As the world is drifting more and more towards online models and marketing, websites are becoming a handy option for businesses to grow further and beyond. However, small businesses might find building a professional website a bit hard.
One of the main reasons why a small business desperately needs a website is to have a platform to showcase its services or inventory. If you are a small business owner and want to have your own website, you shouldn’t look any further.
Despite all the marketing strategies, social media by itself doesn’t provide you much influence over your audience or advertising. Therefore, for people to interact with your brand more, they need to visit your website. However, most small company owners could not afford a reliable website with a beautiful design.
Today, however, it’s easy to discover an online tool that will make things so much simpler that one person—instead of a team of designers or programmers—can construct a website. One of the main reasons website builders are an excellent choice for small enterprises on a low budget is because they are cost-effective, don’t require much effort, and are easily customizable. Moreover, you can also design, build and change websites in no time and start selling immediately. It is also a great way to cut corners and spend the saved money somewhere else to promote and flourish your business.
Other than that, not all website builders for small businesses are trustworthy and worth using. Some best website builders design slow websites, which instantly gives a bad impression to any visitor. Other website-building worlds don’t have supporting marketing tools, making website management a hassle for the business owner.
Our Top Picks For The Best Website Builders For Small Business:
- Websitein5 – Overall Best Website Builder For Small Business, Editor’s Pick
- WebHostingPad – Top Rated & Budget-Friendly Website Builder
- Squarespace – Most Recommended Quick And Easy To Use Website Builder
#1. Websitesin5 – Overall Best Website Builder For Small Business, Editor’s Pick
Websitesin5 is relatively a new entrant in the website builder category. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t deserve a spot on our list. The browser-based, online website builder allows you to make your website. The browser-based website builders let you create a website without manual code editing. Moreover, it can also be regarded as the best ecommerce website builder due to its advanced e-commerce features and basic site online.
Coding has become an essential part of website building with time, which is why the programmers and coders have become extremely expensive, and small businesses with a tight budget cannot afford them. In such a scenario, browser-based website builders like Websitein5 are the best option.
Websitein5 aims to provide you with the best website building services, including a personal touch. Their customer support team is also very responsive, and you can reach out to them after getting your website if there is any problems or query.
Unlike many other website builders for small businesses, Websitein5 provides the most easy-to-use and easy-to-navigate websites. Furthermore, Websitein5.com also provides a 10-day free plan trial service. In this free trial, you can enjoy their web hosting, domain services, and other important tools for ten days free of cost to analyze how they work and if they are enough for your small business.
Highlights
Unlimited Updates: A big problem with websites for small businesses is their updates. Most website builders don’t offer updates regularly, which might make the website seem outdated and slow to visitors. However, Websitein5 is entirely different in this regard. They provide unlimited updates for your website if you have their domain and web hosting services. Updates are also essential to make the website easy to customize for the designer.
Attractive Custom Designs: It’s not necessary to always customize every bit of your small business website. Instead, there are some pre-customized themes and designs on Websitein5, which you can use to make your website look more attractive. Furthermore, there are themes for almost every type of website, whether online store of e-commerce, business website, food delivery, or other services.
Webstore Builder: If you own a small online store or e-commerce business online and looking to shift it towards a website, there is no better place than Websitein5 to start with. Websitein5 is specially designed to build a website with multiple benefits. It helps you to better manage your store by compiling and saving all the stats of sales and profits. Furthermore, it offers a secure checkout system where the bank and address details of the buyer are kept secret, and only you can access them. Other than that, PayPal integration, shipping calculator, order management, and order export services are also included in their website builder.
Premium SEO Tools: To rank your website on top of a search and increase traffic, Websitein5 lets you access some premium tools you can use free of cost if you have their subscription. SEO is often underestimated during website building, but SEO is the backbone of the whole website, and Websitein5 takes good care of it.
Value-To-Money: Although Websitein5 isn’t too economical of a website builder for small businesses, considering the features and perks it provides, the price still seems to be a bargain. Some other website builders for small businesses offer even worse features at a higher price. So, overall, Websitein5 is an excellent value-to-money option for your business.
Pros
- Free SSL certificates
- Easy to use website
- Quick scrolling and navigation
- No lags or bugs
- Special features for online store and e-commerce
Cons
- Might be a bit expensive
=> Click here to visit the official website of Websitein5
#2. WebHostingPad – Top Rated & Budget-Friendly Website Builder
A one-size-fits-all small business website builder, WebHostingPad is ideal for those looking to have a website for their small business. It appears that WebHostingPad likes to make things easy. Finding what you’re searching for is quick and hassle-free on the internet.
The hosting options are straightforward, with two significant plans, three smaller ones, and VPS hosting. The business also offers auxiliary services, Weebly website builders, and SEO tools.
A few hosting alternatives are available from WebHostingPad, the two primary ones being Power Plan and Power Plan Plus. Additionally, there are VPS hosting, mini hosting, hosting in India, and hosting in Vietnam.
VPS hosting is resold by WebHostingPad, but it’s hard to discover. Since it isn’t stated anywhere else, you must click the link in the footer to locate it. Gold, Platinum, and Managed are the three VPS options available. There are bandwidth and disc space restrictions, and prices start at $19.99 per month.
VPSDepot provides hosting services with one to four processing cores, two to eight GB of RAM, dedicated IP addresses, and RAID security. The VPS choices appear to be extremely reasonably priced if you already have more demanding requirements than the hosting packages can meet.
Unlimited hosting is WebHostingPad’s key selling factor. Unlimited bandwidth, email addresses, storage space, and free SSL are all included in both options. For such a low-cost web host, this is unique. Even the most well-known web providers don’t provide endless possibilities for all their packages, and most certainly not for their most affordable ones. This is unquestionably a selling feature if your websites are resource-hungry.
Highlights
Free Weebly Website Builder: With their Weebly-powered hosting solution, WebHostingPad provides a free website builder. It does quick work of designing a website using drag and drop editor capabilities like Elementor or Beaver Builder. For non-developers, drag and drop is undoubtedly the approach to go, and Weebly is a fantastic example of a website builder done the right way. Drag & drop page components to the desired location on the page after creating the page and loading the builder. Plans come with three premium choices beginning at $8.99 a month and a free Weebly website builder for online business.
Customized WordPress Servers: WordPress-optimized servers are included in WebHostingPad’s Power Plan Plus package. SSD storage is available on servers and may be upgraded to higher specs. You can utilize “1x computing power,” “2x computing power,” and “3x times computing power” if you choose the Power Plan Plus option.
Budget-Friendly Hosting Plans: For up to five years, new clients may host their websites for as little as $1.99 per month. Prices for renewals start at $4.49 per month, which is still reasonable. We are aware of cheap and have experienced it. We don’t typically find cheap hosting that can compete with top performance. However, WebHostingPad excels in this area. When you realize what you get, that initial deal is relatively low-cost. Even though they are more expensive, renewals are still quite affordable. Additionally, you may register a name for free and get your money back within 30 days if unsatisfied.
Easy to Use Dashboard: The user dashboard is straightforward to use and browse. With rounded edges, serene colors, and clear navigation, it’s simpler to use than cPanel. When you log in, your domain(s), a list of the resources being utilized, and all your options are displayed on the left. Use the left button to manage domains, databases, accounts, emails, and files. Important material is shown in the center. It is simple to use and intuitive. Plans for unrestricted hosting. It’s uncommon for a web server to provide limitless bandwidth and storage in their budget-friendly plans. They are either completely unavailable or only available with more costly procedures. With WebHostingPad, such is not the case. Their major hosting plans, as well as their smaller plans, both include unlimited.
Free SSL: Since SSL is required when shopping online, several site providers now include SSL certificates with their hosting packages. WebHostingPad is the same. Power Plan Plus uses a premium SSL certificate from Comodo, GeoTrust, or DigiCert, whereas Power Plan uses Let’s Encrypt. Including an SSL certificate can make your website safe, ensuring that it uses HTTPS and preventing browser warnings from not being encrypted.
Responsive Support Team: WebHostingPad provides service through the phone, social media, and a ticketing system. Support is available via phone, and live chat from 8 am to 10 pm, US time (CST). The knowledge base has a decent selection of resources covering most web hosting-related issues. Although we didn’t need customer service, evaluations generally appear to be positive, praising them for being helpful, courteous, and prompt.
Pros
- Budget-friendly subscriptions
- Multiple plans to choose from
- Quick and responsive support team
- Easy to manage even without any coding knowledge
- Free domain and Weebly website builder
Cons
- The website feels a bit slow
=> Click here to visit the official website of WebHostingPad
#3. Squarespace – Most Recommended Quick And Easy To Use Website Builder
Squarespace is a website creation platform primarily targeted at entrepreneurs and small company owners. It was created in 2004 to enable anyone without knowledge of web development to complete and administer their websites. It now powers millions of websites globally.
Squarespace has developed over the past several years into a platform that now includes built-in ecommerce and marketing functions, despite its origins as a tool for creating static, brochure-style websites.
Squarespace is one of the most widely used small business website builders at the moment, according to internet statistics company Builtwith.com, which estimates that there are presently 2.8 million sites using the platform. The firm employs more than 1,600 workers.
A “hosted” solution is Squarespace. This means you don’t need to subscribe to a hosting provider or download programs to utilize it because it operates on its servers. A user-friendly content management system enables you to quickly and easily create websites in an internet browser without coding knowledge. In other terms, you build a site online using Squarespace’s themes and style editor rather than installing Dreamweaver or a similar web design tool and writing pieces of code. You only need a web browser and connection to the internet to create and maintain your website.
Highlights
Attractive Templates: The templates on Squarespace are excellent. Although aesthetics are relative, I believe Squarespace’s minimalist, contemporary layouts are unmatched by any other website builder. Bold font, white space, and many areas to display images are all features of Squarespace layouts. The templates are fully responsive, which implies they adapt to the size of the browser, making them suitable for use on a computer, smartphone, and tablet devices.
Email Marketing: You may develop email campaigns using Squarespace. This costs more, but if you use a third-party supplier like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, you would be paying extra. You may send one-time email campaigns or email notification newsletters using Squarespace. Squarespace’s integration with features like an online store and e-commerce and subscription sections is the main benefit of using it for email. Just hire an excellent copywriter to write a copy of an email, and you will see your online business sales breaking the roof.
SEO Tools: A crucial objective for beginning and expanding a small business is being found online. Making sure your website is located, indexed, and shown in online search results on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and other search engines is known as search engine optimization or SEO. Squarespace SEO comes with tools to find the best keywords in your content and a rather extensive checklist to direct your SEO efforts. You can hire an expert to improve your site from your Business SEO panel if you need professional assistance. You may also update the places displayed beneath your Google Business Profile from the Promotional tools in your dashboard.
Ease of Use: Compared to a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Squarespace is much simpler. It’s not the most straightforward small business website builder for small businesses we’ve ever seen, and it is one of Squarespace’s few drawbacks. But it doesn’t indicate it isn’t suited for newbies. The Wix UI is less cluttered and more user-friendly. However, it won’t enable you to create a website design as quickly as GoDaddy website builder, IONOS, or the incredibly user-friendly Mozello small business website builder platform would. Squarespace also lets you insert program code to enhance your site further. If you master how to use these, these capabilities may allow you to take your website to the next tier, making Squarespace less beginner-friendly than other platforms like GoDaddy website builder.
Customer Support: Like other big website builders, Squarespace offers top-notch customer service. It provides informative replies, social media assistance, and 24/7 email support through chat sessions every day of the week, Monday through Friday. You won’t receive quick responses outside of living chat because it doesn’t give phone assistance, but in my experience, the support it offers is more than sufficient. Customers of Squarespace have access to a vast collection of materials, videos, and webinars in addition to speaking with an agent. You may find answers to any fundamental queries and problems with the support resources and guidelines for more complicated issues by searching through them. Lastly, there is a public forum where you may ask these questions of other Squarespace customers if you need a quick response.
Pros
- Handy SEO and ecommerce tools included
- Free domain and SSL certificate.
- Easy to use website
- Makes email marketing a breeze
- Many templates and designs to choose from
Cons
- A little expensive
- Less customized plans
=> Click here to visit the official website of SquareSpace
Buying Guide
We advise you to jot down your goals for your site before evaluating the top small business website builder. Which functions perhaps you’d like to see on your site, and what are your aims?
List items like having a blog page, photo album, online marketplace (e-commerce), booking system, contact page, marketing tools, ecommerce tools, social networking features, etc., as examples. If you’re unclear about what you want, get ideas from other websites or your rivals.
Most small business website builders include a simple drag-and-drop graphical interface to create your website design. Before making a choice, use the trial accounts (free plans) or the substantial money-back guarantee to give it a try.
Even if you don’t choose any of our recommended platforms, this buying guide will help you make an informed decision and help your research. Some of the main factors you would have to consider are the following.
- Consider Your Level of Expertise
Although some builders are incredibly intuitive and made especially for newbies, others need a high level of technical expertise to run effectively. WordPress, for which you’ll require plugins, and WordPress hosting from the top hosting providers are among the alternatives available to skilled users. But, if you aren’t experienced and have never managed a website, we suggest you go for a small business website builder suitable for beginners. However, don’t compromise on features for ease of use. More features don’t always mean a complex operation. So, choose wisely.
- After Sales Support
You might have trouble spotting and fixing problems; though live assistance alternatives differ wildly, most come with comprehensive knowledge libraries and reference catalogs.
Before you make a purchase, be sure to pay close attention to the after-sales service. Check for dependable live chat and phone help to make sure you can recover swiftly. A pro tip is to check the after-sales service of a small business website builder for a small business beforehand. Before you buy a subscription from any small business website builder, contact them through email or reach them out through live chat.
They are your people if you find them responsive enough while replying to you. If not, then you should look towards better alternatives.
- Pricing
Pricing is a huge deciding factor when buying a business website builder for a small business. Small businesses are usually on a tight budget, and you must spend each penny carefully. But, don’t judge a website builder only based on pricing.
Some business website builders might come within budget, but their features and services might not be satisfactory. At the same time, others might be too expensive and still provide crappy features. Therefore, evaluate the features of a website builder for small businesses and their price side by side to see which option provides the better value.
- More Isn’t Always Necessary
Website builders offer hundreds of different features, tools, designs, and packages (Basic, Standard, and Premium). Be wise, know your needs and don’t buy anything extra which might cost you more. If a basic package provides enough tools and features for the type of website you need, there is no need to go for a premium or even standard package. Remember that you can constantly update your subscription later. Therefore, be patient and spend wisely. If you own an online store, make sure you don’t buy any extra features which might be irrelevant to your online store.
- Design and Features
Always ensure that the website builder provides a fair variety of expert website designs and the freedom to include extra features like Google Analytics, CRM, third-party marketing tools, etc.
These tools and features are convenient for an online store to boost their sales and make their site look more presentable. Other than that, the design of a website also lets your visitor stay longer on your website, which might result in more sales.
- Ease of Promotion
The best website builder for small businesses like online stores and e-commerce will include robust marketing features. You’ll need to have a website builder that can connect your website and your social media channels if your company runs things and engages with clients on social media.
Can your small company and online stores truly manage to skip marketing to the three billion social media users that make up nearly half of the world’s population? If not, choose the best website builders for small businesses with accessible promotion features.
- Professional Look
To wow your customers, your site builder must function flawlessly and provide a sharp, polished appearance. A company’s website accounts for 75% of users’ trustworthiness assessments. Therefore, you must access an extensive range of stylish templates if impressions are essential to you (and they should be!).
For image-driven websites like portfolios or photography blogs, Squarespace is the ideal website builder. Your photographs may say a million words, thanks to the current minimalist layouts.
How We Made the List
As we have already discussed, not every website builder is worth trusting. Therefore, we were very cautious while compiling our list of the best website builder for small businesses as we only wanted the best in the business builders to be on our list. Our primary focus was quality over quantity. Therefore, we had to filter out many website builders due to various factors. Here are some of the benchmarks we had set to evaluate a website builder and make a trustworthy list:
What We Looked For
- Ease of Use: A general misconception is that website builders are a complicated phenomenon, and only people familiar with the technical side of a website can use them. However, that’s not the case. A website builder can be easy to use and used by people with even basic computer knowledge. All the website builders on our list have the same ease of use. You don’t need to be a backend or frontend developer to understand its dynamics or use it like a pro. You can get your work done within seconds with the website builder mentioned in our list.
- User Reviews: Best website builders have a significant number of reviews and users online who can give a clear-cut opinion about the service of a website builder better than anybody else. Therefore, we reviewed multiple online sources to check how a website builder performs. We went through numerous social media sites and online forums to check users’ opinions on a particular builder’s service and usability.
- Websites Evaluation: One of our main goals was to check the websites created by using a particular website builder. For instance, we visited a small business website created having used WordPress to see how it performs. Moreover, we also checked if the website contains any bugs which could put off the visitor. We checked and evaluated these websites and only chose the ones doing well during our testing.
- Pricing: The cost of a website builder for small businesses was one of our significant considerations while looking for a budget-friendly option. Small businesses are often tight on budget and don’t have thousands of bucks to spend on a website. Therefore, such companies tend to go towards cheap website builders and mess up the whole website experience of their customers. However, we checked the costs of the best website builders and several other features to ensure no website builder compromises on features while cutting the costs.
- SEO Tools: SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the best way to market your website, attract more traffic, and eventually gain more sales. A website without proper SEO is nothing more than useless. Therefore, we checked the availability of multiple SEO tools on the website builders to ensure they are optimizable. Furthermore, you can’t find all SEO tools even in the best website builders. Therefore, we made sure that the best website builders on our list provide the standard tools so that you won’t have to buy them separately, and you can also save some bucks.
- Speed of Website: Many website builders for small businesses often create awful sites. Slow websites instantly put off the visitor or a potential buyer, which can drastically damage the whole purpose of having a website. Therefore, we checked the speed of websites created using a website builder to check how it performs. We struck off all the website builders from our list, which started slow websites.
- Ease of Customizations: Websites for all businesses are the fastest evolving things on earth. Small businesses need to continuously customize or change the inventory or look of their website. Therefore, they need a website builder with abilities to easily customize the website without taking additional time. This also helps small businesses keep their stocks and services up to date and facilitates the customer. Furthermore, small business websites are often inspired by some big websites of the same type. Therefore, they need to customize the website to add a personal touch every time.
- Easy Navigation: Navigation is one of the essential parts of any website of any business. Especially if the company is related to an online store or has any ecommerce features, it can be a little hard to manage your whole inventory and make it easy to navigate. Therefore, we only picked those website builders for a small businesses that can help you make an easy-to-navigate website.
FAQs About Website Builder
Below listed are a few of the most commonly asked questions by users and clients alike. We urge you to go through them to clear out any other queries you might have.
- Can I build a website through a site builder for free?
Small business owners often come up with this question. Yes, creating a website without paying anything is easy, but if you want a professional website, the reply is no. You can locate free website builders. However, upon deeper inspection, you will realize that you still wish to fund to get things going.
This is because in free versions owning a domain is not possible. Other than that, the real power over your own website is not given by website builders. Access to styles, plugins, and add-ons requires payment. Moreover, there will be many advertisements on your website.
In short, yes! Small business owners can build their own small business site for free and also get pre-prepared free websites for their ecommerce business, but it isn’t recommended.
- What is a mobile responsive site and Amp?
A mobile-responsive website instantly scales its photos, content, and design components to display clearly and fast on the phone. More than 60% of traffic in the United States is now coming from mobile devices. Thus, your website must be mobile-responsive. Moreover, your blog should be AMP-optimized to guarantee rapid loading times on mobile devices. Accelerated mobile pages are known as AMPs. Google (along with many other partners) is making an effort to increase mobile traffic to improve user experience.
Use the AMP functionality if it’s available on your website builder. Your website’s user experience will undoubtedly improve, which will help you rank higher in search engine results.
- What’s the difference between a website builder and a web designer?
You may develop and launch websites with any setup you want using website builders, which are software applications. People of all skill levels may utilize them as much as they have an idea of how they want their website to appear. Nevertheless, there are also a lot of skilled experts who are professional web architects that can complete this task themselves using code or a website builder.
Those who don’t work in the creative industries may not have a designer’s sense of what appears excellent on screens. You might want to consider hiring a designer if you’re unsure how to format your website.
- What’s the purpose of app markets in website builders?
The best website builders provide app stores that you may use to increase your website’s capabilities. If your website builder doesn’t already have capabilities like online marketing and popups, for instance, you should be able to add them with the help of an application or plugins. While some free programs and extensions, others could have monthly or yearly fees.
- Why are SSL certificates included in website builders?
Data flows to and from a website are encrypted using files known as secure sockets layer (SSL) certificates. Therefore, the SSL certificate protects the privacy of the data whenever anyone enters your secure site or submits data in any areas on your website (documents, login, password, or credit card details). For the sake of the consumer, it’s crucial to have such security on your website, but it also improves your positioning in search results.
- Do website builders include SEO tools?
Yes, many reputable companies provide tools to aid in improving your site’s search engine exposure. Most builders have an architecture that makes it simple for search engines to access the content. Additionally, many systems include tools for automating data formatting, customizing the meta tags on your website, and sharing your material easily on social networks.
- Can I edit the website builder templates?
When choosing a template, the options you see contain a lot of sample material. You can change all graphics, text, buttons, and functionality. Everything is only there to give you a broad sense of how your website will look in the end. It is also worthwhile to choose a template applicable to your sector because it is a good possibility that it already has the functionality you want.
- Can I build a website without coding knowledge?
Anyone can learn how to create a website because user-friendliness is now a requirement. Today, as opposed to 20 years ago, creativity and common sense are sufficient to launch your website-building endeavor.
You can learn how to design a website by being familiar with the fundamental features of the best website builder and its tools. At the same time, it is feasible to rely on accessibility and straightforward layouts. However, we suggest you learn the basics of HTML and CSS. You put yourself ahead of the competition regarding issue detection and rectification by mastering the fundamentals of HTML and CSS. If none of the following interests you, you still have the right to produce a handy website.
Conclusion: Which Is The Most Suitable Website Builder For You?
It requires considerable time and effort to operate your business. With our suggestions, you won’t have to spend any more time or money looking for the best website builder for small businesses.
You should pick the builder that best meets your demands when you reduce the pool of builders by feature and cost. For most small company websites, Websitein5 is our recommendation if there isn’t an apparent option. But almost all of our other top picks could be of great use to you as well, so don’t hesitate to give Squarespace and web hosting pad a trial run. Furthermore, be wise while choosing a plan to make the most of the best website builder for small businesses. Now, go and create something unique!
