10 of the Best Website Builders in 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 can make changes as needed and keep your site up-to-date without needing a designer or developer.

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

The Best Website Builders

1. Squarespace

Squarespace is a popular website builder, and it’s our top recommendation. Whether you’re creating a corporate website, portfolio site, blog, personal website, or even an online shop, Squarespace has the needed features.

It’s easy to create a beautiful website with Squarespace. They offer a huge selection of templates for all users (no additional fee on top of the monthly subscription). So for no upfront fee, you can get a professional-looking site in almost no time.

Squarespace offers templates that have been created for various businesses, organizations, events, and even individuals. And, of course, you can customize any template to work for your project.

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

If you run a business that works on appointments, you can use Squarespace Scheduling so website visitors can easily see your availability and schedule an appointment without needing to call. This is perfect for therapists, consultants, attorneys, and other service providers. You can even collect payments and set up automated appointment reminders.

While there are several high-quality web builders, Squarespace is our top recommendation because:

The large selection of beautiful templates.
Ease of use for customizing the sites/templates.
Features that meet the needs of most small businesses, organizations, and entrepreneurs.
Helpful and accessible customer service.

Squarespace Pricing

The Personal plan costs $16 per month, but its features are fairly limited. Most small businesses will want to go with at least the Business plan at $23 per month. For e-commerce functionality, pricing starts at $27 per month. These prices include web hosting, customer support, and access to hundreds of templates.

Squarespace Pros:

Beautiful templates. The Squarespace templates will give you a beautiful website.
Feature-rich. Squarespace has plenty of features, including e-commerce.
Take appointments and reservations. Restaurants and service providers love the ability to accept online reservations and appointments.
Professional email: Squarespace has partnered with Google to provide email at your custom domain name.
Email marketing: Squarespace provides beautiful email templates and other email marketing functionality.

Squarespace Cons:

Pricing. Squarespace’s prices are a little higher than some competitors.

Get Started with Squarespace

2. Wix

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

A unique feature called Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) 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 quickly get something online.

Wix Pricing

Wix offers several different plans with prices starting at $16 per month, which is intended for personal use. The Business Unlimited Plan ($32 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 the features and functionality.

Wix Pros:

Template selection. More than 500 pre-designed templates, including templates for businesses and websites of all kinds.
Loads of features. Wix has more features and options than most of its competitors.
Total design freedom. Customize the templates in 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 instantly create a site. 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 they 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. But please see the next option on our list if you’re looking for simplicity.
Higher prices. Wix is not the cheapest option, although the prices are justified by what’s included.

Get Started with Wix

3. Zyro

Zyro stands out for its ease of use and simplicity. It’s a beautiful and capable web builder, but it’s not as feature-rich as Wix or Squarespace. 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 spending 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 or Squarespace, 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 $11.99 per month, and e-commerce plans start at just $14.99per month, and promotions often drop the prices even lower. There’s also a 30-day money-back guarantee in case you’re not happy with Zyro for any 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 a nice set of features.
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.

Get Started with Zyro

4. Weebly

Weebly is another option 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 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 Wix’s advanced features, it comes with full e-commerce capabilities. Weebly was purchased by Square, and Square will process all payments through e-commerce sites powered by Weebly. In fact, the e-commerce functionality is very good for the price.

Weebly Pricing

Although a free plan is available, it’s 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 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 and Squarespace, Weebly doesn’t offer as many features. However, that helps to improve the ease of use.

Get Started with Weebly

5. Webnode

Webnode is fairly similar to Weebly and Zyro in terms of the feature set. It’s not as feature-rich as Wix or Squarespace 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 monthly to remove Webnode ads from your site. The $12.90 plan includes basic e-commerce functionality, but many 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.

Get Started with Webnode

6. Duda

Duda 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 and less toward end users.

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 design quality. Overall, I’d rate the templates from Squarespace and Wix 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 on Duda’s website.

Duda Pricing

Pricing starts at $14 per month. The Agency plan, which allows you to host up to four sites, 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 als
o offers features related to client management and team collaboration.
E-commerce. Create an online shop for yourself or 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.

Get Started with Duda

7. 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 (at least, not yet). WordPress has been adding more features for building a website, but to get the most out of the platform, you currently need to use a flexible theme like Divi.

The other website builders we’ve covered are hosted solutions, which means they host your website for you. WordPress.org is self-hosted, meaning you’ll need a hosting account with a company like Bluehost or Rocket.

It will take a little more effort to get your site up with WordPress 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, 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.

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 WordPress core updates, theme updates, and plugin updates. It’s not difficult, but the maintenance is slightly higher than other options.

Get Started with WordPress

Ecommerce Website Builders

While most of the web builders covered above will allow you to build an e-commerce site, some platforms are 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 how 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 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 general web builders like Squarespace and Wix.
Selection of themes. The themes (templates) available from Shopify look great, plus you can buy a premium theme for a very reasonable price.
Add-ons. Many add-ons 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.

Get Started with Shopify

2. BigCommerce

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

Shopify is a little simpler 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. 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 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.

Get Started with BigCommerce

3. Square Online

Square is a popular payment processor, and Square Online is its 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 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, 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.

Get Started with Square Online

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 find the best option for your needs.