing off creative projects or products. When we used the builder ourselves, I was particularly impressed with how simplistic and clean these themes looked, especially compared to alternatives like Webador.
Pixpa has over 150+ themes catered to creative businesses. I was impressed how clean they looked, and how well they showed up on mobile. Source: Tech.co user testing
However, while Pixpa’s design tools will be strong enough for most average users, if you’re an experienced web developer who wants to have a granular level of control over the site design, you may find the builder restrictive. This is because the platform doesn’t let you carry out advanced customization tasks like importing your own font or building a site from scratch.
Pixpa will be a great option for growing businesses that are serious about widening their reach. The builder offers a range of marketing features in-house such as on-site and email pop-ups, and an Announcement Bar, which lets you highlight a message on your website to make it stand out to viewers. You’re also able to schedule announcements and add a clickthrough URL to the panel, which is a great perk for businesses with regular promotions.
Pixpa let me add a Mobile Action Bar to my site to increase engagement from visitors. Source: Tech.co user testing
Pixpa’s integrated ecommerce features, available to users on all paid plans, make it a good fit for smaller boutique-style retailers building an online presence too. However, if you already manage an established online store and are looking to sell through multiple channels like social media, we’d recommend using e-commerce-focused builders like Shopify instead.
Learn more about the website builder for online stores in our Shopify review.
Since Pixpa is portfolio-based, and created with the needs of creative businesses in mind, the website builder won’t be a natural fit for traditional or technical businesses in manufacturing, law, and logistics, for example. For these types of businesses, we’d advise checking out Wix, as the popular builder offers templates for a broader range of industries.
Pros:
Cons:
Pixpa offers four different pricing plans: Basic, Creator, Professional, and Advanced. The provider is currently running a deal that knocks 55% off all plans, making the builder even more affordable than usual.
If you want to build a site for a creative business, there’s no debating that Pixpa is an extremely good value. Not only does the website builder offer some of the best-designed templates on the market, but it also helps your site get seen with its range of advanced SEO and marketing features. Pixpa also lets you get selling for as little as $8 per month (or $3.60 with its current deal), which is heads and shoulders below what other providers are charging for this perk.
If you aren’t running a creative business, however, a lot of Pixpa’s features will be lost on you, and you may be forced to outsource other features through its app store, bumping up it’s overall price.
Elementor is a WordPress website builder that offers a feature-rich free plan. With prices starting from $59 per month (which works out as $4.91 per month), its paid packages are cost-effective compared to competitors too. But its affordability isn’t the only reason why it’s gained notoriety. The builder is user-friendly and makes it easy to experiment with different design options, lending itself well to beginners to web design, and earning its status as one of the most popular WordPress plugins of all time.
However, if your website isn’t already hosted, you’ll have to purchase a hosting service separately with a WordPress app, bumping up its initial starting price.
Elementor’s staging environment feature lets users play with the design of their site without affecting its live view. Source: Elementor
Elementor’s staging environment feature lets users switch up the design of their site without affecting its live view. This is perfect for users who want to experiment with the aesthetic and functionality of their site, without impacting its performance. On top of this, the builder’s drag-and-drop builder is intuitive to use, especially compared to competitors like Webador, and all designs you create will be responsive by default – meaning that they adapt automatically to whichever device they’re viewed on.
Elementor’s drag-and-drop builder lets adjust the size and layout of different elements, enabling you to customize the look of your site to your liking. Source: Elementor
However, for all of Elementor’s benefits, its entry-level plans place quite stringent restrictions on the number of sites you can build. For example, its Essential package only lets you build one website, while its Advanced plan caps the amount at three. While this will be fine for small businesses with simple site needs, if your business needs to build a variety of websites to serve multiple different audiences, the service will be much less affordable as you’d need to invest in a pricier package.
As Elementor is a WordPress login, you’ll have to be aware of WordPress best practices if you’re serious about building a high-performing site with fast loading speeds. This could be offputting if you’ve never built a website using WordPress before.
Learn more about how to build a website WordPress.
Pros
Cons
Elementor operates a little differently from other providers on this list, charging users per year instead of monthly. The WordPress plugin offers four different paid plans and a free version, which we break down below:
Unfortunately, none of Elementor’s plans include web hosting in its free or paid packages. If you require this service you’ll have to pay anywhere from $2.99 per month extra through Elementor’s hosting platform..
If you’ve already sorted out your website’s hosting, and you don’t need to build a large volume of sites, Elementor will be a good value. Its web creation and design tools and surprisingly capable for a website builder of its price, and its relatively shallow learning curve makes it especially suited to beginners to website building.
However, unlike most other providers, Elementor charges businesses for a year up-front. While its pricing system works out as a good deal in the long term, this will be off-putting to smaller ventures that want to split up these costs into more affordable monthly payments. Combine this with the fact that hosting isn’t provided as part of its basic package, and it’s likely that Elementor won’t be many businesses’ first pick, which prevented us from displaying it any further up this list.
GoDaddy may lack the bells and whistles offered by premium builders, but dollar for dollar, it offers a great value for smaller businesses and solo entrepreneurs. Like Wix and Hostinger, GoDaddy comes with an AI website builder that lets users build a website from scratch in under 30 seconds, making the builder a great option for users without tons of time to invest in their online presence.
GoDaddy’s small price tag comes with some trade-offs, however. The website builder lacks a mobile-friendly preview option in its editor. This means you’ll have to view the site through a smartphone to see how it comes across on the device. GoDaddy lacks an app store as well, which means that businesses won’t be able to make up for any features it doesn’t offer externally.
When I was building my website I could use GoDaddy’s AI text-generation tools to get the ball rolling. Source: Tech.co’s user testing
Pros
Cons
GoDaddy offers 200+ templates for businesses to get started with, which is a decent selection especially compared with providers like Squarespace which only offer 110 themes. Yet, when we tested out GoDaddy ourselves, we found the templates quite challenging to edit, due to the restrictive nature of its drag-and-drop builder. This means that while GoDaddy is capable of building a professional website, if you have a very specific vision in mind the builder may not be able to meet your needs.
GoDaddy’s drag-and-drop builder let me edit the layout of different elements, but its customization options were quite restrictive. Source: Tech.co user testing
When it comes to pricing, GoDaddy offers four plans, Basic, Standard, Premium, and Ecommerce to cater to different business budgets and needs.
At just over $10 per month, and affordable premium options available, GoDaddy will be a good value for businesses in their earlier stages, looking to keep overheads low. However, with no app store to fall back on, if you want to build a large or complex website, or an ecommerce store you might find that GoDaddy struggles to meet your needs.
Website builders have the power to make and break your business. If you’re committed to building a high-performing site without splurging on pricey packages here are some factors you prioritize.
The cost of building a website will vary from user to user. Users on a tight budget will be able to keep costs low by using a no-frills package with hosting included. However, if you’re chosen builder doesn’t offer hosting in-house, you’ll have to pay for this service through a third-party provider, while additional plugins and third-party apps can also bump up the price of a package.
For greater insight into how much a website may cost you, check out our pricing table below:
Portfolio Sites
Online Blogs
Small Business Sites
Larger Business Sites
Ecommerce Sites
$12/month
$6-14/month
$12-26/month
$20/month
$20/month
Squarespace
WordPress
Square Online
Wix
Shopify
While lots of the website builders above offer free plans, they’re often very limited in terms of features. And, when you can build a good website from as little as $6.99 per month from Hostinger, there’s no real reason to compromise.
With a paid-for site, even one that’s only a few dollars a month, you won’t have to put up with adverts, website builder branding, a fixed domain name (e.g. username.wixsite.com/website) and limited functionality. You’ll also get better support and analytics, which free users won’t have access to. Better security is another benefit, and one that’s particularly important for modern ecommerce websites.
We take our impartial research and analysis seriously, so you can have complete confidence that we’re giving you the clearest, most useful product recommendations.
When crafting our list of the best cheap website builders, we identified the most relevant, popular, and established tools in the market, before testing them out for ourselves and spending over 200 hours collecting and analyzing product data. We then used this data to analyze the builder’s potential in six main categories including website features, design functionality, and customer satisfaction, to figure out which solutions showed the most potential.
Once we established which website builders were the best, we checked for the presence of a free plan and noted the price of their cheapest premium plan. We then used this information to rank the best website builders in order of their overall affordability, as displayed on this list.
Learn more about our product testing and research.
Based on our user testing, research, and analysis, the best cheap website builder is without a doubt, Webador. Not only does the website builder offer capable paid plans for as little as $7 per month, but it also offers a free version that lets users create, host, and manage a website at no cost at all.
Hostinger stole our second spot, due to its useful AI-site builder which is available to use for as little as $2.99 per month with its current plan, while Pixpa is hands down the best option for creatives who want to build an aesthetic, portfolio-focused site for less.
If you’re having trouble deciding which one is best, we can help! Our research-backed website builder quiz will only take a minute to fill out and will provide you with three options that meet your specific criteria for your business.
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