Why is choosing the right website builder important? Finding the right website builder can avoid many detours for your online business, allow quick and easy setup without significant time and capital investment, and ensure that your online business has the tools you need for your online business, including the capability for growth. In this guide, we will discuss the 5 best website builders to help you build your ideal online business.
Factors to consider when choosing the right website builder
User-friendly
Finding the right website builder from the very beginning can save you a lot of trouble and time, especially if you have no experience in website building. Choosing the right website builder for you that is user-friendly can allow you to set up your online business as soon as possible and allow you to customize it with ease when needed.
Scalability
One consideration you should include when choosing a website builder is scalability. How big are you going to grow your business? As your business grows, your website must scale with it. If your website builder can’t offer the features you need, such as customizing your checkout process or handling increased traffic, you will have to perform website migration. Migrating your website is a complex and lengthy process that can disrupt operations, cause sales and data losses, and negatively affect domain authority.
Ecommerce features
If you are running an online store that involves selling physical or digital goods, you will need to find a website builder with ecommerce functionality and multiple payment processing options. Some website builders have in-built ecommerce functionality, while others may require extra processes to set up one.
Pricing
Pricing is one of the most important factors to consider when choosing the correct website builder. Some website builders offer free trials and allow you to start with minimal upfront costs, while others may require higher-tier plans to assess features like ecommerce features. Further, the cost can be incredibly expensive as your business scales. Therefore, carefully select a website builder that aligns with your future business plans to avoid major financial setbacks in the long run.
1. Wix – Best All-Round Website Builder for Small Online Businesses
Best for: Small businesses and beginners
Price: Price: $0 to $159/month
What I like:
- Beginner-friendly interface
- Drag-and-drop
- AI website builder
- Aesthetic templates
What I dislike:
- Ecommerce features are available only from high-tier plans (Core and above)
- Website transfer and template switch are unavailable
Wix Overview
Wix is the best all-around website builder for online businesses who wish to build an aesthetic website with no coding knowledge. Wix has over 900 aesthetic theme templates and 800+ apps for you to choose from to help you create a unique website with all the extensive features you need.
Key Strengths of Wix
Drag-and-drop editor
What makes Wix stand out for small online businesses is its balance of simplicity and power. The drag-and-drop editor is genuinely intuitive. You can literally grab elements and place them exactly where you want. For someone who is using WordPress like me, I have to say that it’s very impressive. There are different element templates that you can use and further customize, from menus, buttons, blogs, bookings, and more, so you don’t have to spend hours just trying to make your menu look good.
AI website builder
Wix has a powerful AI website builder that can assist you in creating your website. Before it begins building your website, it asks you all important questions to define your vision and understand your needs. This is perfect for beginners who have no prior experience in website building or design, questions like who is your target audience, what specific features do you need for your website, and what makes you stand out from your competitors to create a personalized dashboard and website.
I found the “Help me answer” incredibly useful. When you don’t know how to answer a question, clicking the button will prompt the AI to ask more questions to help it help you figure out what is needed for your website.
The Downsides of Using Wix
Theme inflexibility and restricted migration
Every website builder has its pros and cons, and inflexibility is one of the cons of using Wix. WIX has hundreds of attractive templates, but switching from one to another is impossible. If you want to change the theme, you will have to recreate another website with the desired theme and copy your content over. Furthermore, your website design is owned by Wix, and you won’t be able to transfer your design to another platform.
Not ideal for ecommerce store
While Wix offers e-commerce functionalities, these are only available with Core plans and higher. Purchasing the core plan gives you basic ecommerce features, such as adding a shopping cart, multi-channel product listings, product reviews, and customer accounts. To get standard ecommerce features, you will have to purchase the Business plan, which costs $36/month (billed yearly).
Pricing
- Free: No ecommerce features, 500MB storage
- Light ($17/month): No ecommerce features, free domain for 1 year(available for all paid plans), light marketing suite
- Core ($29/month): Basic ecommerce features
- Business ($36/month): 100GB storage space, standard ecommerce features,
- Business Elite ($159/month): Unlimited storage space, advanced ecommerce features, advanced developer platform
Overall, I recommend Wix for small business owners or freelancers with little to no web design experience but wish to create a professional-looking website without a significant time and financial investment.
2. Shopify – Best Ecommerce Website Builder
Shopify
Best for: Ecommerce Businesses
Price: $1 (for 3 months) to $2300/month
What I like:
- Extensive e-commerce features and apps even for basic plans
- User-friendly
- Drag-and-drop feature
What I dislike:
- Costly
- Limited free themes
- Shopify owns your online store
Shopify Overview
If selling products online is your primary goal, Shopify is your best option. Shopify is the best ecommerce website builder because the platform was built specifically for selling.
Shopify is the choice of many huge brands, including Gymshark, Allbirds, Red Bull, and Kylie Cosmetics. While other website builders add e-commerce as an additional feature, Shopify’s entire platform is built to increase sales.
Shopify also offers a compelling $1 for 3 months trial, making it the perfect platform for aspiring entrepreneurs to test their business ideas before investing significant capital.
Key Strengths of Shopify
Ease of use
Shopify is a beginner-friendly platform that allows you to build your online store as a beginner. It has 13 themes (as of 2025) for you to choose from and also uses the drag-and-drop features. While Shopify excels at driving sales, it also provides an easy website-building experience for many.
Extensive ecommerce features
Shopify gives you all the advanced features even for the cheapest plan. Take abandoned cart recovery, for instance. On other platforms, it’s often a premium add-on or requires a clunky third-party app. Even with the basic plan, you can sell unlimited products, access analytics, utilize various sales channels, use in-built shipping software, and create discount codes and vouchers. For other website builders, these features are limited to higher-tier plans. Moreover, Shopify has in-built SEO so you don’t have to worry about website optimization.
Shopify Apps
Even with its comprehensive ecommerce features, Shopify has over 8,000 apps in the store for you to further enhance your store. Need a loyalty program? There are dozens of options. Want to create urgency with countdown timers? Take your pick of solutions. The downside? Those apps can add up cost-wise, so budget accordingly.
$1 for 3 months
Shopify offers a $1 for 3 months trial, which gives you all the features you need, and this trial is available for all plans except for Plus, which means you can try out the feature on higher-tier plans and downgrade to the cheaper one if you wish. The trial Shopify offers lowers the financial risk and increases the chance of success for those who wish to validate their business ideas.
The Downsides of Using Shopify
Cost
Although Shopify offers $1 for 3-month trials, it can be costly after the trial period ends. Apart from that, as your business scales, and requires more capacity to support your business expansion, it can get very expensive to upgrade to higher-tier plans. Shopify also has limited customization, if you choose more unique themes, it can drive costs even higher.
Transferring your store
Just like Wix, transferring your store to another platform is not an easy task if you use Shopify. Most of the platforms, including Shopify are trying to keep you on their platform, they do not provide easy ways to export your store data, or content to another platform. Therefore, once you have committed to using Shopify, understand that you might have to stay on the platform forever or undertake a complex and time-consuming migration process.
Pricing
- Basic ($29/month): Full online store features
- Shopify ($79/month): Staff discounts and lower card rates
- Advanced ($299/month): lower card rates and increased checkout capacity
- Plus: ($2300/month): lowest card rates and priority support by phone or live chat
If you’re serious about selling products online and plan to have more than a handful of items, Shopify is for you. It’s not the cheapest option, and it’s not the easiest for beginners, but it’s purposefully built to help you succeed at ecommerce.
3. Hostinger – Best Budget-Friendly Web Hosting and Website Builder
Best for: Small businesses, WordPress users, Bloggers
Price: Price: $2.99/month to $19.99/month
What I like:
- Budget-Friendly
- Effortless Website Building
- Robust AI Tools for Bloggers
- 0% transaction fees
What I dislike:
- Limited customization (Hostinger AI website builder)
- Steep learning curve (WordPress)
Hostinger Overview
Hostinger offers an affordable, user-friendly solution for individuals and small businesses looking to establish an online presence quickly and cost-effectively. As both a website hosting provider and a website builder, Hostinger features an intuitive builder for beginners and is also the best hosting for WordPress.
Key Strengths of Hostinger
Budget-friendly
The primary advantage of Hostinger is its exceptional value proposition. The platform combines low-cost hosting with a robust website builder, a free domain, and unlimited free SSL and essential digital tools at prices significantly lower than many competitors. You can start from $2.99/month for 48 months for both web hosting and hosting for WordPress.
The features offered in both web hosting and hosting for WordPress are the same, both allow you to build a website using WordPress and Hostinger AI website builder. The difference lies in hosting for WordPress has WordPress pre-installed, while you have to do it manually for web hosting plan.
Effortless website building
Hostinger allows you to build a website effortlessly using its AI-powered drag-and-drop website builder just like Wix, but at a more affordable price. You can easily change your website style, fonts, and buttons on the design panel on the left, and add elements such as text and shapes to personalize your website however you want.
Robust AI tools for bloggers
Hostinger has powerful AI tools perfect for bloggers, it includes an AI writer, section, page, and blog generators that can help you create a draft article in a few minutes. Additionally, it offers a free image generator for creating custom visuals for your blog posts and website.
Hostinger ecommerce capabilities
There are three ways to assess ecommerce features on Hostinger. If you wish to build your online store with Hostinger AI website builder, you will have to purchase a Business or Cloud hosting plan, which starts from $3.99/month for 48 months. If you wish to build your website on WordPress, you have two options, purchase the premium plan and assess ecommerce features manually through WooCommerce or PrestaShop, or opt for an eCommerce hosting plan for easy setup. It’s functionally the same as manual setup, but more convenient. While Hostinger doesn’t charge any transaction fee for your sales, third-party payment processors like PayPal or Stripe will still have their own processing fees.
While not as comprehensive as dedicated e-commerce platforms, Hostinger provides sufficient tools for small to medium-sized online stores.
Maximum customization with WordPress
If you choose to build your website using WordPress, then you can enjoy the maximum customization. All themes have built-in customization options, you can add advanced features through plugins, and you can further customize your website if you know how to code. Although WordPress is perfect for blogging, you can literally build any type of website using WordPress, educational, news and magazine, ecommerce, landing pages, forums, and more.
The Downside of Using Hostinger
Limited customization
When you use Hostinger AI website builder, you should expect there to be limited customization. If you wish for advanced and unique designs, Hostinger website builder may not be able to satisfy your needs. If you wish to have more customization control, you will have to opt for WordPress.
The Downside of Using WordPress
Steep learning curve
WordPress is an excellent choice to build your website through Hostinger. It’s free, which doesn’t have an additional cost and you can design your website however you want. The only challenge with WordPress is it has a steep learning curve.
I created a whole website using Hostinger in a few days, but it took weeks for me to build one using WordPress, hours were spent watching tutorials and making sure that the titles, text, and images were in the right places and right sizes.
Pricing
- Premium ($2.99/month, renew – $7.99/month): A free domain, weekly backup, unlimited free SSL
- Business ($3.99/month, renew – $8.99/month): WordPress AI tools + WordPress staging tool
- Cloud Startup ($7.99/month, renew – $19.99/month): WordPress AI tools + WordPress staging tool + primary support
- Cloud hosting starts from $7/99/month
Overall, Hostinger is a perfect solution for small businesses, bloggers, and WordPress users who are on a budget. Its website builder allows you to create a website with ease, or if you choose to build your website using WordPress, it gives you the maximum customization and scalability control over your website.
4. GoDaddy Website Builder – Fastest Setup for Basic Online Businesses
Best for: Beginners, Small businesses, and Professionals
Price: $9.99 to $20.99/month
What I like:
- Quick setup process
- Straightforward and intuitive user interface
What I dislike:
- No free plan (7-day trial)
- Limited customization and features
- Ecommerce features only available on the Commerce plan ($20.99/month)
- Slightly costly
GoDaddy Overview
GoDaddy provides the quickest path to establishing an online business presence. It’s perfect for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and professionals who prioritize convenience and rapid deployment over design flexibility. The platform follows an AI-assisted approach, using business information to generate ready-to-publish websites that require minimal setup time.
Key Strengths of GoDaddy
Speedy setup
The greatest advantage of GoDaddy Website Builder is its remarkable speed of building a simple website. You can have a complete, mobile-responsive website online within hours rather than days or weeks. The platform’s ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) system generates industry-specific layouts based on the information provided.
Ecommerce capabilities
While not as feature-rich as dedicated e-commerce platforms, GoDaddy provides sufficient selling tools for small businesses with straightforward product offerings and modest sales volumes to quickly set up their stores. All the essential sections and elements needed for an ecommerce store are set up for you, all you have to do is add your product and information, and you will have your basic ecommerce site ready to be published.
Downsides of Using GoDaddy
Limited features
GoDaddy’s rapid website creation comes with a trade-off, it only does the job and nothing more. Although GoDaddy provides all the features you need for your website, they are not as extensive as other website builders, plus there are limited plugins available to expand the functionality of your website.
Ecommerce features only available on the Commerce Plan
All the basic plans do not support ecommerce features. In order to sell your product online, you will have to opt for the Commerce plan, which is $20.99/month. With its limited features, customization, and price, it may not be the ideal choice among all the existing website builders. Therefore, if you are trying to build an online store, you may have to consider alternative options.
Costly for what you get
GoDaddy’s website builder plans are on the more expensive side considering its basic features and functions. Even with the discount prices, the cheapest plan (without ecommerce features) comes at $9.99/month for 12 months and renews at $16.99/month for the second year onwards. Furthermore, you must pay for a full year upfront for all plans.
Pricing
GoDaddy Website Builder offers four main plans:
- Basic ($9.99/month, renew – $16.99/month): Basic website functionality
- Premium ($14.99/month, renew – $29.99/month): Enhanced features and email marketing tools
- Commerce ($20.99/month, renew – $34.99/month): Ecommerce features
All plans include hosting, SSL certificates, mobile-responsive design, and free professional emails.
GoDaddy is the go-to solution for businesses and entrepreneurs who wish to set up a simple website quickly without a huge demand for features and customization.
5. Webflow – Best for Custom Designs Without Coding
Best for: Best for: Design agencies, Freelancers, businesses that want a highly customized website
Price: $0 to $39/month, Ecommerce plans start from $29/month
What I like:
- Highly customized and professional-looking websites
- AI learning support and assistance
What I dislike:
- Steep learning curve
- Not ideal for ecommerce store
- Customer support only via email
Webflow Overview
We have discussed the website builders that are suitable for beginners to swiftly create a website, most of them have a problem with customization. If you are willing to invest more time and energy into creating a custom and unique website, even if you are not a developer, Webflow is the best option. Webflow offers a sophisticated visual development platform for you to create professional-level websites without any coding knowledge.
Key Strengths of Webflow
Design flexibility
Webflow’s primary advantage is its unique visual editor that offers design freedom typically only available through custom coding, but in this case, you don’t need any coding knowledge at all! It gives you full control over your website, and you can adjust every component using the visual editor. Just look at the control and settings on the right side of the image below and you will understand what I am talking about!
Powerful Content Management System
Webflow CMS aims to make managing content easier, more efficient, and more organized. You can create frameworks to eliminate the need to create each page or blog post individually. Furthermore, Webflow CMS also enables you to create dynamic content, which means when you change content on WebFlow CMS, the content will be updated everywhere it appears on your website. They are excellent for blog posts, testimonials, and portfolios. Webflow CMS will make your life easier if your website is content-heavy.
AI learning assistant and support
Webflow has an AI learning assistant that teaches you how to create your unique website step by step. If you don’t know how to do parallax movement on scroll, which is making your images move while you scroll down a page, you can simply ask the AI learning assistant to teach you how to do it. Furthermore, it has tons of videos and courses to help you create your website.
The downsides of using Webflow
Steep learning curve
Webflow is created for non-developers to create aesthetic and highly customized websites, however, it doesn’t necessarily mean that creating a website on Webflow is easy. When I tried out Webflow, I was overwhelmed by its endless customization options, there are just too many things going on!
Customer support via email
Webflow only provides customer support via email, unless you are an Entreprise user. Not having immediate assistance during a crisis can be scary, especially with a long email response time. You can expect the customer service team to get back to you within 24-48 hours, and many things can go wrong during this time.
Ecommerce functionalities
Webflow doesn’t have comprehensive ecommerce features as dedicated e-commerce platforms. It only provides more design control over the purchasing experience, allowing for highly customized product pages and checkout flows, and hence may not fully meet the demands of your online store.
Pricing
- Starter ($0): CMS (E.g. 50 blog posts, 15 menu items), no custom domain
- Basic ($14/month): Custom domain, no CMS
- CMS ($24/month): 20 CMS collections, 2,000 CMS items
- Business ($39/month): 40 CMS collections, 10,000 CMS items (CMS item capacity can be increased with additional purchases)
Ecommerce
- Standard ($29/month): 2% transaction fees, 500 ecommerce items
- Plus ($74/month): 0% transaction fees, 5,000 ecommerce items
- Advanced ($212/month): 0% transaction fees, 15,000 ecommerce items
Common Website Builder Mistakes to Avoid
When setting up an online business website, especially for the first time, it’s easy to fall prey to common pitfalls that impact your long-term success. Avoiding these mistakes can save you significant time, money, and frustration down the road.
Choosing Based on Price Alone
One of the most frequent mistakes business owners make is selecting a website builder solely based on which platform offers the lowest monthly fee. There are website builders that offer even cheaper plans than we have discussed but be careful to watch out for the following red flags:
- Limited functionality that hampers your business operations as you grow
- Hidden costs for essential features like removing platform branding or adding basic e-commerce capabilities
- Spending more time working around limitations, effectively negating any cost savings
- Expensive migration costs when you outgrow the platform
Therefore, if you come across other website builders that offer attractive pricing, make sure to perform enough research to find out if these red flags are present. Furthermore, focus on the value you can get from your choice of website builders and what features and capabilities you get for your investment rather than simply looking at the base price.
Ignoring Scalability Needs
Many business owners select a website builder that meets their current needs without considering future growth. This shortsightedness can create significant problems when your business expands. Before choosing a platform, align your selection with your long-term business vision, and ensure your website builder can accommodate your projected needs without requiring a complete rebuild.
Overlooking Mobile Optimization
Despite mobile traffic accounting for over 64.04% of internet traffic, some business owners still overlook the importance of prioritizing mobile experience when building their sites. Most website builders have templates that are responsive across all devices, but it’s important to test them and ensure that they function as intended. Don’t ignore mobile page speed optimization; some website builders offer in-built features like automatic image compression and caching to improve performance, while others rely on external apps and plugins.
Underestimating Technical Support Needs
Even with user-friendly platforms, you’ll inevitably encounter technical questions or issues. Customer support is crucial not only to support you during day-to-day business operations but also critical during emergencies such as website breakdowns. Detailed courses and video guides for website building and problem troubleshooting are valuable forms of support you may receive, however, they can never match the support you can receive from a dedicated technical support team.
Falling for the Template Trap
Many business owners select a platform based on attractive templates. However, you should be mindful about overly relying on templates, since they can be heavily used by your competitors. Therefore, you should consider the customization options to make sure that you can create a unique website that represents your brand identity. Choosing the right website builder for your business that allows for sufficient customization should be considered to build a unique website.
Neglecting Integration Capabilities
Website functionality is one of the important factors to consider for business scaling. You will typically rely on multiple software solutions working together to have the features you need when your business scales. Therefore, it’s crucial to evaluate whether a website builder offers third-party apps or plugins to support your long-term growth.
