Disclosure: If you make a purchase through our links we are compensated at no cost to you.
Choosing the right website builder is vitally essential to the future success of your business.
From selling products online to monetizing a blog, you need to find a platform that makes it easy to create your own website.
Ultimately, there is no “best” website builder—the right choice for you depends on what you want from a tool.
My coaching website, for example, is powered by Squarespace because I wanted a sleek design and access to templates. The website for my community Peak Freelance, however, is hosted on WordPress because I wanted more control over the site experience.
Unsure where to start? This guide shares eight of the best website builders on the market today.
For each one, we’ll share the price, reliability, web hosting services, technical support, site speed, SEO, ease of use, template design features, and more—so you can find the right website builder for your new site.
Best for: Beginner entrepreneurs who want a simple website builder.
Wix is one of the most popular website builders that powers over 11.4 million websites worldwide.
Wix has 500+ ready-to-use templates to design your business’ website in any industry—all of which are mobile-optimized and come with 100 fonts to choose from. And, you can almost endlessly customize the look and feel of your site with no coding knowledge.
Wix is the best web builder if you’re a small business. You don’t necessarily need a platform with more advanced options like BigCommerce and Shopify. Wix website owners that want to add a basic ecommerce store can get these great new features.
Wix is a popular website builder for a reason. Amongst its most impressive features include:
Alongside the features it has to offer, let’s cover the advantages of using Wix to build your website:
That said, there are some minor disadvantages to building your website on Wix:
All Wix plans include a custom domain, no Wix branding, and 24/7 customer support. But the right plan for you depends on what features you need access to.
Prices for the Wix website builder starts at $16 per month, which is ideal for new bloggers. This includes 2GB of storage space and a light marketing suite to get up and running.
If you want to add ecommerce to your site to sell online, premium plans start at $27/month. The Core plan gives you 50GB of storage space, basic website analytics, and ecommerce functionality to accept credit card payments through your store.
For enterprise companies, Wix’s Business plan starts at $32 per month. This gives you standard site analytics and 100GB of storage space.
The premium plan for Wix’s site builder, Business Elite, gives you unlimited storage space, advanced analytics, and an advanced developer platform. This costs $159 per month.
Best for: Bloggers who want stunning website templates.
Squarespace truly knows how to create beautiful, high-quality sites that look great for small businesses and personal websites.
With over 100 design templates to choose from, they lead the pack in design. Squarespace templates look excellent down to every detail. The fonts, color schemes, and imagery all mesh perfectly with any website.
Besides design, their platform is great for bloggers. I chose Squarespace for my coaching website because its WYSIWYG blog editor is very intuitive. You drag elements like images, headings, and text onto the page and position it where you want.
Sites are easy to build with Squarespace’s editing tools. In-built analytics tools provide collected data for on-site visitors if you’re not using Google Analytics. Plus, it’s hard to go wrong with a beautifully designed website for just $16/month.
Squarespace is a great website builder for bloggers because of the following features:
Now we know the standout features of Squarespace, let’s cover the biggest advantages of choosing it as your site builder of choice:
Mark Blakey, CEO of Autism Parenting Magazine, says: “Squarespace simplifies website creation with its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, making it accessible even for those without technical skills.
“The platform’s reliable hosting, security, and excellent customer support ensure a hassle-free website-building experience.”
Mark adds: “Overall, Squarespace combines aesthetics, functionality, and ease of use, making it my top choice for website creation.”
A few minor limitations hold Squarespace from being #1 on this list:
Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial for people who want to experiment with its website builder. This offer applies to all pricing plans.
Squarespace’s most basic plan costs $16 per month and includes mobile-optimized websites, free templates, and a free custom domain.
Its business plan, which starts at $23 per month, also includes advanced analytics, checkout features on your website, and integrated ecommerce features with a 3% transaction fee on any payments made through your website.
Commerce, Squarespace’s plan for online store owners, starts at $27 per month. Businesses on this plan benefit from a 0% transaction fee and powerful merchandising features.
Its most premium plan, Commerce, costs $49 per month and gives you access to everything—including advanced shipping and discounting features, and tools to help you sell subscriptions through Squarespace’s website builder.
Best for: Bloggers who want ultimate control over their website.
With WordPress, you can create a website for anything—a blog, a local business, or an online store—the options are limitless. More than 810 million websites around the world (or 43% of all sites) use it to post content online.
There are two options to build a website on WordPress:
WordPress.org, which I use for my community membership website, also has its Jetpack essential features, including basic SEO, social sharing, and site analytics. The famous, all-in-one Jetpack add-on covers all functionality, from SEO and analytics to security and marketing.
“My favorite feature is the Gutenberg editor, which makes creating and editing content a breeze,” says Liam Lucas, blogger at Off Road Genius. “It’s a drag-and-drop tool that simplifies the whole process, allowing you to focus more on the content rather than the technical aspects.”
Aside from that, other standout features of WordPress.org’s website builder include:
WordPress.org is the go-to website builder for so many creators because of these advantages:
Despite WordPress being the world’s most popular website builder, it does have some vulnerabilities:
With WordPress.com’ free plan, you get a website, access to 1GB of storage, unlimited pages, and unlimited users.
Get a free domain for your first year by upgrading to its Personal plan, which starts at $4 per month.
WordPress.com’s Premium plan includes premium themes and style customization. Expect to pay $8 per month for these features.
If you’re looking to upgrade or pay for premium features, it’s best to start off with WordPress.org as it gives more advanced features you’ll need to build a world-class website.
Because you’ll need to download the software and install it on your server, it’s often best to find a web hosting service that offers WordPress.org. Popular options include BlueHost and HostZinger.
Best for: Beginners who want a drag-and-drop ecommerce website builder.
Weebly powers over 882,000 live websites and is known as the free website builder of choice for people without much technical expertise. It was acquired by Square, a payment processing provider, in 2018.
If you’re a blogger, you can use Weebly.com to pick a custom domain name and use their editor to add your text, images, and content. It also has built-in marketing tools—like email marketing and SEO features—to help drive traffic to your new website.
Overall, it’s a good option if you’re looking for a free website builder that makes it easy to launch a new ecommerce website.
Consider Weebly’s website builder if the following features are essential to you when evaluating potential options:
Weebly is a good website builder to consider because:
Weebly does have some downsides that might not make it the best website builder for you.
Weebly has a free plan that gives you a free SSL certificate and a domain with Weebly branding. With this plan, you can use a custom domain but are forced to have Weebly branding throughout your site. The free plan also only comes with chat and email support—no phone support.
If you want to upgrade your site, Weebly’s Personal plan starts at $10 per month. You’ll have to connect a custom domain but you’ll get access to advanced ecommerce features like digital goods, shipping calculators, and pop-up website notifications.
Weebly’s Professional plan starts at $12 per month and also includes a free domain, password protection, and the ability to remove ads on your website.
Its Performance plan is the most advanced option. Get access to cart abandonment emails, advanced ecommerce analytics, and priority support for $26 per month.
Best for: Website owners who want to sell products online.
While not every website owner needs product-selling functionality, Shopify is the best website builder if you’re selling products online. Over 4 million ecommerce businesses use to sell products through their website.
With Shopify, you could set up a quick website, including a blog, a map of your location, contact info, and appointment scheduling (with an app), and you could also sell hair care products online. This creates a website and another online source of revenue for your business.
Shopify has a lot of features you’d come to expect from other tools on this list, including hosting, your domain name, 70+ professional themes, a free SSL certificate, and marketing and SEO features.
It also offers mobile commerce, 100+ payment gateways, automatic carrier shipping rates, automatic tax rates, and the entire checkout experience.
If you’re setting up a new website and think you may want to sell products online in the future, it’s better to get started with Shopify—rather than another tool that doesn’t take online shopping as seriously.
Shopify is considered one of the top website builders for ecommerce business owners because of the following features:
Shopify is the world’s most popular ecommerce platform because of the following advantages:
Shopify is great, but it does have some disadvantages:
While Shopify doesn’t offer a free trial, you can start building your ecommerce site with its website builder that costs $1/month for three months.
Shopify’s paid plans start at $39 per month. This will give you access to basic reports, two staff accounts, and free themes to get your website up and running.
The next-best plan, appropriately named Shopify, offers better payment processing fees and five staff accounts. You’ll also get better shipping discounts to make more profit when selling products online for $105 per month.
Its most advanced plan costs $399 per month. This offers the lowest payment fees, 15 staff accounts, and tools to manage duties and import taxes.
Best for: Bloggers who want hosting, email addresses, and domains from the same website builder.
GoDaddy used to be known as a domain registrar that provided good service at reasonable prices. But they’ve upped their game in recent years and become a powerful website builder.
GoDaddy’s website builder is one of the easiest to use with its simple drag-and-drop interface, making it simple to create a website—even if you have no prior experience. The platform also offers built-in marketing tools to help drive traffic and engagement, which is crucial to getting your website seen by potential customers.
Overall, GoDaddy is an excellent choice for those looking for an all-in-one solution for creating a website. It offers:
Bloggers love GoDaddy because it offers:
“I would certainly recommend GoDaddy to another blogger,” Chris Muller says. “The platform offers a balance of ease-of-use and professional features that can benefit bloggers in all niches.”
GoDaddy does have some disadvantages. Consider these cons if you’re evaluating GoDaddy as your website builder of choice:
GoDaddy offers a free website builder that includes GoDaddy Payments, SSL certificates, and email/social media marketing features.
If you want to upgrade, GoDaddy’s basic plan starts at $9.99 per month. This offers advanced features like online payment links, sales tracking, and social media posts.
GoDaddy’s premium plan costs $14.99 per month and is the best option if you take appointments through your website.
If you want to sell products through your GoDaddy store, you’ll need to upgrade to its $16.99 per month Commerce plan. This is the only plan that allows you to list products on your online store and process 50 orders per month from marketplaces.
Its most advanced plan, Commerce Plus, has added automations to make your life easier as a website owner. For $29.99 per month, upload unlimited products to your store and send 100,000 emails each month.
Best for: Bloggers with technical knowledge and want to design their own professional website.
Webflow is a California-based website builder that helps you build, launch, and host websites.
The Webflow designer tool uses semantic HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript to build a site that aligns with your requirements. You can drag and drop HTML elements or choose pre-designed features like sliders, tabs, background videos, etc.
Plus, you can use a CSS-based system to make changes to multiple elements simultaneously. It also lets you add custom codes to any page in the <head> or before the </head> of any web page.
Webflow also puts particular emphasis on the visual aesthetics of the site. You can create animation effects—like parallax, precise reveal animations, and progress bars—and add them to your web pages. It provides over 20 pre-built interactions, animations, and triggers.
You also get specific eCommerce tools if you’re interested in building this site. For instance, Webflow provides customizable product fields to highlight product features, images, and other information. The website builder also helps you create a checkout process, customize your homepage and gallery layout, and upload your logo.
Webflow is a popular scalable website builder because creators love these standout features:
Add Webflow to your shortlist of potential website builders if these advantages are important to you:
Webflow might not be the best website builder for you, based on the following disadvantages:
“If the new blogger is keen on learning and has the time to dedicate to understanding the ins and outs of Webflow, then it’s an excellent choice,” says Tom Molnar, content creator at Fit Design.
“The platform offers an enormous amount of creative freedom and fine-grained control, which can result in a truly unique and professional-looking blog.”
Tom continues: “However, if the blogger is looking for something straightforward to set up and easy to manage, without a lot of complexities or a steep learning curve, they might be better off with a different, more user-friendly platform, such as WordPress.”
If you want to launch a new website quickly, Webflow offers a free plan that includes a webflow.io domain, two pages, and 1GB of bandwidth. However, there is a 1,000 visitor limit on this plan.
If you surpass the monthly traffic limit or want more advanced features, Webflow’s Basic plan costs $14 per month. You can build 150 pages, 250,000 visitors, and 50 GB of bandwidth.
Its CMS plan, designed to help website owners add more content to their website, allows you to create three editor profiles and 2,000 CMS items for $23 per month. You’ll also have site search functionality to improve website navigation.
The Business plan is designed for larger sites that need 400 GB of bandwidth and 10,000 CMS items. Pricing for this plan starts at $39 per month.
Best for: Bloggers who want to build a content subscription or membership website.
Ghost is an open-source publishing platform that allows creators to make their own website.
Designed for bloggers, Ghost is primarily a content management system (CMS) but it offers themes and templates for creators who want to start making money from a new blog.
There’s also extra functionality to help you grow an audience through your website—including newsletter, paid subscriptions, and payments which can all be managed through Ghost’s website builder.
Overall, Ghost is a superb option for bloggers who want to grow their audience and build a website that manages their audience engagement and monetization strategy.
Ghost is a popular CMS and website builder because of the following benefits it offers to creators:
“My favorite feature has to be the newsletter and analytics capability with built-in SEO,” says Cathy Diaz, blogger at Why We Journal.
“I want my blog to be discoverable and to learn how to improve its ability to reach audiences. I would definitely recommend Ghost CMS if the new blogger was willing to give a little time each day learning a new skill.”
Ghost has been growing in popularity because it offers bloggers the following benefits:
Some of the downsides of Ghost include:
Pricing for Ghost’s website builder depends on how big your audience is. Its beginner plan, designed for 500 audience members, is billed at $9 per month. This includes access to free Ghost themes and built-in integrations.
Its Creator plan, built for bloggers with 1,000 members, gives you unlimited custom themes and 1,000+ Zapier integrations. This costs $25 per month.
If you hire people to help with your website, the Team plan—which allows you to have up to 1,000 members—gives five staff accounts for $50 per month. You’ll also get priority support and higher usage limits.
Finally, for high-growth creator businesses that have 10,000+ members, pricing starts at $199 per month. You’ll get unlimited staff accounts and 99.9% uptime SLA.
There’s a lot that goes into finding a website builder when creating a new site.
From ecommerce functionality to SEO features, evaluate the most important features you need from a website builder and work through this shortlist to find the right one for you.
We’ve covered a lot in this article, so to summarize:
Wix is a good website builder for beginners who don’t have much design experience. WordPress, however, offers greater customization features for those who want more control over their website.
WordPress is the most popular website builder, but bloggers often use Ghost, Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, or Weebly to build their blogs.
Our reviews are made by a team of experts before being written and come from real-world experience. Read our editorial process here.
Some of the links in this article may be affiliate links, which can provide compensation to us at no cost to you if you decide to purchase a paid plan. These are products we’ve personally used and stand behind. This site is not intended to provide financial advice. You can read our affiliate disclosure in our privacy policy.
We test and review software products based on an independent, multi-point methodology. If you use our links to purchase something, we earn a commission. Read our editorial process and disclosures.
Related Articles
Wonderful post! We are linking to this great articlke on our
website. Keepp up the good writing.
Excellent blog you have here.. It’s difficult to find high quality writing like yours these days.
I really appreciate individuals like you! Take care!!
I always liked Weebly back in the day when I actually used website builders like this.
I personally use Wix, because most of the people just want to drag and drop it. Indeed i chose wix, thanks for the article mate.
I’ve personally used SquareSpace while I was building landing pages for FB Ads (before clickfunnels exist). I couldn’t recommend it more, it is indeed a great time saver. But for beginners, Wix is hands-down the best option! Great write up!
Thank you very much Adam. I found this information comprehensive, easy to follow, understandable and I feel encouraged to create my website.
That’s great!
Hi Adam,
A wonderful blog that’s really good, inspiring, and helpful too. Hope you will keep sharing more.
Hey Adam,
Incredibly helpful article. I was just about to develop my site and your review of free website builders will be very useful to me. thank you.
No problem, thanks for reading. 🙂
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
© 2024 Adam Enfroy Ventures LLC
7901 4TH ST N STE 300 ST PETERSBURG, FL 33702
This website is operated and maintained by Adam Enfroy Ventures LLC. Use of the website is governed by its Terms Of Service and Privacy Policy.
Adam Enfroy Ventures LLC is an education and training company. We do not sell a business opportunity, “get rich quick” program or money-making system. We believe, with education, individuals can be better prepared to make investment decisions, but we do not guarantee success in our training. We do not make earnings claims, efforts claims, or claims that our training will make you any money.
Adam Enfroy Ventures LLC may link to content or refer to content and/or services created by or provided by third parties that are not affiliated with Adam Enfroy Ventures LLC. Adam Enfroy Ventures LLC is not responsible for such content and does not endorse or approve it.
We use cookies to help improve, promote and protect our services. By continuing to use this site, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use.
This site is not a part of Facebook website or Facebook, Inc.
This site is NOT endorsed by Facebook in any way. FACEBOOK is a trademark of FACEBOOK, Inc.
Digital Marketing & Design by Yellow Falcon