A website is a major part of a brand and portfolio. Its aesthetic should stand out and make an impression. You may think you need to know how to code to have a modern and technical page, but with a website builder, you don't need to have any technical experience. Most builders come bundled with web hosting, giving you more peace of mind to work on your website's visuals rather than worry about anything technical.
Our Picks
I've thoroughly researched and tested website builders and web hosting companies to curate the ultimate list to help you find the best website builder for your needs.
What is the best website builder right now?
| Website builder | Free trial? | Starting price* | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best overall website builder overall | Wix | Free plan and 14-day trial | $19 a month |
| Best AI site builder | Squarespace | 14-day trial | $16 a month |
| Best for e-commerce | Shopify | 3 days free | $29 a month |
| Best for designers | Duda | 14-day free trial | $25 a month |
| Best for beginners | GoDaddy | Free plan | $10 a month |
Best website builders of 2025
Best website builder overall
Pros
- Over 900 templates
- Easy-to-use and flexible site editor
- Great server performance
- Fast customer service
- Robust security
Cons
- AI site generator is terrible
- E-commerce is limited to higher-tier plans
- Strict storage limitations on most plans
Wix is the biggest player in the website builder game, powering more than eight million live websites, according to Built With. The core Wix software is built to help freelancers, solo bloggers and small business owners create a website for the first time, while Wix Studio is built for agencies that want more control over their design.
Who it’s best for
Wix is the best website builder for consultants, freelancers and other service-based business owners. You can also use Wix for a personal site or blog, but the cost can be prohibitive if you’re not generating any revenue, especially when you factor in the storage limitations on lower-tier plans.
Why we like it
In my hands-on testing, I found Wix’s site editor flexible and easy to use. Server performance was also excellent, with 100% uptime during our week of testing and the second-best site speed of all the hosts I’ve benchmarked. Customer service -- the place where even our top-ranking hosts usually fail -- was fast and, despite some initial miscommunications, helpful.
Wix offers industry-standard security features. It protects all websites on its platform with secure socket layer -- SSL -- certification to encrypt your data. There’s also an advanced firewall with distributed denial of service -- DDoS -- protection to prevent malware or malicious traffic from harming your site. You can also enable two-factor authentication to further protect your site. Wix provides 24/7 security monitoring to find and eliminate vulnerabilities.
Pricing
Wix has a free plan but the bandwidth and data restrictions mean it’s mostly useful for testing the software before purchasing. The most affordable paid plan starts at $19 a month (billed annually) and includes enough storage for at least 20 pages, unlimited bandwidth and basic marketing tools.
E-commerce features are available starting on the Core plan, which costs $29 a month, billed annually. Core also includes enough storage for at least 500 pages, tools for service-based businesses (such as appointment booking and course creation software) and a slightly more advanced marketing suite.
Best AI site generator
Pros
- Beautiful templates
- Collaborative AI website builder
- Good server performance
- Robust security
Cons
- Poor customer service
- Some site editing processes are more complicated than they need to be
Squarespace is another big player in the website builder space, powering more than 5 million websites. Squarespace seeks to help professionals and small business owners new to website creation build their first online home.
Who it’s best for
Squarespace is an excellent choice if you’re building a professional portfolio and you want a slick, elegant design you don’t have to spend much time on.
Why we like it
What stood out in my hands-on Squarespace testing is how easy it is to create a beautiful site. The templates are some of the best I’ve seen, with great visual balance, color schemes and font selections. The AI builder is uniquely collaborative, letting you choose key aspects of your site -- such as brand personality and fonts -- to help it create a website that matches your vision. No matter which option you choose, you’ll have an attractive site in minutes, with minimal need to alter design settings.
Squarespace also had excellent uptime and decent site speed. Furthermore, all Squarespace sites are secured with SSL certification, an advanced firewall with DDoS protection, two-factor authentication and 24/7 security monitoring.
However, there’s a caveat: I experienced lackluster customer service when testing Squarespace. Thankfully, many users won’t need customer service often. In more than 10 years of running websites, I’ve contacted customer service five or six times. This means customer service probably won’t impact your Squarespace experiences much, if at all.
Pricing
Squarespace starts at $16 a month (billed annually) for full access to the website builder, including essential marketing tools. You’ll also get e-commerce functionality but Squarespace will collect some hefty transaction fees: 2% for online store transactions and 7% for digital content and memberships. These are in addition to the roughly 3% charged by most payment processors, so you’ll actually be losing 5% total on online store transactions and 10% on membership fees.
You can skip the online store transaction fees by choosing the Squarespace Core plan priced at $23 a month (billed annually). However, Squarespace will still collect 5% transaction fees on digital content and memberships. You’ll have to pay $99 a month (billed annually) for the Advanced plan if you don’t want Squarespace taking a chunk out of your profits (payment processor fees will still apply).
Best for e-commerce
Pros
- E-commerce-focused website builder
- Email marketing tools, including automation
- Massive shipping discounts
- Tools for in-person sales
Cons
- Starting plan is expensive
- Customer service may be poor
Shopify is probably the most well-known e-commerce website builder, powering nearly 5 million online stores.
Who it’s best for
Shopify is the best website builder for building an e-commerce store. It’s also a great choice if you hope to sell at pop-up markets or open a permanent physical store in the future.
Why we like it
Shopify offers a robust store builder with a variety of highly customizable templates, tools for creating detailed product pages and a checkout system compatible with different payment processing tools. You’ll also get several marketing tools, including abandoned cart recovery, email marketing software and automated marketing workflows.
Some of Shopify’s biggest benefits are specifically for selling physical products, like the significant (up to 77%) shipping discounts for USPS, DHL and UPS. You can also use the Shopify Point of Sale system to sell products at in-person events or even run checkout at a permanent physical location. If you’re selling internationally, Shopify makes creating a multilingual web store easy.
All Shopify websites are secured with SSL certification, an advanced firewall featuring DDoS prevention, two-factor authentication and 24/7 security monitoring.
There are more than 2,000 negative reviews of Shopify on Trustpilot. Most cite issues with slow customer service, while others report more serious problems such as people being locked out of their stores without explanation or failing to receive payments. These reviews are concerning -- and good to know about -- but 2,000 reviews are a drop in the bucket when compared to the 4.9 million stores operating on Shopify, so you probably don’t need to be concerned.
Pricing
Shopify’s Basic plan costs $29 a month (billed annually) for all of the core website builder and email marketing features. This plan also includes unlimited storage and bandwidth, inventory management for up to 10 locations and Shopify POS Lite for selling at physical events.
Best value
Pros
- Great server performance
- Great long-term value
- Robust security
Cons
- Must sign up for a four-year contract to get the best discount
- Live chat customer service is AI-powered and reaching a human support rep can take a while
Hostinger is a fast-growing web host, having expanded its revenue by 57% in 2023 alone. The company offers numerous types of web hosting, including two specialized website builder plans.
Who it's best for
Hostinger is a great choice if you're willing to commit to a long-term hosting plan in exchange for saving a bundle.
Why we like it
I had a great time testing Hostinger thanks to its strong server performance, easy-to-use dashboard and highly affordable hosting plans. Hostinger also offers robust security, including SSL certification, firewall protection, anti-DDoS protocols and malware scanning. If something does go wrong, you'll be able to quickly restore your site using the automated backups created during every site update.
The only downside of Hostinger is the mediocre customer service, which is primarily conducted through an AI-powered live chat. While I was impressed with the bot's effectiveness, I spent more than 30 minutes waiting to speak to a person when I had a more advanced issue -- time that could result in a significant loss of traffic or revenue if your site is down while you're waiting. However, you probably won't need to spend a lot of time dealing with customer service -- I've only had to reach out to it a handful of times in more than a decade of hosting my own sites -- so this shouldn't be a deal breaker unless you prefer phone or email support.
Pricing
The basic Hostinger website builder plan costs $3 a month to start ($12 a month on renewal), based on a four-year contract. This plan includes enough storage for at least 1,000 pages across 100 websites, the full website builder with 150 templates, AI site generation tools and email hosting for up to 100 custom email addresses (such as yourname@yourdomain.com).
Hostinger offers a Business Website Builder plan for e-commerce stores, starting at $4 a month ($14 a month on renewal) for a four-year contract. This plan includes enough storage for at least 2,000 pages and 500 products, plus access to all of Hostinger's AI tools and e-commerce features.
How to choose the best website builder
Site purpose
If you’re building a professional portfolio, you’ll probably appreciate the elegant design and moderate flexibility of Squarespace. If you’re building a coaching business -- or any other type of service-based business -- you might consider Wix for its appointment booking tools. If you're building a hobby site or you're on a tight budget, you might want to consider Hostinger. If you’re creating an e-commerce store, you’ll probably want Shopify.
Ease of use
Every website builder lets you create a website without code. Beyond that, there are many differences between website builder interfaces. Some are more intuitive, making it easy to move from one area of site design to the next. Others use complicated processes that can be difficult to grasp if you’re not technically inclined. A steeper learning curve may mean a longer site-building process.
Most website builders offer either a free trial or a perma-free plan. You can use them to get a feel for the website builder you're interested in before you commit to a long-term plan.
Design flexibility
Wix offers a pretty comprehensive suite of site editing tools.
Some website builders have limited options for fonts and color schemes, while others limit your ability to move content blocks. This can be great if you’re creating a personal site or a professional portfolio and you don’t want to spend a lot of time making small design decisions. If you want to create something unique, you’ll want to choose a website builder with more flexibility and spend more time fiddling with every individual setting. You can read in-depth reviews, watch tutorials or test website builders through their free trials to determine if the tool you're considering has the flexibility you need.
E-commerce features
"" image-filename="screen-shot-2019-05-14-at-3-35-11-pm.png" image-target-url="" image-credit-url="" image-width="1597" image-height="682" image-date-created="2019-05-14" image-do-not-crop="true" image-watermark="true" ng-block="{"id":"viesu50s8981hd8","type":"image"}" edition="us">Do you plan to sell products on your site? If so, will selling products be just one part of your site (like a blog with a merch store) or will it be the focus of your site? If it’s the former, most website builders will work for you. If it’s the latter, you may want to choose a specialized website builder for e-commerce like Shopify.
You'll need to pay attention to the plans if you're choosing a website builder that isn't fully focused on e-commerce. Some, like Wix, restrict e-commerce features to higher-tier plans. Others, like Squarespace, charge steep transaction fees on lower-tier plans -- and these fees are in addition to payment processing fees, not instead of payment processing fees. This means you'll have to either increase your prices to cover those fees or be prepared to lose some money on every sale.
You'll also want to pay attention to other e-commerce features such as checkout customization, inventory management, shipping calculation and automated sales tax calculation. Most website builders offer at least some of these tools but they may only be available on certain plans or have other restrictions. Wix, for example, only includes automated sales tax on up to 500 transactions per month even on the highest-tier plan.
AI availability and functionality
Most website builders offer AI site generation, which builds a site for you in a couple of minutes based on your site title, description and purpose. However, the quality of these tools varies. Some, like the Wix AI tool, generate sites that look like they came right out of 2008. (Unless you enjoyed the MySpace era, that’s not a good thing.) Others, like Squarespace, build beautiful websites. If you want to use AI site generation, read in-depth reviews or watch YouTube tutorials to see how each website builder’s AI tools work.
Before you build your website with AI, though, I recommend reading up on the ethical and legal concerns surrounding AI. Many Generative AI tools are trained by scraping content from the web, often without consent from or compensation for the original creators. Some companies are embroiled in copyright lawsuits because of this, including a lawsuit against Stable Diffusion. As of writing this article, it’s also impossible to copyright entirely AI-generated work in the US without human authorship of some kind.
Finally, I recommend avoiding AI if you’re concerned about climate change, as AI uses an enormous amount of power and water.
Storage
While most website builders offer unlimited storage, some companies like Wix have strict storage limits, making it important to consider how many pages -- and the types of pages -- you’ll be creating. A good rule of thumb is that you’ll need 1GB of storage for 10 large pages (product pages with several high-resolution images) or 100 small pages (blog posts with one or two images). You can use these estimates to figure out exactly how much storage you'll need for your website or take the "more is better" approach and buy the highest storage plan you can afford.
Bandwidth/data transfer
Technically, bandwidth is a measurement of how much data your site's server can send to visitors per second. However, most companies use bandwidth interchangeably with data transfer, which dictates how many visitors your site can have in a month.
Most popular website builders offer unlimited bandwidth (sometimes called data transfer, depending on the web host), so you won't have to think about this much. Some companies, like Hostinger, do state limits on monthly visitors for their plans. Make sure you know the bandwidth/data transfer model of any website builder you're considering.
Uptime
Uptime is the amount of time your site spends online, typically expressed as a percentage. Most web hosting companies offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee, promising that server issues won't cause your site to go down for more than 10 minutes per week. Some website builder companies guarantee 99.99% uptime, which means your site shouldn't go down for more than two minutes per week because of server issues. These guarantees are important because users who can't access your site will probably go somewhere else. This can result in lost traffic and, if you're running a business website, lost revenue.
Site speed
Visitors expect your site to load quickly. In fact, the percentage of people who leave your website after viewing only one page -- known as the bounce rate -- increases by 32% when load time goes from one to three seconds. Website builders often use two protocols to improve site speed and avoid this problem:
- Caching -- A method of keeping information in a special type of data storage connected to the server's CPU instead of the more traditional RAM. This allows data retrieval to occur at the CPU speed, which is faster than RAM speed, so visitors' devices can load your site more quickly.
- Content delivery network or CDN-- A network of interconnected servers in radically different geographical locations. For example, a content delivery network may include servers in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. When your site data is distributed across a CDN, users' devices can pull data from the server closest to their location rather than relying on a server on the other side of the globe. This can improve site speeds for international users.
Customer service
You should have 24/7 access to customer service through your preferred method of communication, like email or live chat. Some companies offer phone service as well.
Hours aren't the only important factor, either. Your website builder's customer support representatives should be quick to respond and trained well enough to help you with a variety of issues. This is especially important if you're starting a business or e-commerce website, as downtime and other issues can result in lost revenue. We've shared customer support details from our hands-on reviews in this article to give you a better understanding of how each website builder company treats its customers.
Pricing
Most website builders use one of two pricing models: traditional web hosting pricing and simplified website builder hosting.
Traditional web hosting pricing comes with a significant introductory discount if you sign up for one or more years. You’ll have to pay up front for those years, but you’ll save a lot of money over the lifetime of your contract. However, your payment will increase significantly (often by $10 or more per month) when the contract renews.
Simplified website builder hosting charges the same amount yearly, with no introductory discounts or renewal price hikes. This makes it easy to calculate long-term costs, but you’ll often pay $15 or more per month from the get-go.
You’ll also need to consider additional expenses. For example, many website builders include your domain free for the first year, then charge $20 to $30 for domain renewal every subsequent year. You may also need to buy extensions for things like advanced marketing tools.
How we test the best website builders
My hands-on testing starts with a deep analysis of each website builder’s plans and features to assess value and flexibility. From there, I read reviews on sites like Trustpilot to evaluate the website builder’s trustworthiness and overall reputation. I also review the company’s Better Business Bureau profile and consider the number of open complaints.
If the website builder has a free version, I create an account to evaluate the quality of the templates, how easy it is to build/edit a website and how flexible the design tools are.
I’m also in the process of testing the most popular website builders using our framework for testing web hosting services. This involves purchasing a plan and evaluating the website builder for ease of use, server performance and customer service. Notes from these reviews are included in relevant list items. I’ve also included notes about server performance and customer service from reviewing traditional web hosting offered by companies like GoDaddy, as these benefits will also be enjoyed by folks using their website builders.
Other website builders to consider
GoDaddy
While our hands-on testing for GoDaddy focused on traditional shared hosting, the main benefits -- great server performance and good customer service -- are things you’ll also experience using the website builder.
I also enjoyed how easy it was to use the GoDaddy website builder. The design tools, SEO tools and marketing tools are clearly laid out so you can perform essential website management tasks in minutes, even without previous experience. This is achieved in part through limiting its functionality -- the GoDaddy website builder doesn’t offer the same level of customization as others on this list, but the functionality is enough for creating a personal site or a portfolio meant to be the digital equivalent of a business card.
GoDaddy’s Basic website builder plan starts at $10 a month (billed annually) and increases to $17 a month on renewal. This plan lets you create up to 50 pages and accommodate 10,000 monthly visitors on your site. However, you won’t get a custom domain. Domain registration costs an additional $20 to $30 per year. You’ll also need to pay $107.78 per year for the Web Security add-on if you want firewall protection, DDoS prevention and malware scanning/cleanup.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce is built for medium- to large-scale online stores that can cash in on the lack of added transaction fees and unlimited product variants. The editor has a lot of features and flexibility when you're getting set up. Those features and tools -- like product variants and tax rates -- will probably come in handy as you grow or if you're already at scale.
However, BigCommerce has over 200 one-star reviews on Trustpilot. While this is a smaller number of negative reviews than Shopify or Squarespace, it’s more statistically significant considering that BigCommerce only powers 35,000 active websites.
BigCommerce plans start at $29 a month for unlimited storage, bandwidth and product creation. You’ll also get inventory management tools for up to four locations.
WordPress.com
When most people talk about WordPress, they're usually referring to the free, open-source software available through WordPress.org. This software is very powerful, but you’ll need to perform various tasks like updating the software and installing plugins for things like SEO.
WordPress.com is a hosting company that uses a modified version of the WordPress.org software as a website builder. The Gutenberg editor at its core (and the core of WordPress.org tech) uses content blocks with drag-and-drop functionality to make editing individual pages easy, while the Customizer lets you edit the overall appearance of your site. Moreover, WordPress.com updates and secures this software, so you don’t have to worry about it.
However, there are some issues with WordPress.com. You can’t access most of the themes that make the WordPress.org software so flexible, and you can’t install any plugins on lower-tier plans. E-commerce plans are also extremely expensive, starting at $45 a month, and many Trustpilot reviews suggest that you won’t get what you’re paying for.
Still, WordPress.com may be worth considering for its good blogging tools, decent user interface and generous free hosting plan. You can also get paid WordPress.com plans starting at $4 for 6GB of storage and unlimited bandwidth.
Duda
Duda is a specialized website builder for designers and agencies. The builder offers several stand-out features, such as personalization tools that help you optimize the messaging each visitor sees and collaboration tools to help you work with other designers and clients.
All Duda sites are secured with SSL certification, an advanced firewall with automated DDoS prevention and customizable access controls. Duda servers are continuously monitored through automated malware scanning and updated with frequent security patches to eliminate vulnerabilities as they arise.
The pricing model is where Duda falls apart. Plans start at $19 a month, which is in line with other website builders, but there are some caveats: you'll only get customer support via email and you won't get any e-commerce features. In fact, you can't get e-commerce features through the main plans -- you'll have to buy a separate e-commerce subscription to start an online store. This subscription starts at $6 a month and only includes up to 100 products, whereas other popular website builders don't restrict the number of products you can have at all. Even Hostinger, which does restrict the number of products you can display, allows for up to 500 products -- and at a lower price point.