Website builders allow individuals, small business owners, and entrepreneurs to build websites without hiring web developers. Finding an appropriate website builder for beginners may prove challenging given all the affordable options on the market; how can you decide which is the most suitable? Ultimately, this depends on your unique requirements.
This article will help you choose the ideal business website builder by outlining its advantages and disadvantages.
Build Your Online Presence
Nowadays, businesses must establish an online presence. It's no longer optional: your digital footprint speaks for you to the outside world and vice versa. A strong digital footprint can set a business up for success at local or global scales alike. Hence, an introduction to building your online presence provides a key understanding of this topic while exploring various aspects related to finding an optimal website builder service provider for any given business.
What Is The Role Of An Online Business Website?
Your business website serves as the center of your digital presence; it serves as the face of your organization online and allows potential customers to discover your offerings, engage with your brand, make purchases, and learn about any special discounts you are offering them. As with other social networks or sites that complement social media presence online, having one specifically dedicated to business allows for unmatched professionalism when communicating and engaging with potential clients on an intimate and individual basis - you're free to tell the tale of your organization, showcase products/services while engaging customers at will - on terms set by you alone!
Beginning your online presence requires making one crucial choice: selecting an effective business website builder. With so many available, all with different features, benefits, and constraints - your decision may have an enormous effect on whether or not your online presence functions and appeals effectively. Make an informed decision that takes budgetary concerns, long-term objectives, and business needs into consideration when making this important choice.
This comprehensive guide will assist in selecting a website builder that's the best match for your business needs. By comparing top website builders, we will show their key features and applications, thus arming you with the knowledge to make informed decisions for yourself based on our step-by-step tour through the business website building world.
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What To Consider When Choosing A Business Website Builder
Selecting an effective website builder to aid in building, expanding, and managing your online presence is an important decision for businesses of any kind. Your ability to establish, expand, and manage it all online depends heavily upon this choice; when making this important choice, be mindful to carefully weigh various factors that meet both goals and business needs. This section explores key considerations before choosing one for you!
1. Easy Of Use:
Before selecting a website creator, the tool must meet user-friendliness criteria. This is particularly pertinent if your knowledge in web development is limited; ideal website builders feature intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces that enable advanced users to build sites quickly without needing programming expertise or knowing code. Look out for themes, templates, and widgets that simplify design while giving creative freedom and providing flexible customization opportunities.
2. Design And Customization:
The design of your website is critical in creating the online image you present. When selecting your builder, ensure they offer templates and themes tailored specifically for your brand, with options such as customizable color schemes and font styles that suit it best. You should be able to easily tailor layout, color schemes, and font styles as required - with many templates already included by builders these days offering more customization than ever.
3. Mobile Responsiveness:
Your website needs to look great and function smoothly across mobile devices, which means choosing a website builder that automatically optimizes for mobile or provides responsive design options. A mobile-friendly site not only gives visitors an optimal experience but will rank higher in search engines, too!
4. Search Engine Features:
SEO is essential for increasing your visibility online. If the site builder has SEO features such as customizable URLs, meta tags, and sitemaps built in, then you should check. Your site's visibility and ranking can be greatly affected by the ability to optimize content for search engine crawlers.
5. Scalability:
As you select a web builder, keep long-term growth in mind when making your selection. Make sure the platform can adapt as your company expands; as more pages, services, and products appear online, it should easily accommodate this growth while accommodating additional built-in features/functionalities seamlessly into its structure.
6. E-commerce Capabilities:
As you select a web builder, keep long-term growth in mind when making your selection. Make sure the platform can adapt as your company expands; as more pages, services, and products appear online, it should easily accommodate this growth while accommodating additional features/functionalities seamlessly into its structure.
7. Performance And Speed:
As you select a web builder, keep long-term growth in mind when making your selection. Make sure the platform can adapt as your company expands; as more pages, services, and products appear online, it should easily accommodate this growth while accommodating additional features/functionalities seamlessly into its structure.
8. Customer Service:
Customer support can be essential in dealing with technical issues. Assess the level of support offered by web builders, such as live chat, telephone support, email assistance, and comprehensive documentation - responsive support will minimize downtime and help address problems quickly.
9. Price And Budget:
Pricing structures range from free plans to subscription-based premium packages, and it is essential that your budget, desired features, and any associated additional costs like hosting or domain registration be carefully taken into account when considering these pricing structures.
10. Safety And Updates:
Securing your online presence is crucial to protecting customer data. Check that your website builder follows security standards, provides SSL certificates, and offers regular updates. To protect your content, look for automated backups.
11. Integrating And Adding Add-Ons
Take a look at the add-ons and integrations the site builder plans offers. Integrating third-party services and tools such as analytics, email marketing, social media, and other design tools can improve your business and online presence.
12. User Reviews And Recommendations
Search the reviews, testimonials, and recommendations from companies that have utilized your chosen website creator platform. Hearing first-hand stories can give a deeper understanding of its strengths as well as weaknesses.
13. Data Ownership And Portability:
Verify that the content and data belong solely to you. Some website builders restrict your ability to migrate or export content; data portability gives you total creative control of your online presence.
Consideration should be given when selecting the ideal website creator for you based on these aspects. As your web presence depends heavily upon it, taking time and energy to select an optimal option should pay dividends in terms of web presence growth and development.
Read More: Everything To Know About A Website Builder
Compare The Top Website Builders For Business
1. WordPress
WordPress.org, also referred to as Self-Hosted WordPress and simply known as "WordPress," is one of the world's leading platforms for building websites and powers over 43% of them online. There are two versions of the software - self-hosted WordPress and WordPress.com; we'll discuss WordPress.com later in this article.
For further insights, check out our comparison between WordPress.org and WordPress.com - Self-hosted WordPress stands out as being easier for the best website builder due to its accessibility, popularity, power, and scalability.
WordPress is an open-source, free website builder. When compared with other website builders, WordPress gives you greater control and privacy by giving ownership over the domain without outside influences affecting it. Many popular websites, like WhiteHouse.gov, CNN, The New York Times, and Microsoft, use WordPress for building their sites.
Your hosting options for WordPress websites should also be easy; below are specific instructions to get you going with WordPress.
Pros:
WordPress allows you to control every element of a website you create with it, making it ideal for use as any type of platform - whether an eCommerce store, community forum, social networking website, corporate site, landing page, etc.
Choose from thousands of high-quality pre-built WordPress designs available today and build custom sites quickly using drag-and-drop builders such as Divi and SeedProd for WordPress websites using an intuitive drag-and-drop editor.
WordPress also boasts over 60,000 free plugins. WordPress plugins function like apps to add extra features to your website - such as live chat functionality, photo galleries, Google Analytics tracking custom code and CRM systems, CRM system builder solutions, or social media tools.
WordPress plugins make it straightforward to integrate and link your website with business software, automating day-to-day operations. Furthermore, its website builder - capable of translating over 75 different languages - makes multilingual sites effortless to create with this powerful CMS platform.
WordPress stands out as an effective web building and SEO solution, beloved by search engines alike. All in One SEO plugin is our go-to recommendation to outrank the competition in Google. Our experts rank WordPress #1 for this reason alone and believe that its flexibility makes it ideal for bloggers, web designers, and developers.
Cons:
Maintaining your website requires learning a whole new system; most users can quickly overcome its slight learning curve. Updating WordPress plugins and creating backups is also vitally important; your WordPress hosting service may automate these tasks for you.
Pricing:
WordPress makes creating websites free, but to achieve the maximum potential, you'll require both web host and domain registration, which costs $14.99/year or $7.99/month, respectively.
WordPress offers special pricing packages tailored specifically for small business enterprises.
WordPress is compatible with the most popular hosting companies and recommended by GoDaddy, SiteGround, DreamHost, and Hostinger, among many others. If you need assistance coming up with an appropriate name for your brand but can't think of one right off hand, then our A.I.-powered tool will be there to assist.
2. Web.com
Web.com was one of the first and most well-recognized small business website builders available today, providing easy-to-use website-building tools at an economical price - anyone with no programming technical knowledge whatsoever could create their website using these tools!
The Pros:
Web.com is a straightforward web-building platform designed for both novices and non-technical business owners to create websites from pre-designed templates with just a click or two of a mouse button. Choose among thousands of ready-to-go designs, then customize them to meet your business requirements by clicking directly on each template to personalize.
Add as many pages as desired and customize their design separately on each webpage of your website, offering 100% mobile-friendly templates so you can tailor each one's appearance for various devices such as desktop computers, smartphones, and tablets.
With their eCommerce tools, you can add up to 50 products at once, accept payments safely online using credit cards, track orders, manage discounts if applicable, manage inventory levels, etc - Web.com offers powerful tools for websites like yours that include domain registration and business email services as well as automatic backup, security measures, SEO support analytics services as well as more!
Web experts provide:
- Unlimited phone and chat support.
- Custom website design at an economical rate.
- Domain registration services for maximum convenience.
You may also learn more about the drawbacks.
Web.com could provide all the website construction tools required to create a website for a small business, but it might not have all the capabilities you need as your company grows.
Web.com lacks the limited features offered by WordPress when it comes to blogging features and eCommerce plans; their eCommerce plan limits you to 50 products, which is adequate for small businesses; for more robust online shops, you might consider more flexible builders like WooCommerce or Shopify as these proprietary platforms will not permit future transitions away from it.
Pricing:
Web.com starts its pricing plans at just $1.95 monthly for their Starter Plan, which offers drag & drop website creation with 100s of templates, along with thousands of images.
Marketing plans start from $2.95 monthly and provide SEO tools that help improve your ranking. In contrast, eCommerce plans start at $3.95 monthly and provide limited features such as accepting credit cards, selling 50 products with secured shopping carts, tracking orders and managing them, etc Web.com's site builder helps create affordable business websites quickly.
3. Wix
Wix.com, another cloud-based software for website building, is also incredibly popular among website owners and is used by over 1.9% of websites worldwide. The software offers both user-friendliness and powerful features when building websites - Wix is used by more than 1,9%.
The Pros:
Wix's platform is fully hosted, eliminating hosting fees altogether. When designing your website with Wix, you have your pick from hundreds of available templates - each customizable through a drag-and-drop site builder for optimal design flexibility - as well as accessing artificial intelligence to assist in designing it all for you! Additionally, Wix provides artificial intelligence, which will design it all automatically!
Wix offers an assortment of apps - both paid and free - that you can integrate with your website for additional functionality and new features. Third-party developers develop some, while some come directly from Wix itself.
Wix offers a free plan with limited bandwidth and storage; you may still use this plan to experiment with their drag-and-drop website builder, though in order to continue your website use, you must upgrade to their premium plan. All Wix plans include a free SSL certificate, which must be activated prior to using them for any website creation purposes.
The Cons:
To eliminate these adverts from your website, upgrade to the Combo or Unlimited Plans.
Wix websites may be challenging to remove, and its link Domain option, which costs $9.16 per month, only allows you to link custom domains-you can't simultaneously control both domains. Additional fees, such as domain purchase/registration fees, would be incurred in order to totally erase their presence from Wix's platform.
Pricing:
Wix provides a free, limited version that includes a Wix subdomain. Connecting an external domain costs $9.16 each month; with our Combo Plan, including one at no cost every month (including free domain connection!), eCommerce stores can get started for just $23 monthly when purchasing our eCommerce Plan! If interested, check out our Wix vs WordPress comparison!
4. HubSpot Website Builder
HubSpot Website Builder platform is an advanced content management system tailored to small businesses and marketers, featuring drag-and-drop website creation as well as marketing automation, CRM Ecommerce capabilities, and CRM features to deliver customized digital experiences to users.
The Pros:
HubSpot has built itself an impeccable reputation as one of the premier CRM and marketing automation platforms, listening to small businesses' concerns when designing it's all-in-one website builder review (without hiring a programmer!). Their conversion-optimized templates will make creating websites with results much quicker.
HubSpot makes website creation quick and simple with its drag-and-drop editor; users can design an entire site quickly using up to five variations for testing purposes before the most efficient option is shown on their screen.
HubSpot's website builder integrates smoothly with their CRM platform, making customer data readily accessible while crafting an engaging digital user experience for every website visitor. In addition, it includes many powerful tools, including SEO tools, advanced analytics, blogging features, live chat basic features, and email marketing tool support for multiple languages, as well as SEO. HubSpot stands out as an exceptional choice among website builders for small business owners.
The Cons:
HubSpot is an impressive digital user experience-creation platform. However, WordPress may be more appropriate for company websites or online stores that require an eCommerce component as its strengths lie more with straightforward landing pages or business websites. As a result, HubSpot offers a free plugin that works well with it.
HubSpot provides an impressive platform with many basic features, which may seem intimidating for new small-business owners. Their account executives are committed to working with you until your goals have been achieved.
Pricing:
HubSpot is a free tool that makes building websites simple while offering marketing automation online store features like email marketing, CRM, and live chat.
Start for free and upgrade as your company expands. Our Starter Plan costs $45 monthly and provides all of the blogging tools required for business operations: website builders, marketing tools, sales tools, and business operations tools - everything needed for running an efficient operation!
HubSpot stands out as an excellent solution for creative businesses searching for an all-inclusive platform capable of supporting all the tools necessary for running a small enterprise successfully. Their support staff are extremely friendly, making HubSpot an easy decision when selecting an enterprise management software platform to run your small business successfully.
5. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the world's most widely used eCommerce website builder for creating an online shop. An open-source eCommerce solution built on WordPress that currently powers 8.8% of websites compared to Shopify at building their eCommerce stores. Our research indicates a wide range adoption rate.
The Pros:
WooCommerce gives you complete control of your site. The software comes equipped with everything necessary for running an effective store online.
WooCommerce Payments makes accepting online payments simple. Integrate WooCommerce with over 83 payment options, such as Stripe, PayPal Square, Authorize.net, AmazonPay, AfterPay Klarna, Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc, without incurring additional transaction fees when switching payment methods. Plus, there are plenty of extensions that help with shipping delivery fulfillment & sales tax management, as well as stock/inventory complete control tools!
Advanced Coupons allow you to offer BOGO or free shipping deals, while WholeSale Suite allows you to set wholesale prices. FunnelKit (formerly BuildWooFunnels) makes adding order bumps, upsells, and other upgrades simple!
WooCommerce integrates easily with many popular services like email marketing, analytics, live chat support desk, and helpdesk tools, as well as conversion optimization services like OptinMonster's WooCommerce plugin, enabling gamification while decreasing cart abandonment rates.
The AIO SEO plugin for WooCommerce can assist with improving the SEO of an eCommerce site, offering greater freedom and flexibility than its rival website builders. We have assembled our list of WooCommerce plugins and themes here for more details, with experts ranking WooCommerce as the number one website builder in eCommerce for all these reasons and more!
The Cons:
WooCommerce, like WordPress, is an eCommerce self-hosted platform, and you will need to familiarize yourself with it before beginning use.
Maintaining WooCommerce requires maintaining its current version, creating backups of its data, and performing regular maintenance checks on it. WooCommerce hosts such as SiteGround, Bluehost, or WP Engine can assist with these duties by automating many of them for you.
Pricing:
WooCommerce makes creating and operating an eCommerce store free, but for it to go live, you will require both web hosting and domain name services as well as traffic volume for the site in which it resides. Your cost for running it may depend on its popularity or traffic volumes.
SiteGround's Startup basic Plan starts from just $2.99 monthly and features WooCommerce, an SSL certificate (free!), daily backups of your website, CDN (free), auto-updates, and enhanced security measures.
Bluehost offers premium WooCommerce basic plans at $12.95/month that includes extensions such as subscriptions, booking & appointment online scheduling, as well as additional Ecommerce features and extensions.
WP Engine's Managed WooCommerce Hosting starts from $30/month and provides owners of WooCommerce sites with high traffic the perfect option to keep costs to a minimum. See our breakdown of what an eCommerce store really costs!
Make Your Decision
To help ensure you make an informed decision when selecting the ideal business website builder for you, there are a few steps you need to follow. Making the correct selection can have a dramatic impact on how easily and professionally your site can be created - we'll explore each step further below.
What Are Your Business Needs?
Before diving into the world of website builders:
- Take some time to reflect upon your needs and goals.
- Consider why your website exists as well as which type you would like it to be: an online store, blog, portfolio website, or business site, for instance.
- Define its purpose along with target audiences and any features necessary.
Decision-making will depend upon understanding these requirements in detail.
How To Weigh The Pros And Cons:
Once your company's needs have been identified, evaluate each builder's pros and cons. Make a list of features, functionalities, and requirements essential to your project before comparing each website creator against them in terms of ease-of-use, design features, scalability/ Search engine optimization capabilities/pricing considerations, etc - this will enable you to prioritize those aspects most critical to online presence success.
Try It For Free And Get A Trial Period:
Take the opportunity to test out as many simple website builders as possible before making your selection, taking advantage of free trials available online to you to explore user simple interface, design features, and available options before selecting one that meets all your expectations for ease of use and meets expectations on ease of use.
Gathering User Feedback:
Feedback from users can help guide your decision process and guide a more informed choice. Reaching out to those familiar with the website builders you are considering -- particularly those whose websites resemble yours -- can provide invaluable insight. You may ask about their design experience using it as well as any challenges or benefits they experienced, plus hear testimonials that might not appear anywhere in official documentation.
The Final Decision Making:
Once your research and testing are complete, take time to gather user feedback by conducting user tests on them as well as compiling pros/cons lists/assessments - the right website builder must meet both your budget requirements as well as provide all of the features that meet those needs.
Never lose hope that you may change your mind; revisit the choice of website builder as your online presence expands and changes over time. Being successful online requires making adjustments quickly in order to remain visible online and thrive as part of an evolving network.
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The Conclusion Of The Article Is:
Building an online presence, in particular, is essential for individuals and businesses that wish to establish or spread their message online. Selecting an ideal website builder could have a huge impact on its success and should, therefore, not be ignored when you create a business site.
Our guide touches upon an assortment of subjects. From assessing your business needs to considering different platforms' pros and cons, we explored numerous aspects. Furthermore, this document addressed free trial plans as well as getting feedback directly from users.
Your choice of website builder will depend entirely upon your goals and needs, including ease of use, functionalities/features required, and budget considerations. Researching available customization options before making a final choice could take up some of your valuable time, but it is an investment worth making for creating a professional online presence.
Remember, the internet landscape is ever-evolving; your website builder needs to adapt as your needs shift and grow. Revamp your builder regularly to ensure it satisfies these evolving demands.
Your online presence can be an extremely effective means of reaching out and connecting with audiences while meeting goals - you can achieve both with the assistance of the best website builder.
