The Best Website Builders for Creating Your Own Website

Creating your own website has never been easier than it is today. Thanks to drag-and-drop website builders that are improving at a rapid pace, it’s no longer necessary to hire a professional designer or developer to create a basic website for your business or organization.

Today’s website builders are perfect for small businesses, non-profit organizations, and entrepreneurs who want a quality website at an affordable price. You can choose from a selection of pre-designed templates, add your own photos and text, and in most cases, customize the design and layout to suit your needs. Going forward, you’re also able to make changes as needed and keep your site up-to-date without the need of a designer or developer.

There are a number of website builders to choose from, and here you’ll find our rankings and top recommendations.

The Best Website Builders

1. Wix

Wix is the most popular website builder with millions of sites built on the platform. It’s more than a simple website builder, including features like:

• Ecommerce. Sell products directly from your own website.
• Point of sale. Streamline online and in-store sales.
• Multichannel sells. Sell on Facebook, Instagram, and others.
• Online booking. Let website visitors schedule appointments and pay for services.
• Membership. Offer various memberships and packages.

With an impressive and extensive set of features, it’s easy to see why people like Wix. You can use Wix to create a simple website for a small business and take advantage of many of the special features that set it apart from the competition, including things like:

• Restaurant websites – Display the menu on your website and accept online reservations and takeout orders.
• Hotel websites – Allow website visitors to book a room.
• Event websites – Send invites, sell tickets, and track RSVPs.
• Musicians and bands – Allow visitors to stream your music or sell it from your site.
• Service providers – Manage clients, bookings, and payments.

With features like these, you can see that Wix is a robust platform, allowing you to build a fully functional website, not just a basic site with a few simple pages.

Wix also provides unlimited design freedom. You can start with a pre-designed template or create your own layout and design from scratch, with no limitations. You can move things around wherever you want, without the need to code. In terms of flexibility, no other web builder compares with Wix.

There’s also a really unique feature call Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) that makes it possible to create your website in just a few minutes. You’ll be asked a few basic questions about your business and artificial intelligence is used to create a customized website for you instantly. While this doesn’t give you the design freedom and flexibility of creating your own site, it’s perfect when you need to get something online very quickly.

Wix Pricing

Wix offers several different plans with prices starting at $14 per month, which is intended for personal use. The Business Unlimited Plan ($27 per month) gives you access to essential features like e-commerce, subscriptions, online bookings, event management, online reservations, hotel reservations and more.

Overall, Wix’s prices aren’t the lowest, but they still represent a great value considering all of the features and functionality you can’t get from competitors.

Wix Pros:

• Template selection. More than 500 pre-designed templates to choose from, including templates for all kinds of businesses and websites.
• Loads of features. Wix has more features and options than most of its competitors.
• Total design freedom. Customize the templates any way you want to or start your own design from scratch. Wix has very few design restraints.
• Wix ADI. It’s possible to use artificial design intelligence (ADI) to create a site almost instantly. Just answer a few questions and Wix will create the site for you with custom text and images.

Wix Cons:

• The design freedom can be overwhelming. While many users will appreciate the freedom that Wix provides to design whatever you want, there’s a bit of a learning curve and it may not be the right fit for everyone. Some users prefer a simpler solution.
• The extensive features can be overwhelming. If you’re looking for a powerful, feature-rich website builder, Wix is a great choice. If you’re looking for simplicity, please see the next option on our list.

2. Zyro

Zyro stands out for its ease of use and simplicity. It’s a very beautiful and capable web builder, but it’s not as feature-rich as Wix. However, Zyro offers a user experience that you’re sure to appreciate.

Because of the ease of use, Zyro is a great choice for solopreneurs, small businesses, and non-profit organizations. Anyone who wants to create an attractive, professional-looking website without needing to spend much time on it will love Zyro.

There are more than 100 pre-designed templates you can choose from, which gives you some variety without being completely overwhelming. The templates represent many industries and types of websites, and they’re very well designed. Overall, the templates tend to feature clean design styles.

While Zyro doesn’t offer a feature list as long as Wix, it does allow you to build an e-commerce website and sell products online. You can also integrate your site to sell on Amazon, Facebook, and Instagram.

One of the most interesting things about Zyro is the extensive list of artificial intelligence (AI) features. There’s an AI writer that will generate text and save a lot of time for you. You can also use the AI business name generator, slogan generator, blog post title generator, and logo maker.

Zyro Pricing

Currently, Zyro is one of the best values you’ll find. The prices are very low considering everything you get. Prices currently start at just $2.90 per month, and e-commerce plans start at just $9.90 per month. There’s also a 30-day money-back guarantee in case you’re not happy with Zyro for some reason.

Zyro Pros:

• Simplicity and ease of use. Zyro is great for entrepreneurs and business owners who don’t have any experience building a website. It’s the easiest web builder to use.
• Excellent features. Zyro has all the features most businesses will need.
• Amazing prices. Zyro’s prices are among the lowest in the industry.
• Well-designed templates. The selection isn’t huge, but the quality of the designs is strong.

Zyro Cons:

• Smaller selection of templates. There are more than 100 templates to choose from, but that’s less than Wix.

3. Weebly

Weebly is another option that’s similar to Zyro in terms of ease of use. You won’t get the same extensive features or complete design freedom you can get with Wix, but there’s less of a learning curve and Weebly offers everything that most small businesses and organizations need.

Of course, you’ll have a large selection of templates to use as a starting point for your design. The templates available from Weebly are very well-designed, so it’s easy even for non-designers to get a great-looking website. The drag-and-drop editor gives you plenty of flexibility to customize your site while still being simple and easy to use.

Although Weebly doesn’t offer some of the advanced features from Wix, it does come with full e-commerce capabilities. Weebly was purchased by Square and all payments through e-commerce sites powered by Weebly will be processed by Square. In fact, the e-commerce functionality is very good for the price.

Weebly Pricing

Although there’s a free plan available, it’s very limited and only suitable for personal websites. Paid plans start at just $6 per month, but you’ll need to pay at least $12 per month to remove Weebly ads from your site. That $12 per month plan also includes almost all of the e-commerce features, making it an outstanding value. To get all of the e-commerce features like accepting PayPal payments, allowing product reviews, and abandoned cart emails, you’ll need to pay $26 per month.

Weebly Pros:

• Simplicity and ease of use. Like Zyro, Weebly is an excellent choice if you want to create a website quickly and easily.
• Beautiful templates. The pre-designed templates available from Weebly are outstanding.
• Excellent pricing. Weebly is an outstanding value. The prices aren’t as low as Zyro, but it’s close.
• E-commerce features. Weebly’s e-commerce features are very solid, especially for the price.
• Mobile app. Manage your website from your smartphone.

Weebly Cons:

• Limited features. Compared to Wix, Weebly doesn’t offer as many features. However, that helps to improve the ease of use.

4. Webnode

Webnode is fairly similar to Weebly and Zyro in terms of the feature set. It’s not as feature-rich as Wix, but still offers everything most small businesses will need, including e-commerce capabilities.

The templates available from Webnode are beautiful, but the selection is limited. You won’t find as big a collection of templates or as many choices here as you will with most competitors.

Webnode Pricing

Plans start at just $3.90 per month, however, that plan is extremely limited. You’ll need to pay at least $12.90 per month to remove Webnode ads from your site. The $12.90 plan includes basic e-commerce functionality, but many of the e-commerce features require a plan that costs $20.90 per month.

Webnode Pros

• Beautiful templates. Get a great-looking website easily.
• Simplicity. Webnode is easy to use.

Webnode Cons:

• Limited features. Webnode may not be sufficient for your business’s needs.
• Small selection of templates. Competitors offer a much bigger collection of templates.

5. Duda

Duda is a lesser-known option, but it offers some unique features you won’t find with most competitors. It’s geared more towards web designers and agencies that want to use Duda to build client websites.

Of course, you’ll get a collection of templates to use as the starting point for your layout and design. There are more than 100 templates available, but the quality is varied. Some of the templates are excellent, but others don’t seem to offer the same quality of design. Overall, I’d rate the templates from Wix and Weebly higher than the selection from Duda.

Some of the more interesting features of Duda include:

• White-label options
• Website personalization
• Notification bars
• Import content from another website or Facebook page
• Popups
• Online scheduling and reservations

That’s just a short list. There are many additional features covered at Duda’s website. In terms of features, Duda has more to offer than the others we’ve looked at so far, aside from Wix.

Duda Pricing

Pricing starts at $14 per month. The Agency plan, which allows you to host up to four sites on the plan, is $44 per month. Custom plans are available to suit your specific needs.

Duda Pros:

• Ideal for designers and agencies. Duda allows you to create a white label website editor for your clients and also offers features related to client management and team collaboration.
• E-commerce. Create an online shop for yourself or for your clients.
• Excellent interface. The user interface of the website builder is beautiful and easy to use.

Duda Cons:

• Not ideal for end users. Duda is built mostly for designers and agencies. End users will probably prefer to go to Wix, Zyro, or Weebly rather than purchasing directly from Duda.

6. WordPress

WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world, but it’s not a direct comparison to the options we’ve looked at so far. All of the other websites builders we’ve covered are hosted solutions, which means they host your website for you. WordPress.org is self-hosted, which means you’ll need a hosting account with a company like Bluehost or WP Engine (read our Bluehost review and our WP Engine review to see which is right for you).

It definitely will take a little more effort to get your site up with WordPress as compared to one of the options covered earlier in this article, but you’ll also have more freedom and flexibility. There are thousands of WordPress themes and plugins out there, including some that make it easy to build your own site without any design or coding experience.

Divi from Elegant Themes is our favorite option for creating your own site on WordPress. Divi comes with more than 100 pre-design websites you can use, and you can customize the layouts and designs to meet your needs or preferences. Divi also allows you to create custom layouts for any page or post with a drag-and-drop visual builder.

WordPress Pricing

WordPress itself is free and open-source, but you’ll need a hosting account and a theme (template). Hosting from Bluehost starts at just $3.95 per month. A membership to Elegant Themes costs $89 per year or $249 for a lifetime license. With each plan, you’ll get access to both themes from Elegant Themes (Divi and Extra), plus three plugins.

Special Discount: Save 20% at Elegant Themes by clicking on this link. The discount applies for yearly and lifetime memberships.

WordPress Pros:

• Complete control. Host your site anywhere you want and build whatever you want.
• Familiarity. Millions of people already use WordPress, and if you’re one of them, you’ll benefit from a reduced learning curve.
• Excellent pricing. WordPress itself is free, and it’s possible to get a cheap hosting plan from Bluehost and membership to Elegant Themes for a great price. You can run an e-commerce site on these plans. You don’t need to upgrade simply to get a few features.

WordPress Cons:

• Complexity. You’ll need to set up the hosting account. It’s not difficult, but if you have no experience with design or development and you’re looking for a simple solution, something like Zyro or Weebly would be easier.
• Higher maintenance. You’ll need to deal with things like WordPress core updates, theme updates, and plugin updates. It’s not difficult, but the maintenance is a little higher than other options.

7. Constant Contact

You may know Constant Contact as an email marketing service, but they now offer a website builder in addition to email marketing. This option is much different than any of the others we’ve covered so far because your plan will include both the website builder and all the features needed to manage your email list.

As far as the website builder is concerned, Constant Contact favors simplicity. You won’t get as many features and options for creating your website as you would get with another service like Wix, but Constant Contact is suitable for simple small business websites. It’s also capable of powering an online shop so you can create an e-commerce website.

Constant Contact uses AI to help you create your website in just a few minutes. All you need to do is answer a few questions and it will created a customized website for you almost instantly. It’s similar to Wix ADI.

Of course, this option is best for businesses and entrepreneurs that want to have tight integration between their website and email marketing. With the email automation features offered by Constant Contact, there’s a lot you can do with email marketing, especially if you’re using the e-commerce capabilities to sell products.

Constant Contact Pricing

Pricing is another way that Constant Contact stands out. You can get access to the web builder for just $10 per month, although the features of that plan are fairly limited. But for just $20 per month, you can get a plan that provides the website builder, e-commerce, and email marketing.

Constant Contact Pros:

• Includes email marketing. Manage your website and email list in one place.
• Great pricing. The prices are very reasonable considering you’re getting a web builder and email marketing for one price.
• AI builder creates websites fast. Get your website up and running in a matter of just a few minutes.
• Simple. Easy to use, making it a good choice for those who haven’t built a website before.

Constant Contact Cons:

• Very limited. The features are basic and may not meet the needs of every small business.
• Lack of design control. The options for designing and customizing your site are far more limited compared to other options like Wix.

8. Squarespace

Squarespace is a popular website builder, in part because of the beautiful templates available. The only downside to the Squarespace templates is that they rely heavily on pro-quality photos. If the quality of the photos on your site isn’t up to par, it probably won’t look very good. The designs are simple, allowing the photos and images to shine. But you’ll need great photos to be able to pull it off.

Compared to the other web builders covered here (aside from WordPress), Squarespace offers more features created with bloggers in mind. You can also create create an e-commerce website and sell products through Squarespace.

Many users find the dashboard and functionality of Squarespace to be a little bit clunky. It offers plenty of features, but it’s not as easy to use as some others like Wix and Weebly. However, you should have no problems once you get through the learning curve.

Squarespace Pricing

The Personal plan costs $12 per month, but it’s fairly limited in terms of features. Most small businesses will want to go with at least the Business plan at $18 per month. For e-commerce functionality, you’ll need to pay at least $26 per month. Overall, Squarespace’s pricing is on the higher side, but still reasonable.

Squarespace Pros:

• Beautiful templates. If you have high-quality photos to use, the Squarespace templates will give you a beautiful website.
• Feature-rich. Squarespace has plenty of features, including e-commerce.

Squarespace Cons:

• Not the easiest to use. You’ll have to go through a learning curve.
• Pricing. Squarespace’s prices are a little higher than most competitors.

Ecommerce Website Builders

While most of the web builders covered above will allow you to build an e-commerce site, there are also some platforms created specifically and exclusively for e-commerce. The e-commerce capabilities of the general web builders are fairly limited, but the options listed below make it possible to create a very powerful online shop. If e-commerce is a major part of your business, I would recommend choosing a platform created specifically for that purpose

1. Shopify

Shopify is the most popular platform for building and hosting an e-commerce site. They offer a large selection of templates (themes) to choose from, and there are also thousands of premium Shopify themes you can purchase for a very reasonable price.

With the help of Shopify, it’s easy to get a great-looking e-commerce site that’s easy to manage. If you run a brick and mortar business, Shopify can be used for point of sale purchases as well as e-commerce. It also integrates with Amazon and other platforms and social networks.

If you sell physical products, you’ll love the way Shopify receives automatic shipping rates from major carriers like USPS, UPS, and FedEx. It will also handle sales tax calculations for you.

Shopify offers far too many features to cover here, but it’s safe to say that it’s the top choice for small and medium-sized e-commerce businesses.

Shopify Pricing

Pricing starts at $29 per month. All of the Shopify plans allow you to sell an unlimited number of products, so you won’t have to upgrade simply because you have a lot of different products. The higher-priced plans offer some additional features like more admin user accounts, advanced reporting, and USPS priority pricing.

Shopify Pros:

• Feature-rich. Shopify offers more extensive e-commerce features than the general web builders like Wix and Weebly.
• Selection of themes. The themes (templates) available from Shopify look great, plus you can buy a premium theme for a very reasonable price.
• Addons. There are many addons that extend the functionality of Shopify, providing unlimited possibilities.
• Competitive pricing. Since Shopify’s plans allow you to sell an unlimited number of products, the pricing is very reasonable for what you get.

Shopify Cons:

• Limited design/layout flexibility. Although Shopify does make it easy to customize your design, you don’t have the same unlimited freedom you would get with Wix.

2. BigCommerce

BigCommerce is another excellent choice for building and hosting your e-commerce site. It’s similar to Shopify in a lot of ways but maybe a little bit better suited for larger sites, while Shopify is better for small and medium-sized businesses.

Shopify is a little more simple than BigCommerce, but BigCommerce offers more advanced features and capabilities. You’ll also get more design freedom and flexibility with BigCommerce.

With BigCommerce, just like Shopify, you can sell anywhere. Sell on Amazon or other marketplaces, as well as social networks. You can even integrate BigCommerce with an existing WordPress-powered website.

BigCommerce Pricing

Plans start at $29.95 per month. Just like Shopify, BigCommerce doesn’t limit the number of products you can sell on any plan. High-priced plans allow you to sell more per year and also introduce advanced features.

BigCommerce Pros:

• Design freedom. BigCommerce allows you to create a beautiful e-commerce site that’s fully customized.
• Advanced features. The e-commerce capabilities are as good as you’ll find from any platform.
• Ideal for larger businesses and shops. BigCommerce is probably more ideal than Shopify for larger online shops.

BigCommerce Cons:

• Not ideal for smaller shops. The features of BigCommerce are overkill for smaller shops and businesses.

3. Square Online

Square is a popular payment processor and Square Online is their own web builder for e-commerce sites. It’s not as feature-rich as Shopify or BigCommerce, but there are some reasons to consider Square Online. Restaurants can take orders for takeout and curbside pick up. You can also take advantage of the online booking capabilities, which are incredibly useful for service providers. Square Online can also handle recurring membership payments.

While Square does make it easy to create your own website, you won’t have as much design flexibility as you’d get with Shopify or BigCommerce. Square Online may be the right choice for business owners who want to get a site online quickly and aren’t as concerned about controlling all of the small details of the design.

Square Online Pricing

It’s possible to get started for free, however, you can’t use your own domain on the free plan. Businesses need their own domain for a professional image, so the free plan really isn’t suitable for anything other than a trial. Paid plans start at just $12 per month.

Square Online Pros:

• Simplicity. If you want an e-commerce site that’s quick and easy to set up and you’re not concerned about advanced features, take a look at Square Online.
• Pricing. The prices are low for a solid e-commerce option.

Square Online Cons:

• Too simple for most e-commerce businesses. You may find the features of Shopify or BigCommerce to be more suitable.
• Limited design flexibility. You can create a site quickly, but you won’t have as much control over the design and layout.

Final Thoughts

Building your own website today is easier than it’s ever been. The leading website builders covered here will give you plenty of options for building your own website without touching any code. Hopefully, these rankings and reviews have helped you to find the best option for your specific needs.