When it comes to building a website, especially those you might need for a website, you must find a way to maximize efficiency while not spending an arm and a leg on a web designer or company to do it for you. Having a decent website built can cost as little as $5 if you are going to waste your time finding someone on a site like Fiverr, but while you may get something that looks great, you’re going to get jacked when it comes to having great functionality and a complete site.
Other sites out there claim to have the ability to make it easy on people by letting the business owners choose from templates and then tweak it to their liking. These “site-building websites” are handy, but let’s look and compare them from what you could end up getting compared to you building it yourself!
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The Sites that Claim to be the Best
Here are some of the most popular sites that claim to be the very best when hosting a “site builder” site – Many people have heard of them.
· WordPress
WordPress is the most used website builder in existence, and there are many reasons why.
This is one of the first big websites that was originally a blogging site. It’s by far one of the oldest and the most flexible. It does take some getting used to if you want to customize things, but there are a ton of free, freemium, and premium plugins and functionalities that you can add to it, not to mention themes. Some companies pay for premium themes, but there are a few little secrets and tools that you can use to simply fully customize and design these themes yourself.
If you want to host it on your hosting server, many companies allow you to have these automatically installed and managed, or you can host it directly on wordpress.com, as well as do everything manually (installation, MySQL, etc.) yourself. The primary downside is that there is no automatic drag and drop builder. You can still easily learn how to use Beaver Builder, MotoPress, Elementor, and some of the more popular building plugins.
· Squarespace
Squarespace has some cool pre-made templates, and it’s straightforward to use.
Squarespace is one big smorgasbord of an editor when it comes to being geared towards business. You get responsive, mobile-friendly designs, as well as have the ability to customize things on your own. They have a strict codebase that is their own, so that it may get a little confusing at times, and you don’t have a lot of options to choose from when it comes to finding custom templates. They also don’t have a free version (although you can build your “site” for free) to publish your site, and they are pretty expensive when it comes to their monthly costs.
· Shopify
Shopify is a pretty easy website builder to use if you are looking to sell goods online.
Shopify just really boomed over the past few years, but in terms of creating a custom online e-commerce business (or dropshipping) website, they are unmatched in competition. While they, too, have a handful of themes to choose from, they are pretty standard in their layouts. Aside from being expensive for businesses (even though they do offer a free 14-day trial), they charge the standard 2.9% plus $0.30 for every credit card (which, on a positive note – they accept almost all of them) transaction, and even more for using payment providers that aren’t “Shopify-based.”
· Wix
Wix is an OK website builder if you’re a beginner.
Ah yes, the kings of advertising are known as Wix.com. We’ve all seen the commercials on YouTube, banner ads, Facebook, and even television! Wix is a top-rated source for those “do-it-yourselfers” that don’t have a lick of design or website building sense. They have a ton of site gadgets and even have an option to have your website on there for free, but they don’t allow you to change templates once you’ve created a site… Yes, you have to start all over from scratch. You also don’t have any analytics to see how your site is doing, and you aren’t always mobile-friendly – a humongous pitfall for small business owners and entrepreneurs.
So Who’s the Winner?
WordPress is the winner in terms of site-building. With numerous options to choose from, you may be like a kid in a candy store, but why not? You can have total flexibility and make your website look great, plus get the right SEO out there. There are even plugins that allow you to run an entire e-commerce store on your WordPress site. No, we’re not affiliated with them in any way; they’re just so much better and easier to manage. If you get the right hosting from an IT provider, you can even use it to host on your company’s intranet as well!