6 Best Website Builders for Small Businesses

According to our independent research, the best website builder for small businesses is Wix, scoring 4.8/5 overall on our 2023 product testing. It offers hundreds of sleek, customizable templates, and an entire suite of advanced, business-friendly tools — including CRM, which makes it the perfect choice for small, growing businesses. It also comes with social media integrations, a video maker, a logo maker, and ownership of your own domain – it's the most feature-rich website builder on the market.

Squarespace also ranked well in our testing, also scoring 4.8/5 thanks to its design functionality. But our research found that Wix proved to be superior as an option for small businesses as it provides better SEO integrations and more ecommerce features.

GoDaddy performed well in areas like speed, but offered a more basic package in comparison to Squarespace and Wix overall, so it only just made it into our top three recommendations.

In this review, we take a look at how the best website builders for small businesses compare. Our top recommendations:

• Wix for a powerful platform with great business features
• Squarespace if your priority is beautiful templates and design
• GoDaddy for a website that is simple and easy-to-set-up

See how they compare in our table below.

Whether you're working from home or setting up in an office, these ecommerce website builders will help you get your online store up and running quickly and easily.

You can also use our 1-minute website builder comparison quiz to quickly find the best website builder for your business' needs. Just answer four questions and we'll provide you with tailored recommendations based on your criteria and our hours of research and testing.

All of our research at Tech.co is completely independent, and is based on user feedback and expert analysis. For this review, our researchers ranked the website builders based on an extensive list of criteria specifically for small US businesses, including usability, functionality, features, design, and price.

For small business owners we know that scalability and affordability is crucial to growth, which is why we not only consider pricing plans, but also the number of features vs price to evaluate which website builder is best value for money when ranking.

We also know that for small business owners, building a website should be both simple and  hassle free. With limited resources, you'll want a website builder that is able to build both basic and complex pages without having to hire or dedicate specialist resource, which is why we rank website builders with good design flexibility, UX, features and functionality more favourably.

In this guide:

• What to Look For in a Website Builder
• Six Website Builders for Small Businesses
• Why Avoid Free Website Builders?
• How We Test and Rate Website Builders for Small Businesses
• Our Final Verdict
• Frequently Asked Questions

What Is the Best Website Builder for Small Businesses?

According to our research, the best website builder for small businesses is Wix. On our 2023 tests, Wix scored 4.8/5 overall – it's affordable, intuitive, easy to use, and packed with hundreds of customizable templates — but, there are many website builders on the market.

Through rigorous testing, our researchers found that while every website builder will claim to do the same thing — build the site of your dreams – fast, quick, and on the cheap), not all website builders were cut out for the demands of a modern business. The six best website builders we list below, however, were. In this review, we explain why.

1. Wix — Best for small businesses overall
2. Squarespace — Best for growing businesses
3. GoDaddy — Best for setting up quickly
4. Shopify – Best for selling online 
5. Weebly — Best for free plan
6. Hostinger — Best for uptime reliability + low starting price

Wix for Small Businesses

Best for small businesses overall

Wix website builder is an incredibly powerful platform, packed with 800+ customizable templates, sophisticated features, and advanced business tools, so it should come as no surprise that it scores so highly in our independent testing.

In comparison to other website builders like Hostinger, Wix offers a lot of value for small businesses across the board, with one of the most intuitive, feature-rich platforms on the market. Wix scores 4.8/5 for features, the highest score out of any website builder we tested, and an impressive 4.9/5 for help & support services.

It is also one of the easiest website builders to use, scoring 4.4/5 for ease of use (the same as Squarespace) thanks to its quick, drag-and-drop feature, and we love how it offers an entire suite of advanced business tools like CRM software.

The onboarding experience for Wix is also very straightforward, making it perfect for businesses with limited back-end knowledge or tech capability. London-based restaurant The Five Fields also found Wix to be super intuitive — and even made it to the final of the 2021 Wix Awards with the website they built — taking advantage of its many useful business features, in the process.

“We can easily update the images with each season to give it a fresh look as well as the daily changing menu. The ability to distribute newsletters via Wix email marketing is a great benefit. The myriad of analytics available can be a bit of a rabbit-hole, but incredibly enlightening!” — Matthew Widdowson, General Manager, Five Fields Restaurant.

In comparison to other website builders, our research found Wix scores high in nearly all of our ranking categories, including ease-of-use, help and support, customer experience, and number and quality of business features. Wix's SEO tool-kit is particularly strong, thanks to its new partnership with Semruch which gives users access to over 21 billion keywords, and its revised search optimization settings which give businesses greater control over their SEO data. Wix scores 5/5 for SEO and was our best website builder for optimizing websites for Google.

“Wix has been a fantastic platform for the restaurant to communicate their identity and offering. It enables us to track visitor activity and traffic which is hugely beneficial and is something that was lacking on the previous website” — Matthew Widdowson.

Wix also has a high average customer score, with an impressive score of 4.6 out of 5  – second only to Shopify – and proved to have the most useful functionality and built-in capabilities. This includes translation functionality, making it the perfect website builder for businesses looking to grow, diversify, and manage their business on a budget.

Wix won't be the best fit for every business though, so scroll down to discover our other recommendations or read our in-depth summary of Wix's best alternatives here.

Wix Pricing

Wix also offers a great variety of pricing plans, which makes it an ideal website builder that will scale alongside your business as it grows. Wix price plans cost between $16 and $45 per month. Its ecommerce plan, which gives you access to an online store from $27 per month, is a great choice for anyone in the retail industry.

These plans are reasonably pricey, but Wix still managed to attain a 3.6/5 for value for money – users will pay more for Wix than they will for Hostinger, for example, but you get a much vaster array of useful features.

For the plans in the below table, please note that website hosting is included in every plan, as is the case for pretty much all web builder products. A domain is included for every plan except Free.

Squarespace for Small Business

Best for growing businesses

Squarespace website builder prides itself on its aesthetic appeal — with the best-looking website builder templates on the market hands down. While Squarespace only offers 113 templates -— which is a little weak in comparison to Wix's extensive offering, each of them is stunning, and will set you well on your way to creating a beautiful website.

Squarespace is the best website builder we tested for design functionality, scoring 4.5/5. It also tied with Wix when it came to customer support (both score 4.9/5 and offer phone and email support) and ease of use (both providers score 4.4/5).

However, that's not to say that Squarespace sites are all about style and not about substance. It offers an incredibly robust feature catalog, including tools for email and social marketing, as well as an in-depth analytics board, scoring 4.6/5 for features overall.

Plus, Squarespace offers a much more comprehensive knowledge center than solutions like WordPress and GoDaddy, allowing users to solve problems and learn about the platform to an extensive degree.

Read our Squarespace vs WordPress guide to learn more about how these tools compare.

Squarespace pricing

Squarespace pricing plans include two standard website builder plans — Personal and Business — as well as two ecommerce plans, which include a Basic and Advanced plan. All Squarespace plans include hosting, a one-year domain, 24/7 support, plus unlimited storage and bandwidth.

The Personal plan will cost you $16 per month and comes with your standard features for getting a site live, like a custom domain and SSL security certificate. The Business plan costs $23 per month and is, as you can guess, aimed at small businesses, allowing them more marketing features to attract users and analytics to see how you're doing.

The ecommerce plans in Squarespace pricing, however, add a bit more — the ability to sell and market products. The Basic plan only costs $27 per month and allows you to sell unlimited products with a few simple features. The Advanced plan costs $49 per month, and adds more complex features, like abandoned cart recovery and subscriptions, while giving you access to commerce APIs.

Find out more in our full Squarespace for Ecommerce Review

For the plans in the below table, please note that website hosting is included in every plan, and a domain is included in every one-year contract.

GoDaddy for Small Businesses

Best for setting up quickly

With 76 million domains to its name, GoDaddy is a very popular website builder — and for good reason. It offers a very easy-to-use and, more importantly, easy-to-set-up platform that won't scare off beginners.

GoDaddy also provides some seamless SEO guidance that will help you get your site noticed and visited by more users. It actually improved its SEO score on our 2023 tests, from 3/5 to 4/5 having added keyword support.

Compared to Wix and Squarespace, however, GoDaddy offers a slightly more basic package and scores 4.1/5 overall, with a middle-of-the-road features score of 3.1/5.

Check out our GoDaddy review for more information

The web design is relatively restrictive, and the feature and templates it does have, doesn't make for the most customizability, which is why GoDaddy only scores 3.5/5 for design capabilities. While the SEO features are easy to use, there's less guidance than Wix and Squarespace offer, so you aren't getting a whole lot of information needed to help your business grow. Still, it is on the more affordable side, so if these cons aren't a dealbreaker, it's worth a try.

In fact, GoDaddy has improved greatly since our last bout of research — which we conduct regularly, to ensure that the advice we provide is as accurate and as timely as possible — adding more features, better templates, and overall ease of use previously not found on the platform. This improvement shot the popular website builder into the top three, so we highly recommend checking it out.

GoDaddy pricing

GoDaddy offers four pricing plans — Basic, Standard, Premium, and Ecommerce plans —  all of which include a 30-day free trial and your own domain.

The Basic plan costs only $9.99 per month, providing you with the basics of website building and that's about it. You get some simple ecommerce functionality too, but you can only use it through GoDaddy Payments, which isn't ideal.

The Standard plan adds a lot more at $14.99 per month and adds some marketing features, including the ability to be found on Google, which is vital for any burgeoning business. It also includes a website chatbot — which is huge for customer service — and a whole bunch of advanced appointment features.

As expected the Premium plan, which costs $16.99 per month, adds real ecommerce features, opening up your online store with social selling, gift cards, discounts, and lots more. Finally, Commerce Plus is $29.99 per month and boosts the caps on how many products can be listed or sold through social marketplaces.

For the plans in the table below, please note that all four of them include website hosting, a custom domain, and 24/7 support — quite a deal!

Shopify for Small Businesses

Best for small businesses selling online for the first time

Shopify is undeniably one of the biggest names in website building, and it's one of our top picks too, scoring 4.2/5 overall according to our 2023 website builder testing criteria. When it comes to sales and marketing features, Shopify is in a league of its own, and its ease of use makes it especially helpful for small businesses.

While its design is more restrictive than other platforms on this list, Shopify does offer a wealth of apps and multi-channel integrations that make transitioning to selling online for the first time really simple. It also offers one of the most advanced stock management tools, meaning that the platform is able to cater to more complex inventories as your small business begins to grow. So, if scaling your small business is in your plans, Shopify is undeniably a solid bet.

If you're looking to build a high-quality website that shifts stock quickly, Shopify should be on your radar. The platform's advanced design tools let you create a polished online store quickly and easily, making it perform for new, emerging and small businesses. Like Wix, Shopify also offers a broad range of templates, or ‘themes' to build your site upon, created by its community of independent designers.

But while Shopify is primarily a website builder, its strengths really lie in sales and marketing. The platform offers powerful multi-channel integrations with major platforms like Amazon, eBay, and Instagram, allowing small businesses to sell their goods across a variety of channels. Shopify's industry-leading reporting features also make it easy for users to track and analyze sales, helping businesses to gain an edge in an increasingly competitive landscape.

Overall, however, Shopify was awarded a 3.6/5 score for features – not nearly as impressive as Wix's 4.8/5. Granted, Shopify has good ecommerce features, but it's not got the breadth of website design capabilities offered by Wix.

Even if sales tools aren't a top priority for your business at the moment, you're likely to have a positive experience with Shopify, especially as your small business starts to grow. Our researchers awarded the platform a customer satisfaction score 4.6/5, making it the second most popular website builder we've ranked, beaten only by Wix.

Despite Shopify's strengths — of which there are many — the platform is slightly pricier than its rivals. This is what prevents it from appearing any higher on our list. We discuss its pricing in greater detail below.

Shopify pricing

Shopify offers three main pricing plans —Starter, Basic, Shopify, Advanced, and Plus.

Shopify Basic retails for $29 per month. It allows for two staff accounts and up to four inventory locations, making it suitable for smaller businesses just starting out. The plan doesn't offer the same hardware support available on more premium plans and prevents international domains.

Shopify's namesake plan ‘Shopify‘ costs businesses $79 per month. This package is designed for businesses earning around $4000 in monthly revenue, and it contains standard reporting tools, international pricing options, and hardware support.

Shopify Advanced is available for $299 per month, and it includes all the features you need to run a slick, profitable ecommerce website, including sophisticated reporting, custom reports, and sales tracking tools. Users of this tier also benefit from slightly smaller transaction fees and credit card rates, making it suitable for small businesses on the verge of massive growth.

Weebly for Small Businesses

Best for a straightforward set-up

Weebly can’t quite match Wix – it only scores 3.7/5 overall – but it's still a solid website builder. Creating an account and starting to create your website is incredibly straightforward and fast, making it perfect for new or small businesses – you can even sign up with a Facebook account alone.

You’ll then be able to take a look at the excellent website templates on offer, which – unlike with Wix – can be changed later after you’ve first published your site. However, Weebly can't compete with the best when it comes to design functionality, scoring just 2.6/5 on our 2023 tests, with fewer templates and less overall control than you'll get with a provider like Squarespace.

As with Wix, there’s a great variety of apps – everything from Facebook Messenger chat boxes to product review widgets. Integrating these apps into your site is straightforward, and you won’t need to add a single line of code. They will help to enhance the usability and usefulness of your business’s website, and should keep customers coming back for more.

Weebly pricing

Weebly pricing offers a commendable free version that you can use indefinitely, and this helped it to a 3.8/5 score for value, higher than Wix's 3.6/5. As free plans go, it's actually quite robust, allowing you to get a website live, with features like inventory management, SEO, lead capture, and more. This makes Weebly one of the best values on the market, but it's still a bit limited compared to its paid-for competitors. There's also a Personal plan for $10 per month, which adds a bit more functionality and drops the Weebly-branded URL.

Those are for individual users though. Business users will prefer to pick one of the three paid versions. The Performance plan costs $26 per month, and gives you functionality for hosting an online shop. The Professional plan costs $12 per month and is great for service businesses, such as construction companies or restaurants.

Hostinger for Small Businesses

Best for beginners

Hostinger is a great website builder for small businesses with limited tech capabilities, as it's extremely reliable and very simple to set up, coring 3.9/5 for ease of use. It provides a stripped-down, easy-to-use platform with simple grid-based templates that any member of your team will be able to pick up with ease.

However, this did mean Hostinger did not score nearly as well as Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, and Shopify, and was only awarded a score of 3.6/5 overall. In fact, Hostinger scores just 2.7/5 for features, which was one of the lowest features scores achieved by any website builder we've tested.

Obviously, this ease of use comes at a price though. Hostinger doesn't have an app store, so you'll be stuck with the basics when it comes to your website. Customization is understandably limited, but at this price, you should be more than happy to get a site live that looks good.

Check out our Hostinger vs Wix comparison guide for more info

Hostinger pricing

Outside of the assorted free plans on this list, Hostinger's single-price plan offers the most affordable website builder plan on this list. The original price is $11.99 per month, which is already pretty low, but the website builder is now offering three free months and an impressively low price of $2.99 per month for all users (although you can get up to 78% off by using the code TECH at checkout).

Check out our Hostinger review for more information

With only one pricing plan, Hostinger makes it as easy as possible to get set up, with minimal customization options. Obviously, the low cost comes at a price, as the website builder is missing some key features, most importantly an app store, but if speed, ease of use, and affordability are important to you, Hostinger is likely your best bet.

Click here to get set up with Hostinger today

Why Small Businesses Should Avoid Free Website Builders

While it may seem cost effective at the time, free websites could actually cost you a lot more in the long-run. 

1. Limited features

With a free website, you won't have access to the same roster of features as you would with a premium package. With limited insights, analytics and ecommerce features, you'll be more likely to miss out on potential customers, as you won't be able to monitor or optimize your website in the same way that you would with a premium package.

2. Poor SEO

A free website is also more likely to tank your SEO, as they often don't come with a personalized domain. Unlike premium packages, sites built using free website builder software automatically become part of the website builder's own site, making it notoriously difficult to rank well in search engines, like Google. This is because it takes longer to crawl and is more difficult to index, meaning less customers will find you.

3. Ads

And, unless you're happy with your website advertising the software you used to build it — therefore telling your customers that the software you used to build it was free — we'd advised to opt for ad-free premium website builders, so that the only business your customers are focused on when they come to your website, is yours. Most website builders offer a scaling pricing plan, meaning you can find a plan that is affordable and best suited to your business' needs.

Wix's pricing plan, for example, starts at just $16 a month, and includes some of the best features for small businesses our researchers have recorded to date. That's why so many customers recommend it, and why it came out on top as our overall best website builder

What to Look for in a Website Builder for Small Businesses

What you should look for in a website builder for small businesses will depend entirely on your business' needs, but there are some features that our researchers found to be especially beneficial to small businesses. Below, we run through the most important website builder features, specifically for small businesses.

1. Choice of templates

First impressions count, and if your website looks great, customers will likely think that your business is great, too.

This means you’ll need to find a builder with a good range of template designs, and hopefully ones that are tailored for the industry you’re working in. This should make things far less stressful when it comes to building and running your website. For instance, many web builder platforms have excellent templates for restaurants, or for building firms.

Squarespace is inarguably one of the best on this front, providing plenty of stunning templates that will be sure to impress any visitor, but with over 800+ website templates to choose from, Wix is also a valuable option.

2. Ecommerce options

If your business sells products, you’ll need an ecommerce function. Most website builders will allow you to sell products on the website you’re building.

The Wix ecommerce package is especially good for small businesses because it's great value for money, but you’ll have to do a fair amount of manual setup. Website builders often add fees per transaction on cheaper ecommerce plans — if you’re selling in high volumes, or work on low profit margins, you’ll want to read the small print.

3. Tracking and analytics

These might sound complicated, but they're basically the way to track how customers come to, interact with, and leave your website — the same way you’d want to know how many people come into your store every day.

This will help you work out whether you need to change your design, move things around, or change the tools you use. It’ll also help you understand how customers arrive on your website. Are they searching for businesses like yours on Google, or are they coming straight to your site? This type of information will help you adapt your website, and pick up customers you might be missing out on.

Most website builders will offer some analytics software baked into your package. However, these solutions can be a bit limited, so look for ones that will allow you to install a Google Analytics plugin — this is really the gold standard for analytics tracking.

4. App selection

A website builder needs to have a good app selection if you’re planning to create a business website. These apps are what will help you stand out from your competition.

Contact forms, appointment or reservation booking, coupon codes, gift cards, chatbots and more can all be added to your site — as long as you pick the right website builder.

5. Branding

If you've spent years building up your brand’s name and logo recognition, the last thing you want is to have a website covered with someone else’s branding. Or, even worse — someone else’s adverts.

Most website builders will remove adverts when you sign up to a paid-for package, but not all of them will remove their own branding from your site. Make sure the website builder you choose will keep your branding front and center – not someone else’s.

How We Test and Rate Website Builders for Small Businesses

Tech.co's impartial research team takes a hands-on approach to checking the quality of every website builder that we review (learn about our research). To ensure that our hundreds of hours of research turn up every unique benefit or downside, our team of testers use six in-depth research categories. They are:

• Features: What SEO, blogging, and AI assistance tools are offered?
• Design functionalities: How useful are the themes and mobile editor?
• Value for money: How many features does a plan offer in relation to its cost?
• Help and support: What types of support are offered, and with what hours?
• Customer score: Is customer and user testing feedback positive?
• Ease of use: Is the software intuitive to use?

Once every brand is analyzed and ranked within each category, our team condenses a brand's scores down into one overall rating. This allows our reviews to dive deep into every feature offered, while also letting you know how each website builder compares to the rest across the board. Here is the full table of our research scores for the top website builders on the market:

FAQs