Want to jump straight to the answer? The best website builder for the majority of people is Wix.
You want a website—but you’re not a coder. you simply want your website to look good, work, and be easy to set up.
Good news: even if you’re not good with coding and developing, you’ll be able to get a professional-looking website in minutes.
How? With an excellent website builder.
Nowadays, you are able to get a world-class website, build it yourself quickly, and nobody will ever know for the most part. It looks similar to a $100,000 site from some fancy marketing agency.
The designers are that good.
To find the best website builder, I reviewed 31 website builders, testing them on various criteria such as their ease of use, quality of the product, customer support, and pricing. I then narrowed all of them down to my top 6 picks for the most effective website builders.
My top six picks are:
– Wix
– WordPress With BlueHost Hosting
– Zyro (Now Integrated w/ Hostinger Website Builder)
– Squarespace
– GoDaddy
If you’re trying to find the simplest way to create a site, a website builder like Wix will definitely get you there. It is incredibly easy to get started and you’ll be able to have a great website once published.
But you should also consider building with WordPress. There are no subscription fees and the various options to choose from are limitless. It’s not an all-in-one service, but it is not hard to get access for the other features you’ll need (a domain name, hosting, and a theme).
Read on for an in-depth review of my top picks for 2023 and a couple of step-by-step guides to help you get them set up quickly and cost-effectively.
Wix is definitely the best website builder for people who are a beginner or a seasoned pro.
What I really like about them is that they’re dead simple to use. Wix’s artificial intelligence asks you a couple of different questions and will literally build you a custom website within a couple of seconds. Imagine a genie that magically creates the website you’ve been dreaming about all this time right before your very eyes. It’s that good.
Wix does have a free tier, but I do not recommend it for various reasons. It has a number of the most discrediting “this was not paid for” company branding I’ve even seen — an instant trust breaker. Wix free sites even have cumbersome domain structures: yourusername.wix.com/site name (so we’d be MarkertingSprouts.wix.com/MarketingSprouts.)
Connecting your domain allows you to connect to a Google Analytics profile which will truly benefit you and you can also add email accounts if you’d like ($5 per account every month, or about half of that price with an annual plan).
Unfortunately, the pricing isn’t very upfront. Wix will try to make you connect your domain before you see the email pricing. I found answers to pricing questions in the support center, not in the general user interface screens.
To start creating a Wix website, just click “create site.” Once you finish this task you’ll be asked a question: What kind of website do you want to create? From there, the AI will assist you build your website. (You can always opt-out and try to do it alone, but we appreciated the AI’s help.)
When I tested Wix, I loved how easy it was to seek out a template that matched our vision. The AI stayed with me as I edited the page, almost like a step-by-step tutorial helping me pick the next thing to edit and showing me a way to do it.
The Wix AI matched my new site to my business’ existing online presence, used my logo to make a color palette for my site, pulled right from Instagram, and gave me a template already pre-populated with our logo and our street address. Connecting images from existing social media accounts made it very easy to pull in all the different assets we already owned.
A fun thing to do is to try choosing a business that you already know of and see how close Wix’s AI comes to re-creating it. I used a local fitness studio as an example and Wix closely matched the studio’s existing site. Even better, I bet they paid a web designer a lot of money to get his or her design, and I created mine at no cost with an AI assistant.
There are tons of variety between the different Wix themes, and the personality of each theme matches the designs well. The Business Advisor had a spot-on graphics of an analytics dashboard, while Astrologer features an abstract astral hero image.
Some of Wix’s business-centric themes.
Editing your desktop site with Wix does require a little bit of patience for some beginners. In order to change the text on a text box, you’ll need to hover precisely over the right spot in order to edit the text. I did some deep breathing and managed to find enough inner zen to make all the changes I wanted. The mobile editor has a very helpful feel that I wish the rest of the editor included. It is super easy to click through the different options for how your menu, quick actions, and scroll options function on your mobile page. What you modify within the mobile editor doesn’t affect anything that happens on desktop.
Please take note that all of Wix’s plans are automatically set to auto-renew if not changed. Sticker shock is real, especially if you signed up with an introductory special limited time promo pricing (at the time of creating this post, premium plans were offered at a full 50% off, for example).
There are too many frustrated customers on TrustPilot who are just as unhappy with this. It is possible to turn off your auto-renew, but you’ll have to do it more than 14 days before your plan’s anniversary — and if you are doing it while your 14-day free trial is running, your trial will be canceled immediately.
As for which paid plan to choose, you have between 7 different options: 4 “regular” and 3 “e-commerce.” The difference really boils down to whether or not you will be accepting payments on your site or not. If you’re unsure about how much bandwidth you will need, you can always start out with a smaller subscription: if you happen to go over the limit, you’ll get a notice from Wix (with no penalty) and may use that as your signal to upgrade.
I love WordPress.
In fact, we run Marketing Sprouts on WordPress. That’s because it’s incredibly flexible and customizable to our exact specifications.
I’d recommend anyone starting a website to seriously consider starting it with WordPress, especially if you’re running a content site such as a blog.
WordPress runs a third of the internet and it has the most effective content management system — all for free. You’ll be able to recognize some big names that run their sites on WordPress.
If you run WordPress, you’ll be in fine company, as some of the websites you may know that run WordPress include Vogue, Lucky Peach, and Beyonce’s own website.
Because WordPress is so popular there’s an enormous community of developers and designers creating themes and plugins for you to use.
But this comes with a twist: Unlike other website builders, WordPress isn’t a one-stop-shop because you will still need a domain name and a web host.
Our cheat code: Sign up for BlueHost. It’s one of the most reliable and popular web hosts available.
In just one click, you’ll be ready to get started creating your WordPress website. BlueHost is one of the hosts that WordPress recommends due to its similarity and ease of connecting your website to a domain. That’s because it’s ready-made for the platform.
I like BlueHost because it works well with WordPress and you’re able to get a free domain name with any plan that you choose to go with being either standard or premium plans.
Once you’ve got your domain name and your web host at BlueHost, you’ll be ready to install WordPress within a couple of minutes and obtain your login credentials. They don’t call it WordPress.org’s “famous 5-minute installation” for nothing due to the previous noted ease of connecting the domain, host server, etc.
Once you log in, you’ll see that your site is pre-loaded with a starter theme. Using a different one? Simply install it. From here, you’re ready to adjust your site’s settings, menus, and page structure, and begin writing content for your blog posts. WordPress is hands down the winner when it involves running a content-driven site.
If you need help at any point, there are tons of guides and tutorials on the internet. I like to recommend starting with WordPress’s support page, which can answer questions like Where to start, writing posts, and using themes.
Get started with BlueHost today and see for yourself the amazing features they offer!
Zyro is one of the simple and intuitive website builders that comes at an amazing price point. What you get in return is an incredible drag-and-drop website builder.
In fact, their most standard plans start out at just $11.99 per month. That’s for the basic plan that features a 4-year contract and comes with plenty of tools needed to get your business running. Zyro also allows you to easily customize the design and feel of your website. You’ll even be able to see those changes in real time.
Within minutes of signing up, you’ll be set up to create that blog, e-commerce site, or business website you’ve been desiring to. Their e-commerce functionality is also a top notch. Zyro allows you to sell and promote products across the web, including on powerful e-commerce platforms like Instagram, Amazon, and Facebook.
Perhaps their most exclusive feature is their AI business tool. They leverage the power of machine learning to offer you things such as a slogan generator, business name generator, logo maker, and AI heat-map so you can identify where your customers are clicking.
Overall, it’s an excellent choice for beginners looking to create an e-commerce or business website.
“Build something beautiful” is true. There’s little question that Squarespace wins the design and artistry contest here. The user interface features a little bit of a learning curve and there’s not much of a Squarespace community to help you out, but the page you’ll eventually end up publishing will be phenomenally good-looking.
Squarespace’s templates are all modern and beautiful.
Building a website with Squarespace can feel a bit like building IKEA furniture: for example, in the showroom it’s all so beautiful and clean, but somehow when you go home it feels more complicated to put together than promised. It may be hard to understand where exactly you are in the Squarespace editor.
I kept getting notifications that I was trying to edit demo content, or that I’d see the social logos once we connected our social media, or that we could unlock this or that feature with a paid subscription, but Squarespace didn’t go through the additional steps to make it easy to make that required move. There was a lot of fumbling through a stunning interface, not exactly sure what changes were real, or where to head next. I also had some issues saving changes — an error message popped up and we had to advance further, without our changes.
Unlike their competitor IKEA, Squarespace is a bit pricier than other website builders. That being said, I really like the way sites built with Squarespace look, and think it’s one of the easiest ways to make a beautiful, contemporary site.
If you need something super simple, you’ll be pleased with the free landing page option from Ucraft. You will have the ability to create a single, mobile-ready page and connect your domain without charge. The free version does not eliminate the Ucraft branding but it’s minimal and non-invasive. The template has all of the features I’ve discussed in my analysis of high-converting landing pages.
You can drop the branding and list up to 50 products by upgrading your plan to a $10 per month Pro Website plan. Additionally, you can sell up to 1,000 products if you decide to go with the $21 per month Pro Website plan. (Ucraft has recently dropped the $6 per month basic plan, and even lowered the value of the professional website plan from $14 to $10 per month.) If you have additional items to sell you can always upgrade again, but note that when you upgrade, you can’t drop back down to a less costly plan.
Ucraft’s themes are elegant and clean. It’s one-page free sites are designed to be a long scroll with anchored sections that stand out from the competition.
Be sure to give Ucraft a look if you’re serious about building a website for your brand or business. They have great features at a great price and provide you with the necessary tools to easily build and design a website that fits your business.
On top of great domain and hosting services, GoDaddy offers a simple and easy to use website builder.
From e-commerce websites to blogs to portfolios, they have loads of different templates to help you create the website that’s right for you.
I think that GoDaddy shines the most when it involves their e-commerce offerings. They’ll provide you with the tools to book appointments, sell different products and services, and take reservations. Their drag-and-drop website builder allows you to easily take advantage of this.
Website Builder | Create a Free Website in Minutes – No Tech Skills
Of course, the free plan does have a couple of hiccups along the way. For one, you’ll only be able to have a GoDaddy-branded domain. It also lacks tons of the features and tools you’d want if you would like to scale your website for optimal revenue like social media and email marketing tools and SEO tools.
It’s actually not too expensive though, with plans starting at $9.99 a month. I highly recommend if you’re already using GoDaddy for your domain or web host already.
When reviewing and analyzing the 31 different website builders for this post, I wanted to make sure to take a look at a variety of different criteria. Below are the four most necessary features in my analysis.
Please note that they could differ for you and your business’s needs. However, I find that these four features tend to be the most important ones for the majority of businesses.
Ease of use. There should be no technical skills or knowledge required and no need for a designer or other outside help. We also asked ourselves, how easy is it to get started? And, how long on average does it take to build a good-looking site?
A professional high-quality final product. a professional, well-designed website that reflects your business. We asked, what do the templates look like? How customizable are those templates? Am I able to add an e-commerce option to sell things on my site if needed? Am I able to add a menu? A form? A map? Reservations?
Customer support. We wanted to know that for your sake if it would be there if you needed it, but we also expect everything to be intuitive enough that you really don’t have to feel like you can’t do it alone.
Pricing. It’s pretty basic, but we didn’t just ask the question how much does it cost? We also asked, Which tier should someone start on and when will they have to upgrade? If it’s free, what’s the trade-off? Does it come with a free domain? Does it come with email addresses? Are there any other extras to be on the lookout for?
I like WordPress with BlueHost Hosting for its ability to run just about like any site you can think of. It’s also the most effective content platform out there. If you have a content site, I strongly suggest building it with WordPress — with a template, it’s not drag-and-drop but it’s already pre-built.
In terms of all-in-one true website builders, I really like Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, and Zyro.
Need a bit less? I was surprised by one-page standout Ucraft.
