What is the purpose of your site?
If you’re building a professional portfolio, you’ll probably want 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 creating an e-commerce store, you’ll probably want Shopify. If you’re building a personal or hobby site, you might be okay with GoDaddy’s simplistic interface and minimal options.
How much time do you want to invest in building your website?
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 means a longer site-building process.
How much design control do you want?
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.
How big will your site be?
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 (like product pages with several high-resolution images) or 100 small pages (like blog posts with 1-2 images).
How important is e-commerce?
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 read the plans closely if you’re choosing a website builder that isn’t specially designed for e-commerce. Some, like Wix, restrict e-commerce features to higher-tier plans. Others, like Squarespace, offer e-commerce on all plans but charge steep transaction fees on lower-tier plans.
Are there AI tools and how effective are they?
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 AI-generated work in the US.
Finally, I recommend avoiding AI if you’re concerned about climate change, as AI uses an enormous amount of power and water.
How big is your sales operation?
Some website builders, like Wix, only offer advanced features like automated sales tax calculation on a limited number of transactions per month. This can make life complicated if you’re selling a lot of products.
You’ll also want to consider transaction fees. Most website builders don’t charge anything beyond the standard payment processor fees (usually around 3%), but some, like Squarespace, charge additional transaction fees. These fees typically take an additional 2 to 7% out of your profits, so you’ll lose a total of 5 to 10% on every sale — a significant loss if you’re selling hundreds or thousands of products. You can pass these costs on to the customer by raising your prices, but it may be more worthwhile to choose a website builder or plan without these fees.
What is your preferred way to contact 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.
How flexible do you want to be with the host?
Most website builders are proprietary, meaning you’ll be stuck with the hosting company that created them. Some don’t even let you download your files to transfer to another host. Others, like Duda, let you download your site and transfer it to another host. However, making sure your site looks good after you’ve transferred it can be a time-consuming process. If you think you might want to switch hosts at some point, choose a company that won’t force you to start over from scratch when you make the transition.
How much do you want to spend?
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 upfront 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 is renewed.
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.
