Want to Start a Website? These Are the Best Website Builders

Publishing a website is still more complicated than it has any right to be, but the best website builders streamline the process. Instead of juggling a bunch of files on a server and learning the ins and outs of networking, website builders do exactly what’s written on the tin. Piece by piece, using a drag-and-drop interface, you can design your website the way you want with immediate feedback, rather than spending time buried in code and hoping it comes out on the other end.

There are dozens of website builders, and most of them range from decent to straight-up bad. Any web host with a bit of ambition has a website builder floating around, even if it’s slow, clunky, and lacking features. I focused on finding the best tools for building your website that go beyond just an add-on, and these are my favorites. If you’re after something simpler than a full-blown website, check out our list of the Best Portfolio Websites.

Best Website Builder for Most

You’ve heard of Squarespace over and over again, I’m sure, and that’s not an accident. It’s an inviting website builder that made a name for itself with bold, striking templates. Beneath the veneer of attractive, but seemingly simple, websites, you’ll find one of the most capable website builders on the market. That balance of power and usability is what sets Squarespace apart.

It feels like a creative tool. Where other website builders lag and stutter to get a new element on your page, Squarespace feels fluid. Your dashboard gives you quick access to edit your site, and around every corner, Squarespace feels designed so you never have to look up a tutorial. I started a simple photography website, and within an hour, I had a custom course page set up, an appointment schedule with automated confirmation emails, and services (with pricing and the ability to accept payments) configured.

Squarespace isn’t cheap, but it also doesn’t meddle in restrictive, low-cost plans. Even on the Basic plan, you have access to ecommerce tools and space for multiple contributors.

Best Cheap Website Builder

Hostinger is better known as a web hosting provider, but it has a surprisingly robust website builder that you can use on its own or for free as part of a hosting package. You don’t get the same world-class template design and dense feature-set of a more expensive builder like Squarespace, but that’s OK. Hostinger’s website builder will run you just a few bucks a month, and based on my testing, it feels heavily angled toward newcomers.

You sacrifice some power for convenience, but there’s an awful lot you can accomplish with Hostinger. Integrations with PayPal, Stripe, and Square allow you to quickly set up e-commerce. Add-ons with WhatsApp give you live chat capabilities, and Printful support means you can sell print-on-demand merchandise. And, if you outgrow the website builder, Hostinger allows you to export your website’s content to WordPress.

Where Hostinger wins for me is through its AI tools. Just about every website builder these days has AI integrated in some way, but it’s around every corner at Hostinger. You need to pay extra for some of these AI features—the logo generator, for example, requires credits—but they give you a great starting point for mocking up the look, feel, and tone of your website.

Best for Small Businesses

Wix is undoubtedly the biggest competitor to Squarespace, and I had a hard time putting one above the other. Ultimately, Wix ended up in the backseat due to higher prices and a slightly less intuitive interface. That’s partly because of how powerful Wix is. Rather than corral you in an elegant (if restrictive) website-building workflow, Wix gives you a ton of options.

First, templates. You get a few hundred elsewhere, but Wix offers over 2,000 templates. At the time of writing, there are 223 pages of them on Wix’s website. They aren’t all winners, but I was able to mock up a quick photography portfolio website within a few minutes by browsing the templates and uploading a few photos.

The other area Wix nails is plugins. Squarespace and Hostinger have plug-ins, but Wix has hundreds of them. It reminds me of the flexibility and accessibility of WordPress as a platform. Even without any technical knowledge of the backend of a website, you can pick and choose plug-ins as you need rather than jerry-rigging a half-baked solution.

You get what you pay for, and Wix is proof of that. It’s robust and incredibly powerful, but even the most inexpensive plan will run you $17 per month, and it doesn’t include any e-commerce features. Thankfully, Wix lets you design and publish a website for free if you want to try out the service, though with some strict limitations.

Best Free Website Builder

Strikingly doesn’t come close to the other website builders on this list, at least when you’re paying for a subscription. But if you’re looking for a no-frills website builder that allows you to publish a website for free, Strikingly is the way to go. It not only has a solid free plan available, but it’s also transparent about the limitations of that plan.

You get 500 MB of storage, 5 GB of bandwidth per month, and a Strikingly branded domain on the free plan. You can even leverage the e-commerce features of paid plans with a single product, though with 5 percent transaction fees. What I appreciate most about the free plan is the AI website builder. I was able to get up and running with my portfolio website by answering a few questions. Strikingly generated a full website with placeholder copy and images, all without spending a dime (if you like that sort of thing).

You can upgrade to a paid plan to unlock more storage and bandwidth, as well as support for a custom domain, but it isn’t worth it for most people. You’ll pay around the same price as Squarespace or Wix unless you commit to buying five years upfront, and Strikingly doesn’t offer the same broad range of design tools, nor plugins, that Wix and Squarespace offer.

Other Website Builders We’ve Tested

Weebly: Weebly has been a popular website builder for years due to its generous free plan. However, Weebly was purchased by payment processor Square in 2018, and although Square says Weebly is continuing to receive support, it urges users to use Square Online—an e-commerce-focused website builder—instead. Square says it will continue to support Weebly, and I was still able to create an account, design a website, and publish it. But it’s probably not the best choice given the rocky ground Weebly is standing on when it comes to future support.

Canva: I love Canva’s design tools, and using them to throw together a website is a treat. You can design a website for free and publish it with a Canva-branded domain, as well as bring your own if you’re a paid subscriber. With over 3,500 templates available, you can quite literally set up a website within a few minutes. You trade a lot of power for that convenience, though. Canva is extremely limited, with little in the way of plugins and no e-commerce features to speak of. It’s a great tool if you need to throw together a website for a specific purpose—say, a wedding or landing page—but it doesn’t have legs beyond that.

How We Tested

There’s no one-size-fits-all mold for a website builder. Because of that, I kept away from forcing any website builder I tested into a particular lane; instead, I focused on ensuring the website builder empowered you to do what you want to do with your website. That means a lot of options, but it also means organizing those options in an accessible way.

For testing, I put together a website with a photography portfolio—a hobby of mine in my free time —leveraging upload and layout features, as well as form capture and appointment booking, where available. I don’t have a background in website design, so each website builder needed to empower me to build a website with their tools. If I need to touch a line of code, that’s a dealbreaker.

Outside of doing its core function, there were a few other areas I focused on:

• Pricing. Price is always important, but it’s especially important with website builders. Contract terms can range from monthly to five years at a time, with wildly varying prices. Worse, most website builders aren’t exactly clear what the price is for anything below the longest term limit. For this guide, I normalized all website builders to the price for an annual subscription.
• Scalability. Your website needs to grow with you, and relying on a single website builder to meet all your needs isn’t going to cut it. All the services I selected either give you options to expand the functionality of your website with plugins or, in the case of Hostinger, export your website to WordPress.
• Uptime and bandwidth. You don’t have the option to pop over to another web hosting service with a website builder. You get what you get. That puts a lot of emphasis on uptime. I used my own time testing each of these website builders, as well as the past several months of uptime history, for my evaluation.
• Ease of use. You sign up for a website builder because you don’t know how to build a website, pure and simple. Although flexibility and scalability are important, the core of a website builder should get you online with little to no fuss.
• Support. Run a website long enough, and you’re bound to run into issues at some point. Servers crash, requests don’t get routed properly, and pages render improperly after they’re published. It happens, but it’s important to have resources available to help. In addition to direct support, I also looked at the self-help resources of each website builder I tested.

Website Builders vs. Web Hosting

There’s a lot of crosstalk between website builders and web hosting services, and it’s important to separate the two. Web hosting is part of a website builder, but a website builder isn’t always part of web hosting.

A web host stores all the data for your website on a server and allows others to connect and load that data, displaying your website. It doesn’t matter how your website was designed or what purpose it serves. If you have the right know-how, you can throw together the necessary files to display a website and host it from your own PC or server, in fact.

A website builder gives you the tools to put those files together without any coding or web design background. You start with a template, and you design your website with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface. Once your website is designed, you publish it, and it’s hosted on your website builder’s servers.

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