10 Best Website Builders for Small Business: Compared for 2022

Wix scored the highest rating for its website features in our research, with an impressive 4.9 out of 5 – in fact, it’s improved its features from  score of 4.6 since we first tested it three years ago!

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.

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. In fact, it’s the easiest small business website builder we’ve tested so far, scoring an impressive 4.4 out of 5!

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.

Things are equally as simple if you’re planning to sell online. Wix’s tools and features mean that you can add products and manage your inventory all in one place, cutting out all the complicated to and fro of some ecommerce platforms.

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.

With Wix, you have the freedom to create a small business website that oozes real personality. There are more than 800 professionally designed templates to choose from, covering all types of business from makeup artists to vintage car dealers. Over 118 of these are specifically designed for ecommerce – good news if you’re looking to sell online!

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

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.

If you’re looking to sell online, you’ll need to upgrade to one of Wix’s ecommerce plans, instead. The  Business Basic plan is a good starting point, costing $23/month. This allows you to sell unlimited products, as well as giving you the tools to sell across different social channels.

If you can afford it, though, we’d recommend opting for the Business Unlimited plan, instead – especially if you want to sell a good number of products! It comes with a much more generous suite of sales tools, such as advanced shipping, dropshipping potential, multiple currencies, and the option to sell subscriptions.

Wix is our top-rated ecommerce building, making it an excellent choice if you’re thinking about selling online. It comes with a ton of high-quality features, including a huge array of payment gateways, good inventory tools, diverse multichannel integrations, and the option to start dropshipping. Plus, anything you can’t find in its inbuilt features can be found in its huge App Market. It quite literally is the platform that does it all.

If you want to find out more about what it can do and why we love it so much, check out our Wix ecommerce review, where we’ll dig into all the good stuff in more detail.

We also like Wix because it provides fantastic customer support. Wix’s standout support feature is its helpful in-editor support, which gives you tips and guidance right there in the editor while you build your 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.

After Wix, Squarespace has the next-best website features of all the small business website builders we’ve tested. It has particularly strong SEO tools, although they’re not as beginner-friendly as Wix’s SEO Wiz.

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.

Squarespace offers more advanced design tools than Wix, 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 different template styles available, which make it nearly impossible to go wrong.

Squarespace is the best small business website builder for design, with a chart-topping score of 4.7 out of 5 in our research. It has over 100 professionally designed templates to choose from which cover all the main industries, from local business to real estate.

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.

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

We recommend the $18/month Business plan for small business websites, because it’s not as pricey as the two fully-fledged ecommerce plans, but you can still sell a few products and 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!

Although it doesn’t come with as many sales features as Wix, Squarespace is an awesome option if you want to add a small online store to your small business website.

It’s ideal if you’re looking to sell digital products, although it also supports the sale of services and physical stock, too. It’s worth noting, however, that its inventory features are less advanced than dedicated ecommerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce, so, overall, it’s better suited to a smaller store.

Payments can be taken via PayPal, Stripe, Square, and Apple Pay, and if you choose either the Basic or Advanced Commerce plan, you won’t have to pay any transaction fees. If you opt for the Business plan, however, you’ll need to pay a 3% transaction fee.

Squarespace has the best help and support of any small business website builder we’ve tested – it scores a perfect 5 out of 5, making it a great choice if you value lots of support.

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.

GoDaddy scores really well for website features in our research with 3.6 out of 5 – it has some great features specifically for small business websites:

• 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 is a really easy to use website builder thanks to its ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) feature. This makes it perfect if you want to get online quickly, without having to build your site from scratch.

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.

GoDaddy offers great design functionality, with a score of 4.1 out of 5 outperforming Wix, but not quite matching up to Squarespace.

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.

GoDaddy’s prices are fairly reasonable, and it actually offers slightly better value for money than both Wix and Squarespace. GoDaddy has four plans in total, ranging from $6.99 to $29.99 per month.

We recommend the $13.99 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.

GoDaddy is a good way to get an ecommerce store up and running quickly, due to its ADI functionality. It’s recently released a new ecommerce-specific plan, costing $14.99/month, to help small businesses expand into the ecommerce space if they want to.

Its features include flexible payments through providers such as PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, as well as the ability to set free or for-a-fee shipping. It also supports curbside pickup for local buyers, too.

GoDaddy has always performed well when it comes to marketing and promotional features, and its ecommerce offering is no different. You can offer special discounts as well as hold holiday sales to entice customers further.

Despite this, GoDaddy’s ecommerce plan isn’t suited to larger businesses, or those looking to scale. At the moment, its offering doesn’t come with enough depth to truly promote growth.

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.

Weebly’s features aren’t as strong as GoDaddy’s, and lag way behind those offered by Wix and Squarespace. However, Weebly still has a decent offering overall, with highlights including:

• 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.

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.

Weebly’s themes are disappointing compared to its competitors. Its designs are pretty outdated, and its design score has plummeted by 36% since we last tested Weebly – a sure sign that its themes are falling behind the times.

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.

This is where Weebly comes into its own. Its affordable plans and generous features result in Weebly coming out as the best value small business website builder in our research, with an impressive score of 5 out of 5!

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?

When you create a website with Weebly, you’ll be asked what kind of website you want to build, and if you state that you want an online store, it will point you in the direction of Square Online. Don’t panic, though. You’re still technically building a Weebly site!

Confused? Let us explain. Weebly was acquired by the payment processor, Square, in 2018. Square then launched its own ecommerce platform, Square Online, which is aimed specifically at ecommerce businesses. Since then, out of the two, Square Online has been the go-to for building online stores.

In terms of price, there’s no difference between them, but if you want to sell online, we’d recommend using Square Online for a more ecommerce-focused experience. It came fourth in our ecommerce ratings with a score of 4.2 out of 5, and was also awarded the title of the best ecommerce builder for small businesses.

You can reach the Weebly support team in various ways, including:

• 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.

Zyro’s marketing and SEO features simply can’t compete with the likes of Wix and Squarespace – in fact, Wix scored twice as well as Zyro for website features in our research.

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 – namely, the fact that it doesn’t take commission from any sales on its ecommerce plans.

We were impressed by Zyro’s ease of use when we tested it out. The template editor is very section-based, meaning you can add and delete different page elements in just a few clicks. Whenever you drag different page elements (like images and text boxes) around on a page, a grid format will show up to guide you.

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.

Zyro’s website templates are high-quality: They’re modern, clean, and simple, which are all important elements in providing a good user experience for your visitors.

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!

Zyro’s 30-day money back guarantee is impressive, and its starting price range of $2.61 per month for regular sites and $4.41 per month for ecommerce sites is excellent. In terms of value for money, Zyro sits pretty evenly alongside Wix and Squarespace with a score of 3.9 out of 5.

It is worth mentioning, however, that Zyro’s cheapest starting price of $2.61 per month requires a two-year subscription. If you want to pay annually, it costs $4.41 per month, which is still very affordable!

Zyro’s ecommerce features are still relatively new, so a few teething problems are to be expected, but overall, it has a range of tools for anyone who’s running a small business on the side. Overall, it scored 3.6 out of 5 in our ecommerce testing, putting it in the middle of the pack.

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 2500 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.

Zyro doesn’t offer phone support, which can be a big drawback for some people! But it offers 24/7 email and live chat support, and the team has always been responsive and helpful whenever we’ve used it.

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.

We weren’t impressed with Duda’s website features in our research – it only scored 2.1 out of 5 for its features, putting it way behind its top competitors such as Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy.

Duda lacks basic marketing features, such as a newsletter tool. It doesn’t support any third-party marketing apps, or offer Instagram integration. Duda also has a very limited app store, which contains apps for adding forms to your website. This is quite the downside, as marketing tools are crucial for growing a small business website, and Duda barely scrapes the basics of marketing features.

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. For example, if you’re running a website for an established local business that isn’t looking to grow, the Duda is a fine choice.

Duda is a drag-and-drop builder, making it easy to move elements around the page and to update text boxes. Its business website templates, in particular, are visually appealing – but also very structured. This means that you can only place items within certain areas on the page.

In testing, our users found Duda really easy to use – in fact, with 4.4 out of 5, it has the second-best ease of score after Wix.

The rigidity of Duda’s themes makes it less creatively flexible than Wix, but it’s definitely a beginner-friendly platform. Compared to Squarespace, Duda’s themes are much easier for beginners to customize, but they aren’t as modern or minimalist.

This combination of an easy-to-use – yet somewhat restrictive – editor makes Duda perfect for businesses looking for simplicity over highly personalized branding.

Duda’s flexibility comes from its personalized user journey options. With this feature, you can tailor the way different customers 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 make more positive relationships, since 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content is not personalized.

Duda is an expensive builder, and on top of that it also offers the least value out of all the small business website builders we’ve tested, with a score of just 1.5 out of 5.

There is no free plan, and a 14-day free trial period only applies on one of its paid plans. Duda has four paid plans in total, one being a custom Enterprise plan for large companies with multiple websites:

• Basic ($14/month)
• Team ($22/month)
• Agency ($44/month)
• Enterprise (custom price)

We recommend the Team plan, not just because it comes with a free trial, but because it offers analytics capabilities and branded marketing materials that you won’t get on the Basic plan.

Duda has three ecommerce plans, although like its standard website builder plans, these are expensive. The cheapest Standard plan starts at $7.25/month and promises to deliver everything you need to get selling, including no transaction fees, a wide range of payment methods, multichannel selling, and a store management app.

However, it only supports up to 100 products. If you want to sell unlimited products, you’ll need to upgrade to the Unlimited plan. This comes with a much larger feature set, but costs $39/month and we wouldn’t consider it good value for money.

The support you get on Duda depends on the price plan you choose. You won’t have access to phone support on Duda’s cheapest plan, which is definitely a drawback. That said, we recommend the Team plan for small businesses, which has all of the support options you’ll need:

• Basic: Email
• Team: Email, live chat, and phone
• Agency: Priority email, live chat, and phone

Duda’s standout support feature is its Resource Center, which presents educational webinars and information about product updates.

Jimdo covers the basics, but it doesn’t have the power to supercharge your small business website’s growth. For starters, it lacks any built-in email marketing tools, and only supports Instagram and Facebook social media integrations.

There’s no app store, which means you’re reliant on Jimdo’s in-house features for customizing and growing your business website – and, as we’ve discovered, it’s rather lacking in this department!

One of the biggest gaps in Jimdo’s feature set is the fact it doesn’t offer any blogging tools, which makes it unsuitable for businesses using content marketing.

That said, its SEO tools are pretty good for climbing search engine rankings – it offers all the basics, but you won’t find keyword support or an SEO-specific app.

Jimdo makes life easy with its ADI functionality – like GoDaddy, it uses the information you give it to create the basics of your website for you. That means you can jump straight into customizing your site, rather than building the whole thing from scratch.

In testing, we found that Jimdo is slightly easier to use than GoDaddy, but still not as user-friendly as Wix or Squarespace. Yes, setting up your site is quicker, but Jimdo isn’t as easy to use once you dig into customization.

Using Jimdo can be frustrating, as you don’t get much creative control when trying to edit your template. Jimdo’s templates pose the same problem as Duda’s and Strikingly’s: they’re just too restrictive.

The good thing about Jimdo is that it builds your brand for you, making it perfect for time-stretched businesses wanting plenty of the design work done for them. Jimdo does a nice job combining the ease of GoDaddy’s ADI setup with the visual benefits of Squarespace’s clean designs.

Jimdo redeems itself with its reasonable pricing. Jimdo received 4.7 out of 5 for its value for money, making it one of the best value small business website builders you can choose!

There is a free plan and four premium plans, and despite its flaws, this platform does offer some of the cheapest pricing around.

We recommend the $15 per month Grow  plan, because it comes with social marketing features to help grow your business (hence the name!).

Like everything else about it, Jimdo’s ecommerce offering is pretty simple. It’s ideal for selling up to 100 products, but you can add variations as well. This means that it’s not going to suit a store with a huge inventory, but if you’re just selling products on the side, this kind of capacity should be enough.

Jimdo also comes with a couple of different payment options, as well as multichannel integrations. You won’t need to worry about transaction fees either! Jimdo has recently added local collection as a delivery option, too, so your customers can collect directly from you, meaning you don’t have to worry about packing and shipping your orders.

Jimdo doesn’t offer much instant or “face-to-face” support. Its support channels include:

• Social media
• Knowledge center
• On-site editor support

We’d love to see some more support channels such as live chat or phone support for quick answers – especially for time-pressed business owners. When time is money, you don’t want to be waiting one to two business days for a response!

You have to be on Jimdo’s most expensive price plan to be guaranteed a response in under an hour.

If you need a website builder to run a business blog, or if content marketing lies at the heart of your small business’ marketing strategy, then WordPress.com is a top choice. It provides all the blogging tools you could need – the only features you won’t find are a search feature and blog-specific SEO tools.

In other areas, however, WordPress.com failed to impress. For example, it doesn’t include a free domain name, and its marketing tools are pretty sparse, with no built-in email marketing tools or social media integrations.

WordPress.com is a little difficult to get to grips with at first, so it’s not ideal for small business owners who need a website live ASAP. There’s a pretty steep learning curve here that might put less technically confident users off.

However, if you have some time to invest in creating your site – mostly figuring out how to navigate between the backend and frontend editors – you’ll appreciate the level of control that WordPress.com gives you!

We’ll be totally upfront – WordPress.com only scored 1.8 out of 5 for its design functionality. One reason for such a low score is its limited range of designs for specific industries. Whereas Wix caters for all sorts of businesses – from dog walkers to builders – you’re less likely to find a template that meets your specific needs on WordPress.com.

That said, WordPress.com is highly customizable once you’ve got the hang of its editor. So if you want lots of control over your branding, it’s an excellent choice!

One of the best things about WordPress.com is how much value its plans provide.

WordPress.com is one of the cheapest small business website builders we’ve tested, with a starting price of just $4 per month. Combine that with the number of helpful features you get, such as impressive blogging tools, and you end up with a great value solution for your business!

Although the cheapest plan offers amazing value, we recommend the $25 per month Business plan. It comes with a range of features designed to help your business site succeed, such as more storage space, advanced SEO tools, and the option to install plugins.

There are a number of ways to sell online with WordPress.com, but the best one is the popular ecommerce plugin, WooCommerce. It allows you to add a cart and a checkout process, as well as take payments and manage your inventory. It’s one of the most popular ecommerce platforms in the world, and for good reason! However, you will need to upgrade to a premium plan to add the WooCommerce plugin. Unfortunately, you can’t add plugins if you’re using the free plan.

WordPress.com has a decent range of support channels for you to use:

• Phone
• Live chat
• Knowledge center
• On-site editor support

So, why the less-than-impressive score? Well, when our users actually tested out WordPress.com’s knowledge center, they struggled to find answers to their queries. It’s all very well having support articles, but they need to be useful and easy to find!

Site123 lacks many useful features for small businesses, earning a low score in this area. You can’t embed any social media feeds to your site, and SEO help is limited, too – you won’t get any support when it comes to keyword research.

Site 123 does offer a Google Analytics integration, and comes with built-in email marketing tools – but that’s about as far as it goes in terms of marketing features.

Site123’s main selling point is that it has the best site speed performance out of all the small business website builders we tested. Fast loading pages are hugely important for SEO, conversions, and user experience, so this is a great perk for Site123 users!

Site123 asks you a couple of questions about your website desires, then generates a template with relevant features based on the information you provided. You can think of it like a less powerful version of Wix’s ADI tool.

Despite this, Site123 failed to wow our users during ease of use testing. In the end, it proved far too restrictive to be enjoyable – its simplicity caused frustration rather than making things easier!

Site123’s simplicity translates into basic templates. In all honesty, you’ll get better results by using Wix ADI or GoDaddy, which both offer slicker templates and a greater level of creative freedom. Site123 only scored a 1.3 out of 5 for design flexibility, whereas GoDaddy scored 4.1 with its ADI editor.

Site123 offers good value for money, scoring 4.1 out of 5 for this area in our research. This is mostly due to its affordable price plans, which start at $12.80 per month – however, you can get more for your money with a more robust website builder.

It’s possible to create an online store with Site123, however, don’t expect too much from this basic builder. It comes with a small selection of features that will help a small business get started, but as with the rest of its tools, it doesn’t lend itself well to scalability.

You can get help via on-site editor support, video tutorials, community forum, and a knowledge base forum, but Site123’s standout feature is its live chat option. Live chat is available 24/7, offering quick responses so it feels like you’re never editing alone.

1&1 IONOS keeps things pretty simple. It offers basic blogging tools, but doesn’t provide analytics, comments, categories, or scheduling, and it doesn’t have an app market for you to add any extra features to your site.

You won’t find any built-in email marketing tools, or membership features, and overall its marketing suite is pretty unsuitable for sustaining long-term growth.

That said, there are some strengths we want to highlight. Firstly, 1&1 IONOS has great internationalization tools – it supports 60 languages, and has in-house support for automatic translations!

Secondly, 1&1 IONOS had the quickest server response time in our performance testing, which is great for hitting Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics and improving your rankings.

1&1 IONOS only scored 2.8 out of 5 for ease of use, meaning it’s not for tech newbies. You need patience and confidence to tackle its editor – its limited customization brought down its ease of use score. Our users felt as though the builder was holding them back from creating the site they wanted during testing!

As we discovered, 1&1 IONOS is pretty restrictive when it comes to customization. In addition to this, our users found its imagery and designs were extremely outdated – in fact, they recommended uploading your own images instead of relying on the ones provided by 1&1 IONOS!

If branding is important to your business, 1&1 IONOS isn’t the best choice for you – its templates are hard to personalize, so if you’re after a unique website, you’re better off with Wix or Squarespace.

Since we last scored 1&1 IONOS, its value for money score has doubled – this is thanks to its super cheap prices, which start at just $5 per month when you choose an annual subscription.

If you’re on a budget, these cheap prices are very appealing. 1&1 IONOS even offers big discounts on its plans so that you can get the cheapest plan for just $1 per month for your first year, before it renews at the standard $5 per month price.

1&1 Ionos has an ecommerce website builder alongside its standard one, with plans starting from as little as $1 per month. If you select the most expensive of the three plans, you’ll be able to integrate your store with different social accounts and sell up to 1,000,000 products. You’ll also get a professional email included with all but its starter plan, too.

Still, 1&1 IONOS wouldn’t be our first choice as an ecommerce platform. Although a useful add-on, its ecommerce functionality can’t quite keep up with the likes of Wix or Squarespace.

1&1 IONOS offers a few ways to get help if you need it:

• Phone
• Live chat
• Knowledge center

One of the issues we had during testing is that the knowledge center isn’t accessible from the dashboard, which makes it harder to action the advice given in support guides.