If you are a working professional, or an organization, or running a business, a website is essential to secure your digital presence and build your brand.
With the growing number of web hosting services, design templates, and website builders, now even the least tech-savvy of people can easily build their own website without the support of a professional web developer.
Website builders, especially, have come a long way with an advanced set of features that support the newest trends in the field like social media feeds, email marketing, and E-Commerce. Building your own website is now only a matter of hours, even minutes, with the help of a good website builder.
In this post, we are going to take a look at the 7 of the best website builders in 2021 available for anyone wanting to build their own website without worrying too much about the underlying technical details.
Despite the type of website you are developing, features and functions it should have, and the budget you are willing to set aside for the project, you can find the best pick that suits your needs within the 7 website builders we discuss in this post.
Wix
What We Love about Wix
Wix is one of the easiest website builders to use even for someone entirely new to the platform. Wix provides an unparalleled editor with an incredibly flexible drag-and-drop option. You can drag-and-drop elements anywhere on the page without upsetting the rest of the layout.
Wix has a selection of 800+ high-quality themes readily available to simplify the designing process for you. Only WordPress can compete with the collection of themes Wix offers.
When talking about Wix, we can’t forget its app store which has over 250 apps to choose from. If you want to add something extra to your websites—such as a photo gallery, location maps, and E-Commerce support—you can bet on the app store to house an app that allows you to easily incorporate these features into your website.
Pricing
You can use Wix for free if you are not looking for professional features like a custom domain name. Select the connect domain plan, costing just $4.50/month, to launch a website with a custom domain. Plans that remove Wix ads from your website start at $8.50/month.
Wix is not on the cheaper side of website builders when compared with other available options. But the features and the ease-of-use it provides justifies its price tag.
Where are the Drawbacks?
Wix is not ideal for building large websites with 30+ pages. Especially, the Wix editor tends to slow down when the page count is too high. Wix also doesn’t allow changing the template of a website once created.
Despite being one of the best website builders available, Wix sites tend to be slower compared to their counterparts. If a good speed is fundamental to your website, you may have to think twice before selecting Wix.
Wix customer support doesn’t provide the option to live chat with its agents. You’ll either have to send an email or make telephone calls for support requests.
WordPress
What We Love about WordPress
WordPress has been the first choice website builder of bloggers for the longest time. But WordPress has evolved in recent years to provide better tools for building websites other than blogs.
It has a large collection of themes, both free and paid, available for users to build websites satisfying modern UI/UX requirements. You can use its large collection of plugins to add features like social integration, E-commerce, and email marketing.
You can use WordPress to build large-scale websites, with 100+ pages, without any technical issues.
Pricing
WordPress provides a free plan to create a website as a subdomain of WordPress.com. But if you want your own domain and ad-free WordPress site, paid plans start at $7/month. Though WordPress starts at a lower price compared to Wix, its plans with high-end features cost significantly more than Wix.
What are the Drawbacks?
WordPress editor doesn’t support WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), a feature supported by most other newer website editors. And it doesn’t provide drag-and-drop features either.
Another downside of the WordPress editor is that it doesn’t have integrated image editing capabilities like Wix and Squrespace.
When considering situations like these, the biggest argument against using WordPress is that it’s not as easy and simple to use as other modern solutions.
Squrespace
What We Love about Squarespace
Squarespace, without a doubt, has the best quality set of design templates available for websites. Their templates are created following best design principles and eye-to-detail when selecting fonts, font sizes, and images even in the most insignificant places.
Though the number of available templates is not groundbreaking (100+), you’ll be able to find the best template for the type of website you are building without a hassle.
Squarespace editor is easy-to-use and highly customizable. You can use it to create blogs, portfolio sites, and online stores alike.
For bloggers, Squarespace provides functionalities to handle commenting, multiple authors, and scheduling posts. One of the most interesting features offered to bloggers by Squarespace is the ability to host podcasts through the website.
Pricing
Squarespace doesn’t offer a free plan and its pricing starts, a little higher than in most other website builders, at $12. However, this Personal plan comes with the most essential features required for a professional website: custom domain, SSL security, SEO features, and unlimited storage.
Even though Squarespace appears to be pricey, the features offered seem to justify its price.
Where are the Drawbacks?
Once you create a website with a selected template, Squarespace doesn’t allow you to change it to another. But most of their templates have flexible layouts. So you have the option to change the design manually without the help of a new template.
Squarespace doesn’t provide an option to backup and restore a website’s data. You’ll have to rely on a third-party service provider to run these operations regularly.
Another downside to Squarespace is its lack of telephone support. Instead, you have to rely on either email or live chat for customer support.
Jimdo
What We Love about Jimdo
Jimdo offers two options to build a website.
- Its standard site builder.
- New Dolphine builder.
The Dolphine builder is AI-and-wizard driven and, as Jimdo says, lets you create a simple website in 3 minutes.
It gathers information about your business and its type and social media platforms through a few questions. Then, the Dolphine builder creates a website for you with the business details, texts, and images within a few minutes. This builder is ideal for complete novices to creating websites.
Even with the standard site builder, you get access to over 50 templates to get started with the website design.
Pricing
Jimdo offers a free plan to build a website under a jimdosite.com subdomain. Its paid plans start at $9/month for regular websites and $15/month for online stores. When compared with the features it offers, Jimdo is relatively on the low side of the price scale.
Where are the Drawbacks?
Jimdo’s regular site editor is slightly less intuitive than the other editors we have discussed here. Its templates are also less flexible compared to editors like Wix. Also, Jimdo seems to be lacking in the E-Commerce and upload management departments.
Ultimately, Jimdo is a website builder with fewer features but offered at a relatively low price. If you are aiming to build a simple website Jimdo is an ideal choice due to its Dolphine editor.
GoDaddy
What We Love about GoDaddy
GoDaddy is a leading hosting solutions provider and a domain name registrar. And they have now introduced a great website builder for creating websites.
GoDaddy website builder offers over 300 themes to choose from. And it provides tools for image editing and E-Commerce support.
GoDaddy also contains built-in email marketing tools and a social media content creator to sate your modern web requirements.
It provides a drag-and-drop website editor to make website creation easier. The analytics tools provided by GoDaddy are intuitive and well-rounded. You can also connect social media profiles and show their feeds on the website easily.
GoDaddy is a good choice for small businesses to create their websites.
Pricing
GoDaddy provides a free plan with 24/7 customer support and SSL security. However, to get the maximum functionality, you can use a paid plan starting from $9.99/month. E-Commerce support starts with the E-Commerce plan offered at $24.99/month.
Where are the Downsides?
GoDaddy is not the ideal solution for creating a scalable E-Commerce platform. It may be able to handle an online store with a few hundred visitors, but as the store grows, the website cannot scale up well to meet the demand.
Gator
Gator is a website builder developed by the hosting service provider, HostGator.
It has a nice set of website templates for websites in different industries. These themes are flexible enough and customizable to your needs. Its editor has a similar look to the WordPress editor but with drag-and-drop capabilities.
Same as WordPress, Gator is best for people with some experience in website designing.
Gator provides a good set of tools to handle E-Commerce features like adding new products and payments. It also has native email marketing tools to carry out your marketing campaigns through the website.
Pricing
Though Gator doesn’t offer a free plan, its paid plans charge the lowest among the builders we discussed here for a basic set of features like a custom domain, SSL certificate, and a simple online store.
If you are operating with a low budget, Gator appears to be the best choice for building a website, especially an e-commerce website, in 2021.
Where are the Drawbacks?
Since it’s still a new service, Gator doesn’t have an app store or a plugin store to add additional features to the websites you build. And the features it does offer may not be adequate to easily implement special tasks like adding animations.
Weebly
What We Love about Weebly
Weebly has been in the field of website building for a long time and has stayed up-to-date with modern web requirements over the years.
Weebly is the website builder that provides the best security to its users at a relatively low price. Every Weebly website gets a free TLS certificate to protect it from cyber attacks, especially during data transmission.
With the increase of DDoS attacks we experience today, Weebly’s native DDoS mitigation service that provides protection for every Weebly website, whether you are a free or paid user, is invaluable.
The Weebly editor is quite user-friendly and has literally no learning curve when you are starting out. You only have to drag and drop elements to build any website layout you want.
It has a native image editor and supports adding custom HTML/CSS to the site. This is quite useful for users with experience in the technical aspects of website creation.
You can integrate Weebly with Square to build high-quality E-Commerce sites.
Unlike Wix, Weebly is ideal for building large-scale websites with over 100 pages without affecting the site’s and editor’s performance.
Pricing
Weebly provides a free plan for building non-professional websites under a Weebly subdomain. The Connect plan, starting at $5/month, allows adding a custom domain name to the website. To get rid of Weebly ads, you’ll have to go for the $12/month Pro plan.
Where are the Downsides?
Weebly is popular for its poor customer support services. Sometimes, you have to wait days before receiving a response and some agents responding are not good at handling customer requests.
Weebly designs and templates tend to be less flexible once you add them. Moving elements from one place to another could result in weird layout mishaps.
Summary
Today, we brought you 7 of the best website builders available to us in 2021 when we take their features, prices, and limitations into consideration. Now you can pick the best website builder that can fulfill your needs after carefully going through the review of each builder.
We hope this post will help you overcome whatever dilemma you are facing in picking a builder for your website.
