Best Website Builder 2022: We’ve Reviewed the 11 Best

Features

Wix has a pretty generous free plan, which includes:

• SEO tools (Search Engine Optimization) to help your site get found on Google
• Social sharing, so you can promote your site
• A mobile editor, so you can make your site look great for mobile devices

Wix also comes with a huge app store, so if you need extra features, you can easily add them to your site.

Design

Wix comes with over 800 templates for you to choose from – that’s an impressive number, especially as they’re all professionally designed. Split into different industries such as “Events” and “Photography”, Wix’s templates are easy to filter until you find the perfect one.

You can’t change templates once your site is live, however, so take your time in choosing.

It’s easy to make your site unique – simply drag elements like text boxes and images to exactly where you want them, add pages, and delete anything you don’t want. Wix gives you total creative freedom!

Ecommerce

Although this article focuses mainly on the best website builders, we thought it was important to mention ecommerce when it came to Wix. Although Wix has supported online stores for a long time, it’s only recently that we’ve seen this builder really come into its own in this area. In fact, its ecommerce score has increased by a whole 9% in the new round of research we conducted.  This is a result of all the improvements it’s made to its ecommerce offering. It now delivers quality ecommerce functionality for those who want to sell online, making it a truly multi-talented platform.

Pricing

Wix has a free plan that you can stay on as long as you like, which is great for getting started. However, it has its limitations, so for a truly professional site, you’ll want to look at its paid plans.

There are eight premium plans in total, starting at $16 per month (billed annually). This removes Wix adverts and lets you use a personalized domain name, as well as increasing your storage allowances. Out of the eight, Wix also offers three dedicated ecommerce plans, starting from $27 per month (billed annually). As we touched on earlier, Wix is a little pricier than some alternatives, but – considering it supports so many more features and functionalities than the competition – we reckon that price tag is fully justified.

News and Updates

What’s new this month with Wix?

• Wix has added Semrush integration to its editor. A popular keyword research tool and beloved by SEO experts everywhere, you can use Semrush to find the keywords that people are searching, giving you insight and letting you optimize your content.

Features

Squarespace isn’t just a pretty face: it has the best quality features of any builder, too. For example, with Squarespace you can:

• Install multiple templates to work on at once
• Use video backgrounds
• Add custom codes
• Upload and share music
• Link your social accounts

Squarespace’s huge range of features are all developed in-house. This means you’re guaranteed a high level of quality and security, and can enjoy having everything you need right at your fingertips.

If you want to optimize and expand your site, you can use Squarespace Extensions to integrate with a range of third-parties such as Printful, Quickbooks, or ShipStation. Squarespace’s third-party extensions are a great way of growing your site without upgrading your plan.

It’s also crystal clear that Squarespace is committed to improving the breadth of its features. Wholesale improvements in this area supported Squarespace’s 4/5 rating in our research’s ‘Value for Money’ category (that’s up 1.4 stars from the old rankings), while vast developments in Squarespace’s UX boosted both the builder’s ‘Ease of Use’ and UX ‘Quality’ scores accordingly.

Design

Squarespace has the best quality designs of any website builder on the market. With sleek, sophisticated, modern templates, it creates truly stunning websites. Ideal for creatives and those in search of real customization, Squarespace knows how to make your site look good.

You can easily switch your template, even once you’ve published your site, and can even work on more than one template at the same time.

Plus, Squarespace doesn’t just look nice, but is easy to use, too. Here’s what one of the users we tested had to say:

“I found this way easier to use than Wix and much less overwhelming. There’s so much less reliance on apps which makes it all feel more streamlined”.

Ultimately, Squarespace does keep you in your lane when it comes to design and customization. But, when it comes to providing all the right attributes to help you build a stunning online presence that you can be proud of, it’s still unparalleled in the website building space.

Pricing

Squarespace provides a 14-day free trial, so you can try its builder out totally risk-free. After that, it has four premium plans to choose from, ranging from $16 to $49 per month (billed annually). The highest two plans unlock advanced ecommerce functions.

As we touched on above, pricing was another area in which Squarespace grew as a result of our revised 2021 website builder ratings. It’s still not the cheapest of builders, but given the features that it offers, we think that, like Wix, the price point is justified.

News and Updates

What’s new this month with Squarespace?

• Squarespace has released a new checklist for users to move from Squarespace version 7.0 to version 7.1. Released in early 2020, version 7.1 has improved editing experience and flexibility, adding new features such as site-wide animations, auto-layouts and the new Fluid Engine. While their is no automatic way to upgrade to version 7.1, the new checklist ensures users can swap to the new version with the least resistance possible.

Features

In our latest 2021 in-house research, GoDaddy came out with a less impressive score of 3.3 when it came to the quality of its features – they simply don’t have much depth or power to them. Recently though, GoDaddy claims to have successfully improved website performance for its customers by 75%, according to its recent case study.

While the cheapest Basic plan gives you most of the essentials for starting a website – including in-house marketing tools – it doesn’t include SEO, meaning your site will struggle to be found online. We should note here though that when we say no SEO, that’s not quite accurate. GoDaddy does offer SEO, it’s just self-managed. The platform just doesn’t provide its users with its built-in website optimizer, so you’ll need a little more tech-savviness to feel comfortable setting your GoDaddy site up for SEO success.

Considering Wix and other builders include SEO tools even on their free plans, this is a huge drawback to using GoDaddy.

Design

The reason GoDaddy is so fast to build with is because it uses ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) to create a personalized template for you to edit. This saves you time, and also makes customizing much easier, as most of the hard work is already done for you.

GoDaddy’s editor is pretty simple, so it’s easiest to stick fairly closely to the template rather than trying to push the boundaries too far. Plus, because of its more restrictive block elements, you’re unable to resize or move image blocks outside of a site’s set parameters. With all that in mind, if you’re after design flexibility, GoDaddy isn’t for you!

One of our tested users, for instance, said:

“I think this kind of website would work well for a coffee shop or small independent business. It has all the necessary pages that you could want, but it’s not so jampacked that it’ll overwhelm you. Ideal if you don’t have a really firm, non-negotiable stance on how you want your site to look, but instead want something quick, clean, and professional”.

Pricing

GoDaddy has a free plan, as well as offering a sumptuous one-month free trial across its paid plans, which gives you plenty of time to decide if it’s right for you.

There are four price plans to choose from, ranging from $6.99 to $29.99 per month (billed annually). For SEO tools, you’ll need at least the $13.99 per month Premium plan. While GoDaddy used to be expensive, recent updates to its pricing mean that the platform is now cheaper than many of the top alternatives, including Wix, Squarespace, and Jimdo. Not bad at all!

News and Updates

What’s new this month with GoDaddy?

• GoDaddy has added a Buy Button so users can now link any action movies GoDaddy Online Pay Links. You no longer need an online store or Online Appointments to accept payments, but you will need to have GoDaddy Payments account. It’s great for accepting donations, fundraising, or online bill payments.

Features

With a website features score of 3.9 out of 5, Shopify offers plenty of basic website-building tools to help you create something that’s functional as well as geared towards helping you grow.

We were particularly impressed with Shopify’s additional app and widget integrations. It has an enormous app store, with over 6,000 apps to choose from. This means there are plenty of options if you’re looking to further expand on what your store can do.

It can be overwhelming to know where to start, so we’ve compiled a list of our top 15 favorite Shopify apps to get you started.

Shopify also performs well on the marketing front. It has a number of built-in features, such as its email shout-out and newsletter function. Plus, its multi-channel integrations are ideal for allowing you to expand across a number of different platforms. However, the immense number of marketing apps really help take things to the next level.

Whether it’s creating personalized popups with Kevy, sending targeted emails with Klaviyo, or managing SMS or social campaigns with Remarkety, there’s a wealth of different marketing apps available to help increase and improve your customer reach.

However, it is worth bearing in mind that, although plenty of apps come with a free plan, you’ll need to pay extra for most of them. These costs can mount quickly, and you’ll need to factor this in when working out your monthly expenditure.

Design

Shopify offers 86 different themes to choose from, all of which boast high-quality, professional designs.

Each theme comes in a range of color schemes, so you can select one that best suits your brand, and all of them are mobile responsive, meaning that customers can view your online store on the go.

However, only nine of Shopify’s themes are actually free. You’ll need to pay for any of the other 77, with each template costing anywhere between $150 to $350. Although the free themes still look good, there’s no denying that the paid themes offer more in the way of features and aesthetics.

When it comes to customizability, Shopify is more limited than other builders, such as Wix, but there’s still plenty of room to put your own stamp on your site.

We were particularly impressed with the customizability of Shopify’s product pages. It offers a ton of filtering options, allowing your users to filter the results by size, color, price range, vendor, product style, type of material, and more. Not only will this make the layout of your product pages more attractive, but it’ll ensure a better user experience, too!

Shopify also comes with a handful of extra design features, such as its built-in image editor, and a library of high-quality stock images.

Out of all the builders we tested, Shopify wasn’t the easiest to use when it actually came down to nailing the perfect site design. As a result, it only scored 3.5 out of 5 in this category. This is mostly down to the fact that the platform is split into two interfaces: the front end, where you can edit the design of your store, and the backend, where you’re able to add products and manage your inventory.

Some users found switching between the two slightly confusing, however, most didn’t think it was a problem in the long run, with one user saying:

“I struggled initially with a few aspects, but once I figured it out, it all seemed really obvious.”

Given the power of its features and the overall professionalism of its designs, we think that the slightly steeper learning curve is an acceptable trade-off!

Pricing

Shopify offers three different pricing plans:

• Basic – $29 per month
• Shopify – $79 per month
• Advanced – $299 per month

This is a little pricier than other platforms, which is why Shopify only scored 3 out of 5 in this category. However, when you take a look at the quality of the features it offers, we think that this higher price point is somewhat justified.

Shopify doesn’t offer a free plan, but it does come with a 14-day free trial so you can test it out for yourself before committing to a paid subscription.

News and Updates

What’s new this month with Shopify?

• Shopify has partnered with YouTube so that any creator can feature and sell their products directly via their YouTube content. YouTube Shopping essentially links your Shopify store with your YouTube channel, tapping into YouTube’s large user resource, and connecting shoppers with products. As a merchant, you get an exciting new avenue to promote your business while continuing to manage it all through Shopify.

Features

In our pre-2021 research, Weebly came out as number one for features. Sadly, however, it hasn’t managed to hold onto that crown. Since its acquisition by Square in 2018, there hasn’t been much innovation or development on the website builder, whilst its competitors have raced ahead. Now, Wix takes the crown for features, leaving Weebly trailing behind with an underwhelming score of 3.5 out of 5.

It’s not all bad, though – Weebly does still have some good things going for it, particularly its great SEO support. It has a selection of built-in SEO guides that beginners will find particularly helpful. It’s just a shame Weebly hasn’t applied some of that top-notch SEO info to their own platform – its sitespeed performance score leaves plenty to be desired!

Design

Weebly’s designs aren’t as sleek as Squarespace’s or as bold as Wix’s, but each one feels stylish and well thought out. There are over 50 themes to choose from in total, and you can change your template at any time, even after publishing your site.

Like Wix, Weebly is a drag-and-drop website builder, although it offers less creative freedom than its competitor. Weebly has more structured templates: this makes it super easy to create a website if you want more guidance on the design of your pages, but it can feel limiting if you’re after complete creative control. This overarching sense of limitation was very much something the users we tested picked up one. One said:

“The templates were really bland and there was nothing stylistically special about them. The help center was also really out of date and none of the screenshots in the tutorials matched the editor I was seeing. I would not recommend this builder at all, at least not when there are others out there that do it so much better.”

Our users also struggled with Weebly’s poor mobile formatting, even within Weebly’s set of premade templates. Within Weebly’s drag-and-drop interface itself, the block elements are far too sticky, making customization not only far more difficult than it needs to be, but essentially completely redundant. We reckon this has to do with Weebly getting less attention and resources than payments provider Square, which acquired Weebly in 2018. This has meant limited to no platform updates, which has stymied Weebly’s growth and seen it lose a lot of ground vis a vis the competition.

Pricing

Despite Weebly’s setbacks, its free plan is still the best we’ve found. Dollar for dollar, its average pricing plan performs better than its likely competitors, and its three premium plans start at the highly reasonable price point of $6 per month (billed annually). You can sell online with all of Weebly’s paid plans, making it an affordable choice for small businesses – but not those looking to scale.

Feature of the Month

This month, we’re highlighting Weebly’s membership program.

Do you want to give certain readers access to exclusive content on your website? Weebly’s got you covered! Create a membership experience for your website or business with login pages, group management tools, and customizable invitation emails. Additionally, you can also password-protect specific pages if you’d rather limit access to just a select few people!

Features

Jimdo is a middle-of-the-road website builder – it’s simple to get to grips with and has some handy tools built-in. However, it’s also not the easiest to use, nor does it provide the best (or worst) features around. Compared to Wix, for example, Jimdo’s feature score is 61% worse off, highlighting the relatively limited scope of functionality on offer.

Some perks include the fact you can sell up to five products on the free plan, and remove adverts for just $10 per month on the cheapest paid plan. Some of the drawbacks include Jimdo’s lack of a blogging functionality, limited SEO capabilities, and a lack of direct marketing abilities. Jimdo also doesn’t currently support member areas or password protected pages, so it can be hard to cultivate a loyal, engaged following, or build a membership website.

Jimdo’s Help and Support ranking – a mediocre 2.5/5 – also suffers, owing to the relatively restrictive assistance customers on the platform’s non premium plans have to settle for. On these plans, users seeking help and support can expect a turnaround of 1-2 business days – on Jimdo’s ‘Grow’ plan, this is just an hour!

Design

If you want a site up quickly, then Jimdo is a good option – it works the same way as GoDaddy, using ADI to create a personalized website for you. Think GoDaddy, but with Squarespace’s emphasis on white space, and you’ve got something close to Jimdo. We’d recommend it in particular for those who are time-stretched, or less confident with design. Jimdo builds your brand for you – as one of the users that tested it for our in-house research testified:

“Simple, Jimdo does it for you – loved it. But anything beyond the basic looks near impossible, and the lack of marketing was concerning”.

With Jimdo, it’s super easy to add images, text, and other elements with just a few clicks, but once you’ve added them, it’s difficult to edit and personalize your page. It’s quite rigid, and offers very little creative freedom for you to change the template design.

Pricing

With Jimdo, you can enjoy building for free. If you choose to upgrade, there are two plans to choose from:

• Start: $9 per month (billed annually)
• Grow: $15 per month (billed annually)

Feature of the Month

This month, we’re highlighting Jimdo’s Logo Creator:

• Give your website a professional and branded look with Jimdo’s free logo design tool. Make use of Jimdo’s vast library of elements and broad customization options to create the perfect logo for your website. Free to download, and no license fees!

Features

Duda comes packed with design features, from hundreds of font styles to a built-in photo editor. It doesn’t pack quite the same punch with its features as, say, Wix or Weebly, but Duda certainly has the tools to help your website grow.

It’s especially useful for web designers creating sites for clients, and comes with the added appeal of having a widget builder, so that you can customize your site’s features. Duda is also unusual in giving you ecommerce tools on its cheapest plan, meaning you can start selling from day one.

Design

Design is where Duda really shines. Its templates cover all industries, are professionally designed, and are structured to help guide you through customization. They’re also simple to personalize to your exact specifications, which our data bears out – Duda is 22% easier to use than the average website builder, with a strong focus on a stripped-back, streamlined user experience.

This makes Duda a great choice for those who want a stylish site without wanting to spend hours designing it themselves, as our tested users attest to:

“I would definitely recommend this to those looking to create a pretty well-rounded, comprehensive website for themselves or their business. There’s a huge range of features and stuff that you can do to add value to your user’s experience on your site, and foster loyalty with your business and brand. That said, the interface itself could be a little easier to use (a la Wix)”.

There are over 90 templates, all of which are mobile responsive, and you can switch your design at any point while keeping your original content.

Pricing

Because of all the features it packs into its website builder, Duda’s plans are pretty expensive compared to similar alternatives – particularly when you consider that the help and support of its non-premium plans is limited to email only. Though Wix and Squarespace might cost more, they both scored higher for value in our research than Duda, so you get a lot more bang for your buck with them.

Of Duda’s premium plans, there are four to choose from – the cheapest costs $14 per month (if billed annually), while the most advanced plan comes with custom pricing.

There’s no free plan, but you can try Duda’s $22 per month Team plan free for 14 days.

News and Updates

What’s new this month with Duda?

• Reach international audiences: You can now make your store pages multilingual. As your business expands, increase your global reach and improve the user experience thanks to Duda’s new feature.
• Easy access to Zapier: No longer restricted to API access only, Duda users can now automate workflows with Zapier integrations. For example, you could set up a process so that any time you post on your blog, it’s then automatically shared to your social media accounts.

Features

WordPress.com gives you all the blogging tools you could need, including:

• Social bookmarking
• RSS feed
• Archives
• Comments
• Search feature

You also have control over details like displaying the author bio on single posts, or where you want featured images to appear.

If you want to create an online store or business website, you can do that too – but this works best when combined with a blog. If you try to bend WordPress.com to create anything that’s not a blog, you’ll start to struggle pretty early on. The disjointed backend/frontend experience doesn’t help with this, and is still something yet to be updated.

Design

You get over 300 themes to choose from – some are free, while others you need to pay for. Theme prices vary, but usually fall between $30 and $80 (one-off payment).

You can customize your template, and this is made even easier if you know some basic coding. Total beginners may struggle with the editing layout, which is not as simple as drag-and-drop builders like Wix and Weebly.

It’s hard to really customize WordPress.com templates for anything other than blogging, so think about what type of site you want to create. For example, you’d struggle to create a portfolio website with WordPress.com!

It’s also worth noting that WordPress’s .com platform is designed to showcase what the main dashboard of the .org variety operates like, with the intention that users will swap at some stage as their needs outgrow the capabilities of the more basic platform. The only setback of WordPress.com’s mirroring of its more advanced counterpart – as our tested users were quick to point out – is that the platform can be tough to get to grips with:

“First impressions are that this does come with a bit of a steep learning curve”. 

The platform’s unclear terminology doesn’t help with this, nor do its limited industry-specific templates. Similarly, WordPress.com’s lack of an autosave function at times makes the experience of building a site more hassle than it’s worth!

Pricing

WordPress.com has a free plan, and four paid plans ranging from $4 to $45 per month (billed annually). For a platform as customizable and scalable as this one is, we reckon that’s a steal!

News and Updates

What’s new this month with WordPress.com?

• Site Access: If you have multiple WordPress.com sites to juggle, it can get a little tricky when you need to flick between them all quickly. Problem solved! WordPress.com has now shared a new centralized dashboard for users to organize and jump between websites with ease.
• Microsoft Start: Boost your audience figures with the Microsoft Start plugin, and see your content shared across the Microsoft ecosystem, from MSN to Bing. This special opportunity is currently available for eligible applicants only, so make sure you take a look in case that’s you!

Features

Strikingly simply doesn’t have the features required to grow a powerful website. However, if you’re after a simple website, you’ll find everything you need right at your fingertips, including:

• ‘Simple Store’ feature – you can sell one product on the free plan, or up to 500 on a paid plan
• Social media integration, so you can promote your website
• Blogging tools for you to create and share content

Strikingly has a range of blogging features, including an RSS feed and a comments section. This makes it a great alternative to WordPress, especially for beginners. Strikingly is a much simpler builder: you don’t need to code, and adding elements like text is super easy.

Design

Strikingly’s free plan only allows you to create one-page websites. This is good if you want something live quickly and easily, but can be limiting if you’re looking to build a complex site.

Strikingly is designed to be easy for absolutely everyone to use. The upside of this is that creating, customizing, and editing your website is an absolute breeze – however, the downside is that pushing the limits of your template can become very frustrating, very quickly. With all that in mind, we believe that Strikingly has fallen short when it comes to pushing the boundaries with design and functionality.

This is something our latest round of 2021 research evidences, with Strikingly’s overall score reduction of 12% (compared to older research) the largest we observed across all the platforms we tested. Despite Jimdo supporting less functionality across the board, Strikingly’s value for money score is still 40% less than that builder, due to the limited features Strikingly’s basic plans offer.

Still, it’s not all bad. One of the best things about building with Strikingly is that it’s super easy to change templates. You can switch your template even once your website is live, and your content will automatically reformat itself to keep your pages looking great.

Better still, Strikingly not only has a large storage capacity, but its customer support is fantastic. There’s an on-page live chat bot to help support you through your web creation journey – which one user in particular loved:

“The excellent chat feature was a really handy go-to when the location of a feature was missing”.

Oh, and an excellent onboarding tool, too!

“I thought the customer experience and support was excellent, right down to the walkthrough, which was concise and informative without ever being too long”.

Pricing

Strikingly’s free plan is pretty generous, but if you feel the need for more advanced features, you have three premium plans to choose from. These range from $8 to $49 per month (billed annually), and all come with a 14-day free trial.

Feature of the Month

This month we’re highlighting Strikingly’s social media integration. Sharing your content across a range of social platforms is key if you want to widen your reach and target new clients or customers. Strikingly lets you add and connect your social media accounts to your website with ease, import posts, and even add live chat features thanks to Facebook Messenger.

Features

One of the main strengths of 1&1 IONOS is its multilingual feature, available on all plans. This is great for widening your visitor base and creating a modern website.

Other features include email marketing and social media widgets. These tools and features support business growth, and make 1&1 IONOS ideal for scaling your website.

Another great feature is that you get a free domain for as long as you stay on your plan – other builders only give you the free domain for your first year, after which you have to pay.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, though. Some of the users we tested in our 2021 independent research had some strong words for 1&! IONOS’s functionality (or lack of it!):

“The choice of functionality is so bad compared to every other website builder on the market. You can only add the very most basic website components, such as text, images, a contact form, and gallery. Anything else and you’ll need to add code to insert it, or won’t be able to add it at all. I was shocked that you couldn’t even add a video without needing to embed code onto the website. It felt so basic and way behind its competitors”.

1&1 IONOS is also missing more advanced – yet important – marketing features, such as pop-ups and a wider social media feed collection.

Design

1&1 IONOS isn’t the best website builder for creating a stunning website or portfolio – in all honesty, its designs are pretty dated, and you have very little creative control. Moving things around the page can quickly become frustrating, making it less than ideal for artistic projects.

This is something the users that tested 1&1 IONOS on our behalf agreed with. Pre-2021, they voiced how outdated they felt the platform’s imagery and design were, and this still appears to be the case now. In terms of images, our users said they’d “definitely recommend uploading your own rather than relying on 1&1’s image library”.

Compared to the other best website builders, its template designs are basic and less appealing. The limited customization on offer here makes it feel as though 1&1 IONOS is ‘holding users back’ from being able to build something unique, and for the long term.

That said, one thing our research surfaced about 1&1 IONOS – and that we absolutely love – is that you’re able to add pages and optimize for search engines within the editor itself. This is handy because you can do pretty much everything you need to in one place, rather than having to navigate clumsily to a different area of your site’s backend.

Pricing

1&1 IONOS doesn’t have a free plan or a free trial. It has three price plans to choose from: Starter, Plus, and Pro.

The cheapest website plan costs just $1 per month for the first 12 months, then charges $5 per month until you cancel. The other two plans range from $5 to $15 per month. If that sounds expensive, it’s actually excellent value for money. 1&1 IONOS’s score in this area doubled from what it was in our pre-2021 rankings, thanks to its “cheap” pricing plans.

Feature of the Month

This month we’re highlighting 1&1 IONOS’ built-in email marketing tool. Once you’ve set up an email address with IONOS, you can then start sending out personalized newsletters and emails to your subscribed readers.