Choosing the best website builder for small business should be high on your agenda when you're starting out since a website can be essential to allow potential customers, suppliers and partners to learn about what you do and even find buy your goods and/or services. Fortunately, setting up a website is a fairly easy process today, since web builders allow you to create a site yourself without needing to know anything about code, and they usually also provide hosting, which you'll need to get your site online.
We’ve tested and compared all the leading website builders for small businesses, and some lesser-known ones too, to help you choose the one that’s right for your venture. We've judged them on several criteria: simplicity and ease-of-use, the variety and quality of the templates they offer, flexibility, including how much customisation they allow and whether you can include ecommerce tools, and price.
We've included options with a range of learning curves, from simple web builders that require barely any technical knowledge at all to an option for WordPress is you want to use a more flexible content management system. In order to test them, we signed up to each one as though we were building a site from scratch, assessing their design, SEO and ecommerce tools, checking their pricing plans and levels of service and considering their scalability and future potential.
Wix balances performance with value well, combining a super easy-to-use interface with plenty of customisation options and affordable pricing plans. The service is keenly focused on small businesses, too, meaning the Wix team have thought of everything you might need. Read more below
Squarespace offers nearly unrivalled visual appeal with its wide selection of elegantly designed templates that will truly make your creative business sing. It offers a great user experience and a great range of optional ecommerce tools, but it's worth noting that it's pretty pricey. Read more below
Shopify is the go-to website builder if you want to set up a shop. It's super-easy to use, and its menus guide you through the process, helping you with everything from orders to marketing to analytics. It offers 10 free, good-looking templates with more on offer if you don't mind paying for them. Read more below
While it's a little basic, GoDaddy offers one of the most streamlined routes to getting online out there. There are plenty of great ecommerce and analytical tools, and the interface is really easy. If you don't mind slightly basic results, this is a fine choice. Read more below
If your priority is selling without paying a lot to manage your shop, Weebly offers everything you need without the extra tools of many options on this list. It's a little fiddly to use, and has a more limited template selection, but it's got a great app and offers members-only pages on higher subscriptions. Read more below
Hostinger is a great choice for small businesses starting out since it offers such huge discounts for the first year. It's also good for marketing and e-commerce integration with audience analytics and useful AI tools. Read more below
The best website builder for small business overall
Customer support: Submit ticket or request callback 24/7
Reasons to buy
+
Small business focus
+
Wide choice of templates
+
Super-easy to use
Reasons to avoid
-
Options may overwhelm
Choose this if
✅ You want good value: We think Wix provides the best range of features for the price. Its free plan is the best we've tested, and it's easily scalable.
Don't choose it if:
❌ You want a unique design: Wix provides lots of templates to choose from, but it's not as flexible as creating your own site from scratch. The result of the AI web builder can be very generic.
The bottom line
🔎 Wix provides the best balance of ease-of-use, flexibility and value out of the platforms we tested. Customisation is limited and designs can be a little generic, but the options are many, the price is very competitive and it make scaling a site easy. ★★★★
Wix provides excellent value for money with a great service, which is why it's our pick as the best website builder for small businesses overall. In our testing, we found Wix's interface super-easy to use. You can add your own text and images to page designs via drag and drop, which pretty much anyone who's used to working on a computer can do. When we did run into problems, there were Help buttons everywhere on the page.
It's affordable, easy to use, and tightly focused on a small business audience. And there are more than 800 business templates to choose from, covering almost every type of enterprise you can think of, from finance and law to farming and gardening.
A ‘free forever’ option gives you up to 500MB storage and 500MB bandwidth, however Wix ads will appear on every page of your site, and your URL will be accountname.wixsite.com/siteaddress. If you just want a ‘calling card’ website with your company’s details and information, and don't need an online store, you may be happy with all of that.
Beyond that, the paid-for plans are very reasonably priced and give you a bespoke domain, access to more storage and a marketing suite. From the Core tier up, you'll get site analytics and the ability to accept payments. Considering its price and features, Wix is the best website builder for small businesses overall. For more info, see our Wix review and our comparison of Squarespace vs Wix.
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Wix scorecard
Attributes
Notes
Rating
Interface and usability
Easy-to-use drag-and-drop approach or AI option.
★★★★★
Versatility
Lots of templates and plenty of options for more premium features.
★★★★★
Pricing
Scalable plans allow you to choose the features you need, starting from a limited free plan.
Customer support: 24/7 email, live chat Monday-Friday: 4am-8pm EDT
Reasons to buy
+
Polished templates
+
Strong ecommerce features
Reasons to avoid
-
Slight learning curve
-
No apps market
Choose this if
✅ You want great templates: We think Squarespace offers the best templates for creative work, with lots of minimalist options that put the focus on the visuals.
Don't choose it if:
❌ You want the easiest option: Squarespace has added an AI web builder for quicker setup but you'll probably want to use the traditional interface for decent results, and that isn't quite as intuitive as Wix.
The bottom line
🔎 Squarespace is the best website builder for small businesses in creative sectors thanks to its wide range of sleek, minimalist templates and solid ecommerce options. That said, it's not as easy to use as Wix and doesn't come with Wix's apps market, where you can buy optional add ons. ★★★½
If you run a creative business, such as a photography studio, then the visual appeal of your website is pretty much your calling card. So you want one of the best small business website builders with attractive templates, and Squarespace has the most elegantly designed of them all. Carefully crafted by pro designers, with clean lines and lots of white space, these layouts can really help your business website stand out from the crowd. You can also customise the templates as much as you like.
When we reviewed Squarespace, we found its drag-and-drop interface was a little fiddlier to use than Wix's or Weebly’s. There's no need for coding or web design skills, though, just a little time spent learning the system. And we appreciated the helpful pop-up boxes that appear wherever you point your cursor, guiding you through the different elements of the interface.
Squarespace is also more expensive than most, but if you want your business to look good online, it's probably an extra cost worth paying. Squarespace also offers a great range of ecommerce tools if you want to set up an online store, integrate with ShipStation to print shipping labels, or set up shoppable Instagram posts. There are great analytics and email campaign tools too.
For more, see our Squarespace review and comparison of Squarespace vs Wix. Overall, we recommend Squarespace for creatives over Wix because of its templates, but Wix is the cheaper option and still has some decent templates. If you want something even cheaper, we suggest Weebly (below).
✅ You mainly want to sell products online: As the name suggests, Shopify comes into its own when it comes to ecommerce features and marketing analytics.
Don't choose it if:
❌ You want lots of templates: We found shopify to lack the range of templates available in Squarespace or even Wix.
The bottom line
🔎 Shopify makes setting up an online store fairly easy, which makes it an attractive option for small businesses whose main aim is to sell their products online. It provides a broad range of payment options and marketing analytics, but there are transaction fees on third-party payment methods and design options are more limited. ★★★★½
We think Shopify is the easiest option for anyone who wants to sell items via their website. It's very simple to use, making it ideal for beginners. When we tested it, we found it incredibly easy to set up an ecommerce site. It's got plenty of features too, there's order and product management, shipping and tax features built in, but there's also marketing tools to launch social or email campaigns, for example, which should remove the need for a separate social media or email tool (although the email features are basic compared to the likes of MailChimp).
There's also a handy analytics tab to help you keep track of how products across your catalogue are doing and an array of add-on apps that you can use to get more features – although these can be confusing, compared to the likes of Weebly. Templates are limited compared to the likes of Squarespace, there's only 10 to choose from, but there are more options if you don't mind paying. One con that you should consider is that unless you use Shopify payments, you'll have to pay transaction fees for using a third-party payment gateway. Depending on how wedded you are to your payment system, this could be a deal breaker.
Overall though, as we noted in our Shopify review, if ecommerce is the aim of your website, then Shopify is a really good, easy to use option.
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Shopify scorecard
Attributes
Notes
Rating
Interface and usability
An easy option if your main goal is to sell products.
✅ You want to keep things simple: We found that GoDaddy makes the process of creating a website and getting it online as simple and hassle free as it can be.
Don't choose it if:
❌ You want more sophisticated features: While GoDaddy does have ecommerce options, we found its web builder to be fairly limited in terms of customisation options for templates.
The bottom line
🔎 GoDadddy offers fairly good value, but it's biggest advantage is that it streamlines the process of creating a site, making it attractively straightforward for anyone who's creating a website for the firs time. ★★★★
If speed is the priority and you want the most streamlined path to getting online, then the GoDaddy website builder is a good option. It's quite basic, but that makes it very simple and intuitive. Plus, there's a range of basic ecommerce tools and a full analytics portal.
When reviewing the platform, we found GoDaddy's interface to be nice and intuitive, and we particularly liked the ability to preview different font pairings at the click of a button. On the downside, we found the templates to be quite basic. There's not much room for customisation either, so if you want the look and feel of your site to meet certain brand or design principles, you may prefer to look elsewhere. That said, you can also switch templates at any time, which does add a level of flexibility in case you decide later that you want to redesign your site.
There's a 30-day free trial, and pricing starts from $9.99/£6.99 per month. The Standard plan will do for many business starting out, but if you want to sell online, you'll need an Ecommerce plan, which costs more. For more details, see our GoDaddy review.
Customer support: Via email; phone and live chat for US only (Monday-Friday: 6AM-6PM PT; Sat-Sun: 8am-5pm PT)
Reasons to buy
+
Cheap for ecommerce
+
Excellent app store
+
Free stock images
Reasons to avoid
-
Slight learning curve
Choose this if
✅ You want good value ecommerce options: We thing Weebly's pricing is great value for small businesses that want to sell online.
Don't choose it if:
❌ You want more customisation: Like GoDaddy, Weebly is very easy to use thanks to its simple interface, but you might find it limited if you want the freedom to make a site just the way you want it.
The bottom line
🔎 Weebly is our pick for those who want a straightforward simple interface but still want ecommerce features. It's very similar to Wix, has a good app store and competitive pricing, but we found its tools to be more limited. ★★★★
If you don't just want to promote your business online, but actively sell via your website, then in our view, Weebly offers the best value. Its Pro plan offers great ecommerce tools for a low price that can't be beaten elsewhere.
In our testing, we felt that its interface was slightly trickier to use than Shopify's or Wix’s, although a little easier than Squarespace’s. Also, it doesn't offer quite as many templates as Wix, and its templates aren’t as beautiful as Squarespace’s. However, we found that Weebly does win over both these rivals in other ways.
Firstly, its mobile app is particularly good, and even works when you're offline. Secondly it allows you to create member-only pages on the Professional and Performance Plans. (That might be useful if you work with some big clients and want to provide each of them with bespoke information.)
Thirdly, there's the Weebly App Center, which provides hundreds of apps, covering marketing, communications, ecommerce, social media and other site tools and features. Some are paid for, others are free. So while the basic interface only allows you to build a basic website, you can use these apps to tweak it to something more specialised to your business, although it can be confusing to navigate all these different apps. Finally, Weebly offers free stock images to use on your website.
You also get a shopping cart and the ability to accept payments through Square and other providers. There's advanced site statistics reporting. And, for US customers, phone support and live chat as well as email support. In short, if you want to sell things on your site, but can't afford to use Shopify, we reckon Weebly is your best bet. For more details, see our Weebly review.
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Weebly scorecard
Attributes
Notes
Rating
Interface and usability
Simple to use.
★★★★★
Versatility
Limited customisation options but lots of apps available.
✅ You're starting on a budget: Hostinger tends to have some of the biggest discounts around for new subscribers for the first year, with prices often starting at less than $2 a month.
Don't choose it if:
❌ You want more features: Like with many of the most simple website builders, the trade off is that you lose some of the flexibility to design a site they way you want it.
The bottom line
🔎 Hostinger has improved a lot in recent years and now offers a wide range of plans, making it a flexible and scalable option for growing businesses. It's huge discounts will be particularly attractive for small businesses that want to minimise set up costs in their first year. ★★★★
Hostinger comes equipped with everything you need to build and host your professional business website. This platform has come a long way, and immensely improved its services since we first reviewed it back in 2020. We found that Hostinger's prices at the time of our review made it one of the most desirable web hosting services for creatives, although tight limitations on bandwidth and storage were a bit too restrictive for our liking.
Thankfully, Hostinger now offers the complete package for your website, including marketing integration, AI tools for business, visitor analytics, essential ecommerce tools, free SSL security, an intuitive user interface, access to a royalty-free image library, and support for multiple languages to name just a few features.
You can get started with Hostinger for as low as £1.49/mo for a basic and user-friendly drag-and-drop builder, with free SSL, or for a higher budget of £2.59 per month, you benefit from free business email and 12-month domain too.
It allows you to go beyond a simple portfolio website, with integrated marketing and ecommerce functionality to sell your products and manage orders, with analytics integrated with social media to learn more about your customer base. There are options to have your website up and running in just a few clicks, and tools provided to help you do this efficiently.
Customer support: 24/7 via phone, email, live chat
Reasons to buy
+
Reasonable prices
+
Use WordPress plugins
+
No inbuilt ads
Reasons to avoid
-
No free option
Choose this if
✅ You want to use Wordpress for more flexibility: We think the best thing about Bluehost is its integration with the open-source content management system Wordpress, which offers more options for customisation than many other website builders.
Don't choose it if:
❌ You want a free plan: While Bluehost offers competitive pricing, there's no free plan or trial.
❌ You want the easiest option: We found using Bluehost to involve a steeper learning curve, taking us more time to get know the interface.
The bottom line
🔎 Bluehost has long specialised in integrating with WordPress. This makes it a good option for businesses that want more freedom to customise their site and aren't afraid of a more hands-on approach to designing it. ★★★½
The website builder services we've listed so far are easy to use, but aren't hugely customisable. If you're looking for a more bespoke online presentation of your creative business, you might want to consider the web builder from Bluehost, one of our favourite web hosting services. There's no free version or free trial, but the prices overall are quite competitive.
Bluehost runs on top of WordPress, which gives you countless options to add some finesse to your site using any of the thousands of WordPress plugins available. The Bluehost Wondersuite integrates AI to help you build a site even faster, and is included in every plan. When we reviewed it, we found it easy to use; certainly a lot easier than building a WordPress site from scratch. And we appreciated the availability of 24/7 customer support, along with some excellent email marketing and analytics tools.
The one black mark against it was page load speed. In our tests, a page we created in Bluehost took an average 2.63 seconds to load, while a basic WordPress website built on DreamHost took just 139ms. That could be improved by taking advantage of options for setting up content delivery networks and other optimisations, but it's a bit of a faff.
Overall, though, Bluehost Website Builder is a great website builder for building a site based on WordPress. For more info, see our Bluehost web builder review.
With so many website builders out there, choosing the right one can feel like wandering through a tech maze. Start by asking yourself some key questions. What's your website's main purpose? Showcasing your portfolio? Selling products? Booking appointments? Once you know what you're aiming for, the way ahead will seem much clearer.
More importantly, consider how important a website is to your business overall. If it's mainly a calling-card website you're looking for, so people can find you online and contact you, then you won't need anything particularly sophisticated – you can just choose the simplest options.
You'll also want to think about whether you need more sophisticated features, such as contact forms, email marketing integration, SEO tools, or an online store. We've detailed when these features are available in our guide/our reviews. Remember, though, more features don't always equal better; choose ones that directly address your small business needs. If you want to be discovered on Google, for example, then SEO tools will be for you, and if you want to sell via your website, you'll need a website builder that has an inbuilt online shop.
Finally, many website builders offer free trials or demo versions, or sometimes money-back guarantees. So don't be afraid to take them for a spin! Get your hands dirty with the interface, test the features, and see if it feels intuitive and user-friendly. This hands-on experience will help you identify the platform that clicks with you and your small business.
How we test website builders for small business
To test the easiest and best website builders for small business owners, we sign up as any small business owner would, feeling out the onboarding process and pricing plans, and seeing whether they are transparent and affordable.
We then assess how easy these services make it to build a website. Do the templates look good, and are they customisable? We go through the process of building a website from start to finish, paying attention to the drag-and-drop editor's flexibility, ease of use, and the mobile responsiveness of the site when finished.
We also test essential features like blogging, contact forms, SEO tools, and ecommerce functionality and decide whether they are intuitive and powerful enough for most business owners. Friendly and efficient support is also crucial so we test the knowledge base resources, and live chat/phone options. We ask for help, and see how quickly we get it and whether it solves our problem. Finally, beyond the platform itself, we assess marketing tools, integrations with third-party services, and overall scalability for future growth.
FAQs
Does my business need a website?
These days, almost every business needs a digital presence, including physical businesses, as more and more people are shopping and researching their purchases online. If you don't have an online presence, you're losing out on opportunities for potential customers to find your products or services.
Many small creative businesses go for the quick and easy route of using social media (see our guide to how to sell on Instagram). This is better than nothing, but it does mean you're potentially missing out on huge numbers of potential customers and you limit your ability to be able to actually sell online and process payments. Even if you're using Instagram, to get its full potential, you'll want a website so you can easily add products to your Instagram shop.
With a website, you can use social media platforms such as Instagram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn to make announcements about your business, and send users to the site to where they can find out more about you, make purchases or get in touch directly.
If you have your own website, you can control everything much more precisely, appear in Google search results, conduct ad campaigns and give customers a unique URL, which makes it easy for them to locate you online. Added to that, it just looks a lot more professional and will help customers trust you with their money.
Do I need to learn how to code?
With the website builders described in our guide, no coding skills are required. Each has been designed for ease-of-use and, although you'll make creative and functionality decisions during the process, the technical side is all taken care of for you.
While most large businesses have teams of coders to ensure their highly complex sites run smoothly, website builders help small business owners to be agile and to control costs. With a website builder you can create something that is clear and effective, without spending time or money learning to code. As your business grows, you may require a bigger, more complex, more bespoke site to meet its needs, but you can cross that bridge when you get to it.
Do I need to hire a web designer?
There was a time when, to create a website for any business, you either needed to learn code (see above) or hire a web designer. The former would take a long time and the latter would cost a serious amount of money. Thankfully, these days, there's a third option: using a web builder, which is what we deal with in this guide.
Web builder platforms only cost a few dollars or pounds a month, but provide a simple interface that makes it very easy to build and maintain your own website. You just have to choose a template, then drag and drop in your own images, text and video. Typically, you'll also get a domain name and hosting for your website included in the price.
If you don't want to deal with your website at all, then you may need to hire a web designer to help. Or, you may want to hire a web designer to get you set up, and then teach you how to manage the site yourself. It really depends how hands-on you want to get, as well as what your budget is.
What should a small business website include?
Every business is different, and so what a small business website should include will vary from company to company. Generally, though, there should always be a homepage that that introduces your business and its main offers. Visitors will also expect an About page that discusses who you are, what you do and why. You will always need a Contact page outlining all the ways people can get in touch, including an address, phone number and email, as well as links to any relevant social accounts.
Other pages you may want to include are pages listing your products and/or services; an online shop; FAQs (frequently asked questions); a place for case studies, testimonials and/or reviews; a news page or blog for announcements; and perhaps a page linking through to press stories about your company. It's important when planning your site that you also plan how you will keep its content up to date.
Don't plan for pages that require a lot of updating if you won't have time to do it. A site with lots of out-of-date sections can have a negative impact on how your business is perceived. See our guide to how to make an artist website for more tips.
Do I need to learn about search engine optimisation (SEO)?
Another great thing about online website builder platforms is that many of them give you the tools you need to manage search engine optimisation without having to learn the topic in any depth.
Google Analytics is the most widely-used service for search engine optimisation, however with website builders such as Weebly, Wix or Strikingly, traffic can be monitored using their internal tools. To use Shopify, you will need to set up a Google Analytics 4 account to measure the performance of your site and your ads, but this is fairly simple to set up.
In most cases, you can use Google Analytics with a website created using a site building platform. This can enhance or run alongside the platforms existing SEO tools, and can be set up using a plugin on the platform.
For many small businesses, understanding site traffic and SEO, even at a basic level, can be useful for improving performance. More traffic can lead to more leads can lead to more customers.
What's the best website builder for small business?
Overall, we've picked Wix as the best website builder for small business because it's affordable, easy to use, and clearly focused on small business use. Its web building interface is very easy and intuitive for non-techies. There are more than 500 business templates to choose from, covering almost every type of enterprise you can think of, from finance and law to farming and gardening.
That said, if you want an online store as part of your website, you may be better off with Weebly, as its pricing is more competitive in this area, and if you're a creative business and want a profile with a sleek, minimalist design, we recommend going with Squarespace.
Do I need hosting as well as a web builder?
Web hosting is where you store all the data that makes up your website, including its code, text, images and video, in a way that anyone around the world with a web connection can view it and interact with it. If you want a website, you need hosting, but if you choose one of the best website builders for small business from our list of recommendations, you probably won't have to pay for it separately since they include hosting in their plans.
Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World, T3.com and Tech Radar. He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects.
