The Best Website Builders for 2023

You must leverage social media tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, to get your business’ message to the public. Still, that’s not enough. If you want an internet presence that truly represents your organization, you also need an attractive, easy-to-navigate website. As opposed to a social media page, a website gives you complete control over design and content. This lends credibility to your business, organization, or personal brand, which is essential for potentially wary clients or customers. Thankfully, website builders make it easier than ever to create professional-looking, design-forward websites.

Well-known DIY site building services, such as Squarespace and Wix, are constantly improving and adding new capabilities. Rivals, such as Gator, Simvoly, and Strikingly have also popped up with their own clever twists on the process.

The best website builders we’ve tested can help you get started in creating an online presence. Check out our top picks below, and drop a few words in the comments section to report your experience with a selection (or shout out a service you like that we haven’t included).

Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks

Wix Website Builder

Best for Building Free Sites

Why We Picked It

Wix has nearly everything you could want from a website builder. An intuitive interface lets you create beautiful pages from hundreds of available templates. Widgets and mobile-specific tools add flexibility and functionality. Robust e-commerce tools let businesses sell memberships and digital downloads. And excellent uptime ensures that your site will be online.

Who It’s For

Everyone. On top of all its powerful, business-friendly features, Wix also offers a free tier. You’ll give up some premium features and must tolerate on-site ads, but Wix is far and away the best option for anyone looking to build great sites without paying monthly fees.

PROS

• Remarkably intuitive Editor X interface
• Numerous widgets
• Hundreds of templates for specific businesses and other uses
• Good mobile-site-building tools
• Rich web-store features
• Excellent uptime and customer service support
• Many commerce options, including the ability to sell digital downloads
• Free option

CONS

• Third-party apps offer better analytics
• Doesn’t let you switch templates

Gator

Best for E-Commerce

Why We Picked It

Not only does Gator let you build beautiful sites with its strong interface and stock photography library, but it’s one of the few website builders that let you easily switch themes. That means you don’t need to start from scratch if you decide to take your site in a different direction. HostGator itself is already an excellent web hosting service, so we aren’t surprised the company also knows a thing or two about website builders with this excellent offering.

Who It’s For

Anyone looking to build an online marketplace should consider Gator. All of its tiers include e-commerce options, as well as unlimited monthly data transfers and unlimited storage. Stores also support selling subscription membership and digital downloads. You’ll need pricier plans to sell more products, but the money you spend on Gator can help you make money in the long term.

PROS

• Strong uptime
• Well-designed interface
• Attractive, modern site templates
• Lets you easily switch themes
• Royalty-free stock photography
• Lets you sell digital downloads
• Excellent prices
• All tiers accept some form of payment

CONS

• Lacks a free plan
• Few photo-editing options
• Cannot schedule blog posts
• Tiny app store

Duda Website Builder

Best for Integrating SaaS Platforms

Why We Picked It

Duda is a relatively expensive website builder, but at least you get what you pay. In this case, that means a top-tier editor for building desktop and mobile sites, powerful analytics and ecommerce tools, and unlimited storage and monthly data transfers. You can even write your own custom CSS and HTML code to customize your site even further. 

Who It’s For

Duda is pivoting away from individual users and more toward enterprise organizations. You can see this not just in the price, but also in its features. Duda’s top tiers focus on increasing your team members, integrating software as a service, and detailing client management options. This makes the website builder attractive to web design agencies. 

PROS

• Features a top-tier editor
• Strong tools for crafting phone and tablet sites
• Powerful traffic analysis
• Capable web store tools
• More than 100 templates
• Lets you use custom CSS and HTML code
• Strong e-commerce options, with support for digital downloads and memberships
• Unlimited storage and monthly data transfers with all plans

CONS

• Relatively expensive, and lacks a free option
• Limited widget store
• Doesn’t let you switch templates
• Fully responsive design limited to Flex templates and sections

Bluehost Website Builder

Best for Easy WordPress Site Creation

Why We Picked It

The best website builders streamline the site-creation process so that anyone can do it. Bluehost achieves this with its highly accessible, alternative interface to the already popular WordPress platform. Using it, you can leverage WordPress’ power and strong e-commerce options without learning the full CMS. And if you do want to learn more, Bluehost helps you make the leap. 

Who It’s For

Bluehost’s WordPress focus means it’s more suited for users eager to join that ecosystem, rather than go with something more standalone. Given how proven and capable WordPress is on the web, that’s not a bad choice at all. Bluehost is also already a quality, traditional web hosting service, so these site-building tools just sweeten the deal for existing users.

PROS

• Accessible, alternative website builder for Bluehost users
• Large library of templates and stock photography
• Eases you into learning the WordPress CMS
• WooCommerce storefronts
• Excellent uptime
• Helpful customer service
• Free SSL

CONS

• Lacks a free option
• Limited image editing
• Doesn’t let you switch templates
• Sections could be more intelligently organized

Squarespace Website Builder

Best for Website Customization

Why We Picked It

Squarespace is another well-known website builder, and for good reason. It lets you build truly eye-catching websites with its wide array of templates, as well as responsive design for mobile screens. Squarespace sites are more than just pretty, though. Custom code, blogging tools, and deep e-commerce capabilities gives sites all the powerful functionality serious users need.

Who It’s For

Squarespace has so many good-looking templates that we created an entire separate article highlighting the best ones. Some templates cater to nerds and photographers, while others focus on restaurants and other specific small businesses. Of course, templates are just the starting point. Squarespace is an ideal choice for those who want to customize sites to fit their unique needs.

PROS

• Beautiful, responsive designs that accommodate mobile screens
• Fluid Engine makes design more intuitive in dedicated sections
• Deep e-commerce capabilities, including selling digital downloads
• Lets you use custom code
• Blogging tool lets you schedule posts
• Good help and analytics tools
• Free SSL certificate
• Unlimited storage and monthly data transfers with all plans

CONS

• You must rebuild your site if upgrading from Squarespace 7.0
• Can’t switch templates in new version
• No free tier
• Lacks phone support

Web.com Website Builder

Best for Website Building With Hosting Options

Why We Picked It

Web.com supplemented its mediocre web hosting offerings by adding website building features, and it’s all the better for it. The builder includes e-commerce and WordPress tools, along with a large library of templates and stock photography. In addition, you can enjoy traditional hosting functionality. You see, the site builder plan includes a free domain and hosting, and gives you the option to buy additional shared hosting tiers.

Who It’s For

There are better standalone website builders and web hosting services. For example Web.com lacks basic image editing and dedicated hosting. However if you don’t want to deal with two separate services when building and hosting your site, Web.com does a decent job of giving you both at once.

PROS

• Intuitive interface
• Useful e-commerce and WordPress tools
• Large library of templates and stock photography
• Hosting included
• Excellent uptime in testing
• Terrific customer service support

CONS

• No free option
• Basic image editing
• Lacks cloud, dedicated, or VPS hosting plans
• Doesn’t let you switch templates
• Tiny refund window

Weebly Website Builder

Best for Easy Page Editing

Why We Picked It

Some users are more than happy giving up certain advanced features if it means having an easier overall experience. Weebly doesn’t have the most customization options, but you can still make quality sites with its many attractive themes. The website builder lets you monitor stats to see how your site performs, and sell physical and digital goods. 

Who It’s For

Weebly appeals to people who value convenience. You don’t need to tinker with themes to create a good-looking website. It’s one of the few builders that let you switch themes without rebuilding the site, which is a big plus. And it offers unlimited monthly data transfers across the board.

PROS

• Attractive, responsive-design themes
• Full commerce options, including the ability to sell digital goods
• Site stats included
• Lets you switch themes without rebuilding your site
• Unlimited data transfers with all plans
• Excellent uptime
• Free tier

CONS

• Limited theme customization
• Lacks reusable photo storage
• No interface-wide undo feature
• Slow-responding customer services in testing

Strikingly Website Builder

Best for Previewing Sample Sites

Why We Picked It

Strikingly doesn’t offer many templates, and it lacks robust site customization, but what’s there is responsive and attractive. If you choose Strikingly, though, at least you’ll rest easy knowing that your site is online, thanks to the service’s excellent uptime. 

Who It’s For

Despite its limitations, Strikingly has a surprising amount of flexibility. With its easy-to-use tools and ability to switch templates while designing, you can preview your site and quickly make changes without committing to a lot of extra work. With its free tier, you don’t even have to commit to paying before seeing if the website builder is right for you.

PROS

• Easy-to-use site-building tools
• Attractive themes, with responsive designs
• Lets you switch templates without rebuilding your site
• Excellent uptime
• Free tier

CONS

• Less customization than competing website builders
• Many standard features require a premium account
• Free and cheap tiers limited to five pages per site

Simvoly Website Builder

Best for Visitor Stats

Why We Picked It

Social media serves as a way to express yourself online, which has undercut the appeal of blogging. These days, people who need a full-blown website are folks who wish to sell something. Fortunately, Simvoly’s easy interface lets anyone put together a responsive e-commerce store for digital or physical goods. Just note that it lacks shipping integration.

Who It’s For

If your website is your business, you’ll need to pay attention to the numbers. Simvoly’s site statistics make it useful for users who want to know the best ways to target potential customers. If you need to alter your marketing strategy, you can easily switch your site’s theme to try a new approach.

PROS

• Friendly drag-and-drop interface
• E-commerce functionality, with digital download sales
• Lets you easily switch themes
• Includes site stats
• Excellent uptime

CONS

• No photo editing tools
• Lacks widget marketplace
• No shipping service integrations
• Lacks a free tier

Buying Guide: The Best Website Builders for 2023

5 Things You Need to Know About Web Hosting

Why You Need a Website Builder

Let’s discuss why you need a website in the social media age. On a personal level, you wouldn’t want to send prospective employers to your Facebook page, so a personal website makes more sense as an online, customized resume. Another reason worth considering, for both personal and business purposes, is that building your own site gives you endless design choices. You have total control over products and services you may sell and how they’re delivered, too.

Further, having a real, dedicated site makes a business seem more authoritative and trustworthy than a Facebook or Tumblr presence can on its own (though you should certainly also consider those services as elements of your online presence). It’s as much an opening ante in the business world as having a business card for your company.

Building your own website used to require a lot of tech wizardry, including knowledge of servers, HTML, FTP, site registrars, and web hosting services. Thankfully, website builders make the process super simple. The services included here let you make a well-designed, mobile-friendly site with minimal technical knowledge. They can even take a small or sole-proprietor business to profitability with buy links, online stores, and other money-making options.

Larger businesses spend many thousands of dollars to get their custom-designed and programmed sites. Duda, while still a strong choice for basic users, is pivoting more towards teams and agencies in need of custom expensive enterprise software as a service. However, there’s no need for smaller organizations and individuals to go to that kind of expense. For about $10 per month (or around $25 if you’re selling products) and a few hours of your time, the DIY services included here can help you create a unique, eye-catching website.

With all these services, you build everything yourself, starting with a template you choose from a (hopefully) wide, well-categorized selection. Most use simple drag-and-drop interfaces that let you include social share buttons, photo galleries, blogs, media players, and other items. Some website builders let you restrict viewing by implementing a password, and offer site memberships (see the table).

What are the Best Free Website Builders?

Several of the website builders included here offer free options, too. If you choose that path, your site will include branding from the provider, which makes your site less impressive to savvy surfers—and shoppers. Free offerings vary greatly in the storage, bandwidth, and site options they allow, so read the small print to find out how much you get with each web host. Strikingly, Weebly, and Wix are among the most generous with their free offerings. For more, check out the Best Free Website Builders.

Register Your Domain

Before you start building your home on the web, you need an address for it. Most of the site builders let you register a unique domain, and they all give you a web address using the provider’s domain (yourname.sitebuilder.com, for example). Some include a custom domain name with their plans, usually requiring a year’s commitment. The services also let you use a domain you’ve acquired from a third-party registrar, such as pairNIC, but you often must pay the site builder for that privilege.

(Credit: Wix)

All the web services listed here have you start by choosing from a selection of templates for your site. The better ones, such as Gator and Wix, use templates that automatically reformat your site for viewing on mobile devices. Squarespace in particular has many useful and attractive templates. These services also offer specifically targeted templates based on your site’s purpose, such as for promoting a bakery’s sales, getting gigs for a musician, or keeping wedding guests informed.

Most site builders let you tweak the color scheme, fonts, and page layouts, as well as add new pages. A good site builder offers sub-templates for the most commonly used page types, such as About, Blog, Contact, FAQ, Galleries, and Products.

Of course, you’ll also want to add custom content to those pages. You do this by adding text areas, photos (see Photos and Galleries section below), buttons, and other widgets. The better site builders offer a marketplace of third-party widgets, for things like forms, chat, reservations, and social feeds.

Some site builders, such as Strikingly, uKit, and Virb restrict you to placing page objects in spots that won’t make your site look garish, which can be an advantage if design isn’t your forte. Other builders offer more freedom; if that’s what you’re looking for, check out Gator or Wix. Gator in particular strikes a good balance between design freedom and responsive restrictions. Squarespace enables pockets of freedom in an otherwise ordered grid. Many website builders offer AI-powered tools that let you enter social accounts and other personal or business info, and presto bingo, they deliver a no-work website. Wix’s ADI (artificial design intelligence) tool even impressed a professional designer acquaintance of ours with its results.

(Credit: Duda)

Mobile Site Design

Responsive design is a popular web design strategy used by some website builders. This approach reformats the same webpage content to fit different screens. But in terms of SEO (search engine optimization), the search engines only care about whether a site displays suitably on mobile screen sizes. Both Bing(Opens in a new window) and Google(Opens in a new window) have pages where you can enter your URL to see if your site plays on mobile acceptably.

The strict responsive approach of Simvoly, uKit, and Weeby means you get no control over the mobile-only view. Gator, Ucraft, and Wix, by contrast, offer a mobile site preview and let you make customizations that only apply to mobile viewing. For example, you may want a splash page to welcome mobile viewers, or you may want to leave out an element that doesn’t work well on the smaller screens.

The Best Website Builders for Photography

The highlighted website builders offer some degree of photo and gallery display. Some, like Gator, Squarespace, and Wix, include stock photography. Others let you touch up images with editing tools such as cropping, brightness, and in some cases even Instagram-like filters. Photo gallery options also vary widely. For example, Weebly offers a good selection of styles for your online galleries, while GoDaddy is more limited in visual options.

How to Make Money From Your Website

Of course, if you want to go all out for sales, you need to move up to a dedicated web shopping cart service like Shopify, but that’s a step you might not be ready to take. Most of the services here offer some ability to sell items from your site, if only in the form of a PayPal button, but some don’t offer that in free accounts.

More-advanced options found in some builders let you process credit card payments and add your own cart and checkout pages. The more-powerful site builders include product promotions, email marketing, and inventory and shipping tools. Some let you sell digital downloads, while others don’t; see the table above to find out which do. Only a couple of these builders let you put ads on your site, though most of them allow some degree of custom HTML code insertion.

Website Builder Social and Site Stats

All of the site builders included here let you put Facebook Like and Twitter Follow buttons on your pages, and some even let you display feeds from the social networks. Some give you help building a Facebook Page and tying it into your site design and updates. Many products offer some sort of SEO tool, but too often this is just a form on which you can enter meta tags. You’re mostly left to wrestle with that black magic known as SEO for yourself. It’s very important to submit and verify your site to the search engines, unless you don’t want anyone to find it!

Most of the products here can tell you about your site traffic, though the amount of detail varies greatly among them, and it’s often tied to premium account levels. For example, Weebly displays page views and unique visitors for each day of the month, as well as search terms used to get to the site, referring sites, and top-visited pages. Wix and uKit, at the other end, have little or even nothing in the way of built-in site stats, instead encouraging you to create your own Google Analytics account, and even that requires a paid account. Another drawback of that approach is that you can only see traffic from the preceding day and earlier; it’s not up-to-the-minute, or even the hour.

(Credit: Gator)

What About WordPress Hosting?

WordPress is a big name when it comes to creating websites. But you should know that WordPress.com is not what most people are talking about when they mention WordPress. What most internet-savvy people mean by the term WordPress is the free, open-source blogging platform that comes from WordPress.org. Using this requires you to find your own website hosting service. The WordPress.org software is such a popular site-building platform that many web hosting services even offer managed WordPress hosting plans. WordPress.com, on the other hand, is a service that deploys and hosts that software for you, so you don’t have to go out and find your own hosting service.

WordPress (either version) is a blog-focused content management system that accepts plug-ins and themes that extend its capabilities. In fact, WordPress.com uses plug-ins such as JetPack to provide many of its features. As a whole, WordPress (either .com or .org) is not as easy to use as the other options in this roundup, but if blogging and site transferability are of key importance and you don’t mind digging into its weeds a bit, you should consider the platform—especially WordPress.org. Furthermore, the ability to use WordPress is a valuable skill, as some estimates say that WordPress powers 40% of the internet(Opens in a new window).

Note that we reviewed WordPress.com as a website builder, but its rating of three stars doesn’t quite qualify it for inclusion in this roundup. Instead, consider a WordPress-centric site builder like Bluehost.

How to Move to Another Website Builder

One downside of most of these services is that, should you someday want to move to another web host, you’ll likely be out of luck because of the custom code they use to display your site. Only a few of the services here let you take your site to another web hosting service: The most complete example of this is Weebly, which lets you download the standard site server folders. Squarespace offers some transferability by letting you output your site in standard WordPress format. As you might expect, the same transferability holds for WordPress.com.

Website Builder Support Options

Support among the services varies widely, from free WordPress.com account’s only offering community support, to Jimdo’s email-only service, to Wix’s telephone-callback service—even for free accounts! Many of the site builders offer rich online support knowledge bases and FAQs, so there’s a good chance you won’t even need to contact the company. We test each service’s support as part of the review process by asking about some less-common site-building procedures.

The Best Website Builders for Small Businesses

As you can see, there are quite a few factors to consider when choosing an easy online website builder. And you have a slew of provider choices—there are at least 20 more vendors than those included in this list. Hardly a week goes by when we don’t get a pitch from a new one we’ve never heard of before. We’ve reviewed many of those, but they didn’t make the cut, either because of outdated site designs, lack of site-building options, or inadequate ease-of-use.

For more advice and alternatives to DIY website building, check out our primer, How to Create a Website. The Best Courses for Learning How To Build Websites, 10 Easy But Powerful SEO Tips to Boost Traffic to Your Website, and How to Get a Free Domain for Your Website are great starting points, too.