Best Cheap Website Builders

GoDaddy is super beginner-friendly, because it does most of the hard work for you. It uses Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI), which asks you a few questions, then uses your answers to create a personalized website for you. That’s why it scored an impressive 4.1 out of 5 stars in our ease of use testing.

The ADI builder means that your template comes with relevant features already built-in, and you can jump straight into making it your own and filling out your own content before publishing.

GoDaddy comes with a free plan, in addition to its four premium pricing plans, all of which have a one-month free trial, so you can test it out risk-free before starting out properly. The cheapest premium plan costs $9.99 per month when you pay annually:

• Basic: $9.99 per month
• Standard: $14.99 per month
• Premium: $19.99 per month
• Ecommerce: $24.99 per month

While the Basic plan gives you a decent set of tools, it’s designed for very basic websites. Most small businesses will likely feel its limitations before too long, due to its lack of SEO tools, limited social media integrations, and restrictive appointments features.

With GoDaddy, you don’t start off by choosing your own template, because your site is created for you through the ADI editor. However, that doesn’t mean you’re limited to what it chooses for you, because you can switch up your layout and design pretty easily. Customization is limited, so complex branding will be a struggle, but it’s enough to put your own stamp on your site.

GoDaddy is designed to support entrepreneurs and small businesses – this much is clear in its suite of marketing tools. GoDaddy Insight is particularly useful – it ranks your site compared to similar businesses, and provides a custom action plan to help you improve.

However, unless you’re a brand new small business, you may find the features on the cheapest plan limiting. A big let down is the lack of advanced SEO capabilities, and a lack of recurring online appointment bookings. There’s also no free domain, so be sure to leave room in your budget to buy one!

Square Online is easy to use, making it a great choice for beginners or for sellers eager to start making money quickly. The setup process is quick and simple, and helps you along by asking questions about your business so it can tailor your site to your needs.

However, things do get a bit tricker once you enter the editor. This is because Square uses its own terminology for well-known ecommerce features, and sometimes it’s tricky to find the element you’re looking for amongst the many tabs in the toolbar. Once you’re familiar with it, though, it couldn’t be easier to get your store up and running.

Square Online has a free plan, and it’s immediately better than others based on the fact that you can sell an unlimited number of products!

To remove adverts from your storefront, you’ll need to choose one of Square Online’s three premium plans, which start at $12 per month when you pay annually:

• Professional: $12 per month
• Performance: $26 per month
• Premium: $72 per month

The cheapest Professional plan removes adverts, provides a free domain for one year, or lets you connect to your own custom domain if you have one. Other features on this plan include Instagram integration, Square POS syncing, curbside pickup, order status text alerts for customers, gift cards, and more.

Square Online scored well for design in our research. It doesn’t start you off by choosing a template – instead, it creates a tailored store for you based on the information you provide during setup. This means you end up with a store that follows best ecommerce practices for your industry. 

You get enough tools to edit your design, and the end result is usually a clean, modern looking storefront that does its best to show off your products.

Square Online provides the usual ecommerce necessities, such as inventory management, shipping tools, and gift card creation. However, it reserves more advanced features – such as abandoned cart recovery and shipping discounts – for the more expensive plans.

It also throws in some more unusual features, which show that Square Online is paying attention to sellers’ needs and moving with the times. Examples include order text alerts, curbside pickup, and in-store customization, which lets customers edit their orders and set their pickup hours. All these features are available on the cheapest plan.

Wix is a beginner-friendly way to build an online store. Its drag-and-drop editor is very intuitive and great for branding, as you can drag anything anywhere. You get helpful tips and hints as you build, too – this on-page support is a real standout feature for Wix!

There’s some slight discord between your storefront design and managing your store inventory – you have to switch between the two in your dashboard – so it’s easiest if you have a small product range.

Wix has a large number of plans, but only three allow online selling. The cheapest costs $23 per month when you choose to pay annually, or $18 if you choose a three-year plan:

• Business Basic: $23 per month
• Business Unlimited: $27 per month
• Business VIP: $49 per month

The Business Basic plan comes with helpful features for launching and then growing an online store. You can sell an unlimited number of products for starters, plus you get abandoned cart recovery and social media selling, both of which are useful for scaling up sales. There are no transaction fees on any of Wix’s plans.

Wix has a huge number of online store templates to choose from – around 110! These templates cover a wide range of industries and niches, from fashion to pets, sports, and even CBD!

You also get free reign over your template’s customization – you can change fonts, colors, and the layout as much as you like. This can be great for creating a unique brand, but can also be overwhelming, and result in a cluttered design if you’re not used to ecommerce best practices.

Wix’s cheapest Business Basic plan is designed for new or small online stores, providing basic ecommerce tools to get you started. These include:

• Unlimited number of products
• 20GB storage space
• 5 video hours
• Sell on social channels

You also get more advanced tools included to help you grow your store, including abandoned cart recovery, customer accounts, and $300 worth of ad vouchers.

Squarespace lets you create an online store without needing any coding skills – you start with a professionally designed template, which you can customize using Squarespace’s section-based drag-and-drop editor.

We recommend taking some time to familiarize yourself with Squarespace, as, on first viewing, it might not seem like the most intuitive platform and can take a while to get used to. However, first impressions can be deceptive – Squarespace actually came out as the top builder in our ease of use testing, achieving the highest score of 4.2 out of 5! What’s even more impressive is that this is a 15% increase from its previous score in our pre-2021 rankings.

Squarespace has three ecommerce plans. You may be familiar with its $12 per month Personal plan, but this doesn’t support online stores. The cheapest ecommerce plan is the Business plan, which costs $18 per month when billed annually:

• Business: $18 per month
• Basic Commerce: $26 per month
• Advanced Commerce: $40 per month

The Business plan is a sort of half ecommerce solution. It’s really designed for business sites that want to sell products in addition to hosting their main website.

You get basic ecommerce tools on the Business plan – you can sell an unlimited number of products, create gift cards, and accept donations. However, there is a 3% transaction fee, which isn’t present on the two more advanced ecommerce plans.

Squarespace always wows when it comes to design, and its online store templates are no exception. It has ecommerce-specific designs that come prebuilt with helpful pages and features automatically included, such as “Shop Now” calls to action and product galleries.

Squarespace does have a strong ecommerce offering, but most of its serious sales features are reserved for the Basic Commerce and Advanced Commerce plans.

However, you will find helpful features on the $18 per month Business plan, including:

• Promotional pop-ups
• Donations
• Gift card creation
• Order, inventory, and product catalog management
• Payment, taxes, and shipping tools

Shopify could be easier for beginners – it’s a powerful, feature-heavy platform, so it takes a little longer to build with than a more simple online store builder.

That said, Shopify’s logical layout and inventory-focused approach was a big win with our users during testing, showing that even tech novices can easily get up and running with a powerhouse like Shopify!

Our users liked how Shopify guided them through their store setup. You won’t have your store live in five minutes, but you won’t feel like banging your head against a wall either.

Shopify is a pretty advanced ecommerce platform, and it shows in its pricing. There’s no free plan, but it does provide a 14-day free trial so you can test it out. Its cheapest plan costs $29 per month, or $21.75 if you sign up for three-years straight off the bat:

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

The prices increase quickly between plans, so think ahead before committing – will you be able to upgrade in the future? 

Shopify relies a lot on apps to add features to your site, and to help you scale without needing to upgrade your plan every five minutes. There are some free apps and some paid.

We recommend browsing Shopify’s app store and adding up which apps you might need to get an idea of extra costs to budget for as you build and grow your store.

All of Shopify’s designs are created specifically for online stores.

There are nine free themes, but most of them are paid – the cheapest of these costs around $100, with the most expensive costing $180. If you don’t like any of Shopify’s free themes, this is a big upfront cost that you’ll need to budget for!

In terms of design, Shopify’s themes look great. They’re all mobile responsive, cover a range of industries, and some come with multiple styles to choose from. Themes are tailored to specific industry, with relevant features automatically included.

Shopify is a powerful online store builder that comes packed with features. On the cheapest plan, you can expect: 

• Two staff accounts
• Multichannel selling across marketplaces and social media
• Inventory syncing with up to four locations
• Abandoned cart recovery
• Discount codes
• Gift cards
• Shipping discounts
• Print shipping labels
• Fraud analysis
• Shopify POS Lite – accept in-person payments
• Sell in 133 currencies and up to 20 languages

There are even more exciting features on the advanced plans, including real-time shipping rates, manual foreign exchange rates, and professional reports.

Shopify’s greatest asset is its huge app store – it’s pretty reliant on third-party integrations, so chances are you’ll need to install at least a few apps to get the most out of your store.

Big Cartel has a user-friendly onboarding process that helps you along by providing prompts and tips. While this is helpful for first-time sellers, in testing, our users found it difficult to progress with – in fact, Big Cartel is the most difficult ecommerce platform we’ve tried so far!

It’s worth noting that, despite seeming very beginner-friendly, you do need coding skills to get the most out of Big Cartel – which is sure to be off-putting for those without coding knowledge.

Big Cartel is one of the few ecommerce platforms that let you sell for free. You can sell up to five products at no cost – and if you outgrow this, you can upgrade to a paid plan. There are three paid plans, ranging from $9.99 to $29.99 per month:

• Platinum: $9.99 per month
• Diamond: $19.99 per month
• Titanium: $29.99 per month

The cheapest Platinum plan lets you sell up to 50 products. This plan provides standard selling features – you can upload five images per product, use a custom domain, track shipments, and manage your inventory, for starters.

Big Cartel has a small collection of designs to choose from. They’re modern, clean, and even fun – they’re all mobile-optimized, too, and you can switch your template at any time.

That said, Big Cartel’s templates aren’t the most dazzling, and customization is limited – this is where coding skills are really helpful to take your storefront to the next level. Otherwise, you and your customers may be left feeling uninspired when it comes to visual branding.

Big Cartel covers the basics, from Google Analytics integration to discounts and promotions. However, it’s missing some notable ecommerce must-haves, including abandoned cart recovery.

The features available remain the same across all three premium plans – the only change is the number of products you’re allowed to sell.

Most ecommerce platforms let you sell an unlimited number of products on the cheapest plan and upgrade features on more expensive plans, so it’s worth asking yourself exactly what you’re paying the extra money for with Big Cartel.

Squarespace might not be as straightforward as some other builders out there, but recent improvements have made a big impact! In our user testing, it scored an impressive 4 out of 5 for ease of use, which is a 15% improving on its pre-2021 ranking. This now makes it one of the simplest builders on the list.

We’d recommend taking your time to get acquainted with the editor, but once you know what you’re doing, building a website on this platform could not be more stress-free. Its editor clearly signposts all the most important elements, and its row-oriented layout is perfect for keeping your design clean and professional.

Unlike most of the other portfolio website builders we’ve looked at, Squarespace doesn’t have a free plan. Instead, it comes with a 14-day free trial, which is a risk-free way to try out its premium offering. You don’t need card details to sign up, just an email, so it’s easy to get started.

Squarespace has four price plans, ranging from $10.80 to $40 when you pay annually:

• Personal: $10.80 per month (with our discount code ‘WBE‘)
• Business: $18 per month
• Basic Commerce: $26 per month
• Advanced Commerce: $40 per month

The Personal plan is pretty well-stocked with features. Unlimited storage and bandwidth are great for media-heavy portfolios, strong SEO tools will help clients find your work, and a free domain saves you a little extra money.

The main things missing are ecommerce tools – you can’t sell on Squarespace’s cheapest plan. Instead, you need the $18 per month Business plan if you want to start selling through your portfolio.

Whichever plan you opt for, make sure that you take advantage of our exclusive WBE discount code. Entering ‘WBE’ at the checkout will save you 10% of the total cost, and if you choose the Personal plan, will reduce your monthly payments to just $10.80.

Squarespace has the best templates designs on the market, claiming the highest score of 4.7 out of 5 in the design category. If you’re design conscious, it’s the perfect choice. All templates are mobile responsive and favor large images, with plenty of white space for a modern look.

You don’t have to pay any extra for Squarespace’s templates – they’re all included in the price of your plan. Customization is easy, and you can really make the template your own. You’d need to upgrade to the $18 per month Business plan if you want to customize using code.

Squarespace designs most of its features in-house, meaning there’s a real focus on quality, which is why we awarded it a score of 4.4 out of 5 for its website features. Its blogging and SEO tools are worth a special mention for being particularly extensive, and most portfolio templates come with contact forms and newsletter sign-ups automatically built-in for you to use or remove.

You can add extra features to your site using Squarespace Extensions, which lets you integrate your portfolio with select third parties such as Printful, QuickBooks, and Smart SEO. This allows you to customize your site’s features as well as its design!

WordPress.com isn’t very beginner-friendly compared to other website builders. However, it is much easier to use than WordPress.org, the famous open-source platform.

If you want the power and blogging tools of WordPress.org without so much technical jargon, then WordPress.com is a great choice. If, however, you want a totally user-friendly website builder, you may find it challenging getting started.

In our user testing, WordPress.com received low “likely to recommend” scores from participants, who found it confusing to use. 

That said, WordPress.com does combat its steep learning curve with useful tips and hints while you build, which is a great help!

WordPress.com has a totally free plan, plus four paid plans. It’s a pretty scalable choice, but most of all, it’s an extremely cheap website builder, with its starting plan costing only $4 per month when paid annually:

• Free: $0 per month
• Personal: $4 per month
• Premium: $8 per month
• Business: $25 per month
• Ecommerce: $45 per month

The cheapest paid plan, Personal, comes with a free domain for one year and 6GB storage space. You get less adverts on your site than the free plan, but there’ll still be WordPress.com branding in your site’s footer. 

You don’t get certain features, such as the ability to upload videos or integrate with Google Analytics, but it’s still a great value plan for so little money.

WordPress.com’s template designs are great if you’re building a blog. There are both free and paid designs to choose from, so there’s an option for all budgets.

The downside of WordPress.com’s design is its limited customization.

It’s pretty restricted unless you can code, in which case you can edit your site’s CSS for greater design control. You get a basic version of this on the cheapest plan, but for full customization options, you need the $8 per month Premium plan.

WordPress.com comes with a huge range of blogging features. It’s a website builder that’s built for blogging, so it’s no surprise it scored an impressive 4.3 stars out of 5 in our features testing.

You can expect everything from comment management to social bookmarking to support your blog, as well as features such as social media integration and helpful analytics tools.

First off, Weebly is easier to use than WordPress.com. It uses drag-and-drop editing, where you drag section blocks around to design your site as you’d see it live on-screen. You can code if you want to, but it’s not essential.

That said, Weebly could be easier still. Its customization is fairly limited, which our users found frustrating during testing and affected its overall ease of use score. On the whole, though, Weebly shouldn’t present a challenge to beginners.

Weebly has a totally free plan, which displays adverts on your site, and three paid plans ranging from $6 to $26 per month:

• Free: $0
• Personal: $6 per month
• Professional: $12 per month
• Performance: $26 per month

The cheapest $6 per month Personal plan is an extremely affordable entry plan, but it does come with some drawbacks. You don’t get rid of adverts displaying on your blog, for example – there’s no free domain either, and you only get 500MB storage.

It’s worth mentioning that you can sell an unlimited number of physical and digital products on the Personal plan, which is an unusually generous feature at so low a price. If you want to monetize your blog, this plan is a great choice!

Weebly has a small but stylish range of blogging templates. You can switch your template any time you like, and – the best part – all Weebly’s templates are free. While with WordPress.com you have to pay for the really good designs, with Weebly, you won’t encounter any extra costs when picking out your favorite template.

Weebly scored 4.2 out of 5 for its blogging features in our research. Its blogging-specific tools include in-house analytics, a comments section, and scheduled publishing.

Other helpful features include strong SEO tools to help your blog rank in search results, and a huge app store full of free and paid apps to easily grow your website.

GoDaddy uses Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) to create a website for you that’s tailored to your specific needs. If you tell GoDaddy you’re building a blog, for example, it will automatically generate a blogging template for you. It’s super easy, and the main reason why GoDaddy scored 4.1 out of 5 in our ease of use testing.

During setup, you enter details such as the name and nature of your site, pick your favorite styling options, and GoDaddy presents you with a ready-made site!

This makes GoDaddy one of the fastest and easiest builders to create a website with, because it does most of the work for you. You can tweak the design and fill out your own content, but you don’t have to build your site from scratch.

GoDaddy offers a free plan in addition to its four price plans, all of which come with a one-month free trial, so you still have plenty of time to test out its tools. The cheapest GoDaddy plan costs $9.99 per month when you choose to pay annually:

• Basic: $9.99 per month
• Standard: $14.99 per month
• Premium: $19.99 per month
• Ecommerce: $24.99 per month

The cheapest Basic plan lives up to its name, covering the basic essentials for launching a new, small site. You can integrate with one social media platform and send up to 100 emails per month, which growing blogs may find limiting.

The biggest drawback to the Basic plan is the lack of GoDaddy’s inbuilt SEO website optimizer tool. Weebly and WordPress.com both offer SEO features for less money, so it’s a shame that GoDaddy reserves this higher level of SEO functionality for those ready to pay $14.99 per month. Despite this, it still ranks relatively well in regards to value for money, scoring 4.3 out of 5 in this category in our research.

You don’t start by picking your template with GoDaddy – instead, you use the design it creates for you and customize from there. You can switch up your design, change your color scheme, and so on, but on the whole, its customization options are very limited.

This is a website builder for those who value speed above design – if you want full control over your blog’s aesthetic, you’re better off with a builder like Weebly.

GoDaddy does okay for blogging features – you’ll find the usual blog posts and RSS feed easily enough. However, where it really shines is its marketing and analytics tools, which you may find helpful for taking your blog to the next level.

For example, GoDaddy Insights gives you a tailored action plan to help you achieve your website goals, and see how you’re performing compared to similar websites online.

That said, GoDaddy’s features are pretty limited on its cheapest plan. You have access to GoDaddy Insights, but not full access to GoDaddy’s SEO tools, which seems a little counterproductive.