How We Conduct Our Website Builder Research

Since the birth of Website Builder Expert in 2012, we’ve accumulated years of experience testing and researching website builders, so it’s no surprise that our research process is a well-oiled machine at this point.

Unlike many of our competitors, we conduct real-life research and evaluate the needs of our readers. We ask what you want to know, and then put these website builders through their paces to reveal fair, accurate, and reliable ratings. This means we can make the best recommendations.

How We Test: Overview

We’ve carried out over 300 hours of testing on the top website builders on the market, and have since been able to narrow that list down to our recommended few.

Here’s a quick overview of our research process:

How You Inform Our Investigation Categories

I mentioned areas of investigation, but what do we test specifically? Well, our research team have surveyed 500 small businesses to identify the most common difficulties and priorities faced in today’s climate.

This has helped us form a methodology covering the six key areas that are most important to you:

1. Website functionality
2. Design features
3. Help and support
4. Reputation
5. Pricing
6. User experience

These areas have then been broken down further into 36 sub-categories where we have run additional tests in 207 areas. But we’re not done there!

To find out how each builder holds up in real-life situations, we pull together a group of 54 people to carry out practical tasks involved in the website building process. Then, our writers go through the same round of testing to ensure they’re completely up to speed. (I told you we’re thorough!)

When the scores from these sub-cats are added together, this gives us a total score for that overall area. And, once all six areas of investigation have been examined, these individual scores combine to give us an overall score (out of five) for each website builder.

What’s Changed for 2025?

Our previous analysis identified a shift in price points across every website builder, with major builders like Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy increasing their prices by an average of 30%, or more! So, we’ve tweaked how we look at value for money going forward – we now focus more heavily on “feature vs price” rather than just the average pricing plan.

This is so we can avoid promoting simply the cheapest plan, and instead highlight which builders offer the best value and scalability for you as your business grows.

Another noticeable change in this year’s research is the rise of AI technologies. We’ve explored the use of AI in the following sections:

• Website Functionality: Testing the AI writers within the editor and blogging tools and the AI supported SEO guidance
• Design Features: Assessing the quality and ease of AI setups, as well as AI editing tools

We’ve also made sure to get everyday users to test the builders for us – after all, we use and look at the builders every day so it wouldn’t be fair if we only took internal feedback!

Still with me? Great! Below, I’ll explain exactly what we’ve looked at in each area and how our research process has come together:

Every website builder can help you publish a website, but providing the tools to help you progress and handle real-life business scenarios? That’s another matter.

The “Website Functionality” section of our testing has assessed the breadth and quality of these practical features. We’ve done this by seeing precisely what options are available – if we take social media as an example, we’ve investigated if you can link your social accounts to your website, how many social media platforms are supported, if you can embed live feeds to your pages, and more.

We’ve also established what features are available internally and what features are available through third-party platforms via an app market. If a feature is only available as an app, this would lower the builder’s feature score, since it means it’s not readily accessible to use.

Other examples of features we test include:

• Blogging: Does the builder support a blogging function? If so, we’ve looked to see if this includes the ability to archive, segment categories, and add comments. Whether the builder supports a search bar, RSS feed, social bookmarking, and blog-specific analytics, has also been taken into account.
• SEO: How good is each platform at helping you rank highly on search engines like Google? Can you edit meta titles/descriptions, customize URLs, get keyword support, access SEO-specific apps, and so on?
• Side speed: How quickly do websites load on desktop and mobile devices?
• Globalization: How many languages are supported? Does the website builder offer translation tools?
• Marketing: Are there built-in email marketing tools? Does the builder integrate with social media platforms? Can you share content between your website and social feeds? Are third-party marketing apps available?
• Domains and emails: Is a free domain offered with your website builder plan? If not, how much does it cost and can you buy one directly from the builder? Does your plan come with professional email accounts?

The most weight has been given to advertorial marketing and blogging, since our business surveys and industry analysis have found these to be the highest priority to businesses.

To the naked eye, web design is a lot like art – one person’s genius is another person’s garbage. In order to gain a comprehensive insight into web design and what truly matters, we’ve spoken to leading experts in the field.

They have helped us to understand what constitutes good design, and what helps users engage with a website effectively. From this, we’ve drawn up a list of criteria which each website builder’s templates have then been judged against:

• Do the templates accommodate a wide range of popular industries?
• Can you easily switch templates once your website is live?
• Is the template aesthetically pleasing?
• Are the templates optimized for mobiles, tablets, and desktops?
• Can you design your website using AI?
• Can you personalize the template with a wide range of content elements?
• Does the template provide an integrated image editor?

In 2024, pricing increased across the website builder market, with top builders such as Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, and Weebly bumping up their prices by an average of 30%, or more. Plus, small businesses in the US are still facing rising costs in light of the higher tariffs on imported products.

As a result, we’ve tweaked our “Value for money” algorithm and renamed it “Pricing” to shift our focus to the quality of a website builder’s features vs the price, rather than just the average cost of premium plans.

This means we can accurately judge which plans are the most cost-effective and share the builders that offer the best value for money.

When assessing value, we’ve also looked into whether each platform offers a free plan (and what that contains), and if not, if there’s a free trial – and how long it lasts for.

Everyone is different. What’s easy for us might not be easy for you, and vice versa. It’s in the name – we’re website builder experts – so it’s important we gather feedback from regular website builder users too.

We carried out 54 individual user tests with people just like you, and asked them to create their own website using an assigned website builder. Each person created the same website by working off a task sheet we designed that covered five themes:

1. Design and customization
2. SEO and marketing
3. Content management
4. Ecommerce features
5. Website analytics and integrations

They were asked to score how easy – or hard – they found each task, and the level to which they enjoyed completing it. In total, we collected these scores for 1,200 individual tasks.

This year, we tested the website builders even more vigorously by carefully tailoring the test sheets to each builder’s unique features.

As you’ve probably guessed from the title of this investigation area, we’ve chosen to break it down into the help you receive and the support provided.

For help, we’ve looked at the services on offer. Can you get help via email, phone, live chat, social media, forums, or all of the above? Is help available at any time of the day or week, and how long can you expect to wait for a response? We’ve also tested each platform’s help center by inputting common queries and judging the quality of responses.

For support, we’ve focused mainly on security – restore options and autosave capabilities have all been investigated.

Finally, we’ve also make sure to assess the level of help and support provided for the price paid. In some cases, VIP support is available after upgrading to a higher plan, or limited support is offered on the cheapest plan.

Our “Reputation” category isn’t weighted as highly as others, but that doesn’t take away from its importance. In fact, a website builder’s reputation is everything — online reviews and recommendations can be the determining factor as to which one you commit to.

To quantify this, we’ve interviewed people who’ve taken part in our user tests. As part of the interview, one question we asked was how likely they’d be to recommend the builder to a friend.

Alongside this, we’ve tracked how often the builders were searched for on Google, how many websites they’ve made, and what users had to say about them on popular online review websites, such as trustpilot.