The Best Website Builders for Nonprofit and Charity Organizations in 2024

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If you’re looking to create a website for a nonprofit or charity organization, be sure to read this guide. It will save you both time and money. In this guide, I’ll cover the best website builders for nonprofits – those website creation platforms that are particularly well-suited for building nonprofit sites.

It’s important to understand that a standard nonprofit organization’s website is not just a simple brochure site. It has specific functional and visual features that need to be addressed. I would like to highlight two of these features.

Distinctive Design for Nonprofit Organizations:

Not all website builders offer web templates for nonprofits or charity themes. This means you might spend a lot of effort and time adapting templates from other themes for nonprofit purposes. All the nonprofit website builders reviewed in this guide come with nonprofit templates, saving you the hassle of modifying them.

Donation Option Availability:

The main purpose of nonprofit websites is to collect donations. It’s clear that choosing the best website builders for a nonprofit should primarily depend on whether they include a donation option. Some advanced website builders (like Wix), do not have a built-in donation option but offer it as an additional widget.

Of course, the list of criteria doesn’t end with these two. Keep reading, and you’ll learn everything you need to know.

Best Website Builders for Non-profit Organizations

There are plenty of website builders that I have analyzed and assessed. From all those options, the ones most suitable for nonprofit and charity organizations are discussed below.

Wix – the Best Website Builder for Nonprofits

Wix, perhaps, is the most appropriate website builder for creating non-profit websites. You’ll soon see why.

wix nonprofit website builder

First of all, Wix has got the largest collection of free templates for nonprofits and charity organizations. Their collection is the widest among all online website builders. Plus, Wix also has a powerful yet simple-to-use drag-and-drop editor. The website builder also has some additional non-profits apps that help in making your website even better. There are membership options too, designed specifically to build non-profit websites with membership systems. And above all this, Wix is free. Even when you decide to scale to the premium plans, the cost won’t scare you.

Now, let us study the advantages of Wix in detail.

A Large Selection of Nonprofit Templates

Wix has got the largest collection of quality (and free!) non-profit website templates. And they are fully responsive, which means they’ll display perfectly on any device.

Check all non-profit Wix templates

Moreover, Wix has separate templates for creating websites for charity organizations.

Check all charity Wix templates

Wix also has a religious website templates category. This category has nice solutions for non-profit religious organizations.

Check all religious Wix templates

Simple and User-friendly

Wix is designed in a way so as to ensure that every user (even beginners) can create a website independently. This means you would be able to build a website without having to put in several days or weeks of work and without anyone’s additional help. It’s very important to consider simplicity in a website builder because not all builders that claim to be simple are actually so.

The main advantage of using Wix (after its templates, of course) is an intuitive drag-and-drop editor. Simply stated, this is what will allow you to turn a basic template into a ready website filled with pages and content.

Wix’s drag-and-drop editor is powerful and responsive and comes with lots of settings. It’s the most advanced drag-and-drop editor among all those I’ve seen. And yet, it remains simple and user-friendly.

NOTE: Some website builders have even simpler drag-and-drop editors but that is achieved upon reducing functional capacities. Such platforms are those that never bothered to develop a cool visual editor. So they have just the basic capacities for template editing and that’s why they’re so simple. But that’s not the case with Wix.

Wix Donation and Charity Apps

Another great advantage of Wix is the Wix App Market, where you can find additional apps and widgets for improving your website. Both free and premium options are available here.

Wix Donation and Charity Apps

Some useful free apps for non-profit websites include:

PayPal Button – You can install this button on your website and accept PayPal donations (one-off or by subscription). It allows accepting donations in 25 different currencies.

Get Funding – If you install the Get Funding app on your website, you can get donations safely and reliably through credit cards or PayPal. You’ll also have the option to collect donation statistics and share this data with your website’s users.

Site Badges – This app lets you install badges on single products or pages. Using the badges, you can state, for example, that 50% of the money from sales will go to charity. This is a good way to attract user attention and increase sales.

If you need a more powerful solution for collecting donations, then Wix supports integration with Donorbox.

Donorbox is a comprehensive solution for donation collection through credit cards, bank transfers, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and so on. Donorbox is not just a donation button. It also has configurable donation forms with many additional possibilities.

For example, you can not just accept regular payments, but also collect extra information about your donors. Later you can use this data to form closer relations with donors and ensure their continued cooperation.

Building Nonprofit Websites with Membership System

You can take your nonprofit organization’s website to the next level using closed access areas for the members of your organization.

Wix membership system integration

Members can access certain private sections on the website and browse through the information addressed only to them. Non-member visitors on your website won’t be able to access these sections.

This may also be a convenient option for your donors including large business owners and some corporations that donate to your organization. They can see how much donation they have made so far and the goals for which this money will be utilized in the members-only zone on your website.

Such a level of transparency will aid the reputation and trust-building efforts of your non-profit organization.

Wix can help you with this since it has a built-in membership system. With this, you’ll be able to configure access to certain sections for all members or only selected members or paying customers.

Costs

Wix is a free website builder by default. But I don’t recommend the free plan for creating non-profit websites. With the free plan, you’ll have to make do with a free subdomain, for example, non-profit.wix.com. This won’t contribute towards building people’s confidence in your non-profit organization.

Upgrading from the free plan to one of the premium ones will allow you to use any desirable domain name and your website’s address would look something like non-profit.com.

Advice: The best domain category for nonprofits and fundraising organizations is .ORG. As opposed to .COM (popular in the business field), .ORG domains imply that the website is run by an organization that has nothing to do with money-making.

Wix has several premium plans that you can choose from. The most affordable one is Combo, which costs $14 monthly (when paid annually). The Combo plan allows building a simple non-profit website with basic functionalities. Plus, you also get a free domain name for 1 year and a free SSL certificate.

Learn more about Wix plans on the official website.

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Squarespace – Make a Nonprofit Site More Spectacular

Squarespace is a premium website builder that offers ample opportunities for creating websites for non-profit organizations. Just like Wix, it is one of the few website builders that have their own non-profit website templates.

squarespace nonprofit website builder

Originally, Squarespace positioned itself as a platform for launching online portfolios and websites for photographers, artists, and entertainers. But with constant and admittedly successful steps for development, Squarespace today allows building websites of all kinds. This also includes websites for nonprofit organizations.

Beautiful Nonprofit Templates

Squarespace has a collection of beautiful and user-friendly nonprofit templates. Surely it doesn’t have as many templates as Wix, but the available options are spectacular and professional-looking in design and definitely deserve attention.

Check all non-profit Squarespace templates

The thing that I like most about Squarespace is its attitude towards website appearance. Beautiful, minimalistic templates have traditionally been Squarespace’s strong point. These templates are stylish, have a minimalistic design, lay emphasis on even the smallest details, have carefully balanced design elements and harmoniously chosen colors. All this makes Squarespace a highly valued choice for those who consider the look of the website as an important factor.

Special Blocks with Donation Buttons

In addition to non-profit templates, Squarespace can help you collect donations via special donation blocks. These donation buttons can be edited the way you like. You can change the amount of donation, the button’s color, and its design as well, along with the text on the button.

Information Collection forms

Squarespace also allows collecting data from donors and website visitors. You can collect the names, locations, company names, and contact details of your donors.

Plus, you can create an email list for your newsletter using Mailchimp integration. You can send emails concerning upcoming events, news about your organization, and even blogs published on your site.

Simple Drag-and-Drop Editor

A simple and intuitive drag-and-drop editor allows every user to master Squarespace easily, regardless of their previous website development experience.

Squarespace’s drag-and-drop editor’s interface isn’t overloaded with details and is user-friendly.

Simple Drag-and-Drop Editor

It’s not as flexible as Wix’s editor and has fewer template editing options. But there are enough options for customizing your website to give it the right look.

Costs

Squarespace doesn’t have a free plan but allows you to try the services for free with a 14-days trial. After the trial, you can select one of the premium plans.

The most affordable one is the Personal plan that costs $12 monthly if paid for a year at once. With this plan, you get unlimited bandwidth and storage space, a free SSL certificate, and a free custom domain for 1 year. The plan has enough functionalities to build a small non-profit website with beautiful designs and the option to get donations.

Visit Squarespace pricing to learn more.

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Shopify – for Nonprofit Websites with Ecommerce Requirements

Shopify is a world-famous eCommerce platform for building online stores. But it also has a special section for launching websites for nonprofit and charitable organizations.

Most charitable organizations sell some products and a certain part of the proceeds from sales go to charity.

For example, one non-profit organization that I know very well sells wooden bracelets (made from dry, fallen branches). For every bracelet sold, the organization promises to plant a new tree. This not just helps get funds but also draws attention to forest conservation by taking actual efforts.

If your non-profit organization also plans to sell certain products, Shopify will be the ideal website builder for you.

It allows selling any type of goods, both physical and virtual. This website builder also provides a logistics facility and automated tax receipts and lets you access detailed analytics data about your customers and donors.

Special Prices for Nonprofit Organizations

Shopify doesn’t have low-cost plans and is, in fact, one of the most expensive online website builders. However, realizing the specific needs of nonprofit organizations, Shopify offers some plans specifically for them. These include the NPO Lite and NPO Full plan.

The cost of these special plans is not stated on the website, as Shopify recommends that charitable and other non-profit organizations contact them for the prices and additional information.

Advanced Features for Online Sales

If you want to make hassle-free sales and also increase your buyer base, Shopify is exactly what you need. With Shopify, you can sell any physical or virtual goods (like charitable online postcards) around the world.

If you are interested in selling your physical products in the United States, Canada, or Australia, you can save even more money thanks to Shopify Shipping. Under this, Shopify delivers your goods at a lower cost (almost 25% of the original cost). This is possible as Shopify has special agreements with shipping carriers like USPS, DHL Express, Canada Post, and Sendle.

This is a stress-free, simple and money-saving solution for charitable organizations.

Regular Donation Subscriptions

Another valuable feature of Shopify is that it allows receiving donations via regular subscriptions. Your donors can set up a monthly or quarterly subscription and automate their donations. It is very convenient for both charitable foundations and donors.

Shopify Pay – Receive Donations Without a Fee

Most payment systems charge a commission on payment processing. But if you use Shopify, you don’t have to pay any fees. Shopify doesn’t charge any extra commissions. With Shopify Pay, you can accept donations and payments for purchase without having to pay any extra charges.

Shopify Apps for NPO

Special apps for nonprofit organizations

Like Wix, Shopify also has an App Store from where you can download the necessary apps for free. The Shopify app store also has some apps for websites for non-profit organizations. The most useful ones are:

Give&Grow Donations – It is an end-to-end donation solution that allows donors to see the social impact of their donations.

Easy Donation – It is a donation app that allows NPOs to collect donations directly at the checkout page. Using this app, at the time of purchase, the customer gets an option to make a small donation to your organization.

Change Commerce – This is a fully customizable end-to-end donation app that can increase customer loyalty and the AOV for charitable companies.

Moreover, Shopify easily integrates with DonorBox, which allows using multiple channels for getting donations for your non-profit organization.

Costs

As I already said, Shopify caters to the needs of nonprofit and charitable organizations by offering two plans specifically for them: NPO Lite and NPO Full Plan.

These plans are available at lower costs and have additional capacities, suitable for nonprofit organizations.

You can get more information about the cost of these by sending in a request on the official Shopify website.

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The Importance of a Website for Nonprofit Organizations

No matter what kind of nonprofit organization you represent – charity organization, political organization, church, social club, consumer cooperative, or school – it’ll be hard to overemphasize the importance of having a decent website. More so if you run or manage a charitable organization that directly relates to social activities and donations.

The key point is trust and the organization’s reputation. You can visit the link below to see what Wikipedia tells us about the importance of trust for nonprofit organizations: “For a nonprofit that seeks to finance its operations through donations, public confidence is a factor in the amount of money that a nonprofit organization is able to raise. The more nonprofits focus on their mission, the more public confidence they will have. This will result in more money for the organization.”

nonprofit organizations

A website acts as a showcase and newsletter that reveals the objectives and mission of the organization to the public. However, that’s not the end of what a nonprofit organization’s website should look like or do. In the case of some non-commercial organizations, the website should make it possible for visitors to make a donation and, of course, contact the organization’s representatives.

How Should a Contemporary Website for Non-Commercial Organizations Be?

Before talking about choosing the best website builder for nonprofit organizations, let’s find out what features a good nonprofit site should have.

If you believe you have a deep understanding of the specific requirements of non-profit organization’s websites, you can skip this section and directly proceed to the section that discusses the website builders suitable for the job.

For everybody else, we have the specific requirements of a nonprofit website laid out right here.

Nonprofit Website Design

All websites should have a characteristic design. And by glancing at your nonprofit website your users should be able to immediately understand what your website and organization are about.

This is extremely important since most Internet users are likely to quickly bounce away from your website if they feel that the work of your organization doesn’t meet their expectations. They might also believe they have landed on the wrong site due to a mistake in the URL.

As it is already known, millennials and Generation Z tend to take rapid (often hasty) decisions based on first impressions. They hardly consider the details if the first impression isn’t good enough. That’s why you should pay more attention to the design of your nonprofit organization’s website.

Conclusion: The website builder you choose must have quality nonprofit templates created by professional web designers.

Responsive Design

In addition to a beautiful and clean design, a website should also have an adaptive layout and be responsive. This means it must be properly displayed on any device, whether it is a PC with a widescreen monitor, a laptop, or a mobile phone.

You might be surprised, but most people visit websites right from their smartphones. So, you should take mobile responsive design and layout into account.

Conclusion: The website builder you pick must have responsive templates. Ideally, the website builder should also allow you to configure the mobile version of your website separately from the desktop version.

About Us and Our Mission Sections

Your website must have About Us and Our Mission sections. These sections tell your website, visitors, about your nonprofit organization. These pages on your website are perfect for placing videos too. With a video, you can quickly share the information with your target audience and also create a better impact on them.

Conclusion: The website builder should support video integrations on all the pages of your website.

News Section

Your website must have a News section where you can publish the details about the day-to-day activities and important milestones of your organization.

The presence of a News section on your website is important since it shows that your organization is active and is not just interested in collecting donations. This helps increase the reliability and image of your NPO in the community.

Conclusion: The website builder you use for your nonprofit organization’s website should have a News section with the possibility to add different types of content, including text, photos, and videos. The website builder should also have an option to schedule the new updates on a specific date. This will ensure that the news is communicated to your site users at the appropriate times.

Photo and Video Galleries

Photo and video galleries on your website will be a big plus. Using these sections you will be able to publish photo reports and videos of past events. It’s an effective way to raise the audience’s confidence in your organization.

Conclusion: The right website builder for your needs should have photo and video galleries with the possibility of sorting photos/videos according to categories and dates.

Donation Option

If there is one thing that is the most important for any nonprofit website (especially charity sites), then it is the ability to accept donations directly from the website. Usually, buttons with different amounts are shown on the website which can be clicked on, to use a payment gateway to make donations. Of course, there should also be an option where philanthropists can themselves decide the amount of money they would like to donate to your organization.

Conclusion: A suitable website builder should have a donation option. The more ways of receiving payment the platform supports, the better it would be.

Integration with Social Networks

Your website should give visitors a simple and quick option to share any website content on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If you have a strong Reddit community, Reddit social Integration should also be available.

Conclusion: The website builder you choose must have an option that allows quick sharing of website content to social media platforms.

Contact Section

Your website should definitely have a Contact page with phone numbers, email addresses, and other contact information. Having a contact form on the page that allows visitors to quickly share messages is also essential to make your visitors feel that you are available for conversation.

Conclusion: Your preferred website builder must have a message sending option through a website contact form.

5 Best Church Website Builders for 204

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Nowadays, having a church website is as much a necessity as having, for example, a church events calendar. In fact, the website for the church is an online newsletter where parishioners can find out the necessary information about upcoming events. In addition, donations can be set up directly through your church website. This is convenient for both parishioners and church leaders.

According to statistics, 33% of people in a survey said that they found about their Church through the Internet. So, to be able to bring people to Christ, you need to be found on the web first. Another 80% of people said that they visited the church website before visiting the church. And 64% of churchgoers mentioned the website as a factor that facilitated participation in the church.

Now, it is obvious that websites for churches should be welcoming for new and regular visitors alike. But if you don’t have the time, skill, and budget to build a religious website, it may seem like there is little that you can do.

However, church website builders are Godsends in such a situation. Unlike business website builders platforms for church website creating have special church themes and can offer unique feature for specially church website.

The Best Church Website Builders

There are a lot of website builders out there for building a church website. But only five can be called the best. Here they are:

Wix for a Church

church website builder

Wix is one of the most popular website builders on the market. It is fast, easy, and effortless. But it isn’t specifically designed for churches. However, it does have church website templates for you to choose from.

Pricing

Wix has seven affordable plans that you can choose from. The lowest plan costs $11/month (if paid annually). This makes it one of the most affordable options. You can create a free website first to analyze what Wix has to offer before financially committing to it.

Pros:

Wix comes with a drag-and-drop editor. You just need to select the elements you want on your site. And you can drop them where you want to see them. This makes it very simple to create a customized church website design.

When you create a website with Wix, it comes with hosting. This saves you from the hassle of finding another hosting service provider. With the paid plans, you also get to use a custom domain for your church website.

The church-specific templates let you add pages for events, donations, and contact. You can post sermons on your website and also share blog posts that interest your audience. And all these templates are responsive, which means your website will load perfectly on any device.

Not optimizing your website for search engines is a grave mistake. But with Wix, you won’t be making that mistake. It comes with plenty of SEO features ranging from the basic ones to even the advanced options. For starters, you can add meta title, meta description, and alt tags. You can also link your website to Google Analytics to keep track of your visitors.

Wix has a very informative Help Centre where you can find all the information you’ll need to get started. Also, you get intuitive prompts throughout the website building process. If you still feel stuck somewhere, you can contact support via phone or email. English on-call support is available 24/7.

Cons:

Wix’s only downside is that the free plan and the lowest paid plan both come with advertising. To remove the adverts, you will have to go with the $14/month plan. Also, for some users, advanced SEO with Wix can be a tough nut to crack.

Summary

If you want a professional-looking website customized to your church’s specific needs, Wix is the overall best website builder to go with.

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Squarespace

best church website builder

A study revealed that 94% of the reasons why visitors don’t trust a website relate to its design.

This means the content isn’t the only thing that needs to be up to the mark on your website. You also need perfect designs. And Squarespace is the website builder that lets you do that.

It is a generic website builder known for its extensive and exemplary collection of designs and templates.

And you can find templates suitable for church websites in the Community and Non Profit segment.

Pricing

The entry plan costs $12/month (when billed annually). With all the plans, you also get hosting and a custom domain name. While there is no free plan, you can take a 14-day trial to test the waters.

Pros:

Squarespace’s editor is made of blocks and segments. You can drag and drop different elements to the sections and create pages that have the right balance of images, text, and widgets. Also, Squarespace doesn’t just focus on ease. It is an intuitive builder that guides those who aren’t experienced.

Squarespace has robust blogging features. With a blog that is informative and engaging, you can build a regular readership. And with Squarespace’s features like RSS feed, customizable URLs, drafts, etc., creating a blog becomes very easy.

If you want to collect donations through your website, Squarespace is your best bet. Unlike other builders that just give you a PayPal button, Squarespace has a complete system in place. You get custom checkout, suggestions for donation options as well as customized email receipts to put your donation system in place.

If you would like to post sermons on your website in the form of podcasts, you can do that with Squarespace. It offers an option to syndicate the podcast, which is necessary for adding it to Spotify or Apple podcasts.

A lot of visitors to your website use mobile devices for browsing. And Squarespace supports Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). When you enable the AMP option, you can create lightweight pages that load fast on mobile devices. Also, the templates that you get with Squarespace are mobile optimized.

Squarespace has both a forum and a knowledge center that you can use. Also, you get 24/7 email support and a live chat option.

Cons:

If you are using one of the Business plans for your church website, Squarespace charges a 3% commission on donations. This fee is in addition to what your payment partner would charge. If you want to get rid of Squarespace’s commission, you’ll have to go with eCommerce plans, which are a little expensive.

Summary

While it is no doubt focused on design, Squarespace doesn’t skimp on other features. It is an all-round church website building solution.

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Ministry Designs

free church website builder

Each member of the Ministry Designs team has worked for a church ministry in the past. Their experience and skills make Ministry Designs a great pick for building Christian websites. Especially for those who want to get support and specific functionalities.

Pricing

Ministry Designs’ monthly hosting plan costs $20/month. Plus, you have to pay $1000 upfront as a one-time fee when you sign up.

Pros:

Ministry Designs comes with plenty of beautiful templates suitable for use by churches. No matter what kind of a template you are looking for, you’ll find it with Ministry Designs. Also, all these templates are responsive. This means your website will load perfectly on all devices and screen sizes.

You get a lot of features that are tailor-made for churches. You can create a calendar, add sermons, and also build an email list. These features are added, keeping in mind the need to bring in more viewers and keep them coming back for more.

Your Ministry Designs account will, by default, be a multi-user account. This helps you bring volunteers on board to help you with website building and maintenance. You can add up to three users for free. And for adding more users, you’ll need to pay extra.

Ministry Design also lets you add multimedia content to your website. You can add podcasts and video backgrounds. Plus, it comes with blogging tools as well that help you build readership.

When you sign up with the builder, you get an hour-long phone call as a welcome gesture. Then you are assigned a Ministry Success Representative who can help you learn how to build your website using screen sharing. Also, there is unlimited training available. And you can contact support as and when you need help.

Cons:

Ministry Designs’ hosting package is by no means cheap. And the one-time fee that you have to pay upfront makes it an expensive option.

Summary

If you need a lot of tech support, Ministry Designs is the website builder that will suit your needs. Customer support is where it shines brightest. But, be prepared to pay a hefty upfront fee and a high monthly charge.

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Sharefaith

free church website builder

Over 8,000 ministries have created their website with Sharefaith. And that says a lot about its efficiency and suitability. It is a dedicated church website builder that uses cutting-edge technology to spread the word of God.

Pricing

Sharefaith’s Web+Media package that you need to build your website costs $45/month. It includes free hosting and a donation system. It also comes with support for switching your site from another platform to Sharefaith.

Pros:

All the themes that you find in Sharefaith are suitable for churches. You just have to look for a theme that matches your needs. Also, you can get a demo of the templates without having to pay even a dime.

If you want to keep your audience engaged, you’ll need to add images, banners, and other multimedia content. And with Sharefaith, populating your website with graphics and visual content is a breeze. You can also add audio and video recordings of sermons on your website.

Sharefaith comes with a built-in calendar feature that lets you create a list of events, services, and more. This is a feature that you won’t easily find in generic builders.

To accept donations, you can use the Sharefaith Giving feature. There is no setup fee. Only a 3% transaction fee is charged. You can easily set up an online form and start receiving donations.

Sharefaith lets you add other users to your website. This is made possible using Advanced tools. You can use this feature to add volunteers to the website builder’s backend to update and manage the site. The level of access that additional users get can be controlled.

Cons:

Sharefaith’s expensive pricing is its biggest downside. You can get better features at a fraction of the price with the generic website builders.

Summary

If you don’t have budgetary constraints and would like to have a specific website builder suitable for churches, you can choose Sharefaith.

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Nucleus

church website builder reviews

If you want to make sure that your church has active participants and not just passive spectators, Nucleus is the website builder for you.

Well, that is what Nucleus says about itself. And with over 1,000 churches using the platform, it is evident that you can trust it too.

Pricing

The website builder in itself costs $99/month. But for the whole package, it will set you back by $125/month. This includes hosting. And you get a 30-day free trial to take it for a test drive.

Pros:

Nucleus comes with all the church-specific features. These include uploading sermons, beautiful and responsive templates, and an option for your users to get notifications and sign up for events.

Signup forms are at the core of Nucleus’s offering. You can create stellar signup forms and direct people to the forms. This helps you create a central hub for your church.

Nucleus comes with a lot of pre-created social media posts. The images come with a text overlay and suggested captions. You can use these posts on your social media channels to build a following there too.

Nucleus has a responsive support team and many informational resources that are helpful for first-timers. Also, you have an option to apply for scholarships. If you have a small church and the platform’s fee doesn’t fit your budget, you can inquire about the scholarship.

Unlike most other options in the market, Nucleus lets you test the website builder without the need to give out your credit card details. This significantly increases the trust factor. If you feel you want to use the test version for a couple of more days, you can contact the support staff for a trial extension.

Cons:

Nucleus’ support team is available only from 9.00 am to 5.00 pm EST. This can mean you have to wait for a couple of hours before your issue gets resolved. Also, the cost at which it comes is expensive when compared to other builders.

Summary

If you want your website to be the nexus of your church, Nucleus is the builder that lets you do that by centralizing control, though the facility comes at a cost.

Depending on your specific needs, you can pick the best church website builder from this list. And create a website that helps you connect existing and new visitors to your church and Christ.

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Guide for Building a Church Website

1. The Utility Of Church Websites – What Purpose Do They Serve?

A church’s website is its digital profile. It introduces prospective members to your church’s appearance, location, history and services. It also keeps existing members more connected. According to LifeWay Research, at least 80 percent of US churches have a website.

free church website builder and hosting

If you’re creating a church website, it’s essential you remember the purposes it’s required to serve:

Identify, Introduce And Promote Your Church

Your church website should be able to guide a new member to the church’s physical doorsteps! It must include photographs and videos, the church’s basic information and directions. It should act as a quick introduction to what your church is all about. The online visitor should be able to learn of your church’s leadership, vision, history and services.

Your website also needs to succeed as a digital poster for your church. It should speak in a clear, appealing way, highlight your church’s offerings and encourage people to come and visit the church.

Inform And Engage Your Congregation

The website’s interface and utility needs to be tailored to the needs and expectations of the congregation. As such, it can act as a digital platform to inform them of the church’s regular activities, future events and important updates.

Features like members’ directory, chat, blogs and online sermons are simple, effective ways of keeping the congregation engaged even on days other than the holidays and Sundays.

2. Importance Of A Competent Church Website

To help your church grow, you need a website that meets the current standards of technology and social engagement. Here’s why a competent website is important:

It Adds To Your Church’s Credibility

A competent website lends credibility to the church. It relays the church’s mission, past and present activities with the site visitors so they can develop trust in your church.

IT Is An Excellent Expansion Tool

A competent website can help your church grow monetarily and in congregation size. According to statistics, 24 percent church donations are done online. In addition, 57 percent donors prefer to donate through mobile apps. A mobile friendly church website allows users to make tithes and non-traditional donations online in a familiar, trusted and time saving manner.

3. Must Have Features Of A Church Website

What makes for a competent church website, sets it apart from the generic websites? It’s these essential features:

Easy To Find Information

Your website must include your church’s address and contact information such as working phone numbers and email and the church service schedule. This information should be easy to locate on your website, preferably through the top menu on the website’s Home page.

Online Donations

Your church website should have an online giving option, so members can tithe and offer other donations in a quick, easy way. According to church giving surveys, online giving is the preferred mode for 26 percent of people that attend mass regularly.

Online Giving report of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) has revealed that 32 percent of working age Catholics have made online donations at some point of their life. A website using reliable contemporary online giving options can significantly improve your church’s finances.

Strategically Placed Video Content

According to cisco.com, by 2022, over 82 percent of all internet traffic will be driven by online videos. It’s clear having video content on your website is important to increase user involvement. Video related to recent events and live sermons should be embedded on the website’s home page.

A YouTube channel is a great way of promoting your church and draw in your congregation. Ensure the links to the church’s YouTube channel are strategically placed on the home page. You can also include a dedicated tab for sermon video library in the home page’s main menu.

4. Which Is Better For Your Church – General Website Builder Or Church Specific Website Builder?

The answer depends on your resources, needs and finances. A general website builder is a non-specific platform to create websites that won’t really stand out from other church websites. It’s cheaper than a Church Specific website builder that designs websites around your church’s specific geography, history and offerings.

A church website builder is a platform with existing design templates, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools, site hosting, security and technical support features that enable you to build your website without having to start coding from scratch. When choosing a website builder, you have two broad choices – General website builders like Weebly, Squarespace and Wix, and Church Specific website builders like Nucleus and FaithConnector.

Church Specific website builders offer dedicated technical support to resolve any problems that may arise with your website. If you have a small budget and already have a web developer with you, you should opt for a general website builder. If, however, you’re looking to build a website around your church’s identity, speak to a target audience, and budget isn’t a constraint, a Church Specific website builder is right for you.

Criteria For Selecting A Church Website Builder

When searching for the best church website builder, make sure your choice meets these criteria:

Attractive, Flexible Design

The church website design needs to be simple, attractive and contemporary. Your website builder must satisfy these design needs. Look into the website builders’ customization options. The builder should have color schemes and templates that you like.

Dedicated Calendar

A dedicated events calendar is a must for church websites. The website builder you choose should enable you to create and easily update a calendar that relays the church’s yearly and day to day activities.

Easy Video Uploads

The website builder should allow you to easily upload videos. It’s advisable you take a close look at the website builder’s video editing options and compare these with other website builders’ before making a final decision.

Newsletter Feature

Your church’s own newsletter is a useful way of encouraging participation and promoting the church. Make sure the website builder you select has a newsletter service or allows you to add a newsletter registration form in future.

Essential Sections for a Modern Music Band or Artist Website

No matter which free music website template you choose, it can have any web design, be black or bright, or minimalistically strict. It’s all a matter of taste. But what is truly important is the structure of your music website – the sections that must be present on the site.

So, in addition to the Home page, a modern music website should have several main sections:

About

The About section is where the band or artist shares their story, influences, and background. Include a brief biography, high-quality photographs, and information about each band member or the artist. This section helps fans connect on a personal level and build a deeper understanding of the music.

Music

The Music section should be dedicated to showcasing the band or artist’s discography. Provide streaming options for fans to listen to the music, with links to popular platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, or Soundcloud. If the band or artist has released physical albums or merchandise, include an e-commerce store or a link to purchase the items.

Tour Dates & Events

Keep fans informed about upcoming concerts, tours, and events by maintaining a regularly updated calendar. This section should provide details such as dates, venues, ticket prices, and links to purchase tickets. Additionally, consider including past event highlights or reviews to give newcomers a sense of the band’s live performance.

For example, take a look at the Tour page on Metallica’s official website: https://www.metallica.com/tour/ On this page, you can not only see all the scheduled concerts of the Metallica band, but also purchase tickets right away. It’s indeed very convenient.

Videos

A Videos section allows the band or artist to showcase their creative side through music videos, live performances, or behind-the-scenes footage. High-quality videos can significantly enhance fan engagement and encourage sharing on social media platforms.

News & Blog

A regularly updated News & Blog section provides fans with the latest updates, announcements, and insights into the band or artist’s journey. This content can range from new music releases to personal stories and even fan spotlights. Keeping this section updated encourages fans to visit the website regularly and stay connected.

Contact & Booking

The Contact & Booking section should provide clear information for fans, event organizers, and media representatives to get in touch with the band or artist. Include a contact form, email address, phone number, and social media links for quick and easy communication.

Social Media Integration

Integrate social media icons and feeds directly into the website to encourage visitors to follow and engage with the band or artist on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Social media integration helps drive traffic and increases the chances of gaining new fans.

Conclusion

A well-designed and comprehensive website is an invaluable tool for a music band or artist to promote their work, engage with fans, and grow their online presence. By incorporating these essential sections into the website, bands and artists can create a cohesive and engaging digital experience that leaves a lasting impression on visitors.

How to Build a Hotel Booking Website: Top Hotel Website Builders

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Which website builders have their own hotel reservation system? Check out the list of best hotel website builders with direct bookings. These hotel booking website builders will allow to book hotel rooms directly on a hotel website. And also accept payment without any commissions.

Which website builders are the best for creating a hotel website? For not just a simple one-page website but also modern hotel websites with room reservation systems?

Riddled by questions like these and many others?

This guide will walk you through hotel website builders that have their own reservation options. Also, you’ll learn what factors to consider when choosing a website builder for your hotel.

Being the owner or manager of a hotel business, you’d be aware of the importance of a website for your hotel.

Of course, you can go digital just by registering with global hotel booking sites, like Booking.com, Hotels.com, Kayak, Momondo etc. But this isn’t quite the same as having your independent hotel website.

Here’s why:

1. No Fees

Having your hotel website with a built-in reservation system allows you to run a direct booking on your own website and saves you from paying fees to intermediaries.

2. More Flexibility

Global hotel booking sites offer limited display and coverage of additional hotel services. Your hotel might also have a restaurant, a gym, car rental, massage services, excursions, and so on. At most, third-party sites will let you mention such services in your hotel’s description. With your website, you can create individual sections/pages for additional services. You can also include photos and videos and even allow prior bookings.

NOTE: When choosing a hotel, most people look for information about it on the Internet first. Even after finding a hotel on a booking site, some visitors prefer visiting the hotel’s website. This is done to validate the details. For example, people are usually interested in knowing the restaurant’s timings and the possibility to reserve a table for dinner. They also want to check out the pictures of the sauna/swimming pool/bar. So, if a hotel has its own, and at the same time, attractive, website, it’s another reason to choose it over the others.

3. More Freedom

Unsatisfied customers can leave negative reviews about your hotel. This can significantly drop your hotel’s rating on third-party sites. And it is almost impossible to prove to the site that the client hasn’t been objective, or the review isn’t credible. Having your hotel site gives you the freedom to decide which reviews to publish and which not.

4. More PR Possibilities

No matter what marketing strategy you choose, it will be easier and faster to implement it with your hotel website. You can place ads in various magazines with a link to your hotel website. Or you can go for contextual advertising with Google Ads. Or just create pamphlets and business cards with your website’s URL. All these will be impossible or painstakingly difficult to pull off with hotel aggregator sites.

Top 5 Website Builders for Hotels

Now that we know what factors to consider, let’s get to the reviews of the best hotel site builders.

Wix – Easy Website Builder With Direct On-site Bookings

Wix is a free website builder that has managed to establish itself as the best website builder for small businesses.

Wix – easy website builder to create a hotel website

Hotels businesses are no exception. Wix comes laced with all the features required for creating a modern hotel website. And its direct booking functionality is better than any other online website builder. Other features that it offers include:

Lots Of Templates Perfect For Hotels

Wix has the largest collection of website templates suitable for hotels. All the templates are fully responsive and automatically adapt to any device. Wix even went a step ahead and designed templates for various types of hotels. For example, there are templates for business hotels, resorts, family hotels, apartment hotels, motels, and bed and breakfast hotels too.

Simple Drag-and-Drop Editor

Wix has one of the best drag-and-drop editors of all online website builders. This means that you’ll be able to edit your favorite hotel template on your own. You can change the color scheme, replace photos, edit the logo and text, and whatever else you want. And it is easy to do even for non-techies.

Wix Hotels

Wix Hotels is Wix’s online booking system. Thanks to this, you can configure and manage room bookings on your website. It is available for free for Wix clients using the Combo plan or higher.

Wix Hotels app

What Advantages Does Wix Hotels Offer?

Direct reservations without any fees.

Accept payments directly via the website.

Flexible pricing options.

Works on any device – PC, Mac or mobile.

Multilingual booking page.

Allows configuring automatic confirmation emails to be sent out to customers immediately after payment.

SEO-Friendly

Wix has everything that you need for creating SEO-friendly websites. This means that your website will get indexed by and rank on search engines without any problems. There’s a set of SEO options that also allow you to customize every website page for different search queries. You can learn more about this in the article: Best SEO-friendly Website Builder.

Free Hotel Website Builder

Wix is a free website builder. So, you launch your hotel website with Wix without any charges. Of course, your free hotel website will have several restrictions. The key limitations include the Wix ad in the footer and the inability to use your domain name. Instead of your domain name, you’ll get a domain that looks something like www.yourhotelname.wix.com. If that’s not what you want, switch to one of the premium plans. The basic plan where you’ll be able to use your domain and have no Wix ads – Combo – comes at $14 per month.

Hotel Apps In The Wix App Market

Wix has an App Market from where you can find additional apps for improving and enhancing your website. Most of them are free. Others charge a certain monthly fee. The amount varies from app to app. Some of the apps available for enhancing a hotel website include:

Vacation Rental Booking – Free and secure system for short-term rentals, which also lets you connect with Google.

Impressive Slideshow Gallery – Display your hotel’s photos by creating a spectacular slideshow gallery.

Hotels & Airbnbs Map – Show your customers where your hotel (or hotels) is located on the map, as well as other surrounding sights of the city.

Visitor Analytics – Monitor your hotel website’s statistics These include the number of users, the pages they visited, and the time spent on each page. You can also check the type of device used for access, conversions, bounce rates, and much more.

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WordPress.com – A Powerful Online Platform For Launching Hotel Websites

WordPress.com is one of the most popular online website builders. It is the paid and managed version of the free and open-source WordPress CMS. And just like its free counterpart, it has a large (and impressive!) collection of templates and additional plugins, including plenty of options suitable for hotel websites.

WordPress.com – powerful online platform to create a hotel website

Let’s explore its features in detail.

WordPress.com Hotel Website Themes

In the world of WordPress, website templates are called themes. Irrespective of the name, they work the same way. You choose a theme and customize it.

Now, the total number of themes available with WordPress.com is higher than with Wix. But there are only two options in WordPress under the hotel category. These include:

Hotel by themehall

Hotel by WooCommerce

Also, WordPress.com’s themes lag behind Wix’s templates in terms of the quality of design. However, thanks to a large selection of free universal WordPress themes, you can customize any of them for your hotel website.

Hotel Reservation System In WordPress.com

For developing a hotel booking website, WordPress.com offers a unique extension called WooCommerce Bookings. It’s a powerful booking extension that can be integrated into any WordPress.com website. WooCommerce Bookings allows customers to book and reserve hotels, apartments, restaurants, beauty salons, and even rent equipment.

WooCommerce Bookings plugin

It has a wide range of settings too, which allows building the perfect hotel website as per your needs. For example, WooCommerce Bookings makes it possible to offer group discounts for those who book several rooms at the same time.

The WooCommerce Booking extension comes in at $249 (billed annually).

With this extension on your hotel website, you can also integrate some additional hotel plugins/add-ons.

For example, there is the WooCommerce Accommodation Bookings add-on. It is a free option that let you add the “Accommodation” option for managing the time of arrival and departure of hotel guests.

Another convenient add-on is WooCommerce Bookings Availability. For $49 per year, you get to place a calendar or schedule of the available hotel rooms. It also offers lots of additional options like pop-ups in booking process.

NOTE: You can always find more WordPress plugins for your hotel website. But make sure you consider their capacities well. Some hotel plugins, for example, don’t allow receiving payment for bookings online. They only let visitors make booking requests for the selected date.
You then need to contact the customers via email, WhatsApp, or phone to clarify booking details.

Other plugins allow both booking and paying directly through the hotel website itself but may not be free. So, you should exercise caution before selecting any plugin.

How Much Does It Cost To Build A Hotel Website With WordPress.com?

WordPress.com offers 4 plans. The basic plan costs only $5 a month. However, you can add the WooCommerce Bookings extension and other add-ons only after buying the Business plan ($25/per month, if billed annually) or a more expensive eCommerce plan.

The Personal and Premium plans won’t allow this.

Further, don’t forget the cost of the WooCommerce Bookings extension ($249 per/year). The total bill thus rises to a considerable amount of $549 per year.

And that’s when you have a free and not a premium WordPress theme.

Due to this, despite the huge functional opportunities and customization flexibility, I have placed WordPress.com below Wix. Moreover, Wix is also simpler to use than WordPress.com.

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Weebly – 100% Free Hotel Booking Website Builder

Weebly is one of the oldest site builders that managed to establish itself as a free yet reliable option. And you can easily create a free hotel website with a booking system on Weebly. However, note that Weebly doesn’t have a built-in booking system. Instead, you can add a room booking widget from the Weebly App Center. That saves you from having to turn to third-party room booking services.

Weebly free website builder for a hotel website

Truly Free

Most website builders don’t offer a room reservation system for direct bookings. Wix and WordPress offer additional hotel apps and hotel add-ons for that. But they are available only in the premium plans. (Even though they both claim to be ‘free’ website builders!)

In case of Weebly though, you can add a room booking widget even with the free plan. Therefore, Weebly is a truly free hotel booking website builder.

NOTE: Despite the fact that Weebly has a free plan, I recommend upgrading to one of the premium plans. With that, you’ll be able to remove Weebly ads from your website. And more importantly, you’ll be able to use a custom domain name. Both these are really important for any business.

Weebly’s Templates

I am a long-time Weebly enthusiast. It was the first website builder I ever used. But still, I have to admit that the platform’s templates are not its strongest feature.

Weebly doesn’t have a wide selection of templates like Wix and WordPress do. And even if the designs are somewhat comparable to WordPress templates, it falls short compared to the templates available on Wix.

Moreover, you can’t even preview Weebly’s templates in the fullscreen mode before registration. I don’t know what made the team behind Weebly do it, but it’s really inconvenient. The maximum it lets you do is see a small template preview.

For example, in the Business category (because there’s no hotel category in Weebly), you can’t see a preview.

Weebly website templates in Business category

Feel like turning to the description for some deciphering? Hard luck there too as there’s no clarification about the template. Not in the template name and neither in the category name. And one is very likely to go crazy trying to gauge what is written on the previews.

Perhaps, that’s a marketing trick to push people towards registration, but in my opinion, it’s a lowly attempt.

Weebly Hotel Reservation System

To add a hotel reservation system to your Weebly website, you only need to get a booking app of your choice. And Weebly offers both free and paid options for that.

Two of the best solutions that I’d recommend include:

Futurestay – Allows adding direct booking with Google Vacation Rentals integration to the website.

Vacation and short-term rentals booking app

Appointedd – A universal booking solution for various kinds of businesses, including those dealing with rental of premises and accommodation.

Ultimate online booking for Weebly sites

How Much Does It Cost To Launch A Hotel Website On Weebly?

Other than the free plan, Weebly has 3 premium plans to choose from.

It should also be noted that Weebly is one of the most affordable website builders and its plans are cheaper than most contemporaries in the market.

The basic Personal plan costs only $10 per month (paid annually). It lets you build a hotel website using your own domain and comes with 500MB Storage. You also get a free SSL certificate.

For just 2 more dollars, you can go for the more powerful Professional plan, which comes in at $12 a month. With that, you get unlimited storage, access to advanced website statistics and free domain for 1 year.

This is the most profitable Weebly plans in terms of price-quality ratio.

Then you also have the Performance plan for $26 per month that offers maximum features. It is especially beneficial for building online stores since it includes Advanced eCommerce Insights.

NOTE: The Weebly plans are named and priced different for their European audience. The basic plan is called Connect costs €5 a month (paid annually). The Pro plan costs €10 a month. And the Business plan comes in at €20 a month. The functional capacities of these plan are however, identical to their American variants.

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Duda – Simple Website Builder For Multiple Hotels

Duda is another easy-to-use website builder that lets you build hotel websites with booking systems. Thus, Duda is remarkably remunerative for constructing websites for multiple hotels at once.

Drag-and-drop editor DudaFlex

It uses a built-in drag-and-drop editor called DudaFlex. You can choose from the available templates or create your own like all other website builders.

Duda Hotel Templates

Duda has a large selection of templates. But that includes only one hotel website template. That shouldn’t upset you though. You can use almost any template and turn it into a contemporary hotel website with DudaFlex.

Duda City Hotel websie template

Most of the templates feature a minimalist design, including large elements, big images, and clear and convenient navigation. That’s why they can be easily turned into the website of any theme, including the hotel business.

It is not hard to do that either. In fact, it is simpler than how it seems at first glance.

And of course, like all modern templates, they are responsive. You won’t need to put in additional effort to make Duda templates adapt to PC or mobile screens.

Hotel Booking System

Like previously discussed hotel website creators, Duda lacks a built-in booking system. Instead, there are two booking apps in the Duda App Store that you can add to your website:

Bookingmood – Allows configuring a system for online booking of hotel rooms and accepting payments without fees. There’s also an availability calendar which displays free rooms for the selected days. Bookingmood plans start from $2.50 a month.

Bookafy – It is a universal app that is better suited for planning events. But as it allows creating a standalone booking page, you can use Bookafy for apartment rentals or small family-run hotels. The best part? Bookafy is free to use.

SEO-Friendly Websites

Duda understands the importance of marketing effectiveness and SEO. Thus, like most leading SEO-friendly website builders, Duda has in-build SEO functionalities that let you effectively optimize your site for search engines.

Another thing I personally liked about Duda is that it offers AWS hosting. It is a quick and very reliable hosting from Amazon. That’s why the Duda websites load faster than other website builders.

How Much Will A Hotel Website On Duda Cost?

Duda isn’t a free website builder. It has the following premium plans to pick from

The most affordable Basic plan allows launching a simple hotel website for $14 per month. It is definitely not the cheapest option for a basic set of options.

The Team plan comes in at $22 per month and allows adding Client Billing and up to 4 people as team members. It’s a convenient option if the website will be taken care of by several hotel managers.

The Agency plan, for $44 per month, is a really interesting plan. It supports 4 different websites and will be a good solution for someone who owns a chain of hotels. It also offers access to the Widget Builder and the possibility of exporting the website.

NOTE: Duda allows adding extra websites to every plan. However, the most profitable option is the Agency plan for 4 hotel websites where you can include additional websites for $12.99 each. It’s a very attractive offer given that you get AWS hosting. For owners and managers of hotel chains, this is definitely worth considering.

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Best Hotel Website Builder – What Features To Look For?

Before you choose a hotel website builder, it is important to note what features it must have. The presence of the following features makes a website builder suitable for creating a contemporary hotel website.

1. Perfect Hotel Website Templates

The more hotel template options, the better it is for you. A large template library helps you choose the website design that will work best for your hotel.

Collection of hotel website template

2. Responsive Templates

Having lots of hotel template options is great. But they must be responsive as well. This means that the templates are going to look equally good on both PC and mobile devices. Without the need for an independent mobile website version. Since many customers use mobile phones to access the web, this becomes important.

3. Photo and Video Galleries

Photos and videos of hotel rooms, the reception desk, the restaurant, and the area around the hotel…

photo and video galleries for hotel website

Image source: wix.com

These are the first few things that people take into consideration before booking a room. Having a good photo and video gallery option on your website is thus, essential.

4. Phone Number

A good website builder for hotel businesses must allow placing a phone number in the header of the site. Some clients prefer to not book hotels online but via call. Therefore, remember to place the phone number at the most noticeable place on the website. It is usually in the upper right corner.

5. Hotel Reservation System

A reservation system is, perhaps, the most important feature that hotel website builders must have. The best options on the market have built-in reservation systems. Others might offer third-party integrations, third-party plugins, or additional apps for the same. One way or another, a hotel reservation system should be the key factor of consideration when choosing a hotel website builder.

What is a Hotel Reservation System and how does it work?

A Hotel Reservation System is a software solution that enables hoteliers to manage room bookings and reservations efficiently. This type of system allows hotels to streamline their booking processes, maximize occupancy, and improve the overall guest experience. By automating and centralizing various aspects of the booking process, hotel reservation systems make it easier for both hotel staff and guests to navigate the reservation process.

The system typically includes features such as real-time room availability, online booking, payment processing, and guest communication tools. It may also integrate with third-party platforms such as Online Travel Agency (OTA) and Global Distribution System (GDS), which help expand the hotel’s reach to potential customers worldwide.

The Hotel Reservation System allows guests to easily search for available rooms, compare rates and amenities, and make reservations, all from the comfort of their own devices. This technology not only saves time for both hoteliers and guests but also reduces the possibility of human error in the booking process, resulting in a more seamless experience for all parties involved.

The Best Website Builders for Small Business (and not only)

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In this review, I will discuss choosing the best website builder for small businesses. You will learn how to select a website builder, which factors are most important to consider first, and which are less critical. I will also share my observations and conclusions from testing over a hundred different website builders.

Before diving into the review, I’d like to explain why, when we talk about a website for a small business, using website builders is a more rational and generally more successful solution than offline CMS or any custom solutions.

The key reason is that most modern business website builders are not just limited to website creation software. They are genuine online business platforms. By using them, you not only create a website but also populate it with content, edit the design, upgrade its functionality, and enhance it with additional apps.

But the main thing is the system – an online system for managing your business where you track visitors, analyze which of them convert to customers and which do not, what products they buy, and much more.

You might argue that many CMS and custom solutions can do this too.

Absolutely true. However, modern business website builders can do this much more affordably than if you were to seek web development from a design agency or freelancers.

Moreover, using website builders, you can manage all these processes yourself because modern website builders are user-friendly, unlike many programming engines.

So, let’s get started.

NOTE: To write this piece, I’ve spent tens of hours on research and personally tried more than 30 website builders. As a result, I was able to come down to the 7 best website builders, which are ideal for small businesses. You won’t have to settle with or even try out mediocre solutions thanks to this review. In the final part of this listicle, I have also given my recommendations for choosing a website builder and pointed out the common mistakes made by business owners when selecting a website builder. So do read on till the end.

What is a website builder?

Website builder is software that allows you to design, edit and subsequently fill websites with content. Most modern website builders are online platforms that include a visual website design editor, hosting and domain name. The best ones have drag and drop editors, which makes it much easier to create website pages without having to react HTML/CSS code. Thus, a modern website builder is the easiest and most affordable way to create a website.

Top 10 Best Website Builders

Below I have collected and described the most powerful, convenient and functional website builders. Each of them has its own specialization – some are good for small business websites, others are only for ecommerce, others for doctors, etc.

WIX – Ideal for Small Business

Wix is probably the best universal website builder. And more than 62 million websites all over the world have been created using it, that’s more than 200M users (according to official data for 2021). And that is the highest record for all online website builders, both in the free and premium segments. Despite its versatility, Wix’s capabilities are fully revealed in the development of small business websites. For this, Wix has hundreds of all kinds of templates – for a wide variety of business categories. Thanks to this, Wix can be used to build great restaurants websites, websites for real estate agencies, travel businesses, hotels, beauty salons, law firms and many other small businesses. Well, why is it that people like Wix and use it? Let’s find out.

Very Simple

Wix is easier and more user-friendly when compared to most other website builders. Very few website builders have the same intuitive interface as Wix does. Even without any knowledge of web development, you can successfully create a website using Wix. You don’t need to know anything about web design, HTML layout, or programming.

Wix drag&drop editor

Universal

Wix can be used to create many different kinds of websites. From simple blogs to comprehensive websites with forums, membership options, online stores, etc. – everything is possible with Wix.

Wix website templates categories

Moreover, it has more template categories than other website builders. This means you can find the website templates for even some rare niches like driving schools, yoga instructors, farm produce delivery, and many others.

More than 700 Quality Templates Available

Wix is one of the leaders among website builders. And the claim is further substantiated by the fact that it has more than 700 template options. And these options cater to a wide range of color preferences and design tastes. Also, the template options that you get with Wix don’t compromise on quality. All the templates are fully responsive and created by professional website designers.

NOTE: Having great, up-to-date business templates is one of the most important things to look for when choosing a business website builder. To make it easier to choose the right business templates, check out this collection: 50 Best Free Business Website Templates and WP Themes. Here are the best free business templates that are currently available on the web.

Free

Wix’s free plan comes with better functional capacities as compared to other platforms. Most builders limit their free plans to nominal features so that you can just try out the builder. But Wix offers a full-fledged, feature-loaded plan for free. Of course, the premium plans offer several more features. But for simple blogs and personal websites, Wix’s free plan usually suffices.

AI Availability

Wix has recently started to use AI. And the use of AI makes website development even easier. If you choose the Wix Artificial Design Interface (ADI) mode, you can create a website by just answering simple questions about your site’s purpose and your preferences (color scheme, style, font, and the like). AI will do the heavy-lifting for you. And your website will be ready within 10 to 20 minutes. This is a perfect option for beginners.

Wix ADI

More than 300 additional Apps

In addition to built-in functional capacities, Wix offers access to more than 300 different apps through the Wix App Market. These specialized apps allow you to perform even more detailed website customization and open up new functional avenues. And the best part is that all these apps are available for free.

Embedding Codes and Custom Elements

For more experienced users, Wix allows embedding custom code, widgets, and custom elements to the websites. You can use the Velo by Wix option for this. And this is what significantly improves the standard Wix editor experience. While it doesn’t give you the freedom to change the existing HTML code of the website, you can certainly add some more elements that you may need.

Wix Embedding Codes and Custom Elements

If you’re a beginner webmaster, this feature won’t matter much to you. But, for advanced users, it is a huge plus.

Security

All the websites created with Wix have SSL security certificates. It also applies to free Wix websites. Most free website builders don’t offer an SSL certificate with the free plan. As opposed to WordPress and other CMS with open code, your Wix website won’t need frequent system updates. That’s why you needn’t worry about security. Hackers won’t get access to your website because you forgot to update it. No upgrades – no problems with website cracks.

Automatic Backups

In my opinion, Wix’s automatic backup point creation is a perfect feature. It gives you an option to return to your website’s previous version, that is, the one before your latest changes. It reminds me a bit of the “History” feature in Adobe Photoshop – just click on the latest save and go back.

Wix revisions history

For whom will Wix be the best solution?

Those who have minimum knowledge of website development;

Those who want to develop a small website (up to 30 pages);

Those who want to create a free website;

Those who want to build a website for unusual and rare activity;

Those who want to set up small online stores;

Those who need a website for selling “virtual” products (photos, graphics, music, and so on).

How much does Wix cost?

Wix is a free website builder without any time restrictions on use. This means you can use a free Wix website for as long as you need. For more advanced functionalities, there are several paid plans that you can consider.

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Shopify – Best for Online Stores

Shopify is the absolute leader among ecommerce website builders. A lot of website builders allow you to run online stores, but no one does it as professionally and thoughtfully as Shopify. And you’ll soon realize why. Unlike most business website builders, Shopify doesn’t try to be a universal solution. Instead, it specializes in helping users set up online stores.

Sell with Shopify

And in time, Shopify has developed many functional options and extra capacities for online sales and drop shipping that it has left all its competitors way behind. However, in this process, it turned out to be more complicated to use. And, of course, more expensive. Although, this is not an issue given the sheer amount of capabilities it has. So, why is Shopify the leader among ecommerce platforms?

NOTE: Perhaps for small businesses, this website builder may seem too expensive, and some of its options are superfluous. But when you gradually develop your small business and start introducing more and more new additions to the website, you will understand how good Shopify is. No other business website builder has as many ecommerce features as Shopify. You just find what you need and turn it on in your website.

Highly specialized platform

Shopify isn’t trying to please everyone. It just aims to become the best online sales and drop shipping solution. And this specialized focus resulted in lots of functional options and extra ecommerce apps. Plus, there are all sorts of free and premium ecommerce themes. All these were created with a great understanding of how ecommerce businesses operate.

More than 100 free themes and thousands of premium options

Shopify has both free and premium themes from third-party developers. For example, there are more than 1200 premium themes for Shopify sold on ThemeForest alone. Premium themes allow making your online store’s design more unique. Thanks to so many options, you’ll able to find appropriate themes even for selling products in rare niches.

Shopify templates

Hundreds of useful apps and plugins

Shopify has lots of free and premium apps and plugins. These were created to significantly improve the functionality of Shopify online stores. I’ve highlighted this in red for a reason. And it is that these apps can provide an important competitive edge for your ecommerce business.

Shopify app store

Here are some examples of Shopify apps and plugins and what they do:

Judge.me – You get automatic client mailing that requests to leave a comment about a purchased product. You can either send the request via email, push notifications, or SMS. You can quickly collect real client reviews on your e-store and increase conversion through this.

Oberlo – It a great pick for drop shipping. This app interacts with your suppliers, and orders are serviced semi-automatically. Shipping tracks are automatically entered. And the shipment of the order by the supplier is automatically confirmed.

ROI Hunter – It integrates with your Shopify site and sets up dynamic Google and Facebook ads. For Google ads, this plugin independently creates a product feed and remarketing tag. And for Facebook ads, the plugin creates a product catalog and Facebook remarketing pixel. Moreover, ROI Hunter can configure dynamic remarketing ads. It shows ads to visitors who expressed interest in your store but left without making a purchase.

Ali Hunter– it automates the analysis of drop shipping products and stores on AliExpress. It aids in finding new products and also analyzing and tracking competitors’ stores. This plugin can save you several hours.

Shopify Shipping

Shopify Shipping is a unique offer that helps save money on goods delivery within the USA. You can buy and print discounted shipping labels when filling an order. At the expense of Shopify and DHL’s partnership arrangements, UPS and USPS, you can extend delivery discounts to your clients up to 75%.

Shopify Payments

With Shopify, you can use PayPal, Stripe, Square, and other payment intake solutions. But there is also a built-in solution – Shopify Payment with several advantages:

Financially beneficial: With Shopify Payments, there are no extra Shopify fees.

User-friendly: All the tools are accessible in a single Shopify account. You don’t need to shift from the payment system account to your Shopify store account.

Shopify Fulfillment Network: a possibility to use Shopify warehouses for goods storage and delivery to clients. It is similar to the Amazon Fulfillment service.

Shopify dashboard

Integration with trading platforms

Shopify has several options for integration with some popular marketplaces and trading platforms like Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google Shopping, Instagram, and more. This allows store owners to sell goods on their site as well as on other popular trading platforms at the same time. This is a convenient feature and helps save a lot of time.

For whom will Shopify be the best solution?

For drop shipping salesmen who already sell their goods through Amazon, Instagram, and Facebook and now want to broaden their market by setting up their online store.

For those who wish to set up medium-sized or large online stores.

For quick ecommerce business startups within the USA.

Shopify drop shipping

How much does Shopify cost?

Shopify doesn’t have a free plan. But it offers a 14-day free trial (no card required). After this period, you’ll get the option to switch to one of the premium plans. The plans are Basic Shopify ($29 per month), Shopify ($79 per month), and Advanced Shopify ($229 per month). More details about Shopify plans.

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Squarespace – Perfect Website Builder for Photographers

Being a professional website designer, I personally like Squarespace. It is one of the few website builders that help you make beautiful and aesthetically flawless websites in a minimalist style.

Squarespace

Squarespace was initially created as a website builder for photographers and artists to create great portfolio websites. This platform is for people and web developers with artistic taste, to summarize it briefly. The latest Squarespace 7.1 version comes with more functional capacities than ever before. But truth be told, most of them are far from perfect. Now let us understand Squarespace’s peculiarities in detail.

Dreams Come True for Photographers and Artists

Betting on visual content demonstration, Squarespace can satisfy the tastes of even the most demanding photographers, designers, artists, and other creatives. Website visitors need to be shown photos, graphics, and videos from the best perspectives. And Squarespace is one of the best website builders for such purposes.

Squarespace editor

Moreover, you’re can easily get sales with the help of visual content. For this, you’ll need the Business tariff plan, though. (Check its price here.)

Excellent Template Design

Squarespace has the most beautiful website templates in the market. Of course, there aren’t too many options (about 100 templates are available). And not all categories are available either. But the templates that are available are beautiful, of high quality, and fully responsive.

Squarespace website templates

NOTE: Squarespace templates often use a minimalist style, complemented with large beautiful images and big yet simple design elements. It’s well-suited for small sites that aim at showcasing their photos or their products’ photos in the best light. However, don’t expect your Squarespace website to look spectacular if you, for example, are a lawyer and your site is focused on legal services.

Greater Opportunities for Blogging

Squarespace is perfect for creating a blog. It has a lot of valuable functions that include a simple way to edit posts, deferred publication planning, rich customization of the comments system, AMP support, RSS, tag adding, the possibility to add several authors for one post at a time, iTunes podcasting integration possibility and many more.

Squarespace blog option

Drag-and-Drop Editor

Squarespace has a built-in drag-and-drop editor for easy customization of your website. It allows you to change the design by simply dragging and dropping the required elements at the required place on a page.

NOTE: Squarespace’s drag-and-drop editor isn’t bad. But my personal experience suggested that it is not so intuitive and requires some getting used to. Unlike other top website builders, Squarespace’s drag-and-drop editor comes without a traditional dashboard on the left side of the screen. Instead, all the options appear after clicking on template design elements. That’s why if you have already used technically advanced website builders like Wix or Weebly, then you’ll need some extra time getting used to Squarespace’s drag-and-drop editor.

Free SSL Certificate

There is no free plan in Squarespace, but the monthly plan charges that you pay include the cost of an SSL certificate, which is a great thing.

Squarespace Analytics Tools

Squarespace offers its own solutions for website visitor analytics through the built-in Squarespace Analytics App. Integration with Google Analytics is also possible in case you need more data.

Squarespace analytics tools

Unlimited Bandwidth and Storage Space

Squarespace offers unlimited bandwidth and storage space for all plans starting from the most basic one. There is also no limit on the number of web pages your website can have.

For whom will Squarespace be the best solution?

For photographers, designers, artists, and anyone else who needs a stylish portfolio website;

For bloggers who are looking for an alternative to a WordPress blog;

For those who wish to build a small ecommerce website that sells designer things, handmade goods, posters, photos, or graphics;

For those looking forward to developing a personal website, like public figures, musicians, sports persons, and show-biz stars.

How much does Squarespace cost?

Squarespace doesn’t have a free plan (but there is aa 14-day trial) and it can hardly be called affordable. The lowest-prices Squarespace plan starts at $12 per month (paid annually) and is commensurate with the top competitors’ plans.

A more functional Business plan costs $18 per month. The Basic Commerce plan allows online sales without any transaction fees and will cost you $26 per month. Advanced Commerce, the most powerful plan, requires you to shell out $40 per month. It includes all the capacities that Squarespace has on offer for its clients. Check out a more detailed view of Squarespace plans.

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Webnode – Best for Multilingual Websites

Webnode is one of the oldest website builders (created in 2008) that is constantly developing and making its clients happy. And today, there are over 40 million websites all over the world that are powered by Webnode. Now I’ll tell you exactly why people trust Webnode and what it’s got better than its competitors. Though it has some cons, too, the strong pros make Webnode a value offering.

Beautiful and Responsive Templates

In 2016, Webnode rolled out an important update with its drag-and-drop editor and website templates. At the moment, it’s got a collection of more than 200 beautiful and responsive templates. All of which are available for free.

Webnode website templates

Easy-to-Use

Webnode is far from being a leader in functional capacities since it falls behind Wix and Weebly. Nevertheless, it is intuitive and user-friendly. Webnode is convenient even for beginner users.

Ideal for Multi-Language Websites

Webnode allows for multi-language website development as it supports 20 languages. That figure is higher than what any other website builder supports. And that’s what makes Webnode the best website builder for launching multi-language websites.

Option to choose any language

NOTE: To create a multi-language website with unlimited language support, you need the Profi plan ($22.90 per month). With the Standard plan ($12.90 per month), your website would support only two languages.

No Limit On The Number Of Pages In The Free plan

Webnode is a free website builder. With the free plan, you can develop a fully functional website, get free hosting (100MB storage and 1GB bandwidth), and a free third-level domain name. Also, there is no limit on the number of pages that your website can have.

Free SSL Certificate for All Plans

Webnode takes responsibility for your website’s security and offers free SSL certificates for all websites built using it. (Including those that have been developed for free.)

Website Backup and Recovery

Webnode allows creating backups and recovering previous versions of your website. This function will especially please beginner webmasters who can easily correct mistakes using this feature. Backup creation is possible in two ways – online and offline. With the offline option, you can save your website’s backup directly on your computer. Find out how to do that here.

Adding HTML/CSS Code

Webnode makes it possible to easily add HTML/CSS code and extra widgets. You can add your HTML code to the header, footer, or anywhere else on your website.

Option to add HTML/CSS code

Visit here to know how it can be done.

Affordable prices

Another great advantage of Webnode is its affordable premium plans. As compared to other top website builders, Webnode has the lowest prices. Like Wix, Webnode also has a simple Connect Domain plan that costs $3.90 per month (against $5 for the Wix plan). The most basic premium plan, Mini, costs $7.50 per month. A similar plan with Squarespace costs $12, and as for Wix, it’s $14.

However, note that, unlike competitors, Webnode’s Mini plan doesn’t remove Webnode ads from your website. The basic eCommerce plan (Standard) is available for only $12.90 per month. Wix’s minimum ecommerce plan costs $23, and for the basic Squarespace eCommerce plan, you’d have to pay $26. Shopify’s basic plan costs $29. The price advantage is obvious – you’ll have to pay much less with Webnode.

For whom will Webnode be the best solution?

NOTE: Despite the available free plan, I don’t recommend Webnode for creating a free website. Webnode free plan possibilities are considerably limited compared to Wix or Weebly. You can try other builders if your aim is to develop a free website.

But I recommend using Webnode in the following cases:

For multi-language website creation. Webnode is the best solution in the market;

For beginner webmasters who want to develop a personal website;

For making small online stores, since the cost of starting up an online store is low with Webnode;

For creating small business sites (using the Mini or Standard plans).

How much does Webnode cost?

Webnode offers a free plan without any limits on use and four affordable premium plans. The most basic Limited plan costs $3.90 per month. It is the same as the free plan but with the possibility to use your domain name. Mini plan ($7.50) has got broader capacities but doesn’t remove Webnode ads. Standard Plan costs $12.90 and has got even more options, not to mention the possibility to make online sales. The top Profi plan costs $22.90. It’s got maximum capabilities and supports all 20 languages for multi-language website creation. Here are more details about Webnode’s plans.

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Pixpa – Good for Portfolios and Selling Art Works

At first glance, Pixpa doesn’t look like a small business website builder. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Squarespace – just like Squarespace, it’s designed to develop portfolio websites. But it has its own advantages that Squarespace doesn’t have. And it’s not just more affordable prices.

Pixpa website builder

Pixpa is betting on the development of three types of sites – portfolio websites for photographers, artists and illustrators, blogs and an online store. Of course, all this can be packaged in one website.

Easy Portfolio Website Creation

Simplicity and convenience are the distinguishing features of Pixpa. Pixpa has a simple yet functional drag and drop editor with an intuitive interface. You should not expect super-wide features from it (like Wix, for example), but they are quite enough to customize the template you like the way you need.

Minimalist and Responsive Templates

Pixpa has about 40 website templates on topics: Photography, Design, Art & Illustration, Graphic and Web, Architecture, Music and Performing Arts, Fashion, Models & Actors, Beauty & Style, Health & Wellness, Personal & Lifestyle, Wedding, Health & Wellness, Blog, Business & Services, Consulting & Coaching, Food & Restaurants, Real Estate & Properties.

I specifically listed them all so that you can be convinced of their diversity. In terms of category selection, Pixpa outperforms most other portfolio website builders. Because Pixpa is more about business than just building a portfolio website.

Pixpa templates

All Pixpa templates are responsive and automatically adjust to any screen resolution. Without additional actions on your part, which of course will greatly simplify the life of beginners.

NOTE: What I personally like about Pixpa as a web designer is the easy change of website template. Most website builders don’t allow you to easily change the template of a live website (Wix – hello!). With Pixpa, this is possible with just one click – you simply select a new template and Pixpa will automatically adapt the content to fit it. Very simple and fast. And that’s pretty cool for me!

Advanced SEO Features already in basic plan

Pixpa has built-in SEO tools for advanced website SEO customization. Remarkably, this option is already available in the Basic plan, unlike most website builders.

NOTE: Pixpa has fast loading pages due to progressive loaded images on the pages. This works similar to lazy loading in WordPress. Images are loaded on the page not all at once when it is opened, but as the page is scrolled. The benefit is especially noticeable for websites with long pages with lots of images, such as photo galleries or blogs.

Adding and editing CSS, HTML, Javascript already in the basic plan

Adding your own CSS code and manually editing the HTML code of pages is a feature of many advanced website builders. But not many builders offer this opportunity in the basic plan. Pixpa is one of them. This, no doubt, will be appreciated by more experienced web masters with the appropriate skills.

Sell without a transaction fee

Pixpa allows you to not only create various image galleries on your website, but also sell them. And at the same time with zero commission, which favorably distinguishes Pixpa from many other online stores (Squarespace and Shopify, hello to you!).

In fact, on Pixpa, you can create not the usual portfolio website, but a fully functional online store. For example, selling paintings or posters. Or even printed T-shirts. In short, any product where the visual component is of primary importance. In this case, the benefits of Pixpa will be fully revealed.

Pixpa has many more features than I have listed here. Check them all on the official website.

For whom will Pixpa be the best solution?

For photographers, illustrators, graphic and web designers who want a minimalist portfolio website at an affordable cost.

For those who would like to create an online store without transaction fees to sell photos, art works, posters, paintings and any other creative products and more.

Anyone who needs a small website with good functionality at a cheap price.

NOTE: want to see what websites built with Pixpa look like? Check out these 20+ Pixpa website examples to see what your website might look like with this website builder.

How much does Pixpa cost?

Cheap prices is another Pixpa plus. Pixpa has a 15 day trial period, after which you will be prompted to choose one of four plans as standard: Basic, Creator, Professional, Advanced. Pixpa allows you to have additional discounts when paying yearly (50% Off!) and 2 yearly (63% Off!). Thus, the already affordable prices have become even more profitable.

Judge for yourself:

	Basic	Creator	Professional	Advanced
Pay monthly	$5/mo	$10/mo	$15/mo	$25/mo
Pay yearly	$2.50/mo	$5/mo	$7.50/mo	$12.50/mo
Pay 2 yearly	$1.88/mo	$3.75/mo	$5.63/mo	$9.38/mo

NOTE: you can get an additional 50% off any Pixpa plan if you use our 50% Off Pixpa coupon code.

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Weebly – Best Free Website Builder

Weebly was the first website builder I ever used. It’s one of the oldest online website builders that began operation in 2007.

Weebly website builder

Being one of the best free website builders, Weebly has lots of advantages, some of which you’re unlikely to get with other website builders. What I like about this builder is that it’s got a good balance (between functional capacities and simplicity of use) and has ample opportunities for creating larger sites. With regards to the latter, Weebly is second to none.

Easy To Use

Weebly is really easy to use. You’ll have to spend the least possible amount of time and effort to master its interface. Weebly’s drag-and-drop editor is extremely easy and intuitive, but I must say that it appeared to me not that flexible when compared to Wix.

Weebly editor

I would have liked more capacities for changing templates and editing them. However, the ease and user-friendliness of this builder are still worth appreciating.

Perfect for Larger Websites

Most of the good website builders are aimed at small website development. They are limited in terms of pages, sections, categories, and subcategories. Moreover, managing larger projects using such platforms isn’t as easy as you’d like. But all this isn’t true for Weebly. Weebly, perhaps, is the best online website builder if you want to build a sizable informational website. It has a well-considered website architecture that is great for multi-page websites with a big enclosure of sections and subsections.

Website made on Weebly

Also, it is as easy to handle a larger website with Weebly as it is to handle a smaller one.

Unlimited Depth of Navigation

Weebly allows creating an unlimited enclosure of categories, sections, and navigation menus. That’s what I felt lacking in Squarespace, where you can create categories for only first-level enclosures. Weebly automatically creates a drop-down menu for you in accordance with your multilevel website structure. It’s really wonderful!

Membership Site Creation

Using Weebly, you can build membership sites with the possibility of showing certain content to only a certain group of users. It’s possible to give them personal access passwords or let them independently register on the website to gain entry to the membership area.

Weebly membership options

Learn more about Weebly membership features here.

NOTE: Creating a membership website is possible with the Pro plan and plans above it. With the Pro plan, you can have up to 100 members. With the most expensive plans, the limit on the number of members gets lifted.

Adding and Editing The Website Code

It’s been my long-held observation that experienced webmasters (especially web developers) consider Weebly to be the absolute leader among all online website builders. And that’s not for nothing. The point is that Weebly, unlike most of its competitors, allows editing the HTML/CSS code of your website. It can be via the Embed Code element. And it is really comfortable to work with. You can edit the CSS code and see how your website has changed in the preview section. (Select the Auto Preview option in the settings.)

Weebly HTML/CSS editor

As a result, you can perform more accurate customization of your website as per your needs.

NOTE: Be very careful while manually editing the HTML website code. Ensure that you don’t accidentally make changes that may hurt your entire website’s operation. Given that Weebly hasn’t got an automatic website backup creation option (like Wix and Webnode), wrongly editing the code can create major problems for you. You’ll have to contact Weebly support in order to restore your website. That’s why you should edit the code only if you have the required skills and experience.

Apps and Widgets

Weebly has the Weebly App Center, where you’ll find a great collection of apps, widgets, and tools to integrate with your Weebly websites. Judged based on the number of additional apps available, Weebly is the third-best platform (after Shopify and Wix).

Weebly editor

Using apps and widgets allows making your website even better. For example, you can add complicated tables or text animations to attract your users’ attention. What’s remarkable about this is that the Weebly App Center can be accessed on all plans, including the free version.

For whom will Weebly be the best solution?

For creating bigger sites with a large number of pages and sections;

For creating free websites;

For beginner webmasters without any experience in site building;

For making business websites;

For webmasters with HTML layout and programming skills;

For making eCommerce stores.

How much does Weebly cost?

Weebly has one free and several premium plans. Note that Weebly has different plans for users from the USA and Europe. There are 3 premium plans for the USA: The Personal plan, available for $6 per month, allows adding your custom domain name. There is also a plan for $12 per month and the Performance plan for $26 per month. For European countries, there are 4 premium plans:

Connect (Similar to the personal plan, available for €6 per month);

Pro (Positioned as a plan for groups and organizations, available for €10 per month);

Business (For small businesses and online stores, available for €20 per month);

Business Plus (For larger eCommerce sellers, available for €30 per month).

Find out more details about Weebly’s plans.

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Jimdo – Good for Simple Small Business Sites

Jimdo belongs to the category of older website builders (it exists since 2007) that keep on evolving and getting better.

Jimdo website builder

In 2017, Jimdo released an artificial intelligence-powered version of its website builder – Jimdo Dolphin. Jimdo Dolphin is now one of the best AI website builders at a very affordable price. For the most part, it was Jimdo Dolphin’s existence that made me put it on the best website builders list. Jimdo Creator, a version for more experienced users, appeared to me not functional enough. It contains more advanced settings than Jimdo Dolphin, but it’s obviously a weaker variant than Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace. That’s why when I’m talking about Jimdo, I mean Jimdo Dolphin.

Very Fast

Jimdo Dolphin is the fastest website builder among the ones that I have used. You can develop a simple but high-quality website in only 3 minutes. Literally, in just 3 minutes! If you spend about an hour on its final customization, you’ll get a perfect simple website.

Very Simple

Jimdo’s simplicity and user-friendliness are commendable. It was more comfortable and easier for me to edit a website using Jimdo Dolphin than using Wix ADI. The reason was that Jimdo allows editing websites in real-time. This means you can immediately see the results of your actions.

Jimdo editor

Free

Jimdo has a free plan – it’s an undeniable pro, but in my opinion, its possibilities are very restricted. It’s fair to say that there are some free website builders that have fewer restrictions and more functional options in their free plans.

Quality Website Templates

Jimdo offers beautiful and quality website templates. They look equally good on different devices like smartphones, older mobile phones, tablets, or PCs.

Jimdo website templates

NOTE: Keep in mind that if you choose Jimdo Dolphin, you cannot switch to Jimdo Creator and vice versa. What is more, you should know that Jimdo doesn’t support the possibility of HTML website code editing. Website editing is limited to what you can do using the visual Jimdo drag-and-drop editor.

For whom will Jimdo be the best solution?

For beginner webmasters with minimum skills;

For immediate website creation (when you need a website right now);

For developing simple websites for small businesses.

How much does Jimdo cost?

Jimdo offers 2 kinds of plans – for creating standard websites and for online stores. For standard websites:

Play – A free plan that is good for nothing but testing Jimdo;

Start – A basic premium plan without ads and with your custom domain for $6 per month;

Grow – Recommended for business websites (for $15 per month);

Unlimited – As obvious from the self-explanatory name, the plan has no restrictions. The cost of this plan isn’t stated on the website.

For online stores:

Basic – Similar to the Start plan, but aimed at ecommerce (for $15 per month);

Business – For more advanced online stores (for $19 per month);

VIP – The top ecommerce plan, the price for which isn’t mentioned on the website.

More details about Jimdo plans.

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My expert tips for choosing website builders for businesses

Finding a good website builder is a challenging task. Not because there aren’t enough of them. But rather because there are too many different website building platforms, and the choice gets overwhelming.

Now even though website builders are great, choosing an unsuitable website builder can be extremely detrimental to your business.

You cannot put off or avoid the choice either because an effective website is essential for any business in the modern world.

In this section, I’m going to clearly explain how to choose a website builder for small businesses and what criteria should be taken into consideration.

Where to start choosing from?

To begin with, you should decide on the challenges that your website is going to solve for your business and what is going to be the goal of the website.

There are usually three main kinds of business websites.

eCommerce

These types of websites are online stores that sell different products and services. Their main purpose is to sell physical or digital products and directly receive payment.

If you want to find an eCommerce website builder with all the relevant features for ensuring and facilitating online sales, check out my article on the best eCommerce website builders.

Business Representation

These are the websites that are a company’s official address on the Internet. They are not directly linked to making sales or earning revenue. The purpose of these websites is to inform the audience about a company’s activities and the goods and services it offers.

Specialized business websites

These are the websites, which have certain (often peculiar) functionalities specific to a certain type of business. For example, a website for a hotel with the possibility of booking rooms online. Or a restaurant’s website with the ability to look through the menu and book a table.

In this guide, I’ll be focusing on choosing website builders for developing the second and third types of business websites.

Now let’s move on.

The first question that beginners struggle to find answers to is…

NOTE: For a better understanding of what high-quality and modern business websites can look like, check out this review: 30 Modern Small Business Websites Examples for 2024. All of the presented websites are related to different business niches and are made on different website builders and CMS.

Free or premium?

To be honest, you can build a business website at no cost using free website builders. But you should be ready for certain restrictions.

Usually, it is in the form of having the website builder’s banner ad (or a button). All free website builders place their advertisements on the sites built using the free versions.

The second thing is that you don’t get the option to use the domain name of your choice. There are only 2 website builders, which allow using a custom domain name in the free plan.

The third restriction of free website builders is the limitation related to bandwidth, storage space, and sometimes even the number of web pages that can be created. Yes, you read it right – your website can have only as many pages as allowed by the chosen plan.

In my opinion, thus, if we are talking about business, small businesses specifically, a free plan’s capabilities will never be enough. Even if the chosen website builder is the best in the market.

Thus, it is always better to choose a low-cost premium plan and create a professional website using your own domain name and without ads or hard limits.

Which website builders are reliable?

It’s a reasonable question to ask, considering the fact that a website builder is a visual editor, web hosting, domain name registrar, and email sender all rolled into one. All these things together are packed in the integrated SaaS service with unified technical support.

Now, how reliable these services are going to be and how well they’ll function together depends on both the technical support and the coherence of the work of the entire website builder team.

It is especially important to emphasize the age of the website builder though. Website builders that have been constantly offering their services for 10+ years, improving their drag-and-drop editors, creating more contemporary templates, and adding new options are, of course, more reliable. Such companies have served hundreds and thousands of clients. And thus, it won’t be a ‘worth considering’ option for them to stop their business or not offer proper services.

Meanwhile, a lot of newly launched website builders don’t have the hassle of preserving their reputation. Further, many of them go bankrupt shortly after the launch, leaving those who chose the builder in a major fix.

Here are the most reliable website builders for businesses (and even individuals):

There are also Shopify and BigCommerce, specifically suitable for building online stores.

All these website builders have been operating successfully for several years and aren’t going to curtail their activities.

What points should be first taken into consideration?

The key point to be considered while selecting website builders is whether it has quality templates relevant to your business. The more such templates will be, the greater choice you’ll have.

Why is this important?

Well, some website builders offer universal templates suitable for any industry/niche.

And let me be clear here – it’s not the best solution.

It’s always better to find a specialized template that is designed to your industry-specific requirements.

By “quality templates” I mean not only stylish and contemporary designs but also responsiveness. And not all website templates are inherently responsive. This means that most of them will face problems while displaying on mobile phones or other devices.

Is having a drag-and-drop editor mandatory?

Yes. Your website builder must definitely have a drag-and-drop editor. It allows building a website without having HTML and programming skills. You just drag the website elements using your computer mouse and drop them where you want them to be. Easy!

Even if you know how to edit the CSS code manually, the absence of a built-in drag-and-drop editor should be a red flag.

All (without exception) leading contemporary website builders have a drag-and-drop editor.

NOTE: Not all drag-and-drop editors are alike. Some website builders have outdated drag-and-drop editors, which allow only slight edits in the template. The other, more contemporary ones are much more flexible. For example, Wix’s drag-and-drop editor allows dragging content blocks and design elements with 1-pixel precision. What is more, it contains options for setting up the website color scheme too.

What other parameters are important when choosing a website builder?

Every website builder has several plans. There are normally 3 to 5 plans that you can choose from. They vary in terms of the prices and the features that you’ll get.

Always make sure that your chosen plan does not have restrictions on the number of pages that your website can have.

Alert: Also, be sure to verify that you’ll be able to use a custom domain name instead of being confined to the one offered by the website builder. Not all premium plans allow this!

Pay attention to the storage space and bandwidth too.

And it isn’t necessary for website builders to have unlimited storage space and bandwidth. For starting small business websites it will be enough to have 1GB Storage space and 2GB Bandwidth.

The Best Membership Website Builders: Free and Paid Tolls

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If you have ever visited an e-learning site like Udemy or an online community like Facebook, you know what a membership website is. In its simplest form, it is a portal with restricted access to its content, available to members only, although access can be paid, free, or a mix of both. Popular models include:

E-learning sites

E-commerce portals

Blogs/vlogs

Podcasts

News websites

Associations

Non-profits, etc.

Of, course you can use one of the best all-around website builder, bu specialized membership site platforms are the best way for thought-leaders to build their brand, develop an online community, and get paid for the knowledge transfer. This allows businesses with specialized information to set up a consistent revenue stream.

82% of the businesses adopting the “subscription economy” model claim it helped them become industry disruptors. But for every success story, there are dozens of others who have failed. One of the probable causes: choosing the wrong platform to build their portal.

The Top 8 Membership Website Builder

Wild Apricot

Wild Apricot is a fast-growing cloud-based software with a website builder platform to create membership sites. The standout feature? You get your own mobile app designed separately for customers and admins. You can also embed the Wild Apricot widget in other websites to promote an event you are managing on the Wild Apricot site.

Wild Apricot

For example, you can embed a calendar widget to a WordPress site for cross-platform publicity. Wild Apricot also offers a free version that can be used by organizations with 50 members or less. All plans include a 30-day trial period with full access to all features within the trial period.

Pros of Using Wild Apricot

Excellent database and event management tool.

Event coordination feature that lets you send promotions, discounts, and reminders to attendees.

Unlimited email campaigns.

Native mobile app for both Android and iOS that accepts payments and registrations.

Cons of Using Wild Apricot

The blogging platform is outdated and lacks basic features such as content moderation.

You can’t allot a membership ID within the software.

Create a site

Wix

Although not the most intuitive membership free website builder in the market, Wix is a strong contender because of the scalability it offers, along with an affordable pricing plan. The platform allows you to create a members-only area, add pages with restricted content, and process subscription payments.

Wix Member’s Area

You can integrate multiple Wix plugins to enhance the experience, including the Pricing-plan app, Wix bookings, Wix Events, Wix Forum, Wix chat, etc.

Pros of Using Wix

Membership areas can be created for free, although you can’t process payments with them.

Contacts are automatically synced in the back-end with the Wix email marketing tool.

Supports multi-platform registrations like Google, Facebook, or email.

Allows recurring payments.

The Pricing-plan app allows setting up a Paywall to grant restricted access to paid members.

Member roles restrict access to specific users on your site.

Cons of Using Wix

Has a steep learning curve, not suitable for novices.

New registrations have to be manually approved to send confirmation emails to users.

Doesn’t have a Learning Management System, so you can’t create online courses.

Doesn’t support content dripping and content locking.

Create a site

Memberpress

An easy-to-use WordPress membership plugin that allows you to create multi-tiered memberships, online courses, content-dripping, and integrating 3rd-party plugins to build communities.

Memberpress

One of the standout features of Memberpress is Paywall – a tool that allows non-members to access certain bits of content for free, a great bonus to attract initial users. With three different pricing options, you can choose to install it on a single website or across 5 different websites.

Pros of Using Memberpress

Integrates with existing WordPress sites.

Creates unlimited multi-level membership across all plans.

Users can have more than one membership at a time.

Good technical support.

Multiple access rules, including posts, pages, categories, tags, files, etc.

You can set content start and expiration dates.

Wide range of pricing options for subscriptions – recurring payments, monthly/yearly payments, free/paid trials, etc.

Customizable coupons and email marketing tools.

Analytics reporting dashboard.

Cons of Using Memberpress

Doesn’t support other CMS platforms.

Doesn’t offer a lifetime purchase plan.

Doesn’t have a built-in forum tool; you need to install an additional WordPress forum plugin.

You cannot customize registrations and login forms.

Create a site

Squarespace

Squarespace’s new Member Areas feature has remedied the one big issue that marred its utility as world class membership website builder – the software’s lack of integrated membership features necessary for creating members-only content. You can now create a membership website with Squarespace in two ways – use Member Areas, its very own membership software, or use MemberSpace, a third-party plug-in available with a business or higher plan.

Squarespace

The builder offers virtually every tool you can think of for creating, sharing and managing exclusive content.

Pros of Using Squarespace

It allows access to a wide range of high-quality, royalty free stock images, including the entirety of image gallery from Unsplash.

It includes a vast line-up of web fonts, including more than 600 fonts from Google and approximately 1000 fonts from Adobe.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) enabled web pages that allow for accelerated content delivery on mobile devices.

Cons of Using Squarespace

Squarespace blogs lack the Autosave feature, so you can lose your content in the event of a server crash or accidental post deletion. This makes the platform unsuitable for professional bloggers.

Limitations on organizing the static pages and blog posts make Squarespace ill suited for creating large, more complex websites

Create a site

Yourmembership

Here’s a premium paid membership website builder that strikes the perfect balance of design and functionality. Yourmembership is a comprehensive platform with excellent content, event and membership management tools. It offers efficient blogging and email marketing solutions, along with the ability to manage both members and events through a single, advanced dashboard.

Yourmembership dashboard

Yourmembership excels at creating engaging, mobile responsive websites with futuristic features such as Microsites and expert website design assistance.

Pros of Using Yourmembership

Highly intuitive backend that makes updating and editing content a breeze.

It allows for seamless integration of the members’ registration pages and the events section.

It offers excellent accounting tools to help with invoice generation and delivery, tracking financial information such as the members’ donations and dues.

Cons of Using Yourmembership

The content editing and customization options are limited in comparison to other top membership website builders.

Yourmembership is one of the pricier software for building membership websites which makes it unaffordable for businesses with a limited budget

Create a site

Weebly

Weebly is one of the easiest to use website builders with membership features such as single click members’ login, different membership tiers, email newsletters and online store.

Weebly membership area

With Weebly, you don’t need to traverse a learning curve to create your membership website. Simple, drag-and-drop mechanism allows you to select the desired elements and click on them to edit or include additional features. It’s an excellent choice for businesses who aim to quickly build a community and offer online courses.

Pros of Using Weebly

Websites built with Weebly are practically ad-free. Weebly’s personal and free membership website builder plans include a Weebly logo at the screen’s bottom. Even the logo is absent in Weebly’s paid plans.

Unlimited navigation levels which support the creation of large, complex website structures.

Cons of Using Weebly

Doesn’t support multilingual sites. Character sets for languages such as Arabic, Chinese and Russian aren’t fully supported.

Certain features are too pricey compared to other top membership site builders. Attaching an email address to your website’s domain, for instance, entails a monthly cost of $6.

Create a site

Thinkific

Thinkific is one of the most popular and powerful platforms for creating, promoting and selling online educational courses.

Thinkific

You can include high resolution videos, images and rich text in your courseware. In addition, you can offer downloadable content such as quizzes, tables and certificates. The free plan includes excellent customization options and is great for new instructors who’re just starting out selling online courses. The premium plans allow you to create unlimited courses.

Pros of Using Thinkific

Thinkific allows you to extend a monthly payment option for the pricier courses.

The excellent voice-over tool for creating PowerPoint presentations allows even beginners to create quality video content.

Cons of Using Thinkific

Thinkific lacks integrated features for email marketing, so you’ll have to rely on third-party email providers.

Doesn’t offer chat support.

Create a site

Kajabi

Kajabi enables you to create and market membership websites, online coaching programs and courses using single-click templates.

Kajabi dashboard

Kajabi Pipelines offers custom automations for optimizing and scaling your website and online courses which reduces your team’s workload. The platform specializes in building large scale, close-knit online communities based on your business’ terms and conditions.

Pros of Using Kajabi

It has an excellent mobile app that facilitates better connectivity and uninterrupted learning. The app is included in all of Kajabi’s plans.

The visual email builder features allows for creation of beautifully personalized messages integrated with countdown timers, videos and animations.

Cons of Using Kajabi

It has a limited library of landing page templates.

Doesn’t support key quiz elements such as randomization and question banks.

Create a site

What Is a Membership Website Builder?

Membership website builders allow you to create gated or members-only websites having features such as paid membership, discussion forums, knowledge-based webinars, courses or classes, ebooks, and newsletters, along with exclusive perks such as free or expedited shipping, early access, discount offers and more. These membership websites can be paid, free, or include a tier-based monetary system for their members.

If your goal is to create a membership website, even the most popular or highest rated regular website builders can turn out to be inadequate. While many top-rated generic website builders do include premium membership features, you can only access them via additional plugins. The act of adding membership features by scouring through dozens of plugins can be both time-consuming and ill-suited to individuals that lack prior coding experience and technical skills.

What Is a Membership Website Builder?

A good membership website builder offers powerful, built-in membership tools such as recurring membership payment, discussion boards, Q&As, and drip campaign management – definitely the best choice for building your online membership platform.

What can you do with a Membership Website Builder?

In addition to the necessary website building tools such as customizable templates, the ability to add and modify pages, graphics, and media, the best membership website builder will also help you accomplish these tasks:

Create an Intranet portal for your members

With a good membership website builder, you can set up a password-protected intranet portal and create secure pages where members can sign up for exclusive programs and courses, share their personal details and engage other members in the discussion.

Create and manage dedicated member directories

A members’ directory is a handy means of listing and categorizing members who’ve signed up for exclusive products or services. It’s also a much-sought feature among the members for searching and connecting with other members. A good membership website builder allows you to create and manage the members’ directories in an easy, efficient manner.

Create and manage dedicated member directories

Plan and run effective marketing campaigns

A good membership website builder can help you market your products and services by using efficient marketing tools that aid in creating and customizing microsites and promotional campaigns that target email addresses and the members’ individual profile pages.

In addition to these benefits, the right membership website builder can also help you manage the events calendar, allow for a mobile check-in facility and e-ticketing. The best builders offer extensive learning material and expert, round-the-clock customer support, so you can get quick responses and resolutions to your queries and complaints.

Criteria To Select a Membership Website Builder

How to build a website with user accounts? You have two options – either to opt for a hosted solution or to install a plugin to your existing CMS platform. Both options can work equally well so don’t get into the analysis-paralysis mode.

Choose a platform that offers multiple pricing options and fits into your budget constraints. Look for hidden costs that come in the guise of set-up, support, or additional features.

Your chosen platform should be easy to learn, with minimal steps for adding new users. Check if you can test the platform from the user’s perspective to better understand its intuitiveness and simplicity.

Most providers offer a basic security level to all businesses. If you are considering additional security levels in your website, for example adding a captcha or two-factor authentication, check your options with the service provider.

Know what are the learning and engagement tools provided by the platform. If you are an educator, you would probably want learning management software integrated into your website.

What are the options to create a forum or community? Does the platform have built-in forum features or do you need to add third-party tools?

Opt for platforms that have tiered membership levels so you can segregate members according to services offered.

You would probably have events that users can sign up for. Look for platforms that include tools like event calendars and online registrations.

The Best Membership Website Builder for You Is…

Different businesses have different needs, but a common thread across all membership sites is the membership base. Your membership base is dictated by the niche you have created for yourself in the industry. Hence, it would be wise to choose a website builder according to your business goals and the structure of your membership plans.

The Best Membership Website Builder for You Is...

For example, an e-learning site will need a website builder that has LMS software support. On the other hand, an e-commerce site will have to go for a platform that allows an online store. Some of your subscription models may need drip content to ensure recurring revenue. If your chosen website builder fails to provide any of the necessary integrations, your business model falls apart even before you begin.

It is also a good idea to keep the pricing constraints in mind while choosing a website builder with membership feature. What may fit an enterprise-level company may not be feasible for small businesses. Ideally, you should look for a platform that offers your users a rich set of features with a comprehensive and integrated experience, all under one roof.

What do you need to create a Membership Website?

Membership website builders such as MemberSpace have made the act of creating gated pages and websites easier than ever. The real challenge lies in converting your existing customer base into paying members and creating content that will invite new members to sign up. Creating the best membership platform for your business requires you to focus on these key factors:

Identify and target your audience

If you’re creating members-only pages for an established ecommerce business, you already have a customer base and need to focus on designing/presenting your products or services for a paid model. When creating a new members-only business from scratch, put some time into researching the current and recent trends, the competition, as well as the customers’ needs and unmet demands. Your members-only content needs to be tailored to the age, spending ability, and requirements of the target customer segment.

High-value content and services

Your membership website’s products or services need to be of high value in order to warrant paid member subscriptions. If, for instance, your product is online courses, you should look to ensure the course material is up-to-date, the curriculum description is accurate, and that the course has good accreditations. It’s best to incorporate popular content delivery methods such as video, email, and downloadable PDFs so you can target customers that favor different learning styles.

Decide on the type of membership and charges

One of the biggest decisions to make when creating a membership website is the cost and duration of the membership. If you’re offering a wide range of services, you may categorize them into different membership plans. If you stand to make money through sources such as displaying ads, affiliate marketing, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, you can also consider offering a free membership plan.

What features should a Membership Website Builder include?

When you’re looking for the right membership website builder for creating your membership platform, make sure to look for these features:

What features should a Membership Website Builder include?

Efficient forum software

Make sure the forum software of your membership website builder enables the members to customize their profiles. The ability to customize aspects such as profile pictures and watch or reading lists empowers the members, enhancing their engagement and overall service experience.

The forum software should have a good text editor and allow private messaging between the members. Customizable comment signatures and achievement-based rewards are some of the most vaunted forum features of the day. Make sure your chosen membership website builder includes these.

Easy, secure membership payments

The website builder you choose should allow for seamless, secure recurring payment for the membership fee. It should allow the members to set up membership renewal via both manual and automatic means. If you’re interested in offering a time-based trial membership, the website builder should allow the member to cancel or pay for his/her membership at the end of the trial period.

Your membership website builder should be able to work with multiple payment gateways, including all the popular payment channels such as credit card, debit card, net banking, PayPal, and digital wallets.

High-end membership features

Your pick of membership website builders should ideally allow for adding unlimited members as well as creating a large number of membership levels. A membership level determines the range of content or services included within a certain membership plan. If you offer a wide range of paid services or have plans for future expansion, look for a website builder that offers a large number of, or unlimited membership levels.

A dedicated members’ welcome page, the ability to hide selected content, and automatic integration with your email list are some other essential features you should look for in a membership website builder.

Do Membership Sites make money?

Recent research has revealed that 70 percent of the world’s business leaders consider membership or subscription business models to be the path to future business expansion and commercial success. In addition, a staggering 82 percent of the world’s businesses are looking to adopt the membership model and utilize private websites to achieve greater financial output.

A membership website is a reliable means of creating a steady stream of revenue, typically with little start-up expenditure. It also involves a high margin of profit – if you launch your membership website with a monthly membership fee of $20, you can generate a monthly income of $1000 with just 50 members.

It’s obvious that now is the most opportune time ever to start or switch to the membership-based business model. If you’re an existing business, it’s best to transition slowly, with the goal of converting no more than 50 percent of your existing customers into paid members over a reasonable time frame. You can begin by offering newer products and services to the paying members while maintaining the traditional setup for the existing customer base, let the growth of your paid membership numbers and the quality of service attract the rest to sign up in near future.

Cheapest Website Builders with Domain and Hosting 2024

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I had been putting off writing this piece for a long time. I believed price is an important factor when choosing a website builder but definitely not the main one. But recently, I received the following email:

“Hi Lesley. My name is Mary and I’m your reader. I would like to know – what is the cheapest website builder you can recommend? I don’t have a big budget, but the possibilities of the free plan are not enough for me. Therefore, using an inexpensive but at the same time powerful website builder would be the best solution for me. Thanks for sharing.”

And I decided to not answer Mary personally, but with a comprehensive guide on my website. I’ve just sent the link to Mary.

Today, I’ll tell you about the best website builders and at the same time budget-friendly. And share some thrifty ways of saving money during website development. (Read on to know what things you should or shouldn’t economize on. And how to get extra discount for website builders.)

From this review you will find out:

How to find the cheapest website builders and compare their capacities for creating various types of websites.

How to find more accessible alternatives to popular website builders.

How to find out how website builders are the most financially accessible way to build a website.

Factors that you can economize on while using website builders. (Like payment methods, coupon codes, promotions, and so on.)

What’s the best course of action for website development? (My own observations and recommendations.)

Keep on reading. This article is definitely going to help you save money while developing a website.

Why not Free Website Builders?

When you’re interested in saving money, using free website builders is certainly the best way. It won’t cost you anything.

But then your website design and its features are most likely to be far from what you wanted.

Moreover, most website builders’ free plans contain banner ads. They also won’t allow you to use your own domain name.

That’s why if you want to get a low-cost but still contemporary and user-friendly website with your own domain, you’ll have to forget about free website creators.

Cheapest Website Builder Plans

As you probably already guessed, any basic plan will be better than a free plan. First, you won’t have ads for the builder’s website. Most likely won’t, as some cheap premium plans do advertise the platform on websites. But this is more the exception than the rule.

Secondly, you can use a custom domain name. This is especially important for business websites.

Of course, there may be limits on the number of pages, Bandwidth and Storage space, but the low price of the plan justifies these limits.

Here are the three tables comparing the cheapest website builders that allow custom domain names.

NOTE: Most website builders have different pricing policies for various regions. Depending on your location, prices will be shown in USD (if you’re from the USA), GBP (if you’re from the UK), and EUR (for European users). That’s why I thought that it’d be more convenient to analyze prices using not one but three tables.

For the United States:

Web Builder	Basic Plan Name	Monthly Cost (USD)	Cost for 1 Year (USD)	More Discounts
Webnode	Limited	$3.90	$46.8	up to 50% off for 2+ years
WordPress.com	Personal	$7	$48 (42% off)	Check 50% Off Coupon
Weebly	Personal	$9	$72 (33% off)
Strikingly	Limited	$12	$96 (33% off)	41.6% off for 2 years
Jimdo	Start	$9	$108	Check 40% Off Coupon
GoDaddy	Basic	$11.99	$119.88	30% off for the first year
Squarespace	Business	$16	$134.40 (30% off)	Check 10% Off Coupon
Webflow	Basic	$15	$144 (20% off)
Wix	Combo	$16	$192	Check 10% Off Coupon
SITE123	Premium	$12.80	$153.6
Duda	Basic	$19	$168 (26% off)

For the United Kingdom:

Web Builder	Basic Plan Name	Monthly Cost (GBP)	Cost for 1 Year (GBP)	More Discounts
Webnode	Limited	£2.90	£34.8	up to 50% off for 2+ years
WordPress.com	Personal	$7	$48 (42% off)	Check 50% Off Coupon
Wix	Connect Domain	£4	£48	Check 10% Off Coupon
Weebly	Connect	n/a	£48
GoDaddy	Basic	£7.99	£59.88	37% off for first year
Strikingly	Limited	$12	$96	12.5% off for 2 years
Jimdo	Start	£9	£108	Check 40% Off Coupon
Squarespace	Business	£12.98	£120 (23% off)	Check 10% Off Coupon
Webflow	Basic	$15	$144 (20% off)
SITE123	Premium	$12.80	$153.6
Duda	Basic	$19	$168 (26% off)

* Price in USD means that a website builder doesn’t offer prices in GBP. At the time of purchase, recalculation will take place at the current exchange rate.

For the European Union:

Web Builder	Basic Plan Name	Monthly Cost (EUR)	Cost for 1 Year (EUR)	More Discounts
Webnode	Limited	€3	€36	up to 50% off for 2+ years
WordPress.com	Personal	€7	€48 (42% off)	Check 50% Off Coupon
Wix	Connect Domain	€5.50	€66	Check 10% Off Coupon
Weebly	Connect	n/a	€60
SITE123	Premium	$7.80	$93.6
Strikingly	Limited	$12	$96	12,5% off for 2 years
Jimdo	Start	€9	€108	Check 40% Off Coupon
GoDaddy	Basic	$11.99	$119.88	16% off for the first year
Squarespace	Business	€15	€ 132 (30% off))	Check 10% Off Coupon
Webflow	Basic	$15	$144 (20% off)
Duda	Basic	$19	$168 (26% off)

* Price in USD means that a website builder doesn’t offer prices in GBP. At the time of purchase, recalculation will take place at the current exchange rate.

As you can see, the cheapest tariff plans start from $30, £26.76, or €30.48 per year. It’s the lowest price that you need to pay for a premium website builder.

In fact, there aren’t too many website builders offering plans for less than $100 per year. Webnode, WordPress.com, Weebly, Strikingly, and Wix (for those who live in the UK or EU) are the only ones that do.

ALERT:

Actually, I’ve seen other website builders with even lower prices. But they were mere threepenny website builders. (There was almost no information about them). And I prefer web development using a software solution that’s in good standing and has been in existence for at least five years.

I am absolutely against using just any website builder based only on its rock-bottom price. Remember that you develop a website, not for just one year. The platform you choose should be reliable and worth your trust in the long run.

I don’t think you’ll be too pleased if your website creator suddenly ceased to exist. Or if your experience keeps going from bad to worse. Or if your website is down too often.

The website builders that I have selected are reliable and time-tested online tools. You can freely use any of them.

Comparison of the Most Affordable Website Builders

Now let’s compare the six cheapest website builders from these tables. And then we will find out what features they have and what’s included in their most affordable plans:

Cheapest Website Builders Comparison

	Visit Site	Visit Site	Visit Site	Visit Site	Visit Site
Plan Name	Limited	Personal	Personal	Limited	Start
Monthly Cost	$3.90	$7	$9	$12	n/a
Annually Cost	$46.8	$48	$72	$96	$108
Custom Domain	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Free SSL Certificate	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Free Domain Name	Not included	Yes (for 1 year)	Not included	Yes (Yearly)	Yes (Yearly)
Remove builder ads?	No	No	No	No	Yes
SEO options	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Bandwidth	200 MB	Unlimited	Unlimited	50 GB	10 GB
Space Storage	1 GB	6 GB	500 MB	1 GB per site	5 GB
Number of Pages	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Single page	up 10 pages
Google analytics	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Backup and recovery	No	No	No	No	No
Design Customization	3	2	5	2	3
Easy of Use	5	4	5	4	5
Embed HTML/CSS code	No	No	Yes	No	Yes
Multilingual Options	No	No	No	No	No
Membership Options	No	No	No	No	No
Ecommerce Options	No	No	No	Yes (only 5 products)	No
Support	FAQ – Yes Email – Yes Chat – No Telehone – No	FAQ – Yes Email – Yes Chat – No Telehone – No	FAQ – Yes Email – Yes Chat – Yes Telehone – No	FAQ – Yes Email – Yes Chat – Yes Telehone – No	FAQ – Yes Email – Yes Chat – No Telehone – No

Which of These Cheap Builders is the Best?

First of all, don’t expect too much. We are choosing from the cheapest platforms in the world here.

But, know that they aren’t too bad either. They are good enough for a small personal website or a website for a non-profit organization.

Webnode (Limited plan) – $46.8 per year

Webnode is a great all-in-one website builder with a basic plan and a very attractive price. It has been around since 2008. This website builder is perfect for Windows, for Mac and for any other platform.

Webnode Premium Plans

Its extremely affordable plan – Limited – will cost you only $46.8. And for just that much money, you’ll get hosting with 1GB bandwidth and 100MB storage space. This will be enough for you to run a small site with moderate traffic.

Main Webnode advantages:

Simple and user-friendly drag and drop editor

Easy-to-use even for beginners

A large selection of quality responsive themes

SEO friendly

Ample of opportunities for creating multi-language websites.

Moreover, the Limited plan will allow you to use your own domain name.

Unfortunately, the domain name isn’t a freebie that you get with the plan. You’ll have to shell out $90 per year for that and go with the Mini plan.

NOTE: Webnode allows you to get an even lower price if you buy the subscription for 2, 5, or 10 years. The discount can go up to 50%. Sounds exciting and lucrative, right? But I would still advise you to test Webnode Limited plan thoroughly before deciding to buy it for the long term. Once you know that the Limited plan works fine for you, it is obvious that with the extra discount of up to 50%, Webnode will be the best and cheapest solution for you.

WordPress.com (Personal plan) – $48 per year

Everyone has heard of WordPress. So it was all about another WordPress – CMS with open code (WordPress.org). Unlike the CMS of the same name, WordPress.com is a classic representative of online website builders with free of charge web hosting, domain and SSL certificate. And of course, with very affordable prices for all this.

WordPress.com pricing

The cheapest WordPress plan is Personal for $7 per month billed monthly and $4 per month yearly. There is no additional discount when paying for 2 years. But on the other hand, you will receive a free domain for 1 Year as a gift.

What does WordPress.com offer in the basic plan?

Easy-to-use even for beginners

Free SSL certificate

Free Domain Name for 1 year

Remove WordPress.com Ads

On the Personal plan, you will be limited to using only free themes – more advanced premium themes are available on the Premium plan and up. Advanced design customization will also not be available. This means that you will only be able to slightly edit your design using the basic options of the visual editor. Also, only Email Support will be available to you.

NOTE: Unfortunately, WP Personal plan doesn’t have SEO tools, doesn’t support Advanced Social Media and doesn’t allow Google Analytics integration. In my opinion, these are important options, especially when it comes to a business website.

Weebly (Personal plan) – $72 per year

Weebly is the oldest online builder with wide. You can create almost website – from simple personal blogs to multipage portals and large online stores. Few website builders even come close to Weebly in terms of functionality.

Weebly Pricing

The most affordable Weebly plan comes at $9 per month. That is if you pay $72 for a whole year at once. That’s a 33% saving on what you’d pay if you make monthly payments – that’s not something you’d have complaints with, right?

Though it is priced slightly higher than Webnode, Weebly makes up for it with its richer component parts.

What does Weebly offer in its cheapest plan?

Powerful and user-friendly drag and drop editor. (It is among the best ones in the market.)

Custom domain

Free SSL certificate

SEO options

Chat and Email Support

Plus, Weebly is simple to use. Not as intuitive as Wix, but simple enough even for beginner webmasters to handle. And as a bonus you will get some SEO options – it’s an offering seldom seen in basic plans.

Strikingly (Limited plan) – $96 per year

Strikingly is a website builder that takes a fresh look at website development. It positions itself as a website creator for single-page sites. And creating websites that consist of only one large page is a perfect solution for several situations. Small business websites, landing pages, online portfolios, personal websites, and one-page online stores.

Strikingly Prices

The cheapest Strikingly plan is Limited, which costs $12 a month. Or $96 yearly (which is 33% cheaper) if you pay upfront for the entire year.

Want to save even more? Get 41.6% off if you pay for two years straight. This makes Strikingly one of the best-priced website builders.

Moreover, the Strikingly Limited plan will allow you to get not one but two premium websites. And yes, you’ll get 1GB storage space for each one.

This plan also includes ecommerce options with the possibility of selling up to five products without any Strikingly commission. It’s not bad for less than $100 per year.

What is good about Strikingly?

Free domain if you buy the Limited plan for a year

Possibility to quickly change website templates for existing websites

Possibility to sell through the site

Responsive technical support in chat and email

However, Strikingly is clearly inferior to its competitors regarding template selection and the possibility of their customization. However, it’s not hard to use, has a user-friendly interface, and allows creating two one-page websites. This may sound irresistible to some users.

Wix (Connect Domain plan) – £36 for the UK and €54 for the EU

If you live in the UK or EU, pay attention to Wix’s low-cost Connect Domain plan. In fact, it’s the same Wix Free plan but with the possibility of connecting to a custom domain name.

Wix Premium Plans

There aren’t many great opportunities in this plan, but it’s really cheap – £36 or €54. That’s a very low price for such a powerful website builder like Wix. And I’d like to remind you that Wix is the best website builder (according to numerous media) and the world’s most popular online website builder.

What does Wix offer for this money?

Powerful and very user-friendly drag and drop editor (one of the best ones)

More than 800 free and premium themes to select

Connect custom domain

Free SSL certificate

Chat and Email Support

Storage Space (500MB) and Bandwidth (1GB) limitations do rain down a bit on Wix Connect Plan’s attractiveness. But if you decide to switch to more powerful Combo and Unlimited plans in the future, you’ll understand why 180 million users in the world prefer this very website builder.

Thus, buying the basic Wix plan will open fine opportunities in the future. When you are ready for more than just the basics – Wix will display all its advantages to the fullest.

Universality, simplicity of use, ample functional opportunities, incredibly user-friendly drag and drop editor, a great selection of themes compared to other online website builders – that’s summing up Wix without singing verses in its praise.

Jimdo (Start plan) – $108 per year

Jimdo is one of the cheapest website builders without ads. After releasing its AI Jimdo Dolphin platform, Jimdo became incredibly easy to use. Jimdo Dolphin uses artificial intelligence even for the simplest website building tasks. And it requires minimum human participation. In acse you would like to make someting more complicated, for example, to build a photography website – such help will surely come in handy.

Jimdo Pricing

NOTE: If you’re interested in using AI for your website development, take a look at Wix ADI. It’s an excellent contemporary solution designed in order to make website development much easier. In fact, you just have to answer a few questions about your preferences (favorite colors, website style, theme, and so on), and AI is going to build your website independently and fill it with content. It will be a real catch for inexperienced users. Also be sure to check out more AI website builders for a smarter choice.

In addition to its simplicity of use, Jimdo also comes with a free domain name for one year. Plus, it gives access to SEO options, allows installing Google Analytics, and, most importantly, opens up the possibility to add HTML code to your website. With that, you’ll be able to install third-party widgets, additional scripts, buttons, and other graphical elements. While these options are commonly offered in more expensive premium plans, Jimdo doesn’t shy away from giving it all in the basic plan.

Now, if we talk about Jimdo’s cons, we have web design editing restrictions and a limit of 10 pages (for the Start plan).

So, Jimdo is a really good and thrifty solution, but only for some small websites that require no more than ten pages.

Best Medical Website Builders for Clinics and Doctors

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In this review, I will talk about the development of medical websites – from what a modern medical or healthcare website should be like to choosing the best website builder for doctors and medical practice. I’ve tried to explain this in simple language so that not only my colleagues in web development, but also representatives of the medical industry – doctors, clinic and private practice managers, healthcare business owners – can understand me.

Did you know that every 20th search query in Google relates to medicine and healthcare? After all, whether it is for finding DIY cures, self-diagnosis based on symptoms, or for seeking the right care, people do visit a lot of health and medical-related websites to find the information that they need.

Physicians themselves also often visit websites to collect useful medical information. These can be not only large medical portals such as WebMD and Health.com, but also author’s blogs of doctors and scientists from the field of healthcare.

The second-largest group of Google search queries is performed to find a suitable doctor, therapist, or health clinic and to make an appointment.

What is remarkable, people looking for a doctor or clinic to make an appointment do such searches three times more often than those who are just interested in learning more about health issues. This means that people scrutinize hospitals and private doctors’ websites before making their choice.

That’s why it’s obvious that a well-thought-out medical website with professional design and convincing content would win half the battle of customer acquisition for you.

So, let’s see what are the best website builder fo rdoctors that you can use to build the perfect healthcare website. Moreover, we’re going to compare their prices and the functionalities offered.

How do good medical website builders differ from ordinary ones?

Before reviewing the best medical website builders, I’d like to tell you more about the criteria behind their selection. It will help you understand why these platforms found a place in this list and not the others.

When we talk about using website builders, including those for developing medical and healthcare websites, you need to understand that they are all SaaS platforms.

This means that every month you’ll have to pay a small fee that includes hosting, domain name, technical support, and, of course, website development.

With that small fee, you can perform website development on your own with the help of a visual drag-and-drop editor. This makes the process of website building extremely simple even for newbies. You can learn more about drag and drop editors here.

A website builder for doctors that doesn’t have a contemporary drag-and-drop editor is going to be difficult to use. You might even have to know HTML and CSS basics to begin working with such a platform. Or you might have very limited configuration and website customization options available to you which translates to simplicity but at the cost of design liberty.

You may think that you don’t need a design liberty for your medical website. But you are most likely a doctor or a clinic manager and cannot understand website design as professional web developers understand this.

And here’s what I’ll tell you from the position of a professional website developer with experience since 2005. Your visitors will very well understand the difference between a cheap website with an outdated design layout (designed 8 – 15 years ago) and your competitor’s website with a fresh website design and an excellent usability.

As a result, the credibility of you as a doctor or your clinic may be undermined because your website does not inspire confidence. A visitor can think like this:

– If they have such a weak and buggy website that doesn’t look good on mobile, how good are they at healing? Will they be more considerate of my health than of their website?

In most cases, the answer will not be positive for you.

Thus, the first criterion that should be considered while selecting the best medical website builder is that it should have a simple yet powerful drag-and-drop editor.

The second important criterion to consider while choosing the best website builder for doctors includes contemporary website templates related to the medical and healthcare niche. The available templates must not only be visually appealing but also have the necessary features and customization options. Moreover, the templates must be responsive. Unless your website displays perfectly on any kind of device like mobile phones or tablets, you won’t be able to reach all your audience.

Take a look at these two examples of medical website templates. Both of them are adapted for mobile devices and are considered responsive. But is this true?

bad medical website design

This website template for medical clinic was created in 2014. I specifically made a screenshot from a screen of my widescreen monitor, which is used by many users.

A medical clinic that chooses this template will also get: a dull and boring design, unreadable fonts, a barely noticeable menu (which I found far from at first) and an inconvenient structure.

And here is an example of other medical template created a couple of years ago:

good medical website design

As you can see, it is well adapted to widescreen (and not only) monitors. In general, it looks modern and more attractive due to the well-thought-out color scheme.

The logo of the clinic and three green blocks immediately catch your eye – links to the three main medical areas in which a clinic specializes. This is very convenient because a visitor will immediately go to the department he’s interested in, which will increase the conversion.

By the way, the phone number in the header is much more noticeable than in the first version. Even though that a smaller font is used here. And this means that there will be more calls from potential customers. Another plus to conversion.

For medical and health websites, conversion is of paramount importance because it determines how many visitors to your clinic’s website decide to become its patients.

The third criterion for consideration is search engine friendliness. Your website builder must ensure that Google and other search engines perfectly index the website. I t must be SEO-friendly and have all the necessary SEO and marketing options for promoting your website on the web.

What do we usually get in medical website builders?

While we do seek a lot in an ideal website builder for doctors, most specialized website builders for therapists, hospitals, and clinics don’t come with much to boast of.

They hardly have drag-and-drop editors and make it unlikely for you to be able to build a contemporary website on your own. Moreover, most website builders for doctors only have a small selection of medical templates. And unfortunately, these templates, very often, have an obsolete design.

That also means most of these templates are not responsive. To ensure mobile access to your website, you’d have to develop a mobile version of your site separately. As it was done about ten years ago.

However, if you want a contemporary website that doesn’t look like it was built in the early 2000s you cannot settle with these outdated options.

The Best Medical Website Builders

Enough of the problem, let me now introduce you to some contemporary website builders that are well-equipped with everything you need to build a modern medical website. Please note that some of them are in the Top Best Website Builders for 2024 outside of any category.

These website builders are decidedly the best platforms for creating any kind of medical website. Whether you want a website for a therapist, a dentist, or a large medical organization or hospital, these site builders help. Moreover, these website builders also let you launch a medical blog or forum with their broad spectrum of features.

WIX

WIX free website builder

Wix, as the most popular free website builder, occupies the top spot among online website builders. And it is one of the most appropriate website builders for developing medical websites.

Wix has the largest share of websites built using a site builder platform, second only to WordPress (the CMS, not the online builder).

Now let’s see what Wix can offer in terms of a medical or healthcare website development. We’ll also be shedding light on how much it will cost.

Professional Medical and Health Templates

One of the greatest advantages of Wix is that it has a lot of quality and professionally designed website templates. These templates are available for a wide variety of niches including the medical and healthcare niche.

What’s better is that Wix’s web designers didn’t try to create universal medical templates. Instead, they created options for the following sub-niches:

Medical Clinic Website

Therapist Website

Dentist Website

Psychotherapist Website

Family Doctor Website

Psychologist Website

Dietitian Blog

Nutritionist Website

Website for Home Healthcare Company

Wellness Blog

There are options for some even rare niches like:

Website for Medical Testing Center

Alternative Therapist Website

Baby Consultant Website

Sports Psychologist Website

Individually, there is also a perfect template for Health Communities that you can use.

All these website templates look great (that’s not surprising for Wix) and are responsive. This means they will display perfectly on any device whether it is a desktop, mobile, or tablet. The same is true for operating systems too as you can create a website for Mac, Windows, or Android without any trouble.

So, thanks to the availability of modern medical templates, Wix allows you to run professional-looking medical sites without having to significantly change the templates. In simple terms – you just need to change the name of the website, texts and, possibly, the image in the header and the website of your clinic is ready to be launched. Another advantage of Wix as a website builder for doctors.

Easy Drag and Drop Editor

Wix has one of the best drag and drop editors in its class. It is powerful and incredibly flexible in customization at the same time. You can manage the placement of the block and design elements with a per-pixel accuracy. This lets you build a website that looks nothing like everyday templates and exactly like you want it to look.

NOTE: Most website builders have got drag-and-drop editors that allows changing block order (above – below), replacing titles, images, and color scheme modification. However, with Wix, you can change the whole template completely or even create one from scratch. It all depends on your desire and imagination.

Despite multiple settings, the Wix drag and drop editor is simple to use. All management options are located within the reach of one or two clicks. The editor’s interface is logical and intuitive and you are likely to quickly get used to it.

SEO features

Another plus of using Wix for website development is that search engines perfectly index websites built on the platform. Plus, it has various SEO options that ensure better reach and rankings.

SEO is of key importance for any medical business since people find doctors and clinics through queries on Google, Yahoo, and other search engines.

And if your clinic’s website won’t have at least basic search engine optimization, then it’s unlikely to get rankings or search traffic. That’s why it’s important to choose an SEO-friendly website builder.

Find more details by taking a look at WIX’s SEO advantages.

How much does Medical Website on Wix cost?

It might sound surprising, but Wix is free to use.

Of course, the Free plan has certain limitations. The most substantial one is that you won’t be able to use a custom domain name. Moreover, you’d also have to deal with the Wix button at the top of your website.

My recommendation for medical website aspirants is that you should test the free Wix options for a week or two. Once you are satisfied, switch to one of the Premium plans.

WIX Premium Plans

Combo – $14 per month

This is the basic plan that will be good for personal therapists’ or doctor’s websites. However, it won’t suffice for creating a clinic’s or hospital’s website.

With the Combo plan, your website won’t have Wix ads (Wix button), and you’ll also get a free SSL certificate and a free domain name for 1 year as a gift.

Unlimited – $18 per month

The Unlimited plan has got the best ratio of price and quality. And perhaps it is the most profitable Wix plan.

This plan is good for building larger websites since its Storage Space limit is increased to 10 GB (against 3 GB in Combo). This means that your website can house more articles, photos, and videos.

You’ll also get a one-time $300 gift for running ads ( $100 each for Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Local Listings.) Moreover, they’ll give you free annual access to premium apps – Site Booster and Visitor Analytics.

NOTE: Though you have to pay $216 yearly for using the Unlimited plan, you get more than what you pay. The Wix gift for ads vouchers, the domain name, and extra premium widgets cover up the costs you incur, thus, making your website practically free for the first year.

Pro – $23 per month

It’s a more advanced Wix plan that comes with a Storage Space of 20 GB. The main difference between the Unlimited and the Pro plan is the feature to create a professional logo for your medical office or clinic in the latter.

You also get all commercial rights for your logo and its source code in different formats and more than 40 sizes.

VIP – $39 per month

VIP is the highest-paid, non-eCommerce Wix plan that comes with 35 GB of Storage Space. With VIP, you get everything available in the Pro plan plus 24/7 priority customer care.

This means that you can connect with the Wix support team via phone, without having to wait in queue for a staff member’s attention.

Though Wix is extremely user-friendly and you won’t need custom support often. But for medical businesses, in particular, the website must be operational 24/7 even on holidays and weekends and constant support can make that happen.

Webflow

Webflow website builder

Webflow is another great free website builder for doctors that I recommend for developing medical websites.

Webflow was initially created as web development software for web designers who needed a reliable and simple platform for launching websites. To ensure that, Webflow provided users with a built-in drag and drop editor and allowed creating websites without having to perform layouts and manual HTML code edition.

To some extent, creating websites through Webflow resembles the WordPress experience. But it is more simplified and user-friendly.

Wondering how Webflow would be interesting for doctors and clinics? Let’s check out.

Free and Paid Medical Website Templates

Webflow is in the second spot among website builders in terms of the number of medical and healthcare templates. You might notice that most Webflow templates are premium. But the good part is that the cost varies from $49 to $79, which is the average range when compared with WordPress and Shopify.

And as a web designer, I must admit that Webflow medical templates are of high quality and unique in design. These templates are created in different styles and color schemes.

Webflow website templates

NOTE: Some website builders that have large template collections are characterized by the monotony of web templates designs. They usually have the same core web design, with meager changes in the location of the elements and the color scheme. That’s not the case with Webflow. Webflow’s templates are unique in terms of design.

The one thing I like the most about Webflow medical templates is that they are ready to use. Just choose a template, rename it as per your will, change the text, and you are ready with a medical website.

Here are some examples of ready-to-use templates for developing a medical website for doctors:

For dentists:

For Veterinary Websites:

For Health Websites:

Free SSL and Automatic Backups

One of the best medical website builders (not just for the medical niche), Webflow has great security features too.

All Webflow websites get free SSL certificates – With every plan, even the free one.

Furthermore, Webflow also has an automatic backup system. Thanks to that, Webflow users can restore the website to their last saved point.

The feature may come in handy especially if a mistake or hack attack distorts your website. You can always rely upon the Webflow backup system and save your money and save yourself from the panic.

Ecommerce Features for Medical Websites

In addition to creating informational medical websites and blogs, Webflow allows the creation of feature-loaded online stores too. It may be either in the form of an online pharmacy or a store connected to a clinic’s website, where the patients can buy necessary medicines and equipment, without having to visit the clinic.

Apart from the sale of physical products, Webflow also lets you sell digital goods. For example, you can sell online medical consultations with payment directly on the website, or even online medical literature.

The most noticeable eCommerce advantages of Webflow include:

A wide choice of payment methods including Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay.

Automatic sales tax calculation.

Online store’s integration with Facebook and Instagram.

How Much Does A Medical Website on Webflow cost?

Like Wix, Webflow is a free website builder. Of course, the free plan is going to have some restrictions, but it is enough to test the waters.

Webflow site plans

Further, you get to choose from the following premium plans:

Basic – $12 per month

This is the basic premium plan that will be enough for creating a simple personal website for medical professionals.

With the website, you get a custom domain name, a free SSL certificate, and 50GB bandwidth per month.

CMS – $16 per month

The CMS plan is good for creating websites for clinics and hospitals. To begin with, you get 4 times the bandwidth (200 GB) compared to the Basic plan. Plus, 2000 CMS items.

Secondly, this plan lets you appoint up to 3 guest editors. These can be your staff members who will fill the website with new content and keep the old content updated.

NOTE: the CMS plan is the most appropriate option for small medical websites. With just a difference of $2/month as compared to the basic plan, you can many times more features.

Business – $36 per month

This is the most advanced non-eCommerce Webflow plan. The business plan is ideal for developing a large medical portal or a website for a significant medical institution.

Your website can have great traffic (bandwidth – 400GB), 10000 CMS items, and up to 10 guest editors.

Ecommerce Plans – from $29 per month

For creating online stores Webflow has got three separate eCommerce plans.

The key difference is that there is a transaction of 2% in the basic eCommerce plan, Standard, which comes at $29 per month. The more powerful Plus and Advanced plans don’t have this transaction fee and cost $74 and $212 per month respectively.

You can learn more details about the possibilities and prices of Webflow eCommerce plans on the official website .

Webnode

Webnode website builder

Webnode is a popular free website builder that has got tons of unique advantages.

One of the key advantages is the possibility to develop websites that support up to 20 languages. This is ideal if you want to create a large multilingual website for your medical practice.

However, Webnode is not as flexible or user-friendly as other website builders like Wix, for example. It’s also far from being the leader in terms of the number of templates available for the medical niche. However, it is a great pick at its price point.

Let’s see how.

Fully responsive medical templates

Webnode might lag behind Wix and Webflow in terms of the number of medical templates. But you can at least rest assured that the available templates are made by professional web designers and are fully responsive.

This means that your website will look perfect on any device.

Webnode health website templates

Webnode dentist website templates

Webnode cosmetic website templates

In fact, you can use any Webnode template for creating a medical website. All the templates are easy to customize as you can change titles, images, color schemes, and even the size of every design element. That’s why it isn’t necessary to have a template that is specifically for the medical niche.

Creating multilingual websites for clinics

Most medical website builders allow creating websites that support additional language versions. But Webnode’s well-considered and detailed multilingual features are unmatched.

If your practice sees patients from all over the world, then supporting languages other than English is mandatory. And Webnode allows the creation of medical websites that support 20+ languages. This is more than in any other online website builder for doctors.

Lower prices

What makes Webnode so popular is its attractive pricing. The basic Webnode plan which lets you use your domain name costs only $3.90/month.

Here is a comparison chart of Wix, Webflow, and Webnode’s pricing:

	Check prices	Check prices	Check prices
Connect a custom domain	Combo – $16/month	–	Limited – $3.90/month
Basic plan with no ads	Unlimited – $22/month	Basic – $12/month	Mini – $7.50/month
Most popular plan	PRO – $27/month	CMS – $16/month	Standard – $12.90/month
Plan with all features	VIP – $45/month	Business – $36/month	Profi – $22.90/month

How Much Does Medical Website on Webnode cost?

The free Webnode plan is nothing as compared to the free version of Wix. But the premium Webnode plans are much lighter on the pocket than Wix’s. And your monetary savings become more evident over longer periods ( 1 year and more).

Webnode pricing

The plans include:

Limited – $3.90 per month

This is the basic Webnode plan that allows connecting your own domain name. It includes 200 MB of Storage Space and 1 GB Bandwidth. This plan is good for compact websites for private practitioners.

Mini – $7.50 per month

The Mini plan is ideal for websites with more traffic as it offers 1 GB of Storage Space and 3 GB of Bandwidth. In addition, you also get a free domain for 1 year and access to website statistics and the form builder.

Standard – $12.90 per month

It’s a more profitable plan in terms of price-quality ratio. With this plan, you can launch a large website for a clinic or hospital and support thousands of visitors every month. You 3 GB Storage Space and 10 GB Bandwidth and 20 email accounts. There is also the possibility to connect Google Analytics and Google AdSense and the opportunity to sell through the website or create websites with membership registration for up to 100 members, and more.

Profi – $22.90 per month

This is the most powerful Webnode plan. The Profi plan can be used for developing a large medical portal or an online pharmacy.

You get 7 GB storage, 100 email account, and unlimited bandwidth.

You can learn more details about the plans on the official Webnode website .

Squarespace

Squarespace website builder

Squarespace is another top website builder for doctors. If you’re in the healthcare industry and loking for a website that combines sleek design with user-friendly features, pay your attention to Squarespace. This platform is a dream come true for anyone who wants a site that’s not just functional but also drop-dead gorgeous.

Now, let’s check the specific features that make Squarespace an excellent choice for medical websites.

Beautiful Website Templates

Squarespace isn’t a medical website builder, so it doesn’t have a specific category for health and medicine, but it offers a variety of templates that can be customized for medical and healthcare websites. These templates are designed to be visually appealing and user-friendly, making it easier for patients to navigate and find the information they need.

They aren’t just proffessional looking but also responsive, ensuring a seamless experience across different devices and operating systems. So, we can consider it as one of the best website builders for doctors.

Squarespace website templates – Health & Beauty

User-Friendly Design and Customization

Squarespace offers a user-friendly design interface that is both powerful and easy to navigate. The drag-and-drop editor allows you to place elements with precision, offering a high degree of customization. This is particularly useful for medical professionals who may not have extensive technical skills but still want a unique and professional-looking website.

Robust Security Features

Security is a top priority for medical websites, and Squarespace doesn’t disappoint. All Squarespace websites come with free SSL certificates, providing an extra layer of security. This is crucial for medical websites that handle sensitive patient information.

SEO Capabilities

Squarespace offers a range of SEO features to help your medical website rank well in search engines. This is vital for medical practices, as patients often use search engines to find healthcare providers. Squarespace’s SEO features are easy to use and can be customized to fit the specific needs of a medical website.

Ecommerce Options

Squarespace also offers robust e-commerce capabilities, allowing medical practices to sell products or services online. This could range from selling medical supplies to offering online consultations. Payment options are diverse, including Stripe, PayPal, and Apple Pay, providing convenience for your patients or clients.

Cost of a Medical Website on Squarespace

Squarespace offers a free trial period, allowing you to test the platform before committing. After that, you can choose from several premium plans:

Personal – $12 per month

This basic plan is suitable for individual medical practitioners who need a simple online presence. It includes a free custom domain and unlimited bandwidth and storage.

Business – $18 per month

This plan is more suited for small to medium-sized medical practices. It offers advanced analytics and allows you to have unlimited contributors.

Commerce – $26 per month

This plan is ideal if you’re looking to add an online store to your medical website. It offers zero transaction fees and powerful e-commerce analytics.

Advanced Commerce – $40 per month

This is the most comprehensive plan, suitable for large medical practices or those needing advanced e-commerce capabilities. It offers abandoned cart recovery, advanced shipping, and a range of other high-end features.

You can read more details about the plans on the official Squarespace website .

Best Website Builders and Platforms for SEO

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For a long time, I’ve been eager to highlight the importance of SEO capabilities in website builders through my site. I know from firsthand experience how important it is to choose an appropriate platform for your website from an SEO perspective.

I’ve not just promoted the website for my own web design agency, but also carried out search engine optimization on a lot of my client’s websites too.

And while doing all of that here is what I figured out – Not all website builders and platforms are good for SEO. Websites built on certain platforms are more likely to achieve better SEO results, whereas it is harder to rank higher in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) with the websites built on some other platforms.

In this review, I’ll tell you which website builders and platforms are ideal for SEO and why.

Best SEO Website Builders for Beginners

All web platforms can be divided into two categories – for beginner users and for experienced users.

Beginner users are those who don’t have any web design, HTML layout, or programming skills. But they can do basic tasks, for example, sign up for Facebook and create their own email.

Here, I have mentioned four website builders aimed at beginner users with different primary focuses but with great opportunities for SEO.

NOTE: The website builders in this list are not arranged in the order of their ratings and show no evidence that one platform is better or worse than another. Each of the website builders listed here has its own particular scope of application.

Wix – Free, simple, and universal

Wix is a leader among online website builders and all that is not for nothing. In view of most independent lists, Wix is a top choice when it comes to drag and drop website builders. And as for SEO, Wix is really good at it too, since it comes with dozens of useful options, tools, and widgets for SEO.

WIX SEO tools

Also, Wix was one of the first website builders to abandon Flash technology and switch to HTML5. Thanks to that, web pages on Wix get easily indexed on all search engines.

NOTE: In the past, Wix has had some problems with search engine optimization on its websites. But then the management reconsidered the importance of SEO for their clients and did a great job in this direction. Now, Wix is one of the most SEO-friendly online website builders. However, you might still see old-school SEOs hating Wix, recalling its past shortcomings.

Wix is suitable for SEO due to its following features:

More than 500 perfectly responsive templates

Wix does not just have the largest template library but all Wix templates are created by professional web designers and have a responsive web design too. This means that the templates display correctly on any device screen, whether it’s a mobile phone, a laptop, or a tablet.

Search engine optimized website infrastructure

Websites created on Wix have a simple search engine optimized infrastructure and thus search engine bots easily index webpages and pass on the links within a Wix website without difficulty.

Wix also has server-side rendering (SSR), which allows rendering website pages on the server and not in the customer’s browser. As a result, website page load speed increases, even if the customers have a slow internet connection.

Free SSL certificates with all plans

All Wix websites have HTTPS as Wix offers a free SSL certificate with all their plans, including the free one.

Automatic structured data creation

Wix automatically adds structured data to its website pages. You don’t have to make an effort to add schema markups. Though you do get the option to manually create schema markups and add them to certain pages and use specific schema types like products, ratings, FAQ, and also statistics.

Automatic robots.txt and sitemap.xml file creation

Wix automatically creates robots.txt and sitemap.xml files. Moreover, it also gives you the option to edit the contents of these files, if necessary.

Automatic canonical tags creation and management

Wix automatically creates canonical tags for all new pages (like WordPress does with installed SEO plugins). In the Advanced SEO tab, you can also delete the canonical tag for a certain page or add one, if it isn’t already there.

Integration with Google Marketing Tools

WIX Marketing Integration

One of the greatest advantages of Wix for SEO is the possibility to integrate every possible marketing tool from Google with your website. Primarily, the integration option with Google Search Console directly from the Wix dashboard makes it simple, quick, and convenient.

You can also integrate Google Analytics for getting expanded statistics, and add Google Tag Manager for launching your advertising campaign.

NOTE: In the near future Wix is looking forward to taking a decision on launching Wix managed solution to offer integration with Google Optimize. This will allow analyzing the efficiency of a Wix website SEO’s status with the help of A/B testing. Also, it is possible to integrate Google Optimize using Google Tag Manager. Here’s Google’s guidance for such integrations.

Integration with Google My Business

Your WIX website’s integration with Google My Business will be useful for local SEO. Thanks to it, you’ll be able to create and further edit your company’s profile directly through the Wix dashboard. Again, this integration can be performed in a few clicks, which saves time while delivering excellent local SEO results.

Personalized SEO Setup Plan

This is a unique Wix option that makes it much easier for beginners to perform search engine optimization on their websites. Wix takes into account the particularities of your website and business and then gives you a step-by-step SEO Setup Plan. Just implement the given recommendations as per this plan in order to carry out all the basic SEO activities for your website.

NOTE: In order to use Wix SEO Wiz you’ll need to connect the website to Google Search Console. After this, SEO Wiz will create a step-by-step plan for you to perform your website’s search engine optimization. You don’t necessarily need to carry out all the steps right in the order they are stated in the plan, but the steps you miss will be highlighted as incomplete. You just have to finish implementing all the Wix SEO Wiz recommendations in order to make your website SEO-friendly.

SEO apps in the Wix App Market

One of the greatest Wix advantages that makes it one of the best website builders is that it has a large app collection available in the Wix Apps Market.

These additional solutions can be added to a ready-made Wix website, which increases its SEO and other capabilities. This may be comparable to WordPress plugins.

Here are some of the best SEO and marketing apps offered by Wix App Market:

rankingCoach SEO – It analyses your website and the websites of your competitors, and then creates a step-by-step SEO strategy specifically for your website. All SEO guides are in the form of simple how-to videos.

Rabbit SEO – A comprehensive tool for searching the most appropriate keywords, analyzing competitors’ keywords, website page optimization, and many other things.

Site Booster – It will automatically register your website in business directories, review websites, and popular mobile apps and business listings like Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Bing Maps, Business Data Index, FourSquare, SMB Home Online, Yelp, and some others.

Visitor Analytics – This is a multilingual SEO app that shows expanded statistics related to website attendance with a convenient interface. It allows performing user behavior analytics by using heatmaps and conversion funnels.

How much will Wix website builder with expanded SEO options cost?

Despite the fact that Wix is a free website builder, as you’d already know, with the free plan you won’t get any of those useful SEO options which were referred to above.

Advanced SEO options are available in the Unlimited plan (it costs $18 monthly) and the plans above it. As a free bonus for your first year, you’ll also get Visitor Analytics App, Site Booster App, and 3 free ads vouchers:

For Google Ads – $100

For Bing Ads – $100

For Local Listings – $100

As a result, by spending $216 yearly on Wix (Unlimited plan), you get free SEO tools and advertising vouchers amounting to $425, which is twice as much as your expenses.

These free bonuses and all those SEO tools and options described above make Wix the best online website platform for SEO for beginner users.

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Squarespace – more automatic SEOs options

Like Wix, Squarespace is another top website builder, with some wonderful SEO capacities. Squarespace is especially good for developing portfolio websites, websites for photographers, and online stores.

Squarespace

Squarespace is a well-designed website builder focused on beautiful website designs, elegant minimalistic templates, and lots of SEO features. Moreover, most Squarespace SEO options are fully automatic, which will especially please beginners by making the tasks simpler for them.

Let’s figure out what Squarespace offers in detail.

Automated Heading Tags

Despite the fact that Squarespace allows editing HTML code (I’m sure web developers have a smile on their face right now!), its webpage structure is designed in such a way that users don’t need to add tags <H1>, <H2> for subtitles in HTML manually. You just choose the headline style you want, and Squarespace will automatically create the correct Heading Tag. It is really user-friendly. Here is how Squarespace describes this.

Automatic creation of <alt> and <title> tags for images

Thousands of articles and instructional SEO guides are written about the importance of correctly stating the <alt> and <title> tags for images from an SEO perspective. And Squarespace automatically adds the <alt> and <title> tags to your images with its image description feature.

Automatic sitemap creation and update

SEO Checklist

It’s difficult to overestimate the importance of having up-to-date sitemaps for SEO. As most SEO-friendly website builders, Squarespace independently creates a sitemap for your website in XML format. But that’s not all. It also keeps automatically editing and updating the sitemap as per the changes in your site’s structure.

For example, if you’ve added a new page to your website, then Squarespace will add it to the sitemap. And vice versa, if you delete a certain page, then it will be deleted from the sitemap. This saves manual efforts.

NOTE: Even though Squarespace automates the process of sitemap creation and updating, the updates to the site map don’t happen instantly. After you have changed something on the site, the update in the sitemap usually happens in about an hour. In some cases, this may require up to 24 hours or even more, especially for larger multi-page websites.

Automated mobile optimization

Like in Wix, all the websites developed on Squarespace have an inherently mobile-optimized design. For this, Squarespace saves text and visual content in a format that can be easily displayed on any type of device. You don’t have to take any action for mobile optimization, Squarespace does that for you.

Automated AMP creation

Squarespace supports Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). For all the pages on your website, it creates simplified mobile versions called AMP. These pages download faster and thus, positively affect site speed. This will be an undoubted plus point for SEO, especially if the majority of traffic on your website comes from mobile phones.

NOTE: AMP can be a really effective solution, but you should know that using AMP can sometimes lead to the reduction of website conversion. Similar results have been observed for some online stores, where webmasters noticed declining sales after AMP introduction. However, the organic traffic remained the same.

Management of Meta Titles for pages and posts

Squarespace allows assigning and editing the Meta Title both for the website as a whole and individual pages and blog posts. You can also edit Meta Titles manually and get the best SEO results for every single page.

NOTE: A good SEO practice is when the H1 title differs from Meta Title. It’s not necessary to have completely different titles, but it would be better not to have 100% copies. Moreover, it’s important to test Meta Titles. Perfect Meta Titles as per SEO standards may actually have fewer clicks in SERP positions (lower CTR). And prettier, user-friendly titles, are likely to be actively clicked by users but may appear not so effective in search rankings. It’s important to strike the perfect balance for every page – this is one secret of success in SEO.

Squarespace SEO consultations

Squarespace has a special Squarespace Select Plan with additional possibilities, including some SEO advantages too. If you choose this plan, you’ll get a dedicated manager for developing your website and online business.

And you can also get personal consultation about search engine optimization for your website from Squarespace’s SEO specialists. This is a unique offer that isn’t available with any other website builder.

How much will Squarespace with maximum SEO options cost?

All Squarespace plans include SEO features for website visibility. This means that you’ll be offered simple step-by-step instructions using which you can improve the SEO for your Squarespace website.

The most basic Personal plan will cost you only $12 per month if you pay for the entire year at once.

But if you buy the Business plan for $18 per month, you’ll get access to advanced site analytics and the possibility to edit CSS and JavaScript. This may help you with more accurate SEO optimization of the HTML code of your website.

In addition to this, you’ll get a bonus of $100 Google Ads Credits. This is a good start for launching your own PPC campaign with Google Ads.

Squarespace also offers the Basic Commerce plan for $23 per month specifically for online stores. In addition to all the things that you get with the Personal and Business plans, with this plan, you’ll also get access to Powerful E-commerce Analytics.

This is a more profound analytics system specifically built for E-commerce businesses. You’ll be able to monitor lots of additional parameters, for example, sales conversion as a whole or for selected products. Moreover, you can get insights about which products sell better than others, why, and much more.

I must admit that Squarespace has always been good at creating websites for online sales. And the Basic Commerce plan is a perfect solution in terms of the price-quality ratio. Besides that, unlike Shopify, the Basic Commerce plan doesn’t charge a commission for each transaction. Though the Squarespace Business plan charges a 3% commission on every sale. Once again, the Squarespace Basic Commerce plan proves to be a profitable proposition.

As for getting maximum SEO capacities, you’ll have to go with the Squarespace Select plan, which I referred to earlier. Its main feature is that it comes with personal SEO consultation. It’s up to you to decide how important it is for you, but generally speaking, Squarespace Select is the same Advanced Commerce plan but wrapped in an “individual package”.

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Shopify – Ideal for E-commerce

When it comes to E-commerce, the importance of SEO gets multiplied manifold. This is primarily because E-commerce websites often have a more complex semantic core and have not one or two landing pages, but lots of them. In fact, every product’s page is a landing page. The same is true for category pages too as they all are optimized for certain search queries.

Considering such a large quantity of pages, working on off-page SEO optimization for every page is nearly impossible. And in this case, what comes to the forefront is technical SEO website optimization that, in turn, depends directly on the SEO possibilities of a chosen website builder or platform.

Among all E-commerce website builders, Shopify is the best adapted for SEO. Being the absolute leader among online E-commerce platforms, Shopify couldn’t help but give due consideration to SEO and marketing tools.

Let’s take a closer look at Shopify’s SEO advantages:

Lots of search engine optimized themes

Shopify templates

Shopify has a large library of free (about 100) and the largest library of premium themes (thousands). By default, you have access to all the free themes, which is fine for most users. However, if you are interested in a website with a more unique design or you have a specific niche business, then I recommend checking out the premium themes to find suitable options.

The largest collection of premium Shopify themes is available on the ThemeForest platform. Here you can find every kind of Shopify theme for selling various goods, relating to various niches, and designed in different web design styles. The prices of these themes are also quite affordable and range from $20 to $90 per theme.

And of course, these themes have great opportunities for search engine optimization. The features of these themes include SEO-friendly HTML/CSS layouts, accelerated page loading speed, and various SEO tools and plugins.

For example, most premium Shopify themes already include Google’s Rich Product Snippets, and some of them are tentatively checked by the MOZ SEO tool or equivalent SEO tools.

Adding Meta Title and Meta Description for every page

Adding meta title and meta description for every page

Like all SEO-friendly website builders, Shopify allows adding Meta Title and Meta Description for every page, whether it’s a page from the main section, product subcategories, or product cards.

As a result, you get the possibility to attract organic traffic to all pages of your website. The main requirement from your side is to just optimize the content on your website based on popular and relevant search queries.

Advanced features for robots.txt editing

All websites designed using Shopify have automatically-created robots.txt files that already meet SEO requirements. But you can additionally edit it using the special robots.txt.liquid template.

With this, you can prohibit or allow indexing the pages you need, manually add some extra URLs to sitemaps, add crawl-delay rules, and much more.

NOTE: Despite the fact that having robots.txt.liquid template creates considerable SEO advantages, be very attentive while editing it. If you make a mistake, you can lose organic traffic for certain website pages or even the whole website. Meanwhile, the Shopify Support Team is unlikely to help you as editing robots.txt.liquid isn’t included in basic Shopify possibilities, and that’s why it isn’t maintained by the Support Team.

Automatic sitemap.xml creation

Shopify automatically generates a sitemap.xml file. It is a record containing the links to all the pages on your website that must be indexed on search engines. Shopify also automatically sends the XML sitemap file to Google Search Console in order to let the pages of your website get indexed as soon as possible.

NOTE: Basic Shopify plan allows the automatic creation of sitemap files only for primary domain names. But this will be unavailable to international and region or country-specific domain names. In this case, you’ll need more advanced plans like Advanced Shopify. You can learn more about this here.

Numerous other useful SEO functions

Shopify was initially planned in order to save the clients from the problems that arise while getting organic traffic.

Here are some important Shopify SEO features:

SEO-friendly structure of page URLs

Compliance of logical hierarchy of categories for online stores

The absence of iFrames in pages code, which accelerates their loading speed

Possibility to optimize navigation throughout the site

Possibility to optimize blog pages

Possibility to integrate Google Analytics

Indication of canonical webpage addresses

301 redirect configuration

Possibility to use descriptive image names to search engine optimize images

Additional SEO apps in the Shopify app store

Shopify App store

Shopify has a large selection of apps for increasing the possibilities and performance of Shopify websites available in the Shopify App Store.

Wix and Squarespace also have such apps, right? Well, Shopify boasts of an extremely large collection of apps – about 2700 free and 2400 premium ones. And of course, Shopify has got apps for more successful online store SEO promotion too.

Here are the most powerful of them:

Booster SEO & Image Optimizer – A complex SEO solution for automatic online store optimization. It contains lots of built-in tools, and it can scan your website for SEO compliance and fix critical SEO issues. The app comes with a free plan.

Plug In SEO – One of the most popular universal SEO plugins for Shopify, Plug In SEO allows editing lots of Meta Descriptions and Titles at once, implementing Structured Data/JSON-LD Schema, finding and fixing broken, links and a lot more. The plugin allows performing SEO optimization of Non-English language pages as well.

About Bulk Image Edit & Image SEO – A shareware app, offering a full suite of image optimization features – from reducing the size while maintaining the same quality to adding Alt and file names.

SEO Manager – It scans the website to find SEO errors and provides opportunities for their removal. It contains step-by-step SEO instructions and reference materials for independent online store technical optimization.

How much will Shopify with maximum SEO options cost?

Shopify is definitely aware that it is the best E-commerce website builder in the market. That’s why it doesn’t offer a free plan, you have to pay to access their best-in-class services. However, they do offer a 14-days free trial version.

The cheapest Basic Shopify plan will cost you $29 per month. It includes all SEO options and tools except for those relating to International domain name support and International pricing.

As a result, Basic Shopify is likely to be a perfect solution for a small US or UK-based online store. But if your website has several language versions, then you’ll need the higher Shopify plan that comes at a price of $79 per month. It allows performing International SEO and is not limited to only English language webpages.

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What features should an SEO-friendly website builder have?

SEO has always been an important criterion for determining the best website builder. You can check out my previous guides on choosing website builders and you’ll see that SEO has always been a factor in consideration. But today, I’m going to bet on SEO as the fundamental determining factor.

So, then what features should a website builder have to be liked by Google crawlers? Check them out.

Perfect webpage indexing

The HTML code on a page should be easily identifiable by search engines. And as for the website architecture, it must be simple and without complex elements and technologies that are hard to index.

NOTE: About 10 years ago most online website builders used Macromedia Flash technology. The websites built using Flash looked pretty and had spectacular animation. But it was very difficult for search engines to index them, and they were unlikely to rank higher in Google. Due to that, website builders started getting a bad reputation in SEO communities. But since then, a lot has changed. Today, website builders have completely abandoned Flash in favor of HTML5, and the problems with webpage indexing are now long gone. Moreover, website builders began coming equipped with built-in SEO tools, SEO widgets, and SEO tutorials, which radically changed the situation for the better.

Ability to add Meta Descriptions and Headings

Website builders must allow users to add some MetaData, such as Title, Meta Description, and headings (H1, H2, and H3) separately for each page. It should also be possible for users to specify Alt attributes for all the images on the site. All these options allow accurate search engine optimization for every single page.

SEO-friendly URL structure

SEO-friendly URLs are those which have a simple and clear structure that search engines can easily understand. Such URLs contain the basic keyword or webpage title (most often a fragment) and a minimum amount of enclosures.

Some examples of non-optimized URLs:

1) https://www.yoursite.com/news/?p=637
2) https://www.yoursite.com/articles/2022/09/25/sample-post/
3) https://www.yoursite.com/blog/archives/637

Some examples of SEO-friendly URLs:

1) https://www.yoursite.com/best-seo-friendly-platforms/
2) https://www.yoursite.com/seo/best-platforms/
3) https://www.yoursite.com/best-platforms/seo/

Availability of SSL certificate

The best website builders in the market offer SSL certificates with all their plans, even the free ones. They understand that having a website with HTTPS is not only a security issue but also an important factor for SEO. Moreover, the Chrome browser marks all the websites without HTTPS (that is the ones that don’t have SSL encryption) as ‘isn’t secure’ in the URL tab. This may have a negative impact on your website traffic as well as your reputation.

Responsive web design

After Google launched Mobile-First indexing across the web, having a mobile-friendly website design became a crucially important factor. If a website does not display correctly on mobile devices, then it is unlikely that it will rank higher in Google SERPs.

That is why the website builders targeting SEO must ensure that their templates are as responsive as possible so that they are displayed well across all device types and sizes.

Robots.txt and sitemap.xml creation and editing

The robot.txt file gives search engines the information about which pages have to be indexed and which don’t. As for the sitemap.xml file, it is used to specify the URLs of all pages on your website in the order of their priority to be indexed.

The best SEO website builders can automatically create robots.txt and sitemap.xml (like Tilda). You don’t need to take any efforts to get these files, but at the same time, you have the option to edit them if necessary.

Rapid webpage load

Page speed has been an important SEO factor, as officially announced by Google officials. So, the faster your website loads, the better it is for SEO. And a rapid webpage load speed can be achieved in several different ways. The most effective ways include reducing the page size and optimizing the images on the website.

Moreover, the most advanced SEO platforms also use CDN technology, image conversion into WebP format, and delayed image download (Lazy Loading). All these can significantly accelerate the speed of website operation.

Integration with marketing and analytics tools

Most website builders come with their own built-in analytics systems. But almost always their capacities aren’t sufficient. That’s why you need a possibility to add external marketing tools, A/B Tests, and marketing analytics systems.

In most cases, having the option to add Google Analytics and Google Optimize (for A/B Tests), and Google Search Console is enough.

Common SEO Mistakes That Prevent The Growth Of Your Website

Setting up a pretty-looking website is not enough. You need to ensure that the website ranks well on search. This is more easily said than done. The launch of a site is the beginning of the long battle to reach the top of search engine rankings. You need to resort to search engine optimization or SEO techniques.

However, SEO practices evolve constantly as Google and Bing fine-tune their algorithms. Here is a primer about what to avoid.

4 Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid In 2024

1. Not implementing HTTPS

HTTP or HyperText Transfer Protocol comprises a set of rules that govern how data is exchanged between your computer and others on the internet. Think of it as traffic rules for the web that governs the exchange of packets of data.

In recent years it has become obsolete since HTTP is not secure. The data transmitted using the system is not encrypted. This allows others who choose to eavesdrop on a computer to find passwords, user names, phone numbers, and credit card information.

HTTP has been replaced by HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure or HTTPS. Unless you use it, your site will rank lower on Google. In fact, since 2019, the Chrome browser warns users about proceeding to a site that is not HTTPS certified. Chrome has a 70% market share and you do not want to show up as unsafe to such a vast number of users.

2. Posting duplicate or plagiarized content

There are two ways to look at this SEO mistake. The first is information that is plagiarized. Google cannot decide which page to place higher since the same information appears on both sites.

The other is duplicate content published by mistake. This can happen on product pages and blogs. Two product pages that describe the same exact product are to be avoided. Not only scrutinize the description on the pages but pay attention to URLs as well. They need to be unique.

Most websites host a blog for disseminating information. Since a blog contains a series of posts, a topic might get published twice by mistake. Duplicate content on the blog can prove to be vexing for the search engine to rank.

3. Keywords strategy that is sub-par

A search engine cannot actually read and understand content from a page as humans can. That is why every page carries keywords in descriptions and content. Incorrect keywords are a top SEO mistake.

The keywords allow the search engine to understand if the page is meant for someone looking for information about dental braces or an online store for potted plants.

Keywords are available through Google Keyword Planner and other similar tools. Not only must you place keywords correctly, but choose those that accurately describe your site and the page.

Image source: staticflickr.com

4. Not fixing errors in H1

Header tags or H1 tags are the first and largest tag of a webpage.

Think of it as newspaper headlines. When you want to find the score of a soccer match, you locate it by glancing through the headlines on the sports page.

A search engine does something similar. Wrong header is among the most common SEO mistakes made by a rookie site owner.

For this reason, the H1 tag has to be descriptive and give a summary of what is on the page.

For this page, the H1 is <h1> Common SEO mistakes that prevent the growth of your website</h1>

If instead, the tag read <h1>How to optimize web pages</h1> it tells the search engine nothing about the actual content. It is an SEO issue you need to avoid at all costs.

5. Publishing content that is too concise

Search engines prefer lengthy blog posts.

Posts that are about 1000-2000 words are the norm. In some cases, such as buying guides, content can be 4000 words long.

Shorter posts that contain less than 500 words do not get much attention from search. A longer post contains more details and therefore provides greater value. Ensure that you avoid the most common typos that plague low-effort content.

At the same time, pepper the writing with as much data as possible. This is very attractive to other writers who love to find someone who has done the hard work for them and would gladly provide a backlink to your site.

6. Neglecting SEO-friendly meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are the short snippets that appear below the URL and H1 in the search result.

They have two purposes. The first is to describe the page for the search engine and the second is to inform the visitor about the page.

The meta description has to be no more than 160 characters. Many site owners do not bother with a meta and as a result, the search engine shows the first 160 characters of the webpage content.

To fix it, generate a meta description for every page in 1-2 sentences. Your search ranking would skyrocket.