9 Best Small Business Website Builders

Best Overall Website Builder for Small Business

Wix is our top website builder for small businesses because it’s powerful, simple to use, and offers unrivalled flexibility when you’re creating your website. With Wix’s drag-and-drop functionality, you can build a stunning small business website in just a couple of hours.

Ease of Use: 4.3/5

If you want to keep things simple, then Wix is definitely the builder for you. You don’t need any technical or design skills to build a professional, eye-catching small business website, which is why our research participants were most likely to recommend Wix out of any builder.

Wix has made web design even easier with its ADI builder. 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.

Design Flexibility: 4.0/5

With Wix, you have the freedom to create a small business website that oozes real personality. There are more than 500 professionally designed templates to choose from, covering all types of business from makeup artists to vintage car dealers.

You’ll love the variety of templates on Wix, but 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 round!

Just because Wix is simple to use doesn’t mean it’s short on functionality. With Wix, 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
• Insert video backgrounds (without touching code) to jazz up your website and keep your visitors engaged

For the more tech-savvy among you, there’s Wix Corvid, 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 bespoke small business website.

Website Features: 4.6/5

Wix App Market: choose from over 200 apps and services, covering anything from SEO features that help your site get found online (such as Site Booster), to email tools that help you reach out to customers and expand your user base (such as Contact Collection and Mailchimp).

Wix Video: easily add a video with a customized logo to your platform. Be careful with your product videos, though – 75% of consumers have been discouraged from buying a product due to an annoying video voice over.

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.

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.

Help and Support: 5/5

We also like Wix because it provides fantastic customer support. 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.

This is great because it takes away a lot of the frustration when setting up your online business, and lets you work through any roadblocks yourself, without having to wait on the phone for a customer service team. That said, you can reach Wix directly via email or phone from Monday to Thursday, 5am-5pm EST.

Value for Money: 3.1/5

Wix has eight price plans to choose from, with four plans for non-ecommerce websites and four ecommerce-specific plans:

Wix User Review

There are plenty of reasons why Wix is our #1 recommended website builder for small businesses. But don’t just take our word for it. We spoke to Sara, founder of Cloud Nine Knits, to find out about her experience of using Wix to build her small business website.

Best for Fast-Growing Small Businesses or Startups

Squarespace may not be quite as straightforward to use as Wix, but its beautifully designed templates and phenomenal image quality make it a unique offering for small businesses that want to stand out online.

Ease of Use: 3.4/5

Squarespace offers slightly more advanced design tools than Wix does, which means there is a slightly steeper learning curve. Generally, Squarespace isn’t as intuitive as Wix, and it can take longer to make changes to your website. However, if you have basic tech skills and know your way around a computer, you’ll pick up Squarespace quite quickly – and you’ll love the creative freedom.

Design Flexibility: 4.3/5

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 muck around with any code yourself. What’s more, layout features like Cover Pages – also known as single scrolling pages – can really make your small business website stand out from the crowd.

Squarespace’s templates are all mobile-responsive, which means the content will resize automatically on different devices, so your site looks great no matter what device your customer is using.

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. It’s also very simple to switch your cover page templates when you feel your site needs a revamp.

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

This feature could prove particularly useful, given that 67% of American consumers, plus 87% of UK consumers, own and use mobile devices regularly.

Website Features: 4.2/5

Beautiful blogs: Blogs are brilliant for adding personality to your business and populating your website with useful content.

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.

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.

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.

Help and Support: 3.8/5

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

Value for Money: 3.5/5

Unlike Wix, it does not offer a free plan, but a 14-day free trial period instead. Squarespace has four price plans, with two generic website builder plans and two ecommerce-specific plans:

Personal: $12/month

Business: $18/month

Basic Commerce: $26/month

Advanced Commerce: $40/month

If you’re not looking to sell products online, then you should choose the Personal plan. Meanwhile, the Business plan comes with extra features, such as promotional pop-ups and the ability to accept payments online. The Business Plan is, unsurprisingly, best for businesses, providing everything you need for your small business to succeed. For more detail on what you’ll get on the Personal and Business plans, see the image below…

Great Value for Money

Weebly is a great tool for getting your online business off the ground for very little money and without a fuss, with plans starting from just $6 per month when paid annually. It’s also relatively simple to pick up, lying somewhere between Wix and Squarespace in terms of ease of use – it’s not as intuitive as Wix, but is more user friendly than Squarespace.

Ease of Use: 3.5/5

Like Wix, Weebly uses a drag-and-drop editor which allows you to view your edits in real time, with no switching between editing and preview modes. However, from our user testing, we discovered that Weebly is quite difficult to use in comparison with other builders, with Wix and Duda coming out as the easiest-to-use website builders.

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

Design Flexibility: 3.4/5

Weebly has recently renovated its themes gallery, offering 40 templates to suit all sorts of industries. The templates cannot match those on Squarespace in terms of minimalist beauty, but they will be more than suitable for small business websites that are just looking to showcase their services in a clear, simple, affordable manner.

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.

Website Features: 4.4/5

• Huge App Center: choose from over 300 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 Rabbit SEO and MarketGoo, to help bolster your SEO efforts.

Help and Support: 3.1/5

You can reach the Weebly support team in three different ways:

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

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.

Value for Money: 4.1/5

This is where Weebly comes into its own. For just over a dollar per week, you can access the premium features on its Personal Plan, including 500MB storage and the ability to connect your own domain. Below are Weebly’s three premium plans:

• Personal ($6/month)
• Professional ($12/month)
• Performance ($26/month)

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 a Weebly.com subdomain, but you can remove that blemish for just $6 per month.

We’d recommend springing for the 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?

Best for Time-Conscious Small Business Owners

GoDaddy is the go-to for time-conscious business owners. This is one of the best website builders for small businesses that need to get online quickly, thanks to its ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence).

Ease of Use: 3.8/5

Yes, GoDaddy can create a website for you in a matter of minutes with its ADI feature, which requires minimal effort on your part – but after that, GoDaddy feels quite restrictive. And if you don’t use the ADI, you’ll need to use GoDaddy’s drag-and-drop feature, which can’t match Wix for creative freedom.

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.

Design Flexibility: 3.8/5

As we’ve just explained, GoDaddy offers little design flexibility. But if you need a simple small business website created quickly, and you’re not too fussed about getting creative yourself, then GoDaddy is a good option.

Having said that, GoDaddy offers over 100 themes (compared to Weebly’s 40), and its new Theme Customizer feature 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 Squarepsace is the place to go for sleek templates, GoDaddy is more of a quick fix.

Website Features: 2.7/5

• Limited social media integration: currently, you can only add icons to link out to your social media channels.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Help and Support: 2.8/5

GoDaddy doesn’t offer the best customer support around, but you can still request help using these methods:

• 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.

Value for Money: 3.1/5

GoDaddy has four price plans, plus a 30-day free trial period. The prices are fairly reasonable, but you can find a wider range of features and stronger customer support on Weebly, Wix, or Squarespace. When paid annually, GoDaddy’s price plans are as follows:

• Basic ($10/month)
• Standard ($15/month)
• Premium ($20/month)
• Ecommerce ($25/month)

The Basic Plan unlocks blogging functionality for your website, but we’d recommend signing up to the Standard Plan at least, in order to benefit from GoDaddy’s SEO tools. What we 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.

Best for Blogging

WordPress.com is very much ‘all about the blog’. If your business relies heavily on blogging, or operates as a blog first and foremost, then you’ll strike gold with this website builder. For anything else, however, you’ll likely find WordPress.com too limiting.

Ease of Use: 3.2/5

WordPress.com is the best website builder for small businesses that appreciate blogging. It’s also suitable for users who are either happy with a generic-looking website, or are prepared to customize the code themselves. You’ll find it’s quite frustrating building other any type of website, besides a blog, on WordPress.com.

WordPress.com came joint last in our Customer Score category during our product testing, making it one of the trickiest-to-use website builders on our list.

Design Flexibility: 2.4/5

Unsurprisingly, WordPress.com’s templates are focussed on blogging. You’ll struggle to find a theme to suit your business if you don’t run a blog, so it’s worth remembering that WordPress.com is more of a blogging platform with some website builder add-ons.

Website Features: 3.7/5

• Social Media Integration: you can set up your blog posts to get shared automatically on your social media news feeds, while you can also add widgets to your blog that take the user directly to your social media platforms.
• SEO: WordPress takes care of 80%-90% of the mechanics of SEO for you. For example, all of its templates are designed to optimize your page for ranking on search engines. If you want a more hands on approach to your SEO, i.e. to have access to a wide range of SEO tools that let you edit your meta descriptions and domain names, you’ll need to upgrade from the cheapest plan.

Help and Support: 3.6/5

WordPress.com has a knowledge base with a search feature which will direct you to relevant pages with helpful guides and articles. There is no dedicated support team that you can reach via phone or live chat.

Value for Money: 4.6/5

WordPress.com represents brilliant value for money. Despite its flaws when it comes to building non-blogging websites, it has the second cheapest average pricing behind Wix, with plans starting at $4 per month, billed yearly. Please note that Weebly is the best value for money, not the platform with the cheapest average pricing.  The WordPress.com plans are as follows:

• Free plan
• Personal: $48 per year ($4/month)
• Premium: $96 per year ($8/month)
• Business: $300 per year ($25/month)

Best Template Designs, but Limited Creative Freedom

Duda pitches itself as a website builder for web designers, but don’t let this put you off. Its super simple to create a single site for your business, and the cheapest plan costs just $14 per month.

Ease of Use: 4.1/5

Duda is a drag-and-drop builder, making it easy to move elements around the page and to update text boxes. Its templates are visually appealing but very structured, meaning you can only place items within certain areas on the page. Duda offers creative freedom, within limits.

The rigidity of Duda’s themes makes it less creatively flexible than Wix, which offers a more ‘blank canvas’ approach, but is still a beginner-friendly platform. Compared to Sqaurespace, Duda’s themes aren’t as modern or minimalist, but they are more easy to customize if you’re a tech beginner.

Design Flexibility: 4.6/5

Duda’s flexibility comes from its personalized user journey options. With this feature, you can change the way different users see your website, and it’s available even on the cheapest price plan.

For example, you can choose to display a video about your services to users who are visiting your website for the first time, or you can add a widget asking users to call you if they are visiting from a nearby location.

This feature could help you gain new customers, with 80% of companies reporting an uplift in sales since implementing personalization.

Creating personalized user journeys is usually a tactic only reserved for coders, but Duda makes it easy for anyone to get personal with their web design. All you have to do is click ‘Personalize’ on the right hand side, then choose ‘Rule’.  It’s a really smart feature that sets Duda apart from other builders.

Website Features: 3.2/5

Duda lacks basic marketing features, such as a newsletter tool. It has no app store, which means you can’t easily add extra functionality when you need it. This is quite the downside, as marketing tools are crucial for growing a small business website.

There isn’t much SEO support, either. You won’t benefit from the SEO prompts and guides you’ll find on Weebly or Squarespace, so you’ll need to research everything yourself.

Duda is far from the best small business website builder, but it’s suitable for users who want a well-designed website and aren’t too bothered about marketing features.

Help and Support: 3.6/5

The support you get on Duda depends on the price plan you choose, but you’ll still have access to the Help Center on all plans. Below is a quick snapshot of the available support for each plan:

Basic: Email

Team: Email, live chat, and phone

Agency: Priority email, live chat, and phone

Duda also offers a Resource Center, which presents educational webinars and information about product updates.

Value for Money: 1.2/5

Duda is the most expensive builder we’ve tested. There is no free plan, but you’ll have a 14-day free trial period on the Team Plan. When paid annually, these are the Duda price plans:

• Basic ($14/month)
• Team ($22/month)
• Agency ($74/month)

Best for Help and Support

Strikingly is the place to go for strong customer support. It also represents great value for money. However, it does have some serious drawbacks in the features department.

Ease of Use: 3.7/5

As you can see, Strikingly’s score is pretty average. This builder is relatively simple to use if you want to build a simple, single-page website quickly and cheaply. In a similar fashion to Duda, the templates on Strikingly are rigid – if it’s creative freedom you’re looking for, then head over to Wix.

Design Flexibility: 3.1/5

As we mentioned, you can only build one-page websites on Strikingly. This is the epitome of inflexibility.

Why are one-page sites a no-no? They’re just too long! The average person scrolls 22.7 meters on their phone every day, and let’s just say your one-page website would be responsible for the bulk of that! These types of websites make adding blogs or product categories to your website impossible. It would be too much scrolling otherwise.

Website Features: 2.4/5

Strikingly is not suitable for small businesses looking to grow quickly. Squarespace, with its solid SEO features, is a much better option for fast-growing startups.

Back to Strikingly, though. This platform offers integration with the email marketing app MailChimp, and the ability to add a live chat through Facebook Messenger, but only on the Pro Plan. However, you can add a link to your social media accounts on the free version.

You can also buy a domain on all of Strikingly’s plans, and you can register your domain for up to 10 years. What’s more, this platform provides a basic SEO checklist to ensure you cover the basic SEO best practices.

Overall, though, Strikingly is far from striking in the website features department.

Help and Support: 4.5/5

Not only does Strikingly have the most wholesomely named support team – the Happiness Officers – but it boasts the most active one, too.

Throughout your website-building journey, you’ll find a chat box pop-up inviting you to talk to your Happiness Officer, who is available 24/7. It also offers plenty of helpful tutorial videos. Simply put, you’re never left feeling stuck using Strikingly.

Value for Money: 3.1/5

Strikingly’s price plans are very reasonable, offering an impressive range of benefits for the amount you pay. The three price plans are as follows:

• Limited ($8/month)
• Pro ($16/month)
• VIP ($49/month)

You can choose the free plan, but we’d recommend the Limited Plan at $8/month, which lets you build two sites, sell up to five products, and bag a free domain for the first year. Quite the package!

Best for Total Tech Novices

The clue’s in the name – Site123 makes web design feel as quick and easy as counting to three. Using a design-assisted approach, this platform is a tech-beginner’s dream. However, it can’t offer much more than that.

Ease of Use: 4/5

Site123 asks you a couple of questions about your website desires, then generates a template with relevant features based on the information you provided. Using Site123 really does feel like ABC!

72% of participants in our research said they’d recommend Site123 to a friend, but many users also said they would use a different website builder if they needed a complex website.

Design Flexibility: 2.8/5

Site123’s simplicity translates into basic templates. Even though this platform is quick and easy to use, you’d get better results by using Wix ADI or GoDaddy, which both offer slicker templates and a greater level of creative freedom.

Website Features: 2.6/5

Scoring poorly again, Site123 lacks many useful features. For example, you cannot archive or add a comments section to your blog. If your business loves to blog, then we’d recommend using WordPress.com.

You can add CTAs (Calls to Action) on your website, but that’s about as far as it goes in terms of marketing features. With that in mind, we’d recommend using Wix if you want a website builder that’s easy to use, but doesn’t give you outdated results.

Help and Support: 3.4/5

You can get support via email, social media, and Site123’s knowledge base forum, but its standout feature is the live chat option. Live chat is available 24/7, offering quick responses so it feels like you’re never editing alone.

Value for Money: 2.8/5

Given its lack of useful features, Site123 doesn’t offer great value for money, despite its free plan. The one premium plan costs $12.80 per month.

Simple, But Lacks Quality Features

Congratulations on reading this far! You’ve probably noticed that the small business website builders towards the bottom of our ranking are becoming simpler, but not necessarily for the better. Jimdo Creator is one such builder.

Ease of Use: 3.7/5

Jimdo Creator is very simple, yes – but that’s no longer anything special in the world of website builders. The big players like Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace are constantly evolving to improve their ease of use and depth of features, while platforms like Jimdo Creator get left behind. Overall, Jimdo Creator lacks the intuitiveness found on most other website builders.

Design Flexibility: 2.3/5

Using Jimdo Creator can be frustrating, as you don’t get much creative control when trying to edit your template. Remember Duda and Strikingly? The templates on Jimdo Creator are equally restrictive.

Website Features: 3.3/5

With Jimdo Creator, you can get a free custom domain for one year on any of its premium plans, but the annual cost of renewing a Jimdo custom domain after a year is $80. That’s the highest of any website builder we’ve tested.

In terms of SEO, you can edit your meta descriptions and titles, customize your URLs, and add alt text to your images. You can also add third party SEO apps, but it’s worth noting that installing the majority of apps on Jimdo will require coding knowledge.

Help and Support: 1.7/5

On the most expensive price plan, you’re guaranteed a response in under an hour. This is leagues away from the fast responses you’ll get on Strikingly, or the wealth of information available across WordPress’ forums. Oh, and Jimdo Creator’s support is only available via email.

Value for Money: 3.2/5

Jimdo Creator redeems itself with its reasonable pricing. There is a free plan, plus four premium plans starting from $7.50 per month, when paid annually. Despite its flaws, this platform does offer one of the cheapest price plans around. See the image below for more detail on what you’ll get on each plan…