These days running a business without a website is like running a car without fuel. Meaning you reach nowhere. However, for a newbie, when it comes to launching a website, people get confused. While some web gurus advocate for custom sites, some suggest website builders. The recent trend shows small businesses and professionals are turning to inexpensive SEO website builders for ease of use and fast execution.
The popularity of website builders has created a separate market category, and there are several players in this category at present. Let us look at major players in this category – the ones who will rule in 2021.
Wix
Wix wins hands down as the preferred website builder. The platform has already created over 160 million websites. Take a look at the features:
- The platform offers excellent uptime, incredible page speed, and flexibility to the users.
- Wix offers a massive collection of templates to customers, and thanks to its ease-of-use, building a website is like a cakewalk.
- For freelancers and professionals, creating a fully-functional website using Wix’s vast collection of apps does not take much effort. Generate a lot of buzz with a forum or chat with your clients; Wix makes it easy.
- If you are selling products, setting an e-commerce store is a breeze with Wix.
For small business owners who can’t invest a lot of money in a website, Wix is a boon. You can start with a free site in Wix. You can upgrade anytime should you need.
Weebly Website Builder
Weebly is another famous website builder that powers more than 50 million websites and is ideal for small business owners, professionals, and freelancers. The platform is easy to use and offers simple UX to the users. Like Wix, Weebly too offers a good page speed.
If you are just testing your experience with a website, hosting your site as a subdomain won’t harm you. But for your domainname.com, you have to pay. Weebly plans are reasonably priced, and you get ‘unlimited’ deals as you pay. The platform offers prompt and friendly support.
Squarespace
This slick,drag-and-drop website builder is for you if you want lovely, clean, and modern-looking templates with loads of features. The platform offers clean coded pages with automatic markup that boosts search engine indexing. All sites come with XML sitemaps.
Consider Using Squarespace For The Following Features:
- Good site speed with fast loading pages
- A vast collection of templates – from single to multi-block, you have a pretty exciting lineup there.
- E-commerce friendly with free SSL certificates
- Mobile-friendly sites
- G-suite integration
- Search engine optimization tools
However, Squarespace has no free plan.
GoDaddy Website Builder
GoDaddy, one of the most famous hosting service providers, also provides an easy-to-use website builder. The company has a free plan, and you can easily upgrade when you want.
All plans are reasonably priced. GoDaddy website builder is good for creating e-commerce sites. Whether you are selling a digital product or a physical one, the interface lets you create an inventory, upload product photographs, and writing descriptions.
Shopify
Shopify is an e-commerce website builder preferred by many small-medium business owners. If you are looking for an SEO website builder, Shopify ticks many boxes.
- Wide collection of themes
- Ease of use and multi-channel integration
- Shopify offers its customers an intuitive backend. It makes on-page SEO implementations easy to perform
- The website builder provides a handful of SEO features, including automatic sitemap generation, 301 redirects, title tag customization, and canonical instructions
- Excellent speed and uptime – The absolute musts for an e-commerce website
- Easy integration of Google analytics
- A host of helpful SEO apps – such as Minifier, SeoDoctor, and Reload SEO
Before we go
There will remain a debate if customized sites can score over sites created in website builders. But with the invasion of digital technology in every sphere of our life, website builders are here to stay. The new generation website builders cater to a significant segment of small-medium businesses and professionals and are no less useful than customized websites.