Looking for the best website builder for small businesses?
Having a website is more important now than ever. Your customers are looking for you online, and using social media alone doesn’t give you much control. A website makes your business more professional and gives you more flexibility and options.
But for small businesses on tight budgets, hiring a designer or web developer to build a website can be one expense too much. And learning to code HTML and CSS yourself is too time-consuming.
That’s why website builder software is so important. Website builders:
Are a great option for small business owners with a budget, skill, and time constraints
Let you create an amazing website really fast at an affordable price
Allow you to use the money you would have spent on web development to grow your business
Before we jump into our list, let’s answer a common question…
How Do I Create a Professional Website for Free?
It is possible to create a website for free, but it may not look very professional.
When you look deeper, many free website creators aren’t really free because:
You can’t use your own domain
Your website is covered in ads you don’t control
You have to pay for templates and any addons
You don’t have full control over your site
We DO include a few free website builders in our list below. However, it’s crucial to pay attention to what’s on offer and make sure it fits your needs.
In this roundup, we’ll be looking at the best website builders for small businesses and we’ve included a handy table of contents. If you’re interested in a specific builder, click the links below to go straight to it:
Best Website Builder for Small Business
Self-Hosted WordPress: Most flexible and affordable
Constant Contact Website Builder: Best quick and easy builder
BigCommerce: Flexible eCommerce website builder
Gator Website Builder: Simple and budget-friendly builder
SiteBuilder: Good basic option
Weebly: Popular simple site builder
MemberPress: Best membership site builder
Squarespace: Popular simple builder with modern designs
Wix: Quick builder with simple templates
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You might notice we haven’t included some popular options in our list, such as GoDaddy website builder, Shopify, Jimdo, or Duda. That’s because our list is focused on just the best website builders, not the most popular ones.
How did we choose? Before we get to the website builder reviews, let’s take a look at our requirements. What makes a website builder the best?
How to Choose the Best Website Builder for Your Needs
The best tool for one business won’t necessarily be the best for everyone. It all depends on your needs when building a website.
So, how do you know which is the best small business website builder for you?
Here are a few of the most important factors to look for:
Affordability: One of the most important factors for small business owners is the price. You need a website builder that’s affordable now, and will still be affordable when your business grows. Think about how your site will evolve as your business grows. Ideally, you should be able to scale up easily when you need to.
1. Self-Hosted WordPress
There’s a reason why a third of the web runs on WordPress and it’s the world’s most popular content management system (CMS). That’s because it’s flexible, scalable, and easy to use. We don’t want to jump ahead here, but WordPress is pretty much the best free website builder for small businesses.
Just so you know, there are actually two versions of WordPress (learn more about the difference between WordPress.org vs WordPress.com here). We recommend the self-hosted version (WordPress.org) as your small business website builder because it’s even more flexible than the other version.
Pros:
WordPress is open-source and completely free, so it’s available on most web hosting platforms. For example, Bluehost, an official WordPress partner, has a one-click install.
Designing your site is easy, no web designer required, with thousands of pre-made WordPress themes that cover every business niche you can imagine.
It’s easy to customize your layout using theme customization options and widgets. For those who prefer more control, you can integrate WordPress drag and drop page builders. Two of our recommendations are Elementor, a fast, responsive website builder, available at $49 for a single site, and Beaver Builder (shown below), a live page builder which costs $99 for use on unlimited sites.
2. Constant Contact Website Builder
Constant Contact is not only one of the best email service providers, but they also offer a small business website builder that’s very easy to use.
Their website builder software uses artificial intelligence to quickly create a beautiful custom website based on your Facebook Business Page. All you need to do is enter your Facebook business page URL, and their AI tool will generate your website content for you in an instant. From there, you can customize the website design and text as you like.
Don’t have a Facebook business page? No worries, just enter your business niche or industry, and Constant Contact will recommend the best images and content to help get you started. You can also use their intuitive drag and drop website builder to create your own custom web design and write your own website content from scratch.
Bottom line, Constant Contact is the best website builder if you want to create a simple business website in minutes.
Pros:
Constant Contact makes it easy for anyone to build a mobile-friendly and professional-looking website in just a few minutes, even if you’re not technically inclined. With the drag and drop builder, you can completely customize the look of your site, no code needed. The website builder is also integrated with Unsplash so you get free access to thousands of images. Or, you can upload your own images for a more unique look.
Constant Contact websites will also load quickly thanks to their super-fast content delivery network (CDN). This, in turn, will help your SEO and can boost your search engine rankings, generating more traffic for your website.
Your site will also be extra secure thanks to a free SSL certificate that keeps your customers’ data safe from hackers.
Constant Contact is well known for its customer support. They’re ready to help you 24/7 by phone, email, or live chat.
Best of all, you can get started with Constant Contact’s website builder for free.
Cons:
The Constant Contact website builder does offer a generous free plan that even includes an online store and 24/7 support. But if you want access to more advanced features like a custom domain name or advanced analytics, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan which starts at $10 per month.
Since their website building tool is newer than WordPress, there aren’t any third-party extensions you can install on your website to add new features. So, if you need more advanced features, or think you might want to add them later on, then WordPress is probably the better choice for you.
3. BigCommerce
If you’re looking for an eCommerce website builder, then BigCommerce is a great choice. That’s because it’s specifically designed to help businesses handle online sales. The BigCommerce platform powers Ben & Jerry’s, Skullcandy, CamelBak, and other famous online stores.
Pros:
BigCommerce is a great way to launch an eCommerce store and sell products and services, without having to worry about the technical aspects of managing it. Their Essentials plan includes everything you need to build, run, and scale an online store, without having to know any code.
Even absolute beginners find it easy to create their first online store with their stunning website templates, so you can have a professional-looking eCommerce store up in minutes. They offer more than 80 designs for all different industries, and all of them are fully responsive and look good on mobile devices.
Not only that, but you can easily customize your store with BigCommerce apps. They allow you to unlock more advanced features to grow your online stores, like shipping and inventory solutions, built-in customer reviews, email marketing automation tools, and much more.
BigCommerce gives you your choice of over 55 payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, Square, Amazon Pay, and many more.
Since you’re handling financial transactions, you have the added benefit of built-in security features to keep your customer data safe. BigCommerce has 99.99% uptime, which means you won’t lose customers to glitches that bring your site down. They also have protection from hackers and DDoS attacks, which are becoming more and more common even for smaller websites.
BigCommerce integrates with Google Shopping so you can bring new customers to your store through Google. You can also add many other features using apps from their app store.
To help you get started, they also offer educational video courses and 24/7 live support via phone, chat, and email. They answer all calls in under 2 minutes, so you won’t waste your time waiting around on hold.
Cons:
For some small businesses, the biggest disadvantage of BigCommerce is that it isn’t free.
You need to upgrade to more expensive plans to get:
Google customer reviews
Abandoned cart recovery features
Stored credit cards
Advanced product search and filtering
Want to know how BigCommerce stacks up to other eCommerce platforms? Check out our comparison of BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Magento.