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When it comes to building websites for your business, the right site builder makes all the difference. From ease of use to features to affordability, these are our top picks for the best website builders.
Building a website is more than just throwing together a few pages. You need the right software to make your website easy and build solid enough for live on the back end. With so many software options to buy, we want to focus on the best ones for creating websites.
Are you tech savvy or do you prefer a streamlined dashboard? How important is it to control customization? What are your site’s biggest goals?
Different site builders offer different levels of support and expertise. They all have a good amount of basic functionality, but you should explore the different features and choose the builder that best suits your needs.
Features, pricing, customer support, and more are important considerations when narrowing down your final options and making your final builder decision.
Here are our top picks for the best website builders for small businesses:
- Wicks
- weebly
- square space
- word press
- Kentico
Things to consider when choosing a website builder
Remember: We don’t just create websites. We are also building a brand. Almost all systems provide the basics, but to create a well-designed website there are some important factors to consider.
1. Ease of use
Building and maintaining a website on the backend should be as easy as viewing a published page for your visitors. Too often the coding is too complicated and the dashboard is too confusing.
Whether you’re building a site for an accounting business or a restaurant, you want an intuitive, user-friendly site with a fairly flat learning curve.
2. Customization
For the most part, content management systems are very organized and easy to customize. Since you’re building for brand cohesion, you need a site builder that allows for design customization.
All customizations should be easy to perform on the backend as well, so that design changes don’t break the site’s functionality.
3. Integration
Your site building software should be easy to integrate with other apps and tools. Not only does the integration make your site more functional, it also ensures that your site builder works well with other systems you already have in place.
5 best website builders for small businesses
We touched on key qualities like ease of use and the ability to integrate with other software solutions and apps (and builders) that allow you to customize your site to your brand as needed. But our top five choices have many other important features as well.
It’s a delicate balance between control and ease of use, giving you access to all the features you’d want to find in these site builders while not overpowering you.
Functionality must meet usability. With the above considerations in mind, and other features that are essential for website management, here are the top five options for website builders to consider.
1. Wicks
Wix is popular with small business owners because it is user-friendly and scalable. Updates are handled internally and don’t break the site building flow.
It features a clean and intuitive dashboard and a drag-and-drop builder that makes site creation easy and allows for extensive customization of aesthetics.
As for construction, you have two options. The first option allows you to answer a few questions about your needs and let Wix build your site while you tweak it.
Alternatively, you can use the drag-and-drop tools to design and build pages with blank templates. If you have a logo, you can upload it. Wix creates a theme around it.
Wix’s design system lets you choose colors from your brand’s color palette.Image Source: Author
The price is also conscientious. Wix has a long-term free plan, but if you want a professional site, you’ll need to upgrade to a premium plan.
Paid professional options (including domain name) start at just $13/month for an annual subscription.
Read the full story on The Ascent wicks review
2. Weebly
Weebly is another easy-to-use and affordable solution. With several features and ecommerce capabilities, he said Weebly is perfect for multi-purpose needs and streamlined sites. There are also plenty of free templates available, all of which are easy to customize.
Weebly’s themes are easy to customize for both free and paid templates.Image Source: Author
Weebly also uses drag-and-drop tools to make creating pages a breeze. The dashboard has a navigation toolbar and design options.
Weebly handles the functionality of the website, so there’s no chance of “breaking” anything. Worst case, it’s poorly designed and needs to be redesigned.
Being self-hosted improves Weebly’s security and page load speed. There is a long-term free plan, but the cheapest paid plan is $6/month billed annually.
Read the full story on The Ascent weekly review
3. Square space
If you want to create a sophisticated small business site, Squarespace is the platform of choice. Includes free website templates that are hassle-free and super easy to customize. Squarespace is an attractive option for creatives, artists, and portfolio builders.
There is an entire library of themes available, which you can browse sorted by industry or popularity.
The Squarespace theme is elegantly designed.Image Source: Author
Squarespace is a very streamlined tool and doesn’t use apps for a more focused approach. This helps prevent confusion.
Squarespace’s blog feature leverages SEO tools to increase brand awareness. Other features included are free domain hosting, multi-user rights, Unsplash and Getty stock images, and multiple blogs. Squarespace pricing starts at $12/month for an annual subscription.
Read the full story on The Ascent Squarespace review
4. WordPress
WordPress is a very famous free website builder with many years of experience. Being open source, it doesn’t have traditional support, but instead offers a vast community of developers and resources, as well as an ever-growing number of apps and integrations.
It started as a tool for bloggers, but has been greatly expanded to allow the creation of any website. You can create entire web pages, publish content, grant access to multiple users (with different permissions), edit and change themes, improve SEO, and more.
You have to install it, but overall WordPress is very user-friendly, especially when it comes to maintenance. You can use several ready-made templates to design your website and access multiple step-by-step guides to get you set up.
WordPress offers over 50,000 plugins that you can install to enhance the functionality of your site.Image Source: Author
WordPress is open source, so it’s always free to use, with no paid plans or contracts to sign. Able to build almost any site you need, WordPress is a great choice for everyone from beginners to those looking for scaling capabilities.
Read the full story on The Ascent wordpress reviews
5. Kentico
Kentico is known to be very adaptable, with user-friendly dashboards and tools. The coding required to create custom pages is minimal. It has many useful features such as multiple user permissions, Google integration, customer-facing apps, and more.
It’s also very customizable thanks to an editing toolbar that offers options for uploading media, adjusting fonts, changing color schemes, manipulating borders, and more, but all within a manageable skill set. What helps is being able to adapt to your comfort level.
Just keep the basic build simple and easy, or add apps and customizations for a more complex design.
Widgets can be selectively embedded as needed and are easy to install even for non-developers. Built for efficiency, it uses relinking and cloning features to smartly recycle old content so you don’t have to rebuild or rewrite.
Kentico’s main dashboard is intuitive and customizable.Image Source: Author
After the free trial, Kentico costs a little more, $7,999 per year. Still, its standard and optional features, customer support, and security make it worthwhile for small businesses on a budget.
Read the full story on The Ascent kentico review
Intuitive website building for small businesses
With so many different website builders on the market, small businesses have little choice. You can narrow down your options by considering ease of use, functionality, integration, and affordability.
Whether you’re looking for a drag-and-drop builder (Wix or Weebly), a streamlined design (Squarespace), a free and comprehensive system (WordPress), or enhanced adaptability (Kentico), there’s something for every business need We have a corresponding system.
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