The best website builders help bring your vision of a professional website to life quickly and easily, whether you're building your first website or your latest. Drag-and-drop editors offer ease-of-use; their clear pricing structures offer competitive services; and their versatility extends across visually-appealing templates and high-quality tools.
Some specialize in specific areas, such as ecommerce or small business, while others are optimised for WordPress. Many also come packaged with web hosting services, and most offer free-forever plans or trials, allowing you to try before you buy.
If you're considering a free website builder, then it's worth noting that these are limited in comparison to paid providers, but they do let beginners familiarize themselves with the tools and the principals of building a website.
Choosing from the best website builders in a competitive market can be difficult, but it's easier when considering your requirements and experience. Do you need an easy website builder, or something more complex? Do you require scalability in case of site expansion inline with your business goals? What level of professional customer service and support will you need? And what extra tools or features specific to a particular market would be beneficial?
Our guide helps answer these important questions, so that you can make the right decision for creating your new site.
The top 3 best website builders right now
1. Wix: the best all-round choice
Wix is our choice of the best website builders thanks to an industry-leading template library; an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor; and a wide degree of flexibility. The full builder is included with the free package, while competitive paid upgrades provide ad-free sites and a 14-day money-back guarantee.
View Deal
2. HostGator: a powerful, affordable website builder
HostGator is well known as a web host, but it also offers the powerful and cost-effective Gator Website Builder. Its range of competitively-priced annual plans include a pixel-perfect drag-and-drop editor, unlimited storage and bandwidth, a free domain name, and a free SSL certificate.
View Deal
3. Shopify: the best website builder for ecommerce
Over 1 million merchants in 175 different countries use Shopify for online stores, and it's ideal for building an ecommerce site. An extensive range of third-party apps are available via a clutter-free interface, plus a built-in shopping cart and checkout manager, and marketing and security tools.
View Deal
What are the best website builders?
Wix is our top choice from the best website builders available, thanks to its large template library, excellent design flexibility, its third-party app integrations, and a leading artificial design intelligence site editor. HostGator’s Gator Builder pushes Wix close, due to competitively-priced plans that include unmetered bandwidth, storage, and a free domain name.
Shopify is the top ecommerce website builder thanks to industry-leading ecommerce tools designed for creating and publishing online stores simply and quickly. Squarespace, GoDaddy, Elementor, Zyro, Weebly, 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite, and Constant Contact are all worthy of your consideration too, whether for specific focuses on visually-appealing sites, ease-of-use, or their connection to leading web hosting services or content management systems (CMSs) like WordPress.
| Website builder | Lowest pricing plan | Free plan? | Ecommerce features? | Free domain? | Unlimited storage? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wix | $5 a month (Connect Domain) | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| HostGator | $3.84 a month (Express Start) | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Shopify | $29 a month (Basic Shopify) | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| Squarespace | $12 a month (Personal) | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| GoDaddy | $6.99 a month (Basic) | Yes | Yes | No | Yes, with advanced plans |
| Elementor (for WordPress) | $49 a year (Essential) | Yes | Yes | No | N/A |
| Zyro | $2.90 a month (Basic) | No | Yes, with advanced plans | Yes, with advanced plans | Yes, with advanced plans |
| Weebly | $6 a month (Personal) | Yes | Yes | Yes, with advanced plans | Yes, with advanced plans |
| 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite | $1 a month (Starter) | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Constant Contact | $10 (Website Builder) | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
The best website builders you can buy today
Wix is our choice for the best website builder, the best ecommerce website builder, and the best small business website builder. It offers a great selection of advanced features, including three different editing interfaces—the Wix Editor, Velo Dev Mode, and Wix ADI.
The Wix Editor is one of the most powerful available. It enables you to create your site by dragging and dropping different elements into pixel-perfect positions. It can be a little confusing to learn to use, but the rewards are worth it. Velo Dev Mode allows you to make changes outside of the template model, and add features that usually require developer input, like custom forms, dynamic pages, and databases.
Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) is much more beginner-friendly. To use it, simply work through a short questionnaire. A custom site template will be developed based on your answers, and then you can customize it to your heart’s content.
Another standout feature is Wix’s App Market, which contains numerous add-ons that add extra functionality to your site. Take advantage of the huge template library, which boasts over 500 designs, and create the site of your dreams with a minimum amount of fuss.
The full website builder is included within the excellent free package, though bear in mind it has restrictions and limitations, such as Wix advertisements on your site. However, it allows you to try the builder out before you buy, while each premium plan has a 14-day money-back guarantee.
Pricing starts at $5 a month with the Connect Domain plan, limited to 1GB of bandwidth and 500MB of storage. The Combo plan ($14 a month) has a free domain for the first year, 3GB of storage, and 2GB of bandwidth; while Unlimited ($18 a month), Pro ($23 a month), and VIP ($39 a month) offer more resources and tools. More advanced ecommerce and business features are available via three Business and Ecommerce plans (ranging from $23 to $49 a month).
To find out more, check out our comprehensive Wix review; our interview with Head Product Manager Michal Bignitz; and our step-by-step guide on how to build a website on Wix.
If you want something that offers similar power to Wix without high prices, HostGator’s Gator Builder is a great option. Although there’s no free-forever plan, you can build a new site for just a few dollars a month. Note, though, that prices will increase when you renew your contract.
One thing that stands out is its excellent drag-and-drop editor. This enables you to create the exact site that you want, as you can position any of the numerous elements with pixel-perfect precision. On the downside, HostGator’s templates are average at best. Many are outdated, and you'll need to do a significant amount of work to make them look professional.
However, a free domain name and SSL certificate, alongside unmetered storage and bandwidth, are certainly attractive features. Across three plans (Express Start, Express Site, and Express Store), the Gator Builder ranges from $3.84 to $9.22 a month, though premium customer support is only available by phone and chat on mid-range and top plans.
Free analytics are available on all plans, which is particularly handy for smaller businesses. Advanced users might find the lack of specialized tools disappointing, such as no dedicated email marketing features and relatively basic blogging.
Check out our HostGator review, and our comparison feature pitting HostGator vs IONOS vs GoDaddy, to find out more.
If you have any knowledge of the ecommerce world, you'll have heard of Shopify. Although not a website builder in the traditional sense—its sole focus is ecommerce—it’s one of the best options for those wanting to build an advanced online store, and is the world’s leading online store builder for good reasons.
The tools on offer are excellent, and you will benefit from an unbeatable range of management, marketing, and general online selling features. On top of this, there are numerous templates that you can base your store on. The beginner-friendly editor is a little limited, but you have full code access if you need to fine-tune different parts of your design.
Across three plans, there’s plenty of room to scale if your store grows. Pricing starts at a relatively expensive $29 a month, and ranges up to $299 a month, with more excellent, additional features as you move up. These include a built-in shopping cart and checkout manager, marketing, and security tools. Shopify is Level 1 PCI DSS compliant, providing top-level security for you and your customers.
Find out how to build a website with Shopify, and read our detailed Shopify review to find out more. We also compared Wix vs Shopify to see which comes out on top.
Squarespace has long been known for its professional templates. Although its library is quite small compared to other platforms, every single design is built with modern techniques and standards in mind. These excellent templates, alongside native tools, add-ons, and a versatile marketing suite, make it easy to see why Squarespace is so popular.
In addition, Squarespace offers ecommerce tools to rival the best in the industry. You can sell virtually anything, including digital content, services, and subscriptions. The product categorization tools are great, to say the least, and you will be able to manage inventory and orders through the intuitive management dashboard.
However, when it comes to site creation, Squarespace’s editor is far from the best we’ve used. It’s quite counter-intuitive and poorly designed, and you will likely find it a little confusing to get started with. A free-forever version is also lacking, although a 14-day free trial allows you to test the platform.
Across four paid plans, you get a range of great features, including a free domain for the first year, unmetered bandwidth and storage, and built-in SSL security. The Personal subscription is cheapest at $12 a month for an annual plan, while the Advanced Commerce plan costs $40 a month for an annual plan.
Read our Squarespace review to learn more, and our comparison pitting Wix vs Squarespace.
If your number-one priority is developing an online presence with the minimum amount of fuss and time, we’d recommend GoDaddy's website builder. It's grown rapidly over the past few years to gain a spot on this list, largely thanks to its extremely beginner-friendly, intuitive editor. You won’t have much design flexibility, but that might not necessarily be a bad thing.
With GoDaddy, it’s not unrealistic to expect to get online within a couple of hours. There’s a neat range of tutorials you can take advantage of if you run into problems, but the chances of this are low at best. Underpowered ecommerce tools will bother some users, but you benefit from a free domain, 24/7 support, a free SSL certificate, and unmetered storage with all bar the cheapest plan.
There’s one free and four premium plans , ranging from $6.99 to $17.49 a month, scaling up to $9.99 to $24.99 on renewal. The free plan allows you to create a simple site with a branded GoDaddy domain, but is quite limited. Prices are higher for shorter subscriptions, but all come with the ability to connect a custom domain name, a free business email for the first year, and editing and analytics tools. More advanced plans add marketing, ecommerce, and business-related features too.
Our full GoDaddy review provides further details; our step-by-step guide outlines how to build a website with GoDaddy; and our comparison pits GoDaddy vs Wix.
Although known more as a plugin, Elementor is one of the most powerful WordPress website builders for those using WordPress.org. It provides an intuitive drag-and-drop editor, rather than the less-intuitive native WordPress editor, and with Elementor, you can put together your new WordPress site without any coding.
There are numerous third-party integrations you can take advantage of, along with a neat free plan that provides access to the basics. This plan offers enough tools for you to comprehensively test the editor, including over 40 widgets, 30 templates, and basic support.
However, you'll need to sign up for a separate web hosting account before you can harness its full power, and purchase a domain name before publishing your site. There are five premium plans ranging from $49 to $999 a year, with the main differences being support and the number of sites you can create (one with an Essential plan, and up to 1,000 with an Agency subscription). The three most expensive plans allow you to create an Expert Profile to showcase your portfolio.
Read our Elementor review and our WordPress review, and check out our comparison of WordPress vs Wix vs Squarespace.
Zyro, like GoDaddy, is designed for those who want to build a simple site without spending too much time or money. Start with one of more than 150 templates, add your own content, and hit publish. There are also a number of AI tools available, including an AI writer, a brand name generator, and a logo maker, providing users with an affordable, straightforward site creation process that saves time and effort.
It doesn’t have a free-forever plan, a disadvantage if you wanted to try the service out, but its paid plans are up there with the most affordable we’ve seen. You can sell products through your site, but keep in mind that ecommerce tools are basic at best. The blogging tools are decent, though, and all users benefit from 24/7 customer support.
Packages start at $8.90 a month, with ecommerce features available for $19.90 a month, and every plan comes with free hosting and a free domain name for one year. They can be paid annually or monthly. When it comes to ecommerce, the most expensive plan (eCommerce Plus) costs $25.90 a month, and means you pay no commissions on sales. There's a 30-day money-back guarantee on all paid plans too.
Read our comprehensive Zyro review, and our interview with Zyro CEO Giedrius Zakaitis, to learn more.
Weebly sits alongside Wix as one of the world’s most popular website builders, and it’s easy to see why. It boasts a great selection of professionally designed templates, and some of the best ecommerce and online tools available via payment giant Square, which should give you confidence in their reliability and usefulness.
Noteworthy features include advanced site stats, SEO tools, customizable email templates, and full inventory management. One noteworthy downside is Weebly’s somewhat limited editor, which constrains you to pre-coded element positions. You can still drag elements to reorder them, but you certainly won’t benefit from the pixel-perfect editing some platforms offer.
There are seven plans, including a free-forever plan that allows you to create a site and online store, though you can't connect your own domain. The cheapest Personal plan ($6 a month) adds custom domain support and more advanced ecommerce, while the Professional ($12 a month) and Performance ($26 a month) plans offer further advanced ecommerce options.
Read our Weebly review to learn more, and our comparison pitting Wix vs Squarespace vs Weebly. To find out more about Square, read our interview with ecommerce product lead Katie Miller.
The 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite website builder is an affordable, beginner-friendly builder backed by a great selection of templates and the power of Europe’s largest hosting provider.
It comes with a range of great features, including one of the best template libraries available. You'll find designs for virtually any type of site, including portfolios, ecommerce stores, and simple blogs. In addition, you have access to a range of stock photos you can use to make your new website stand out from the crowd.
There are numerous SEO and marketing tools, and the blog manager is one of the best we’ve seen. The editor is also excellent, boasting an intuitive yet powerful interface. On the downside, there’s no free forever plan or free trial, but there's a paid trial for one month for new users, and with prices starting at just $5 a month, this is a relatively minor flaw.
With eight plans across different site types, there are three for basic site builders, ranging from $1 (Starter) to $10 a month (Pro), with ecommerce options (from $1 to $25). Three plans offer design advice and consultation (from $30 to $60), alongside two MyWebsite Now and Creator plans. These offer a builder packaged with marketing tools, a free domain for a year, a free SSL certificate, and emails; and are free for the first month, increasing to $17 and $23.
Read our 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite review to find out more.
Constant Contact is one of the world’s most powerful email marketing platforms. However, it also comes with a neat little website builder, which you can access for just $10 a month. This makes it a great option for those who plan to focus on email marketing as a major part of their overall strategy.
One particularly interesting feature here is Constant Contact’s AI-powered builder. To take advantage of this, simply answer a few basic questions, and then the platform will deliver a custom template based on your needs. Edit this, add your own content, and hit publish to get online in record time.
On the downside, Constant Contact doesn’t offer a free domain, and the editor is far from the most powerful we’ve seen, while a free plan lets you try the builder, but doesn’t let you publish your site. Four premium plans are available across a different price structure to most other builders: it offers a range of email marketing services as well.
All website building tools, including ecommerce, are available with the Website Builder plan ($10 a month). Email ($20) and Email Plus ($45) options add more advanced email marketing tools, and Ecommerce Pro ($195) adds powerful, AI-driven email marketing. Learn more by reading our full Constant Contact review.
What's the best cheap website builder available?
Our top cheap website builder is HostGator’s Gator Builder, which offers subscriptions starting from just $3.84 a month. This entry-level package gets you access to the platform’s powerful drag-and-drop editor, along with a free domain, a free SSL certificate, and basic online store tools.
What is a website builder?
A website builder helps you create a site, whatever your level of experience. Ranging from simple platforms to powerful editors, they're equipped with a drag-and-drop editor, a template library, and additional tools.
What's the difference between website builders and web hosting?
Website builders offer all-in-one site creation, usually including hosting, technical management, and everything else needed to set up a new site. This means you'll be able to focus on designing your site and adding quality content to it.
Web hosting stores your files and data on a host's servers, and delivers them to visitors when they load the site. You'll need to use a CMS like WordPress to create and manage your site if you take this route. It's generally a little more difficult, and is less attractive for absolute beginners.
WordPress vs website builders: what's the difference?
WordPress and website builders help design, create, and publish sites. However, they have a lot of differences: for one, builders offer all-in-one site creation, including technical management, hosting, security, and often a domain. All you need to worry about is designing and maintaining your site.
WordPress can’t be used without a third-party web host, and is an open-source CMS designed to help you create and manage your site. However, it provides more technical freedom and control.
In general, you should use a website builder if you’re thinking about creating your own site. Most require no coding knowledge, are ideal for beginners, and offer the fastest option, making them a great choice if you want to spend less time and money.
Free website builders vs paid website builders: what's best?
How much does it cost to build a website? Prices range from a few dollars to over $50 a month, and depend on your needs: expect to pay more for decent ecommerce and business tools.
When comparing free website builders vs paid, it's worth noting free builders can be useful, but only in certain cases. You can build a website for free via trials or free plans, but even the best free builders come with limitations like branded subdomains, advertising, and heavily restricted bandwidth and storage.
They usually aren't the best option for business or commercial sites, or for anything beyond small personal projects. However, they're a great way to test a platform before committing.
What is a good free website builder?
Wix is the best option for a free website builder, as the full website builder is included. Remember however that you will be constrained by very limited storage and bandwidth, and will have to have a branded Wix domain and advertising on your site.
How to choose from the best website builders
Selecting one of the best website builders can be hard. Plan your site's intended purpose, look, and budget (consider the specific nature of your business). Research the best options, and take advantage of free-forever plans and trials to test different services.
Builders are generally aimed at beginners, and are quite easy to use. Even complex builders start you off simply: select a template, personalize the design, and add content.
GoDaddy, Constant Contact, and Weebly are excellent for getting online fast; while Squarespace and Wix offer more complexity and flexibility. Pay attention to tools included: most include some form of online store, but choose Shopify, Squarespace, or Weebly for strong ecommerce support and top-level tools.
Bear after-sales support in mind, especially if you're less technically-minded: look for live chat and phone support. Finally, most top builders have strong features and simple editors, so don't compromise on quality for ease of use.
How we review the best website builders
When reviewing the best website builders, we make sure to test the site builder and editor on our own custom sites. That way, we can find out for you where these tools sit on the user experience scale, between overly simple or too complex.
We also test site uptime and response times, because these are key to performance, and any issues might cost you dearly down the line. Additionally, we explore features and trial customer support responsiveness, and establish pricing details, as some initial term costs can increase later on.
Further reading on website builders
We've created further step-by-step guides, covering how to build a website from scratch, an ecommerce website, and a website with WordPress. If you're looking to build a small business website, read our insights into the top tools needed, what we consider the foundations, and why you need one.
