Best Website Builder in 2022: Top Comparison & Reviews
- luckychauhan201820
- Sep 3, 2022
- 6 min read
Looking for the best website builder to create a website for your small business, eCommerce store, or other project?
If you’re not a developer, you might not be sure where to start when it comes to making a website. That’s where website builders come in…
Website builders make it easy for anyone to create a site using pre-made templates and simple drag-and-drop editing. But not all website builders are made equal, and there are some important differences when it comes to functionality, ease of use, and price.
To help you find the best website builder for your specific needs, we went hands-on with seven popular tools. Now, we’ll share the most relevant information with you to help you make your decision.
1. Wix (www.wix.com)
A good all-around builder with affordable prices
Wix is a popular drag-and-drop website builder that lets you create a Wix-branded site for free, or your own branded site for a price. After Squarespace, it’s the second-most popular all-purpose website builder, powering 1.9% of all websites
Wix offers an entire suite of business tools known as Ascend. This is a premium feature, although there is a limited free version that comes with all Wix websites.
Ascend provides a wide variety of tools and functionality, including:
A video maker to help you create promotional content for social media
Targeted marketing, A/B testing, and enhanced analytics
A live chat function for your website
Customizable forms
Invoicing and coupon creation
Email marketing
Membership site functionality
Built-in tasks, reminders, and other administrative features
Unlimited plan for a basic website:
Combo: $16 / mo
Unlimited: $18 / mo
Pro: $23 / mo
VIP: $39 / mo
If you want to accept online payments, you’ll need to pay for one of the Business & eCommerce Plans. These are a bit more expensive, starting at $23 per month and going up to $49 per month:
Business Basic: $23 / mo
Business Unlimited: $27 / mo
Business VIP: $49 / mo
All of the tools are built directly into the Wix dashboard, so they’re simple to use. Ascend plans start at $10 per month, and go up to $24.50 per month for the Unlimited plan.
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You can have the Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) create your website for you based on your answers. As convenient as that might sound, you’re much better off using the Wix Editor to build your site manually, since it gives you full control over the experience.
Anyone can use Wix to build a website for free. However, on that tier, Wix displays ads on your site and forces you to use a Wix-branded URL.
The best website builder for creatives (and others)
By the numbers, Squarespace is the most popular website builder, as well as the most popular hosted content management system. It powers 1.8% of all websites on the Internet according to W3Techs.
Squarespace includes great-looking templates for a variety of niches, as well as an easy onboarding process that makes it easy to build a website even if you have no technical skills.
So how much does it cost to sign up for Squarespace? With four flexible, transparent plans, Squarespace allows users to only opt for the features they need, while also keeping costs low and receiving all features built into the system.
Here are the pricing plans:
Personal: Starting at $16 per month for access to the Squarespace website builder and templates, unlimited storage and bandwidth, basic website metrics, Squarespace extensions, SSL security, SEO features, 2 contributors, limited access to the Squarespace Video Studio app, and 24/7 customer support.
Business: Starting at $23 per month for everything in the previous plan, unlimited contributors, premium integrations and blocks, CSS and JavaScript customization, advanced analytics, promo banners and popups, and a fully integrated eCommerce store to sell unlimited products, accept donations, and sell gift cards. Transaction fees for this plan are 3%.
Basic Commerce: Starting at $27 per month for all features in the previous plans, a decrease to 0% transaction fees for your online store, a point of sale, customer accounts, a checkout on your domain, eCommerce analytics, products on Instagram, limited availability labels, and merchandising tools.
Advanced Commerce: Starting at $49 per month for everything in the previous plans, a 0% transaction fee for online stores, abandoned cart recovery, commerce APIs, advanced discounts, advanced shipping, and subscriptions.
A solid option for all types of sites
Recently acquired by Square for $365 million in April 2018, Weebly is a long-standing website builder that helps you create both standard websites and eCommerce stores (the eCommerce aspect will likely become more prominent with Square’s involvement).
Weebly currently powers 0.6% of all the websites on the Internet.
Weebly has a branded free plan. After that, paid plans start at $5 per month
Overall, creating a website on Weebly works like this:
You make a free Weebly account without having to type in a credit card number.
Weebly asks if you’d like to make a personal website or a business website.
The business website choice sends you to Square Online, which combines Weebly and Square tools for making branded websites and selling online.
The personal website choice mainly runs with original Weebly tools, but with some Square payment processing. This is for making portfolios or blogs, when you don’t plan on selling much online.
You choose a theme.
You design the entire site with the Weebly editor.
Select a domain name, pay for your account, and launch the site.
The best website builder for eCommerce stores
Shopify is a bit of a twist because it’s focused exclusively focused on eCommerce, rather than helping you create a multipurpose site. By the numbers, Shopify powers 4.4% of all websites on the Internet, which makes it the second most popular way to make a website (only after WordPress, which has a whopping 42.9% market share). It’s also the second most popular way to build an eCommerce store, behind WooCommerce.
Basically, it’s not the best website builder overall, but it’s probably your best option if you’re serious about creating an eCommerce store.
There are dozens of built-in features including:
Support for selling unlimited products
Point of sale support for in-person transactions
Gift cards and discount codes
Multiple online sales channels
Finance reports
Email marketing and online advertising campaigns
Fraud analysis
Support for multiple staff accounts
Abandoned cart recovery
Shipping rate calculations
Free SSL certificates
Shipping discounts
Integrated payment processing
Global selling options such as different languages and currencies
Shopify also has an app store to choose from thousands of other store extensions. Some app categories include:
Store design
Marketing
Fulfillment
Shipping and delivery
Customer service
Store management
Conversion
Merchandising
Product recommendations
You can also control how your store looks using Shopify themes.
Shopify pricing
Shopify is similar to most major platforms with its pricing plans.
For instance, the $29 per month Basic Shopify pricing aligns with the basic plans from BigCommerce, Squarespace, and Wix. Weebly has some lower-priced plans, but they’re not as great of a value, especially in terms of eCommerce offerings.
Shopify pricing goes from $29 to $299 depending on what you need, and they offer enterprise features as your business grows, all starting at $2,000 per month in the Shopify Plus plan.
Many stores will be fine with the $29 plan, at least to start. This makes Shopify quite affordable versus the competition.
Finally, Shopify has a $9 per month Shopify Lite plan if you need to add simple online eCommerce tools such as Buy buttons to an existing site. Keep in mind, however, that the Shopify Lite plan is in no way a real online store with a complete shopping cart.
WordPress.com is a service that gives you an easy way to create a website built with the open-source WordPress software. WordPress powers 42.9% of all the websites on the internet, and WordPress.com gives you the simplest way of getting into the WordPress ecosystem.
The open-source WordPress software, AKA WordPress.org, is free software that you can install on your own web hosting. It’s a great way to make a website, but it’s not quite a “website builder” because you’re the one responsible for installing and maintaining the software.
With the ability to install plugins, you can add pretty much any feature to your site. You can even create a WordPress-powered eCommerce store powered by the WooCommerce plugin.
* You need to pay for the Business plan to be able to install plugins – you can’t install plugins on the cheap/free plans.
Pricing
While WordPress.com does have a free plan and some cheap plans, we don’t recommend those plans if you’re looking for a full-featured website builder.
Instead, you should pay for at least the Business plan, which unlocks the full flexibility of the WordPress software.
It costs $25 per month if paid annually or $33 per month if paid monthly.
The most affordable website builder on this list
With promotional prices starting at just $7.18 per month, and regular prices at $10, $12 and $18, SiteBuilder is one of the most affordable website builders on this list.
BUT THERE IS NO FREE PLAN
A good basic option for simple websites
Founded in 2013, Strikingly is much younger than the other website builders on this list. It’s probably not a great option if you’ve already built a few websites and like to tinker. But if you just want a tool to build a basic website, its simple editor keeps things uncomplicated.
Strikingly has a free plan if you’re ok with using a Strikingly subdomain. After that, paid plans start at $8 per month.
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