The Easiest Website Builder Platforms for Beginners in 2024

With around 110 beautifully designed templates and extensive customization options, Squarespace excels in content-focused features and integrates seamlessly with Acuity for scheduling and appointments. The drag-and-drop editor is intuitive and user-friendly, allowing beginners to rearrange page elements and customize the designs.

Squarespace is a fruitful option for bloggers with its built-in blogging tools and search engine optimization features. Also, Squarespace provides an integrated e-commerce functionality on the higher-tier plans, which, according to our testing, allows for a smooth online selling experience. The advanced ecommerce plan also offers features like inventory management, secure checkout, and customer accounts, justifying its price tag.

Squarespace offers four pricing plans (and no free plan) suitable for various needs:

• Squarespace Personal: In this plan, you will get a simple website with a free custom domain, SSL security, and unlimited bandwidth. This will be an excellent option if you aim to create a simple, fuss-free personal site, as you do not need any advanced requirements.
• Squarespace Business: This plan improves the previous offering by providing add-ons like premium integrations, complete customization abilities, and advanced website analytics, catering to small businesses that need basic online transaction capabilities.
• Squarespace Basic Commerce: This plan is tailored for growing e-commerce businesses, equipping users with product reviews, on-domain checkout, and the ability to cross-promote products on Instagram – all without incurring transaction fees.
• Squarespace Advanced Commerce: This top-tier plan pulls out all the stops, adding powerful features like abandoned cart recovery, subscription selling, and comprehensive commerce APIs to maximize sales and streamline operations for high-volume online shops.

Squarespace is an excellent website builder for a wide range of users, including:

• Entrepreneurs who want to increase their digital visibility
• Creatives who want to showcase their portfolio.
• Bloggers seeking advanced, user-friendly blogging solutions.
• Nonprofit organizations that want donation-enabled sites.
• Individuals and freelancers showcasing their work.

While Squarespace caters to a diverse audience, it may not suit users with highly specific or complex website requirements. In these cases, users may find better-suited website builders like Shopify or WordPress for greater flexibility and customization.

Wix’s standout features begin with its visual WYSIWYG editor, which makes website building a breeze, even for beginners. You can choose from hundreds of modern, mobile-responsive templates or use the Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) editor to automatically generate a custom site. It provides robust customization options, allowing you to easily rearrange elements, change fonts and colors, add media, and more. Apart from the flagship ADI editor, Wix offers two editor options:

• The Wix Standard editor: With this option, you can choose a Wix template and customize it based on your preferences. You can also start with the ADI editor and opt for the standard editor anytime. Both the editors are enabled with mobile-friendly options (and you can disable them if you want to). Both these editors make Wix one of the best website builders for beginners.

• Editor X: With Editor X, you can develop a highly mobile-responsive website compatible with all devices within a few minutes. However, editor X is more suitable for designers and is equipped with a full suite of advanced options, ranging from grid layouts to custom breakpoints.

Wix offers a range of pricing plans to suit different needs and budgets:

• Free Plan: Ideal for students, hobbyists, or anyone needing a basic website. This plan offers access to Wix’s templates and design tools but includes Wix branding on the site and does not support a custom domain. It’s a great starting point to test Wix’s capabilities before upgrading to a paid plan.
• Light Plan: Suitable site builder plan for digital creators, small businesses, or personal portfolios who want a professional web presence without Wix branding. It allows for a custom domain (free for the first year), 2GB of storage, and provides basic functionalities for a clean, professional-looking site. This plan is excellent for those who need a fuss-free online presence.
• Core Plan: A good choice for small online stores or businesses beginning to scale. It includes 50GB of storage, five hours of video content, and basic e-commerce functionalities to start selling online. The Core plan also allows you to access Wix Analytics and allows up to five collaborators.
• Business Plan: Site builder plan designed for established businesses that need more robust e-commerce features. This plan supports sales, shipping, product reviews, and selling in multiple currencies. With 100GB of storage and the ability to track website performance through enhanced analytics, it’s suited for businesses aiming to significantly expand their online store or service offerings.
• Business Elite Plan: Best site builder plan for large businesses or rapidly growing online stores requiring extensive site functionality and high-end e-commerce capabilities. It offers unlimited storage, the ability to sell unlimited products, advanced marketing tools, and priority support. This plan benefits businesses that manage high-traffic volumes and transactions, offering tools to enhance customer loyalty and collect extensive product reviews.

Wix is an excellent choice for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and individual users looking to build a website that’s professional looking without coding expertise. Its intuitive site builder interface and massive template library make it a great website builder option for personal blogs, portfolios, online stores, and more.

While Wix offers a variety of features, we also noted a handful of drawbacks:

1. Google Analytics is unavailable on the free or Combo plans, limiting your ability to track website traffic. However, you can use Wix Analytics to track all the essential metrics you need (for duplicating and customizing your reports, you need to upgrade to business plans).
2. Additionally, most Wix plans impose storage limits, forcing an upgrade for continued website growth. The free plan includes Wix ads and restricts users from having a custom domain name.
3. You must select a Wix template wisely, as templates cannot be switched once launched. Instead, you’ll need a complete site redesign from scratch for any significant changes.

While Wix is suitable for beginners, more experienced developers or those seeking more advanced customization may find Wix’s limitations (such as the inability to switch templates) to be a drawback, in which case they may want to consider a website builder platform like WordPress.

Similarly, those seeking higher design flexibility and stylish palette options might find website builders like SquareSpace a much better alternative.

GoDaddy’s Website Builder stands out for its user-friendly and robust features. A key highlight is the seamless integration of the website builder with GoDaddy’s mobile app, allowing users to manage their site whenever needed.

This cross-device functionality is particularly beneficial for busy entrepreneurs who need to quickly update content or respond to customers from their mobile devices, making it one of the best website builders for small businesses.

Apart from this aspect, various integrated marketing tools, including search engine optimization and email marketing features, help users enhance their online presence and engagement. Our test website with GoDaddy loaded in just 1.1 seconds, quicker than the minimum recommended speed of 2.5 seconds by Google PageSpeed Insights.

However, our team did identify a few setbacks:

1. GoDaddy’s SEO wizard could be more robust. While the Wizard assists the users in creating SEO-optimized keywords, meta tags, and canonical URLs, it does not completely optimize the site.
2. A site created with GoDaddy cannot be transferred to another hosting service provider except for a WordPress site.

• Basic Plan: Ideal for individuals or small businesses who need a simple online presence. This plan allows you to connect your own domain and eliminate GoDaddy branding, which is essential for a professional appearance. It also includes appointment booking tools for service-based businesses or consulting firms that need to schedule sessions without third-party apps.
• Premium Plan: Suited for businesses ready to enhance their marketing efforts. While the Premium plan does not offer e-commerce capabilities, it offers unlimited social media integrations and the ability to schedule and post directly from the GoDaddy dashboard, valuable for social media marketing businesses.
• Commerce Plan: This is the only GoDaddy plan with full e-commerce functionality, allowing you to list and sell products directly from your site. It supports physical and digital products and integrates features like product reviews, email marketing, and more. It also has features like integrated marketing tools that may be useful for some users.

Our review of GoDaddy as a site builder found it to be an ideal solution for individuals or small businesses seeking an all-in-one website builder and domain registrar. Its affordable pricing plans, coupled with its easy-to-use editor and 24/7 customer support, can benefit beginners, who can seek instant help whenever they want. Likewise, the built-in e-commerce tools and marketing add-ons are helpful for small business owners with limited technical experience.

However, if you require advanced e-commerce features or extensive customization options, alternative site builders like Shopify or Weebly may better suit your needs.

Primarily, we were impressed by how easy Jimdo’s website builder was to use, with its simple drag-and-drop interface, AI integrations, and access to a range of stylish block elements like slideshows and banners. We found the domain registration process straightforward, though the annual cost to renew a custom domain is relatively high compared to most website builders.

Jimdo’s search engine optimization tools can automatically fill in meta titles and descriptions, though we noted the need for alt text editing as a shortcoming. While Jimdo doesn’t offer robust internal marketing features, its ease of use and professional design options make it a solid choice for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

However, Jimdo does have a few potential drawbacks:

1. Jimdo’s e-commerce segment could be much better on various fronts. For example, if you set up an online store with Jimdo, its website builder provides only basic features, irrespective of your chosen plan. There are no options to set up your inventory and order management features, which are now the norm for most e-commerce website builders.
2. Inventory syncing option is absent in Jimdo’s e-commerce plans. This means you must manually update your stock levels, which can be cumbersome.
3. Adding alt tags to images is not possible in Jimdo. Businesses focusing on maximizing digital visibility may find this a huge setback. Since alt tags play a vital role in improving the SERP rankings of a site, the lack of such an option may not sit well with small businesses and bloggers alike.

• Play Plan: This free website builder option is ideal for individuals who need a basic online presence without financial commitment. It allows the creation of up to 5 pages and includes basic features like contact forms and free images. Still, your site will display Jimdo advertising and operate under a Jimdo subdomain.
• Start Plan: This plan is for small businesses or local service providers. It supports up to 10 web pages and offers 10GB of bandwidth and 5GB of storage. Key features include a free domain name for the first year, ad-free experience, marketing and SEO tools, and customer support.
• Grow Plan: Expanding on the Start plan, this plan provides additional benefits such as faster customer support response times and the ability to set up more detailed websites with various types of content like press releases, events pages, or galleries. This plan is ideal for SMBs that require a more substantial website to cover their expanding activities and services.

Jimdo presents a compelling solution for local businesses and service providers that seek an efficient online platform to showcase their offerings. For an additional $21/month fee, businesses can ensure their details remain consistent across all the social media platforms—a strategic move for attracting new clientele.

For companies keen on leveraging social media, Jimdo enables the seamless integration of social media feeds into the website. Likewise, Jimdo is also useful for artists, particularly musicians, bands, and songwriters as it integrates with popular audio and video hosting services such as SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Anchor, Vimeo, and YouTube.

Despite its broad applicability, Jimdo may not be ideal for businesses or individuals requiring extensive eCommerce capabilities or complex website functionalities. In those cases, website builders like Shopify or WordPress may be more suitable.

One of the main features of Ucraft is the custom visibility setting (i.e.) you can create pages that only users with passwords can visit (more like the admin pages found in WordPress dashboards). It also has a geo-targeting feature, which lets you customize your traffic preferences. In this way, you only focus on the location you want to, improving your local visibility levels.

Ucraft’s free plan offers SSL security, up to 15 pages, and integration with Google Analytics, which is available for unlimited use with a wide selection of templates. Therefore, Ucraft’s free offering is an excellent entry point for those new to website building.

• Free Plan: Ideal for beginners. This plan allows you to explore Ucraft’s basic features, including some design tools for creating a website, and test the website builder platform before committing financially.
• Pro Plan: This plan is suitable for professionals and small businesses needing more functionality than the free version. It includes access to Google Analytics, more advanced design features, and connecting a custom domain sans Ucraft branding.
• Pro Plus Plan: Geared towards growing businesses that require more comprehensive tools and higher functionality from their website. It includes more advanced ecommerce solutions, marketing and SEO tools, and integrations with various platforms.
• Unlimited Plan: As the name suggests, this plan offers everything – bandwidth, pages, and more advanced eCommerce features. It’s designed for large businesses or those needing extensive eCommerce capabilities, such as selling an unlimited number of products, managing extensive inventories, and harnessing powerful marketing tools.

Ucraft is best suited for creatives and small businesses focused on visual storytelling who want to build a website that’s aesthetically pleasing without deep technical know-how. Its free plan is an excellent starting point for startups and entrepreneurs seeking an online presence.

However, Ucraft needs to improve for businesses aiming to scale globally or require multilingual capabilities. For these needs, Shopify or WooCommerce are better suited. Similarly, with its vast plugin ecosystem and theme variety, WordPress is also a preferable alternative.

As one of the best website builders for beginners, Hostinger presents an integrated solution for effortlessly crafting websites. With its beginner-friendly interface, the website builder platform enables novices to learn website creation, thanks to a straightforward drag-and-drop editor. These innovative features streamline content creation and offer insights for optimizing user engagement through heatmap analysis, optimizing the performance of the sites.

For entrepreneurs venturing into the e-commerce space, Hostinger provides a comprehensive toolkit. This suite has an extensive product range with a commission-free structure and supports nearly 20+ payment methods.

Bloggers, too, will find value in Hostinger’s dedicated features for blog management, facilitating content scheduling, categorization, and audience engagement through subscription forms.

• Premium Plan: This plan is ideal for personal projects, bloggers, or small businesses that need essential features at an affordable rate. It provides an easy-to-use interface and around 150 templates. However, the premium plan doesn’t support features such as AI heatmap, marketing and SEO tools, AI Writer, and Image generator, which are exclusive to the Business Plan.
• Business Plan: Aimed at small to medium-sized businesses, this plan offers enhanced features such as unlimited bandwidth and storage. It supports a larger product catalogue, includes advanced tools and analytics (such as AI heatmap, AI writer, DALL-E supported image generator), and is scalable for long-term growth.

Hostinger website builder, with its drag-and-drop editor, AI tools, and 150+ templates, is ideal for artists, photographers, and freelance professionals. Additionally, the website builder offers essential marketing integrations, mobile editing, and e-commerce features like 0% transaction fees, which can benefit small business owners.

However, Hostinger may not be the best fit for large enterprises with complex needs. In those cases, website builders like WordPress with managed hosting solutions or CMS platforms like Drupal/Joomla paired with professional web development services may be more appropriate.

Overall, Hostinger balances ease of use and functionality, making it an attractive option for individuals and small-to-medium businesses looking to establish an online presence quickly and affordably.

Shopify has announced numerous new features to streamline certain aspects of running an online shop or increase sales conversion. The most noteworthy is Shopify Subscriptions, a new app capitalizing on the rising popularity of subscription e-commerce. It allows the creation and management of subscriptions directly within the Shopify ecosystem.

Furthermore, Semantic Search for Shopify Plus merchants has been introduced, which is an AI-driven search tool. It improves the customer shopping experience by better understanding natural search language queries, ensuring users find what they are looking for.

• Shopify Starter Plan: This plan is best for those starting, especially if selling primarily through social media platforms and messaging apps. It allows you to create product links to share on social media and includes basic sales analytics. Priced at $5/month, it’s an economical option but lacks the features of a full online store.
• Basic Shopify Plan: Ideal for small businesses ready to expand beyond simple social selling. For $39/month, it offers two staff accounts, abandoned cart recovery, shipping discounts, and a free SSL certificate. This plan supports a full online store setup with various integrations for multi-channel selling.
• Shopify Plan: At $105/month, this plan supports growing businesses with up to five user accounts and enhances capabilities with professional reporting tools, more staff accounts, and improved e-commerce automation. It’s an excellent middle ground for businesses experiencing growth and needing deeper insights and marketing tools.
• Advanced Shopify Plan: Priced at $399/month, this plan is designed for large-scale businesses that handle many transactions and require advanced features like detailed report customization, advanced shipping options, and better rates on credit card transactions. It supports extensive inventory management and allows for high customization and automation.
• Shopify Plus Plan: Shopify Plus is tailored for high-volume enterprises requiring a top-tier solution with advanced features such as multiple store management, customizable checkout processes, and dedicated support. It offers virtually unlimited scalability and is best for businesses rapidly scaling.

Shopify excels as a platform for small and medium-sized enterprises aiming to carve out or enhance their online footprint. It stands out for entrepreneurs seeking a straightforward, potent, all-encompassing e-commerce solution that doesn’t demand extensive technical skills.

With its adaptability across numerous retail, fashion, and electronics sectors, Shopify supports a broad spectrum of products and services. However, it may not fully meet the needs of large organizations or those with highly intricate e-commerce requirements. Platforms like Magento or SAP Hybris could provide these entities with customization and scalability, making them better-suited alternatives.

As said before, Weebly is a solid option for any website builder beginner interested in creating a website from scratch. A broad selection of modern, responsive templates ensures that websites look professional on any device.

Weebly’s e-commerce functionality provides essential features like inventory management, secure checkout, and shipping integrations. Furthermore, Weebly offers features such as a built-in video hosting platform that allows users to embed high-quality videos directly on their sites. It also has advanced site security features, including SSL encryption and DDoS protection as standard, ensuring user data and site interactions are secure.

• Free Plan: This plan best suits individuals new to website building who wish to explore basic features. It includes SSL security, 500 MB of storage, and essential SEO tools. However, it displays Weebly ads, provides a ‘.weebly’ subdomain, and is ideal for individuals needing a simple online presence.
• Personal Plan: Priced at $10 per month when billed annually, this plan allows for connecting a custom domain. However, it still displays Square ads (Weebly’s logo) and removes Weebly’s branding from its footer. This plan suits individuals or small businesses requiring a simple site without Weebly’s branding.
• Professional Plan: At $12 per month (billed annually), the Professional plan is tailored for small to medium-sized businesses or groups needing advanced site features like site search, video backgrounds, and membership registration. It offers a free domain for the first year, removes Square ads, and includes password protection for pages, making it ideal for businesses looking for a more branded and feature-rich online presence.
• Performance Plan: This top-tier plan is geared towards serious e-commerce sites. It includes all the features of the Professional plan plus enhanced e-commerce capabilities such as item reviews, shipping labels, and abandoned cart emails. It also provides priority support. This plan is perfect for businesses that require extensive e-commerce features, detailed analytics, and advanced marketing tools.

Weebly suits small business owners, freelancers, and entrepreneurs across various niches. Weebly’s e-commerce capabilities provide a solid foundation for small to medium online stores, making it a fine choice for those just starting in online retail or looking to expand their operations online.

However, large businesses or those with intricate and specific e-commerce needs might find Weebly restrictive. In this case, more scalable website builders, like BigCommerce, would be a better option.