6 Best Website Builders for Small Business
The best small business website builder will be one that meets your business’s needs as you begin and when your business gains traction. It’s important to recognise that a given website builder will suit some small businesses more than others.
When researching website builders for small businesses, consider the features your business needs in a website and your level of expertise. E-commerce functionality, storage capacity, security features, price, and scalability will also be decisive factors when choosing a website builder.
How to Choose a Website Builder
According to Eurostat, e-commerce turnover through businesses’ own websites or apps was more than six times higher than in market places in 2022. This highlights the importance of having your own website for your customers to interact with and eventually make a purchase.
When considering different options, you must take several factors into account. Finding a website builder that matches your financial capabilities is important, but make sure your website will be capable of offering everything you need it to.
When picking a website builder, consider:
- Its e-commerce capabilities: Will you be able to sell all of your products through your chosen website both now and as you grow?
- Its suitability for your business model: Not all websites sell physical products. If you sell services or memberships, choose a website builder that will support this business model.
- The design: Some businesses favour simple but intuitive websites. Others require a more elaborate, visually stunning page.
- Ease of use: If you’re going to build your website yourself, consider your skills and how intuitive your website builder is to use.
- SEO friendliness: Search engine optimisation is critical for being found in organic search. Website builders often include features that help you optimise your pages to be indexed and ranked by search engines.
- Pricing: Many website builders come with free and paid options. Consider your current and future needs and whether the pricing structure makes financial sense for your business.
The Best Paid Website Builders for Small Businesses
Serious businesses are usually best off investing in a paid website builder that offers all the features a growing business needs. The following are some of the best website builders—some of which have a free version with more limited features.
1. Shopify
Shopify is a powerful e-commerce website builder that offers top-quality sales features for online stores. These include inventory management and multichannel integration, among others. That said, Shopify isn’t recommendable for very small businesses with just a few products. Businesses with a complex or growing inventory will get the most out of Shopify’s platform and sales tools.
Features
Shopify’s features are built around e-commerce. This website builder is wildly popular with businesses (there are more than 4 million Shopify users in 2024) due to its ability to showcase online stores’ products and convert traffic into sales. Its e-commerce features are certainly hard to beat. Offering tax calculation, abandoned cart recovery, and the ability to generate discount codes, Shopify is an excellent option for building a small business website.
Multichannel Selling with Shopify
Businesses that wish to sell on a range of different platforms including social media platforms or online marketplaces can benefit from multichannel integration. Shopify’s POS system also allows for offline selling.
You can download the platform’s app, Shopify Marketplace Connect, to get access to online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. This is a great benefit to new and growing businesses as it helps you connect with customers in the places they already shop. It also makes it easy to embrace omnichannel commerce in your business.
Ease of Use
Shopify is designed for beginners with no knowledge of code. It has an intuitive interface and offers a good user experience. Business owners can import and export products with CSV files and it’s easy to add product descriptions and images and sort your inventory into product catalogues.
SEO Friendliness
Shopify has some built-in SEO features as well as a few limitations.
- All Shopify websites come with an SSL certificate.
- Shopify generates the sitemap automatically. However, it doesn’t let you make manual changes to the sitemap.
- Shopify generates automatic title tags that include your store name.
- Shopify has a feature that permits you to add structured data. However, the tool tends to need expert help to make it work correctly.
- Shopify’s reliance on plugins for various features can mean that your website slows down (which is bad for ranking). Choose only the plugins you really need to avoid slowing down your site.
Shopify Pricing
There are currently three standard pricing plans available, costing $19, $49, and $299 per month, billed annually. You can get your first month for $1 on any of these plans. In addition, there is Shopify Plus (for complex businesses) and alternative solutions including Starter ($5/month), Retail ($89/month), and Enterprise (custom pricing).
2. WordPress
WordPress is a content management system that offers everything from basic websites for beginners to industry-leading web hosting for developers and enterprise-level companies. WordPress stands out from the crowd in the area of web security and also in the area of customisation. These features make it an ideal choice for creatives and entrepreneurs who are either knowledgeable in code or are willing to hire a developer to help them build the website of their dreams.
Features
WordPress offers the following features (and more):
- A free domain for one year with each of the first four paid tiers
- Fast DNS with an SSL certificate
- Industry-leading security features, including encryption, firewalls, and DDoS protection
- Fast data transfer for site visitors worldwide with WordPress’s global CDN
- Unmetered bandwidth and traffic starting at the lowest tier
- Access to premium website themes and pre-built block patterns starting at the lowest tier
- Drag-and-drop editing with the block editor
- Advanced design tools for creatives and developers
- Access to high amounts of storage in higher tiers for multimedia uploads
- E-commerce tools starting at the lowest tier
- A full suite of marketing tools
- Monetization tools
- Over 50,000 plugins
- Spam protection
- Staging sites
- Support from WordPress’s Happiness Engineers starting at the lowest tier
- Comprehensive business capabilities, including the ability to add blogs, newsletters, e-commerce, and online courses to your website
Ease of Use
WordPress has website-building options for everyone—from beginners to developers. Beginners can create their own website without expert help using the drag-and-drop block editor and premium themes. Developers can take advantage of WordPress as a hosting platform for creating custom websites from scratch.
SEO Friendliness
WordPress offers a wider range of SEO tools than many other website builders, including:
- An auto-generated XML sitemap
- Custom title tags and meta descriptions
- Clean URLs
- Custom or auto-generated image descriptions
- Easy method for verifying your site and integrating analytics
- Fast loading times
- Optimised for mobile
- Powerful SEO plugins that are available with the Creator and Entrepreneur plans
Payment Processing for WordPress E-Commerce (WooCommerce)
Thinking about which payment options to offer your customers is one of the most vital steps for new business owners when setting up an e-commerce website. Offering different payment methods increases your chances of landing a sale. This is because customers feel comfortable completing purchases using their preferred payment method.
Multicurrency Transactions
Linking a global payment gateway to your WooCommerce shopping cart allows you to accept payments in different currencies, opening up your business to a world of possibilities. This is especially useful if you market your business on social media platforms to gain international customers.
PCI-Compliant Gateway with Enhanced Security Features
The best way to ensure PCI compliance and a high level of security for your e-commerce website is to use a PCI-compliant payment gateway as part of a complete merchant services plan. For example, our PCI-compliant payment gateway comes with enhanced anti-fraud capabilities and can be installed and configured quickly and easily in WordPress e-commerce websites as well as a wide range of other shopping carts.
Pricing
WordPress offers pricing tiers for every budget:
- Free plan when you create an account
- Starter – $4/month (Create an ad-free website with your own domain name.)
- Explorer – $8/month (Design a more customised website.)
- Creator – $25/month (Developer level tools and features.)
- Entrepreneur – $45/month (Build an online store.)
- Cloud – $65/month (WP Cloud with Bluehost)
- Enterprise – starting at $25,000/year (enterprise content platform with the highest security standards)
3. Squarespace
Squarespace is a top choice if sleek design, quality content, and making an impactful first impression are your priorities. Presenting a flawlessly designed website can be especially important for creative businesses that focus on aesthetics over e-commerce or backend power.
Features
Squarespace’s standout features are centred around design. This popular website builder offers many different customisable templates and uses a drag-and-drop editor that allows for neat, stunning content. You can browse the selection of around 160 templates before you sign up to make sure they have the features and design options you’re looking for.
Small businesses in fashion, travel, home decor, and online lighting businesses may especially benefit from Squarespace’s visually spectacular website builder with its easy drag-and-drop interface and pre-built page layouts. Squarespace also allows you to add blogs, portfolios, booking calendars, member areas, and take care of e-mail and social media marketing all from your Squarespace account.
Content Tools
Squarespace excels by offering many professionally designed elements to use on your page. This means you can display your content in a visually pleasing and intuitive way for your customers. For example, you could use the accordion feature to hide additional content so visitors aren’t overwhelmed by the amount of content on your page.
Using different elements can help you appeal to a wider audience. People digest information in different ways, so breaking your content down into manageable chunks and using alternative formats can help you communicate your key value propositions more effectively.
Ease of Use
Squarespace is very easy for beginners to use because all you need to do is drag and drop. Easily add text, photos, videos, audio clips, calendars, menus, and anything else you need using Squarespace’s predefined content types.
At the same time, the Squarespace Developer Platform allows advanced users to access the underlying code, customise it, and even create new templates from scratch. This makes Squarespace a great choice for everyone—beginner to expert.
SEO Friendliness
Squarespace has several features that make your website search-engine friendly:
- All Squarespace websites come with an SSL certificate.
- Squarespace generates an .xml sitemap for your website automatically.
- SEO page titles and descriptions are set automatically and can be modified by the user.
- Squarespace generates static URLs for all of your pages that are easily indexed by search engines.
- Squarespace offers built-in mobile optimisation.
- Squarespace AI can be used to generate search engine-friendly website copy (written content).
Squarespace Pricing
Squarespace’s plans range from $16 to $52 per month, billed annually. E-commerce capabilities start at the second tier—Business—which costs $23 per month, billed annually.
The Best Free Website Builders for Small Businesses
If you’re a very small business or want to set up a side hustle to try out a new business idea, a free version may be enough. The following free website builders can help you put your fledgling business on the map:
4. Weebly
Weebly is often promoted as the best free website builder for e-commerce websites. You can build a fully functioning e-commerce website to sell your products and benefit from a range of additional features.
Features
Weebly’s features include gift card sales, generating coupons or discounts, inventory management tools, and online ordering.
Some of the features a free Weebly account offers include:
- A Weebly subdomain (with Square ads)
- 500MB of storage with unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited e-commerce
- Ability to embed code
- Some SEO features
- Community forum
- Chat and e-mail support
Ease of Use
Weebly is very easy to use. Content is added by clicking on the element you want to add and dragging it to where you want it to be. The website builder offers templates and some customisation options. However, there are only around 50 templates and they’re quite plain compared to those offered by Squarespace.
SEO Friendliness
Every Weebly website has a sitemap, meta descriptions, and search engine-friendly HTML formatting. You can also add alt tags to images and add custom URLs, title tags, and meta descriptions to blog posts if you create an onsite blog.
Pricing
Weebly has a free plan as well as paid plans ranging from $10 to $26 per month, billed annually.
5. Tripod by Lycos Publish
Tripod, powered by Lycos Publish, is a website builder that is reliable and easy to use. There is a free plan as well as a very affordable plan for e-commerce businesses.
Features
Tripod’s features include:
- Up-to-date themes
- Easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor
- The ability to add images and video
- SEO capabilities to get found in organic search
- Plugins with a range of additional features
Ease of Use
Tripod is designed for beginners and uses an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.
SEO Friendliness
You can add descriptions and keywords to help people find your website. You can also add Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools tracking codes to measure the success of your website over time.
Pricing
- A free plan that includes ads
- A $6.55/month plan (up to 3 websites) without ads and with more space
- A $13.15/month plan (up to 10 websites) with premium templates, e-commerce features, and more storage
6. Jimdo
Jimdo is an intuitive website builder for small businesses that allows you to create professional-looking business websites, e-commerce websites, and portfolio websites in a short amount of time. It can even build your website for you if you answer a few simple questions. The downside of this website builder is that it doesn’t allow much customisation and doesn’t have internal marketing or blogging capabilities.
Features
Jimdo:
- Allows you to add block elements and use slideshows, banners, and a range of column layouts
- Can build a website for you using Jimdo ADI
- Allows you to optimise easily for mobile with its mobile editor
- Adds title tags, meta descriptions, and image alt text for you using smart technology
- Allows you to integrate your e-commerce store with social media
Ease of Use
Jimdo is very easy to use. However, there are limited options for editing and customisation.
SEO Friendliness
Jimdo fills in a lot of the on-page SEO details for you. However, it doesn’t allow you to add alt tags and doesn’t have any built-in marketing features.
Pricing
Jimdo has a free plan as well as paid plans ranging from $18 to $45 per month.
Which Is the Best Small Business Website Builder?
The best website builder will be one that moulds best to your business’s individual needs. For some novice business owners, this may mean a free website builder that comes with a free subdomain. A free account gives you a chance to test your business idea and your own capabilities while keeping your outgoings to a minimum.
More confident or well-established businesses will do best with a paid plan. When deciding which website builder is best for you, choose an option that you feel comfortable with, that fits your business model and brand, and that ultimately helps you maximise your revenue.
