Best Website Builders for 2024 — My Top Recommendations!

so you need a website but there's just so many tools to choose from which one is right for you well I've been reviewing website Builders every year since 2013 that's 10 years that's a long time yeah it is and in this video I'm going to share what I believe are the five best website Builders right now now I I should say no company has sponsored this video this is my honest opinion and I've personally built sites with every single website builder I mentioned so let's get into it we'll start with square space here we are in Squarespace Squarespace is like the apple of website Builders it's intuitive and thoughtfully designed let's navigate to a blank page that we can edit to edit your page you can add blocks blocks are the individual elements that make up your page and Squarespace has a bunch we can choose from let's add a text block and I'll quickly write some text blocks can then be resized and moved around the the page on a grid great now I'm going to really quickly add an image and nice I like that now of course it takes some skill to arrange blocks into a well-designed page which is why Squarespace also includes sections sections are predesigned collections of blocks and we're looking at example sections right now let's add this one and yeah nice so blocks and sections which are made up of individual blocks this is actually important cuz we're going to look at a bunch of website builders in this video and you'll see that in most you either create Pages by adding sections or individual elements in Squarespace you have the option of both which is nice now let's talk about some of the features you can layer on top of your Squarespace website you can add a Blog a portfolio you can let visitors book appointments with you you can add an online store an event calendar and you can even sell memberships now you probably won't need every one of these features but you might need one or two and that's sort of the point Squarespace just has a wide selection of features to choose from okay here are some of the themes you can choose from with Squarespace I think they have the best themes of any website builder they definitely have a look and feel lots of white space bold typography and plenty of room for photos in total Squarespace has 165 themes and they're all quite good to edit your theme you can choose from preset color palettes of course you can also create your own color palette if you want to but if you want a specific style for individual elements you can do that too nice I currently have multiple websites on Squarespace my music website my personal website and a small online store I really like Squarespace so what about pricing well Squarespace has four plans two website plans and two e-commerce plans Prices range from $16 to $49 per month on an annual plan and as you'll see when we compare to other website Builders Squarespace is very reasonably priced next let's discuss Wix if Squarespace is Apple Wix might be Google or Android you see Wix and Squarespace are actually the two Market leaders for general purpose website Builders and by general purpose I mean they're meant to build all kinds of websites Church websites real estate blogs Spa portfolios and much more this is different from some of the other website Builders I'm going to cover in this video which have a very specific Focus okay here we are in Wix now one reason I Call Wix the Android of website Builders is because it's more flexible but also maybe a little less userfriendly like Squarespace you build your website by adding individual elements and Wix has lots to choose from let's add some text we we can resize the text and we can move it where we want wix's editor gives a lot of freedom remember how on Squarespace you dragged within a grid well in Wix you can literally drag anywhere even pixel by pixel you can also add sections in Wix which are predesigned collections of elements and here we are browsing some of the sections we can choose from let's add this one awesome so like Squarespace it's also a sections and elements editor and also like Squarespace Wix has quite a few features you can layer on top of your website you can add blogging an online store live chat multiple languages and much much more in fact Wix has an app market that lets you add all kinds of features to your website Wix has a whopping 822 website themes that you can choose from many more than Squarespace though I will say Wix has more variants some themes are really good While others feel just a little more outdated it's easy to adjust the color palette of your website just like this and you can always change individual elements too so let's take a look at how wix's pricing Stacks up they have a $16 plan their first e-commerce plan starts at 27 then 32 and then there's a big jump to their business elite plan which costs $159 now there is a reason I keep comparing Wix and Squarespace they're very competitive with one another and in recent years they've actually become more similar to one another though I do see some key differences squarespace's editor is a bit more intuitive and easy to use wix's editor has more freedom but can be a bit more confusing Wix has a few more features for example Wix has a multilingual feature Squarespace doesn't though sometimes wix's features aren't always polished for example multilingual has a pretty poor rating on wix's own app store which leads me to my one complaint with Wix I find things don't always just work and I like things to just work for example I recently added an online store to this website and look what happened to the navigation got all messed up I was able to fix it pretty quickly but my point is things don't always just work on Wix but both Wix and Squarespace are excellent website Builders it really is like Apple versus Android because it might be more about preference than anything else if you'd like to go deeper on Wix versus Squarespace I have a link in the video description to a video that goes more in depth on that but I got to be honest I'm a little parched I could go for some tea so once again this video is not sponsored though you can find affiliate links in the video description and in some cases you may get a disc discount through my link these affiliate links are why I've been able to spend 10 years trying website Builders what started as a side hustle has now become my job but you might be wondering hey which website builder pays him the most I bet he's pushing that one well you're right to be skeptical cuz here's the thing in the past some website Builders have offered to pay me more money in exchange for editorial control though I've always declined that not because I'm some Saint though I do think it's like unethical for companies to buy editorial control I also just think no one's going to watch a video if it's obvious I'm a shelf for one specific company there's so much content on the internet that's bought and paid for and I think people have just gotten good at sniffing that out anyways all this to say these are my honest recommendations and like I said before I've built websites with each of these tools okay let's carry on we've called Squarespace and Wix general purpose website Builders because they're for all kinds of websites but now we're going to discuss Shopify and Shopify is for one type of website online stores so while Squarespace Wix and Shopify can all be good for small stores or stores with just digital products I'd say Shopify is probably the best for medium to large stores let's check it out here we are in Shopify and if you're wondering why I have zero sales in the last 30 days it's because this store is actually closed right now but anyways let's start by editing a page you create your pages in this text editor kind of like Microsoft Word we can hit view page to see how our page looks and there it is it's a little underwhelming especially when compared to Wix in Squarespace but think about this all kinds of pages are being built with Squarespace in Wix so they need a flexible Dragon drop editor but e-commerce websites mostly have the same three pages homepage category and product page and for these Pages Shopify does have a theme editor that is more of a visual editor though still not drag and drop because a flexible drag and drop page editor is just not important for e-commerce websites so what is important well it's the behind the scenes stuff think about all the magic that happens behind the scenes in an online store taxes credit cards email receipts shipping labels and I mean shipping is calculated somehow how does that work exactly this behind the scenes stuff is where Shopify shines I know because I've built my own online stores and after building several of them I've learned to just use Shopify they just make all of the behind the-scenes stuff so much easier and I haven't even mentioned their most important feature the Shopify app store again think of all the features you might want in an e-commerce store what if you want like a whole review system that customers can contribute to what if you want customers to get an email when an out of stock item is back in stock what if you want want to offer gift wrapping as an upsell or consider search what if you want to filter your search results by category or boost certain products in search well these are all apps that are available in the Shopify App Store now most of these apps are created by third-party developers and they do cost additional money basically shopify's core covers most of what people need and then there are apps for everything else I think the App Store is genius because it keeps the Shopify core Clean and Clear like here's volusion a Shopify competitor with no app store and look how confusing this is they've cramped so much into the product editor including gift wrapping by comparison shopify's product editor is clean and clear and if you need an option like gift wrapping you can add it through the App Store so what about themes how are Shopify themes well the Shopify theme store includes 12 free themes and 160 premium themes which cost additional money very nice also nice okay pricing shopify's cheapest plan is obviously an e-commerce plan and it's $29 then it jumps up to $79 and then all the way up to $299 this $299 plan offers better transaction fees and more staff accounts so it's really for a more mature store but you might be noticing something by now Shopify can get expensive themes cost money apps cost money and plans are really expensive but there is a reason it's expensive if you're really serious about e-commerce Shopify really is the best option now I don't exclusively use Shopify for e-commerce though sometimes it is overkill for example I sell this online course and I used Squarespace for it it's cheaper and I like the drag and drop editor but when I launched this full-blown e-commerce store I used Shopify next up web flow web flow has become super popular in the last few years the big reason this design tool frankly I love it but I have to be honest with you I wouldn't say webflow is easy to use webflow may look like a drag and drop website builder like Squarespace or Wix but it's not quite that it's actually a little bit more complicated so you drag elements onto your website and then you can style them look at that webflow is just kind of a user interface for HTML and CSS to be simplistic you could call these HTML elements and these CSS Styles and so basically webflow gives you the flexibility of coding without requiring you to code like you can literally design just about anything using webflow for example people love to replicate Apple designs in webflow that's kind of wild and so webflow is amazing if you're looking to design a custom website but you don't want to have to code this is why I used webflow to make a website for Atlas my software company couldn't have done this in Squarespace or Wix web flow made it easy for me to add gradients animations and break points for tablet and mobile if break points and animations kind of intimidate you well remember web flow has a learning curve I'd say it's about as difficult to learn as like Final Cut Pro or photoshop but let me tell you about one of my favorite web flow features the CMS the CMS lets you design collections of content like a database for example Atlas has a help center help center has this list of Articles you can click one and it shows you the name a video and an article so so in webflow I created a help center collection has Fields like name video and article then in the designer I can connect to these fields name video an article connecting the CMS to the designer is kind of magical you can't do this in Squarespace Wix or Shopify you can kind of do it in WordPress but I'll talk about WordPress later in the video so yeah anyways now what about web flow theme well webflow has a handful of nice free themes and they also have lots of third party themes these themes do cost extra web flow's cheapest plan starts at $14 then $23 and their e-commerce plans range from 29 to 49 all the way up to 212 so it can get expensive these expensive high-end plans are kind of new in website Builders these high-end plans weren't this expensive until this this year I don't love this it kind of feels like a success tax like once these website Builders know your business is doing well with their platform they kind of have you locked in and can charge you a lot more money so if all these prices are just looking too high you'll probably like my next website builder card cuz the first thing I'm going to tell you about card is that it has a very low price these are sort of their only two plants which is awesome I mean cards prices are wild how are they able to charge such low prices well it's because Card is only for onepage websites and if you think that won't work for you just hear me out here are some of card's themes here's an example of a portfolio built-in card a personal website and a landing page for a newsletter I just really like these subtle animations very cute anyways here we are in the card editor and these are elements we can add to the website let's add some text and oops let's drag that back up we'll paste some text here and we'll style that text and there we go nice card doesn't have predesigned sections instead you just build your page with elements overall card is easy to use and surprisingly customizable but feature-wise card doesn't quite compete with Wix in Squarespace if you're on a budget I really think it's worth asking if you can distill your website down to just one page I feel a lot of people pull back when I suggest this people seem to want multi-page websites maybe it just feels more official that makes sense but the truth is you should aim to have less on your website anyways like here's an example we have a classic about page a Services page but there's just too many paragraphs here people don't read websites they scan them and here's what it could look like as a single page website doesn't this just flow and read better I just really think more people should consider card especially since every single other website builder on this list has raised prices in the last year but card has stubbornly kept their prices low we need more of this from website Builders lastly we need to discuss WordPress WordPress is massive it Powers a lot of the web from major websites like time.com to smaller websites like this but WordPress is not a website builder it's a CMS or content management system this is open to debate in fact the founder of Wordpress Matt Mullen WG has argued with me on this point publicly but frankly I think he's wrong though I'm sure he thinks I'm wrong too but there are just important differences between a CMS like WordPress and a website builder website builders provide hosting but you install a CMS like WordPress on a host word WordPress itself is free but the web host will cost money usually around what a website builder would cost WordPress is open source website Builders are not open source means WordPress has tens of thousands of themes and plugins available for it but this all leads to my personal frustration with WordPress it rarely just works if you know what I mean things inevitably go wrong themes break plugins don't work as anticipated and you're in charge of making sure this all stays up to date whereas with website Builders updates and security are done automatically you never have to think about it WordPress requires you to manually keep everything up to dat and secure but there is a reason WordPress is so popular if you have the time and the expertise you can create some amazing stuff with it it's not a website builder at least by my definition but it certainly deserves to be mentioned in this video if you want to learn more about WordPress I've link to some videos in the description at the end of the day I think it's important to just get started just choose a tool don't pay for it just use the free trial but start building something you'll discover really quickly if the tool is going to work for you and if not you'll discover what you do need to look for and remember that there are good websites built with bad website Builders and bad websites built with good website Builders once again my work is supported by affiliate commissions so if you'd like to try one of these tools you can find a link to them in the video description below and I might earn a commission thanks for watching woo [Music]

Channel: Site Builder Report

Views: 15,572

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Id: 8-2k6WudqmY

Length: 19min 31sec (1171 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 28 2023