How to decide the platforms to build your website

Website builders are a perfect solution for individuals and small businesses to start a website without hiring a developer. However, finding the best website builder can be tricky for beginners.

There are so many website builders on the market, how do you know which one is the right solution for you?

In this article, we’ll help you choose the best website builder by going over the pros and cons of the most popular options.

1. Wix

Wix.com is another popular cloud based website builder software. It offers ease of use combined with a powerful set of features to easily build your website. Over 1.9% of all websites use Wix as their website builder.

Pros

1. Wix website creator is a fully hosted platform, so you will not have to pay for hosting. You get access to hundreds of templates to choose for your website’s design. Each template is fully editable with their intuitive drag and drop site builder.

2. Wix has also built an artificial design intelligence (Wix ADI) that can design a beautiful website for you.

3. Aside from tons of templates, Wix also comes with dozens of free and paid apps that you can install on your website. These apps allow you to add new features and functionality to your website. Some of them are created by Wix, and others are created by third-party developers.

4. Wix offers a free plan with limited bandwidth and storage. However, you can use this plan to test drive their drag and drop website builder. It does not include a domain name, so if you decide to keep your website, then you may want to upgrade to a premium plan.

5. You also get a free SSL with all Wix plans, but you will need to turn it on for your website.

Cons

1. Free and Connect Domain plans will show Wix branded ads on your website. You’ll need to upgrade to their Combo or Unlimited plan to remove those ads.

2. If you ever decide to move your website away from Wix, then you will find it quite complicated to do so.

3. Their Connect Domain plan which costs $9.16 per month only lets you connect a custom domain name, so you’ll still have to buy a domain name separately.

Pricing

Wix offers a limited free version with a Wix branded sub domain. You can connect a domain for $9.16 per month. Their combo plan starts at $14 per month and will get you a free domain name. The eCommerce plan for online stores start at $23 per month.

If you are interested in how it stacks up against WordPress, then see our comparison of Wix vs WordPress.

2. WordPress

WordPress.org (also known as self hosted WordPress) is the world’s most popular website building platform. Over 43% of all websites on the internet are powered by WordPress.

It’s important to note that there are two versions of WordPress, self-hosted WordPress CMS and WordPress.com. We will talk about WordPress.com later in this article. You can also read our WordPress.org vs WordPress.com comparison for more details.

The self-hosted WordPress content management system (CMS) tops our list of best website builder due to its popularity, powerful features, scalability, and ease of use.

WordPress is a free and open source website builder. This means that you have maximum control over your website compared to any other online website builder in this list.

With WordPress, you have full ownership of your website without any third-party control, so it gives you maximum privacy.

This is why many popular websites like WhiteHouse.gov (US Government), CNN, The New York Times, Microsoft, and countless other small businesses use WordPress as their website builder.

Unlike other website builders in our list, you will need a WordPress hosting account and host your own website (this is a lot easier than it sounds). We have detailed instructions on how to get started with WordPress below.

Pros:

1. WordPress gives you complete control on every aspect of your website and online presence. It can be used to build any kind of website. For example, an eCommerce store, community forums, a social network, a membership website, business / corporate website, landing pages, and more.

2. There are thousands of high quality pre-made WordPress themes that you can use for your website’s design.

3. You can also use one of the popular drag and drop WordPress page builders like SeedProd and Divi which allow you to easily create your own custom website designs using a drag-and-drop editor (no coding needed).

4. Another big advantage of WordPress is that you get access to more than 59,000 free WordPress plugins.

5. Plugins are like apps for WordPress that let you add additional features and functionality to your website such as shopping cart, contact forms, google analytics, photo gallery, social media tools, live chat, CRM, CSS customization, etc.

6. WordPress plugins also make it easy for you to connect & integrate your website with popular business tools, so you can automate and streamline your daily operations.

7. Another big reason why WordPress is popular across the world is because their website builder is fully translated in over 75+ languages, and it allows you easily create multilingual websites.

When you consider all the above benefits, WordPress is by far the most powerful website builder in the market.

It also comes with robust SEO tools that search engines love, and this ensures your website will always get the highest rankings in search engines. We use and recommend All in One SEO plugin for WordPress because it will help you outrank your competitors in Google.

For all the reasons above, our experts rate WordPress as the #1 website builder and content management system for business owners, bloggers, web developers, and web designers.

Cons:

1. You will have to manage your own website, which means you will need to familiarize yourself with a new system. This slight learning curve is easily overcome by most users, but it does feel a bit difficult in the beginning.

2. You will also have to keep up with WordPress updates, plugin updates, and create website backups. All of this can be automated by your WordPress hosting provider.

Pricing:

While WordPress is a free website builder, you will need a domain name and web hosting to get your website live which typically costs $14.99/year and $7.99 per month respectively.

Fortunately, we have worked out a special deal for WPBeginner readers. You can start a website for only $2.75 per month with Bluehost, an official WordPress recommended hosting provider. They are offering our users 69% off on web hosting that comes with free SSL certificate, free domain name, great uptime, and 24/7 phone support.