Best Cheap Website Builders

WordPress.com isn’t very beginner-friendly. It’s easier to use than WordPress.org, but compared to other website builders, it’s pretty difficult!

You’ll need some coding skills to get the most out of it, and our users found it confusing and clunky to use. WordPress.com tries to combat this with tips, hints, and helpful checklists, which offer some relief for novice builders.

WordPress.com has a totally free plan, and four paid plans. WordPress.com is the cheapest website builder for small businesses, 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

You get some basic features on the cheapest Personal plan, but small business sites may feel restricted. You still have WordPress.com branding in the footer of your site, for example, and you don’t get plugin installation or any extra SEO tools.

Depending on your industry, you may struggle to adapt WordPress.com’s designs to your needs – especially if you have a very strong or unique brand. WordPress.com can’t give you total creative freedom, so if you want lots of control, you’re better off paying more for a platform like Wix.

Blogging is unarguably WordPress.com’s standout strength. It was designed for blogging, and it shows in its impressive blogging tools. If you intend to engage your audience through regular blogging, you’ll be delighted by what WordPress.com has to offer.

However, a lot of features that are important for small businesses are restricted on the cheapest plan, which may cause problems. Social media scheduling, ad revenue, PayPal buttons, Google Analytics integration, and even automated backups are all reserved for more expensive plans.

Gator is very quick and easy to use thanks to its use of smart technology – you give it the basics, and it does the rest for you. Gator will ask you a few questions during setup, and creates a tailored website for your needs based on your answers.

This automated style of building means you can have your website ready to go in a couple of hours. Gator says you’ll be ready in minutes, but you’ll need longer than that by the time you’ve added your own content and customized your design.

An important thing to note is that Gator doesn’t have a free plan or a free trial. Instead, you get a 45-day money-back guarantee. We prefer platforms that let you try for free before entering any payment details, but as long as you cancel within 45 days, you’ll get your money back.

Gator often runs sales with significant discounts on its introductory plans for new users, so the prices you see on its website may be different from what we’ve listed. Just remember that once your first term is over, your plan will renew at the regular price.

We’ve used Gator’s regular prices for an annual subscription, as this is what you’ll end up paying once your discount is over:

• Express Start: $9.22 per month
• Express Site: $12.29 per month
• Express Store: $19.98 per month

You don’t get to start by choosing your template – instead, Gator gives you one based on the answers you provide during setup. While this means your design is tailored to your needs, it does restrict your design choices, as Gator provides you with the template it thinks is best.

Gator’s cheapest plan is pretty generous when it comes to features. You get lots of basic tools, giving you good coverage, but not much power. All plans come with unmetered storage and bandwidth, giving you plenty of room to grow, plus a free domain and an image library.

The main things missing from the cheapest plan are any online appointments or booking tools – you need to upgrade in order to unlock this feature.

You can send three email campaigns per month on the cheapest plan – in fact, you get a ton of email marketing features, including automated scheduling and campaign reporting tools.

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.

This means 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 doesn’t come with a free plan, but it does have a one-month free trial, so you can test it out risk-free before starting out properly. There are four price plans to choose from, the cheapest of which 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.

GoDaddy is similar to Gator in its building style – you don’t start off by choosing your own template, because your site is created for you. With GoDaddy, you can choose your layout and switch up your 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 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!

Jimdo is simple to use, but it’s not impressively simple. Other platforms like Wix combine ease with power, but Jimdo only delivers on the simplicity side. Beginners won’t struggle to build their small business site, but they may struggle to grow or customize it due to Jimdo’s basic tools.

Jimdo has two sets of pricing plans – one for its ADI builder, which starts at $9 per month, and one for its Jimdo Creator editor, which starts at $10 per month. Jimdo Creator is a much better option for small businesses due to the features included. That said, both have a free plan, so you can compare them risk-free before committing.

Jimdo’s Creator plans start at $10 per month when you pay annually:

• Free: $0
• Pro: $10 per month
• Business: $20 per month
• SEO Plus: $30 per month
• Platinum: $40 per month

The $10 per month Pro plan includes a free domain, ecommerce tools, and a whole list of SEO tools, making it a more feature-rich option than GoDaddy’s cheapest plan straight away.

Jimdo’s designs are pretty restrictive, so customizing them can quickly become frustrating if you want to change too much of your template. This makes Jimdo unsuitable for brand-conscious small businesses. It’s best if you need a static, low maintenance site that’s mostly informational. Don’t rely on Jimdo’s designs to blow your clients’ socks off!

Jimdo has a good range of features, as we’ve already discovered, but it’s a case of quantity over quality. There’s just not much power or depth to Jimdo’s features – which could spell problems for ambitious small businesses looking for long-term scalability.

SITE123 is easy to get started with at first, but can quickly become more frustrating as you try to customize your design exactly as you want it. You start off smoothly with SITE123 creating a site for you, but if you want to push your template further, you may start to find things a little more challenging than first expected.

The best feature for beginners is SITE123’s expert live chat support, which is always on hand to answer any questions you might have.

SITE123 has a free plan and four paid plans, ranging from $12.80 to $34.80 when billed annually:

• Basic: $12.80 per month
• Advanced: $19.80 per month
• Professional: $28.80 per month
• Gold: $34.80 per month

SITE123 recommends the Advanced plan for small businesses, and the cheapest Basic plan for personal use. This makes sense. The Basic plan removes the SITE123 floating tag, but still displays the “Powered by SITE123” footer tag on your site.

SITE123 uses design assistance to create a site for you, but chances are you’ll want to edit the pages it provides, as SITE123’s designs can look pretty dated. This can be a struggle, as customization is limited. For this reason, we don’t recommend it to anyone who has a clear brand vision – you’ll need more creative freedom than SITE123 provides.

You get a generous 10GB of storage on the cheapest plan, plus a free domain and 100 mailing list messages. However, small businesses will miss the presence of website statistics, and even the ability to create multi language sites and receive ecommerce orders.

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.

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.

Square Online has a free plan, and it’s immediately better than Big Cartel’s – you can sell an unlimited number of products instead of just five!

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 practice 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.

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 it’s not the most intuitive platform we’ve tested. It takes a little while to get used to, but it’s easy enough once you’ve learned your way around.

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

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:

• 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.

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:

• 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 for 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 $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 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
• Discount codes
• Gift cards
• Shipping discounts
• Print shipping labels
• Fraud analysis
• Shopify POS Lite – accept in-person payments
• Sell in 133 currencies

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.

Weebly is an easy to use website builder that lets you create a stylish portfolio without needing any tech experience or coding skills. Weebly lets you drag section blocks around to visually design your site, add apps with a single click, and easily manage your site’s settings – including SEO – from a single dashboard.

It could be more intuitive, but beginners won’t struggle to build and run their portfolio using Weebly.

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

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

The Personal plan is the cheapest at $6 per month, and is a great starter plan for building your portfolio. You can connect your own custom domain, enable pop-up notifications, and sell an unlimited number of physical and digital goods through your portfolio.

However, it’s worth knowing the limitations of the Personal plan, too. There’s no free domain, no phone support, you only get 500MB storage, and – worst of all – you still have adverts displayed on your site. This means it won’t be suitable once your portfolio starts to gain professional attention.

Weebly’s portfolio templates mean you don’t have to build your site from scratch – you can start off with a design you love, and with relevant features prebuilt into your template.

There’s not a huge range of templates to choose from, but they’re stylish and modern, and you can switch your design any time you like.

You may find Weebly’s customization options a little limited, but the block-based editor is perfect if you need a little creative guidance.

Weebly wowed us in our research when it came to testing and rating its features. In fact, it outperformed all the other platforms we tested! One of the main reasons for this is Weebly’s extremely impressive SEO tools, which are essential for helping your portfolio get found by others in search engines.

IM Creator is difficult to use, meaning it’s not suitable for beginners. Its editor is too minimal, making it hard to navigate and frustrating to use. There’s no drag-and-drop tools or widget dashboard, resulting in a lot of clicking around trying to figure out how everything works.

IM Creator has two main plans – the Premium Account plan, which costs $8 per month, and the Unlimited Licenses & Whitelabel plan, which is billed annually at $350 per year.

The Premium Account plan is available as a free plan for artists, students, and nonprofits. You have to apply for this plan with written proof that you fulfil one of these profiles.

It has to be said that IM Creator’s premium plans lack some basic features. There’s no free domain, no mention of free SSL security, no email marketing tools, and no app store. That said, you will find basic ecommerce tools and unlimited storage, so there are some perks.

Design is where IM Creator really shines. Its templates are all sleek and modern, and feature large image sections for an aesthetically pleasing design. It’s clear that IM Creator is made for creatives, with plenty of designs for industries such as photography, art, fashion, and more.

However, customization isn’t easy, and you can’t switch your template once you’ve committed to one.

IM Creator is a mixed bag when it comes to features. Unlimited storage and ecommerce features are great perks to find on a cheap plan, and on top of this, you’ll have access to basic blogging tools and an advert-free site.

However, we miss common features such as an app store and email marketing, and worry about the lack of free SSL security on your site. These absent features make it hard to recommend IM Creator over a website builder like Weebly.

Ucraft is nice and easy to get started with, so beginners should feel confident giving it a go. The only drawback is that its editor can take a little getting used to – it works by stacking blocks to make up your page structure, which means customization is limited.

Ucraft has a free plan, so you can try it risk-free before committing to a paid plan. If you like it and want to upgrade, Ucraft also has three paid plans, starting from $10 per month when you choose to pay annually:

• Pro Website: $10 per month
• Pro Shop: $21 per month
• Unlimited: $69 per month

The Pro Website plan comes with all the essentials, including SEO tools, a free domain, Google Analytics, team member collaboration tools, and ecommerce tools.

Ucraft has lovely template designs. This is the main reason it’s often described as a budget-friendly Squarespace – it has the same focus on stylish, visually pleasing templates. 

You may find customization limited – if you want to edit the finer details of your template, Ucraft isn’t for you.

Ucraft’s features are plentiful, but not powerful. On its cheapest plan alone, you can check off blogging tools, ecommerce, SEO, coding tools, and analytics. None of them are super in-depth, but it’s more than enough to launch a decent portfolio to impress clients.

SimpleSite is really easy to use. It has a very beginner-friendly onboarding process that holds your hand as you set up your site, and walks you step-by-step through the various stages of building and customizing your pages.

It’s simple and straightforward, although the downside of this is extremely limited creative freedom.

SimpleSite has a free plan, which we recommend trying before signing up to a paid plan to make sure you like it. It only has two paid plans, so it’s not the most scalable option for a portfolio site. The cheapest plan costs $11.25 when you pay annually:

• Pro: $11.25 per month
• E-commerce: $26.25 per month

The cheapest Pro plan comes with a free domain, no adverts, and the ability to sell up to five products. SimpleSite is vague about how much storage or bandwidth you get with your plan, but you can build an unlimited number of pages.

SimpleSite’s designs are basic and, if we’re being totally honest, pretty outdated. Customization is a big downfall of SimpleSite’s beginner-friendly editor, because you can only make very basic changes. This means your portfolio won’t look as sleek or sophisticated as one built with Ucraft, for example, which is cheaper and still easy to use.

SimpleSite is great for mobile optimization thanks to its on-the-go mobile editor. It throws in some nice perks on its cheapest plan, including a free domain and basic ecommerce tools. You even get five personal email addresses and unlimited video minutes, which are great features for a portfolio site!

However, SimpleSite has very poor SEO tools, no app market, and outdated social media integration. It’s a lot more limited than even cheaper platforms, such as Weebly.

Squarespace isn’t as easy to use as Weebly, but it’s not too complicated. To get the best results, we recommend taking some time to learn your way around the interface before jumping in to design your portfolio.

It could be more beginner-friendly, so if you’re in a rush to get your portfolio live in a few hours, Squarespace probably isn’t for you. If you have a little patience, though, you can create a truly professional-looking site that’s worth the wait.

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 $12 to $40 when you pay annually:

• Personal: $12 per month
• 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.

Squarespace has the best templates designs on the market, so 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. 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 4.5 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.

Strikingly is very easy to use. In fact, it’s easier to use than both Weebly and WordPress.com! You don’t need coding skills, or any tech experience at all.

While its easy-to-use tools makes Strikingly welcoming for total novices, it can quickly become limiting as your skills grow. 

You’re more likely to hit a glass ceiling with Strikingly than you are with Weebly or WordPress.com, for example. This can become frustrating as you start to push the editor’s limits, and it stops feeling quite so easy and enjoyable.

Strikingly has a decent free plan, plus three paid plans ranging from $8 to $49 per month when you choose to pay annually:

• Free: $0 per month
• Limited: $8 per month
• Pro: $16 per month
• VIP: $49 per month

The $8 per month Limited plan comes with some nice perks, including a free domain, the option to publish two websites with Limited features, and a Simple Store feature that lets you sell up to five products. However, you’ll still have Strikingly branding on your blog.

The free domain looks attractive, but you should know that after your free year is over, Strikingly charges $24.95 per year for each custom domain, which is extremely expensive. You’re better off buying a cheap domain from a third party like GoDaddy, then connecting it to your Strikingly website to save money.

You need to log in to view the full range of Strikingly’s templates, of which there are many. They’re fun and vibrant designs, although not the most sleek or modern we’ve ever seen. 

You can switch your template at any time, which is a great feature, and may come in handy – Strikingly’s customizations are pretty limited, so if you want to rebrand later, it’s easier to pick a fresh design.

Strikingly’s features aren’t very scalable, so we recommend using it for very small, personal blogs. You can only create one-page websites on its Limited plan – although it’s worth mentioning that blog posts open in a new page.

In terms of blogging features, Strikingly ticks off the essential boxes with ease, including an RSS feed, search feature, and display categories for starters. Its Simple Blog feature covers the basics, but won’t be suitable if you need scheduling or subcategories.

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.

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 doesn’t offer a free plan. Instead, its four price plans 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 SEO tools. Weebly and WordPress.com both offer SEO features for less money, so it’s a shame that GoDaddy reserves SEO tools for those ready to pay $14.99 per month.

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.

Jimdo is easy to use, so beginners won’t feel out of their depth starting a blog with this website builder. It’s pretty limited, though, which can present its own problems as you try to build your site exactly how you want it.

It doesn’t have a very intuitive editor, which is extra frustrating due to its rather outdated templates. Because of this, Jimdo received a markedly low score  of 3.7 out of 5 in our ease of use testing.

Jimdo has two sets of pricing plans – one for its ADI builder, which starts at $9 per month, and one for its Jimdo Creator editor, which starts at $10 per month. Both have a free plan, so which one you choose is totally up to your individual needs!

Here’s a run-down of the Jimdo Creator plans:

• Free: $0
• Pro: $10 per month
• Business: $20 per month
• SEO Plus: $30 per month
• Platinum: $40 per month

The cheapest Pro plan comes with a free domain, and ecommerce features that allow you to sell up to 15 products. It also removes Jimdo branding from your site, making Jimdo a cheap option for an ad-free blog – although not quite as cheap as GoDaddy!

Jimdo’s templates could be better. In fact, it has the worst designs of all the cheap blogging website builders we’ve listed. They’re not bad designs, just a little uninspiring – you’ll probably want to freshen up your template, but may struggle due to a lack of customization features.

Jimdo ticks most of the boxes when it comes to blogging features, making it a decent choice for a cheap but ad-free blog. However, you should know before starting that Jimdo lacks an archive feature. Technically, you can set up an archive, but the process is much harder than it needs to be.