10 Best Website Builders for Small Business: Compared for 2022

The main feature we want to draw your attention to is Wix’s SEO tools. Boosting your business website’s rankings is super important for staying ahead of your competitors, and Wix offers plenty of support with its Wix SEO Wiz tool:

Wix SEO Wiz: enter some information about your industry, location, and target keywords, and this feature will create a bespoke SEO plan with tips on how to improve the visibility of your website on search engines.

Other notable features include:

Wix App Market: choose from over 200 apps and services, covering everything from shipping features to make sending out products easier, to email tools that help you reach out to customers and expand your user base (such as Contact Collection and Mailchimp).

Wix Ascend: the all-in-one marketing package, helping you connect with customers, create personalized messages for each user, post on social media, and send marketing emails, all in one place.

Wix’s editing interface lets you design your site by dragging and dropping text boxes and images to where you want them. A lot of other builders do this too, but our research participants were most likely to recommend Wix because its editor is easy to use and doesn’t sacrifice your creative freedom.

If you’re a longtime resident of the “not techy” camp, you can even use Wix’s ADI builder to create your site. Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) will ask you a few questions about your website, then generate a fully-fledged business website for you based on your answers.

There’s a great variety of templates on Wix, but one major drawback is that you can’t use a different template once you’ve published your website. So, make sure you’re happy with your choice the first time around!

It’s easy to add extra functionality to any Wix template. You can:

• Add contact forms and online booking forms for appointments
• Create and send invoices and track payments, helping you manage your finances in one place
• Add customized quizzes, surveys, and contact forms that let you find out what your customers think

For the more tech-savvy among you, there’s Velo by Wix, which allows you to integrate custom code into your Wix site. It’s entirely optional, but it grants you the freedom to create a totally original business website.

Wix doesn’t offer as much value for money as some platforms, such as Jimdo or Weebly. However, all this means is you need to pick the right plan to fit the unique needs of your small business.

For small business websites, we recommend Wix’s Pro plan, which starts at $23/month. You’ll get access to Ascend, Wix’s in-house marketing tool, and can even get a free logo designed if you want one.

However, it’s also worth noting that the cheaper Unlimited plan ($18/month) is another great choice for those who aren’t planning to sell online. It still comes with $300 ad vouchers, which are split evenly across Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Local Listings and can really give you a leg up when it comes to promoting your small business site.

There are help buttons everywhere on the Wix site, so if you’re having trouble building a specific section of your site, you can click on the button and find a specific answer to your question.

These help buttons make it easy to fix issues by yourself, without having to wait for customer service. That said, you can contact Wix directly over the phone from Monday to Thursday, 5am-5pm EST. Wix doesn’t offer 24/7 phone support, but its editor is so easy to use that you won’t feel like you’re missing out.

• Small restaurant – Wix has restaurant-specific templates, plus handy features such as a built-in menu creator and online ordering
• Music or band promotion – Wix’s detailed music analytics gives you stats on number of plays, shares, sales, and downloads
• Tech & IT business – It has very future-forward technology templates that look smart
• Entertainment and events – the free Wix Events app makes it easy to sell tickets, manage RSVPs, and promote events

Super SEO: Squarespace’s SEO features are really strong, too. If SERP (search engine results page) domination is high on your agenda – and for most small businesses, it should be – then Squarespace is the builder for you. We’ve gone into a ton of detail on exactly what makes Squarespace’s SEO features so good in our Squarespace SEO review.

Organization: Squarespace Scheduling is an easy online booking tool that lets clients view your availability, book or reschedule their appointments, and even pay online. You can also sync Squarespace Scheduling with your existing Google, iCloud, Office 365 or Outlook calendar.

Social media integration: You can integrate your Squarespace site with a raft of social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, and even pull in content from certain platforms straight onto your page.

Domains: You can buy a domain from Squarespace, or connect your own existing domain without a fuss. You’ll get a free domain for one year if you sign up to an annual paid plan, too.

All Squarespace’s templates are polished, and their clean lines give off a really professional vibe. More than any other builder, you can make your small business website look like it’s been professionally designed without having to play around with any code yourself.

What’s more, you’re able to stamp your mark on your website by easily customizing your design, from the fonts and colors right down to the sidebar width and background images. You can’t switch templates once your site is live, but all templates share the same building blocks, so it’s really easy to redesign your site later on if you want to rebrand.

You can also add features like an announcement bar (great if you want to show off your new product), or a mobile information bar, which streamlines your website for visitors using a mobile phone and displays a shortcut menu with key information like contact details and opening hours.

We recommend the $23/month Business plan for small business websites, because you can create modern, professional pages. This plan offers great value for small businesses – in fact, in our research we found that most of our readers are best off with the Business plan!

That said, you’ll have to pay a 3% transaction fee for sales you make on the Business plan, which would be waived if you were to scale up to either the Basic or Advanced Commerce plans. So if you plan to sell a lot of products, it’s worth skipping straight to the Basic Commerce plan ($27/month)!

Like its range of templates, Squarespace’s help and support options are comprehensive and high quality. Whenever you become stuck, you can benefit from:

• Live chat Monday to Friday
• 24/7 Twitter support
• 24/7 email support
• An in-depth knowledge base
• A community forum
• Video tutorials

Squarespace’s knowledge base is particularly helpful, with a huge range of detailed guides. The only thing Squarespace doesn’t offer is phone support, so bear that in mind if you prefer talking to someone directly.

Its full range of support options are available across all its plans, unlike some platforms which reserve better support for higher paying customers.

• Photography and videography – Squarespace is a very visual builder, with templates designed specifically with imagery in mind.
• Blogging – It allows you to create blog posts, tag posts, add them to social, and enable comments.
• Real estate – Squarespace has real estate specific templates that allow you to show off properties.
• Wedding websites – Squarespace allows you to create a wedding registry, gallery, and build a blog to share the special day with loved ones.
• Marketing and advertising – You can create a website for marketing using the tools provided by Squarespace like through branded email campaigns, creating social media posts, the video studio app, and the in-built studio tools.

• GoDaddy SEO: this feature will automatically review your website and optimize it for search engines, but it’s not available on the cheapest price plan. GoDaddy claims that websites using GoDaddy SEO saw their Google traffic increase 2.5 times compared to those not using it.
• Google Analytics: unlike most website builders which use their own analytics tools, GoDaddy has seamlessly integrated its software with Google Analytics, providing brilliant analysis ready at your fingertips.
• Domains: GoDaddy is one of the largest domain registrars in the world, so it’s really easy to set up your domain with this builder. Pricing starts at $9.99 to purchase a domain for one year.

However, it’s important to note that GoDaddy doesn’t have an app store, meaning you’re reliant on the features it provides in-house, without the choice to add any third-party integrations to scale up your website.

GoDaddy scores a very respectable 4.1 out of 5 in our research – the same as Squarespace – but why didn’t it score higher if its ADI does the building for you? Well, GoDaddy can create a website for you in a matter of minutes, which requires minimal effort on your part – but after that, GoDaddy feels quite restrictive.

The majority of users in our research mentioned they wanted more creative control when using the builder. However, 76% of our participants also said they would recommend GoDaddy to a friend who’s looking to get online. So in short, if you value ease of use over creative freedom, then GoDaddy won’t disappoint.

The main thing that sets GoDaddy above Wix is that it lets you switch templates at any time, making it more flexible than Wix if you want to redesign your site later down the line.

GoDaddy’s designs aren’t as sleek or modern as Squarespace’s, but it does cover a great range of industries, including fashion, food, sports, and more. GoDaddy’s Theme Customizer feature is definitely worth trying out – it gives you a sneak preview of your new theme in 20 different styles without losing your content, which helps set it apart from Wix.

All in all, while Squarespace is the place to go for sleek templates, GoDaddy is more of a quick fix.

We recommend the $14.99 Premium plan for small businesses because it comes with:

• Unlimited social media platforms
• 25,000 email marketing sends per month
• Recurring appointments
• Payments for appointments
• Email and text appointment reminders

None of these appointment features are available on cheaper plans, and social media and email marketing integrations are much more limited.

What we really like about GoDaddy is that this platform does a bit of everything – you can manage your domain registration, web hosting, and website building, all in one place.

• 24/7 phone support
• Live chat (Monday to Friday, 5am-6pm)
• Knowledge Base
• Help Forum

You can find answers to simple questions in the forum and knowledge base, but you’ll need to speak to an expert to get answers for specific or niche questions.

• Hobby stores – GoDaddy’s sheer speed is great for those who want to quickly sell on the side of their career
• Jewelry – You can create a basic jewelry shop with GoDaddy, it’ll allow you to sell but keep in mind that the promotional photographs should be of high quality to make the website stand out
• Portfolios – The simple resume templates are great for putting together a creative or professional portfolio

• Huge App Center: choose from over 360 apps across categories such as marketing, communications, ecommerce, social media, and more. One of the best ways that apps can help your website is by connecting Facebook Messenger, allowing you to chat with Facebook users straight from your own website.
• Membership Options: available on the Professional and Performance Plans, this feature lets you grant registered members access to restricted pages. This is useful if you want to create private clubs, or share private information with certain visitors.
• SEO: Weebly makes it easy to edit your meta titles and descriptions, customize your URLs, and add alt text to images, which can all help your website get found by search engine users more easily. There are also a number of excellent SEO apps, such as RabbitSEO and MarketGoo, to help bolster your SEO efforts.

When designing your website, Weebly leaves you to your own devices, providing little in the way of visual cues or design intuitiveness.

Compared to competitors, Weebly has a small selection of templates – around 50 – with an even smaller range designed specifically for businesses. Its poor mobile formatting really let it down in our testing, and customization is challenging due to Weebly’s restrictive block-based editor.

For the coders out there, you can use Weebly’s Code Editor to gain access to the HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and customize the layout of your web pages to add a greater level of personalization.

For just $6 per month (billed annually), you can access the premium features on its Personal Plan, including 500MB storage and the ability to connect your own domain.

Weebly’s paid plans are noticeably cheaper than its competitors, so it’s definitely worth upgrading from the free subscription. On the free plan, you’ll be tied to an unprofessional Weebly.com subdomain, but you can remove that blemish for just $6 per month.

However, for a business website the $6 per month Personal plan isn’t suitable long-term – this plan displays Weebly adverts on your site, which can distract your visitors, confuse your own branding, and detract from your professional image.

For this reason, we recommend the $26 per month Performance plan because it opens up your website to accept PayPal payments, which is one of the most popular payment gateways. This is something your business might need sooner rather than later, so why wait to upgrade?

• Support tickets (answered 24/7)
• Live chat (available Monday to Friday 6am-6pm PST, and Saturday to Sunday 8am-5pm PST)
• Email (24/7)
• Phone (6am-6pm PST)

However, it’s worth noting that Weebly only offers phone support on its more expensive plans, which is disappointing for small businesses on a tighter budget.

Weebly also offers a Support Center showcasing numerous how-to guides, and a Community Forum where you’ll find plenty of tips from existing users.

However, one thing Weebly lacks is a personal restore option. This means that if your site goes down, you’re totally reliant on the support team to restore it for you.

• Small creative portfolio – Weebly has some good templates for create websites, ideally for artists or classic portfolios
• Sleek small stores – Weebly offers some good value features for a small business website

Zyro has all of the basics covered really well – its features just lack depth. Take SEO, for example: you’ll still get to edit alt text, meta titles, and URLs, but there’s no keyword support and there aren’t any dedicated integrations for SEO. Zyro also doesn’t have any built-in email marketing tools, which is a big drawback for any small business looking to build their brand.

Still, we were impressed by Zyro’s sales features – you can see more on that in the selling online section.

Then the page elements will snap right into place at perfect angles, so it’s really hard to make a design mistake with Zyro. Plus, this builder offers a unique set of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, including an SEO copywriting tool and a logo maker, to make content creation and design even easier.

Compared to Wix and Squarespace, Zyro’s templates aren’t extremely customizable – you also can’t switch templates once your site is live, so you really have to be committed to whichever design you choose!

However, Zyro will soon be rolling out a new Smart layout by getting rid of the restrictive rows. This allows for a more dynamic and visual-lead approach to design, so watch this space! The new Smart layout is currently only available for the Adelina template, which you can check out now!

It is worth mentioning, however, that Zyro’s cheapest starting price of $2.69 per month requires a two-year subscription. If you want to pay annually, it costs $2.96 per month, which is still very affordable!

Just note that while we always received responses from the Zyro team in under an hour, that kind of speed isn’t completely guaranteed! If you ever find yourself waiting for a response, it’s worth checking out Zyro’s knowledge base, which offers a ton of quality articles.

It’s a platform that makes building your online store uncomplicated and Wix’s tools and features make selling online a breeze. You can add products and manage your inventory all in one place, cutting out all the back and forth of some ecommerce platforms.

The main feature we want to draw your attention to is its awesome shipping features. Wix eCommerce allows you to create free shipping to entice more customers, and gives discounted shipping rates from popular US carriers.

Another great factor for small businesses is that it provides dropshipping. That means you don’t need to hold any stock, and it even has print on demand capabilities for those who want to create products and sell directly through their website hassle free.

Other notable features include:

Marketing and SEO tools: Wix eCommerce has in-built SEO capabilities that help your products rank higher on Google. This is super important for getting customers to your website and buying your goods.

Store Analytics: A fantastic tool for understanding customer insights and learning from them to make your store the best it can be. With the help of Google Analytics, you can learn from how visitors behave on your website and improve as you go.

The only setback to Wix’s templates is once you’ve chosen one you can’t change the template later down the line. You can always update the one you’re using, but make sure the template will stand the test of time for your business.

It’s easy to add extra functionality to any Wix template. You can:

• Get a huge media library to add imagery that will captivate customers
• Translate your storefront to 90+ languages to engage with people globally
• Have a mobile-optimized small business website, to grab the attention of mobile shoppers.

If you do have the technical skills to boost your website, there’s Velo by Wix, letting you add custom code to your Wix store. You don’t need this to sell online, but it’s perfect for those who want to add extra personalization to their store.

Wix eCommerce also makes SEO and marketing easier than most platforms. It offers step by step guidance and a great help center to get your small businesses name out there easier. The SEO help that Wix eCommerce provides is also great with tools like:

Wix SEO Wiz: you can get a bespoke SEO plan with Wix SEO Wiz. You just need to enter some information about your target keywords, industry, and location, to get SEO tips. This will help you climb the Google algorithm ranks and get your page noticed by more potential customers.

To get started with Wix ADI SEO just click on Settings then:

1. Go to SEO Basics
2. Fill in the Title Tag, enter your sites name and the page name
3. Then fill the Meta Description describing your site’s page
4. Enter up to 10 Keywords
5. Enter the pages URL
6. Click Let’s Go and you should get your personalized SEO plan!

Then you can apply the SEO plan to help your small business sell more and grow.

Wix doesn’t offer as much value for money as some platforms, like Square Online. However, it sits in joint second with Squarespace with a score of 4.4/5, making it pretty great value.

For small business websites that are selling online, we recommend Wix’s Business Basic plan, which starts at $27/month. You’ll get Wix eCommerce’s unlimited products, abandoned cart recovery, and the ability to sell through your social channels.

However, if you can afford it, it’s also worth noting that the Business Unlimited plan ($32/ month) provides advanced shipping, dropshipping, and multiple currencies.

All plans come with 24/7 customer care, but only the Business Unlimited and Business VIP ($59/ month) plans allow product reviews through KudoBuzz – really useful for building your customers’ trust in your products

For businesses that want to grow, Shopify supports bulk product imports, customizable checkout pages, and great accounting options. It also has some neat sales features like tracking customer behaviors through big data.

One downside to Shopify is the transaction fees it has in place. The highest fee is 2% on its Basic Shopify plan – which is why Shopify’s value for money score is lower (see below).

Despite this, customers love Shopify because its smooth UX design leads your potential customers to hitting the “Buy” button.

Shopify has 64 premium themes and 10 free themes, ranging in price from $140 to $180 each.

But are you trying to understand if the themes look any good? Well, Shopify scores a 3.9 out of 5 for design, which is pretty good. We’d say its stores look professional and, more importantly, function best for businesses that aim to grow bigger.

What Shopify’s SEO tools offer you:

• Google Analytics
• Social media integration
• Custom URLs
• SEO best practice prompts
• Meta descriptions

These tools and more are all designed to allow your store to grow beyond a small business – so Shopify is the best small business website builder for those that plan on becoming a big business.

Shopify has a 14-day free trial so you can test out its editor for building your small store. But we recommend its Basic plan at $29 per month for small businesses that want to sell.

This is because it offers you international market management, domain optimization, shipping labels, customer segmentation, and lots of extra features.

If you want to add an ecommerce store to your website, Squarespace actually came out as the easiest to get to grips with in our ease of use testing. Not only that, but it comes with excellent promotional tools such as discounts, and you can sell an unlimited number of products on any of its ecommerce plans.

Squarespace Ecommerce comes with metrics, SSL security, and unlimited storage hosting all in one place. It’s particularly good for creative small businesses that want some top-notch design templates.

The great thing about Squarespace is that you can easily customize templates las you go, in case you fancy changing your branding with the times. But note you can’t switch templates once you’ve picked one. It’s also great for small businesses that are creating a brand as it has clear consistent UX and template designs.

Where Squarespace loses on design points is its lack of product page filtering and the fact it doesn’t have mobile creation as of right now. But overall Squarespace ecommerce is a great alternative to Wix and Shopify for small businesses looking to sell.

Every domain gets a free SSL certificate, which is important for customers seeing your website as secure (as well as Google). Squarespace ecommerce has everything you need for SEO and comes up head to head with Wix for having the utmost capabilities a small business could need.

Square Online has some pretty great shipping options including real-time rates, which automatically calculates the cost based on weight, country, and current shipping costs.

But we’d say if you’re looking for room to expand your business or one packed with features, then we recommend one of the above ecommerce builders.

But then why choose Square Online? Well, if you’re not looking to reinvent the wheel but rather give users a familiar website that lets your products shine then Square Online could be for you. Particularly if you have a clothing or a food and drink store then Square’s simplicity could make your items stand out.

Just know that with Square Online you’ll need to do your own learning on SEO best practices as it doesn’t prompt you or give much guidance on the builder itself.

The main reason for this is because it has an entirely free plan. The main reason for this is because it has an entirely free plan, which is pretty rare! Unlike other builders, you can start selling without actually signing up for a premium plan.

The downside of Square Online’s free plan is that you’ll have ads displayed on your site. You’ll also be sacrificing some features, but if you’re a small business just selling a few items on the side Square might be the match for you.

In our opinion, the Performance plan is like Goldilocks and the three bears – “it’s just right.” You’ll be paying $26/month which is affordable considering you can begin selling on the free plan and work your way to the Performance plan.

For the extra dough you’ll get customer review emails and very important abandoned cart recovery. Both of which could help you earn more with your small business. Plus, if you want that extra PayPal payment option then you’ll need the paid plan.

It offers multi-channel integration as well as a number of payment options including PayPal, Stripe, Square, Amazon, and Apple Pay. One of its standout features is that it integrates with physical POS systems, making it possible for you to link your online venture to a real-life brick and mortar business.

One slight drawback, however, is that you can only add up to 2,500 products at any one time. This might seem like a lot, but when compared to platforms like Wix and Squarespace, both of which support unlimited products, it’s not so impressive.

Much like Wix, Zyro doesn’t allow you to swap templates halfway, so this could become an issue if you’re not super decisive or like to change templates with the times.

Overall the templates are more modern than a builder like Weebly, but aren’t as dazzling as Squarespace or Wix.

One great feature is its AI heatmap that shows you where on your website page visitors are engaging with. This is really great for knowing how to shape your content and lead visitors to the checkout page.

Zyro is missing a few tools that would make it much better, like keyword prompts and support. Much like Square Online you’ll need to do your own SEO research, but if you already know all about SEO then Zyro could work fine for your small business.

Overall, although Zyro has some cheaper plans than most, it doesn’t quite offer the same value in its features, ease of use, and support just yet.

Zyro is the fairly new kid on the block, so comes with plenty of potential – perhaps in future it could rise to the top for selling online. We’d say it’s one to keep an eye on if you’re planning ahead for building a small business in future.