The Hostinger website builder is a serious contender in the website building space, not just another feature of a hosting provider that you think will ‘be handy’ but won’t ever use. It does everything that must people will need it to do, and does it exceptionally well with its visually appealing, speed-of-light interface and intuitive controls. Striking the perfect balance between professional UI design tools and just making it work, I encourage you to think of Hostinger as not just a hosting provider but as a platform that enables you to build and host all kinds of websites (even online stores). Honourable mention for the AI support, which is surprisingly decent (human support not so much). All-in-all, more website builders like this please.
For
Fun to use
Incredible user experience
Great features and customisations
Against
Poor customer support
Unintuitive responsive design
Why you can trust Creative Bloq
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As you begin your website-building journey with Hostinger, you’re presented with the opportunity to let AI create a website for you. If you don’t want to do that, you can start off with a pre-made template instead. However, I saw great success with the AI, running with the first iteration that it created.
(Image credit: Daniel Schwarz)
I provided basic information about the brand and what the website must do, as well as the customer demographic and their motivations (using only 226 of the 700 allowed words, no less). If you’re not sure about the colours, there’s a “Surprise me” option, which did a neat job. I specified that I wanted the website to sell products, and was presented with an “Add online store to my site” checkbox in real-time, which gave me some unexpected confidence. Overall, the outcome was pretty decent.
(Image credit: Daniel Schwarz)
Pre-made templates
Starting from scratch didn't appear to be an option, but if you’re no fan of AI there are pre-made templates to get started with as well. These range from uninspired to surprisingly sleek, but I wouldn’t describe any of them as bad. Professional designers with little time should be happy to know that there’s an entire category for barebones templates.
A small number of the pre-made templates can be personalized with AI — this means that your pre-made template will have more fitting copy and imagery, and of course a logo with your brand name.
(Image credit: Daniel Schwarz)
Design features
Creating pages and navigations is straightforward as you’d expect it to be. The same goes for your general settings, SEO settings, online store settings if you’ve opted for one, any other functionalities such as contact forms and booking systems — all of these are easy to manage and are surprisingly rich in features. For example, blog posts can be scheduled and online store products can have discounts. Support for multiple languages? That’s there too. eCommerce platforms such as Shopify obviously have more eCommerce features, but certainly nothing you’d miss if you were trying to keep it simple. Payment options include Paypal and Stripe, and incur no fees from Hostinger.
(Image credit: Daniel Schwarz)
Integrations can make external tools such as Google Analytics, Hotjar, and Facebook Pixel easy to implement, although Hostinger offers their own analytics. Either way, a cookie banner feature in the general settings enables you to track your users legally.
In terms of building a responsive website, you’re only able to switch between a mobile and desktop version. In addition, it can feel like you’re building two different websites at times, which slows things down.
The aforementioned AI features are also available from within the website builder itself. These can generate images (including logos), copy (including legal policies, blog posts, and SEO metadata), whole sections, and whole pages. There’s even a GenAI heatmap feature, which for those that don’t know will tell you where users are likely to focus their attention. Add this to the fact that Hostinger often explains what the outcome of certain options would be, you’ll find yourself making smart, intentional decisions. That being said, some of the technical and SEO advice is arguably incorrect, and there should perhaps be a warning that explains the ramifications of generating entire blog posts.
To accomplish something that the builder doesn’t appear to let you do, you can provide some custom code. Unfortunately, I found myself having to do this too many times. On the upside, every Hostinger theme is basically the same theme so the code snippets that they provide work perfectly. On the other hand, it seems as if the website builder should be able to facilitate these needs.
User experience
Hostinger’s website builder offers a truly exceptional user experience, firstly because of its easy-to-use and attractive interface, and secondly because of how lightning-fast it is. Those that’ve used a website builder before will probably know that they can be quite a slog to use, but that isn’t the case with Hostinger, which operates as a fully loaded and fully rendered web app.
There’s a grid to help you snap-align design elements into place, and rather than restricting movement this grid adapts to your design. Manoeuvrability is very efficient. That being said, you’ll get very far with the pre-made sections that you can add, as well as their impressively granular customizations that boil down to building most of the website by selecting options and turning toggles on or off.
(Image credit: Daniel Schwarz)
Another quality-of-life feature is website styles, which you don’t have to use but can help you to craft something akin to a design system, just as you would using a professional UI design tool such as Figma or Sketch. This helps you to maintain visual consistency and saves you from having to repeat yourself. This doesn’t work well for buttons, but works fine for colors, text, and animations.
Overall, Hostinger’s approach to site building feels just right.
(Image credit: Daniel Schwarz)
Who is it for?
It’s perhaps better to describe who it’s not for, which is for those building SaaS products or complex eCommerce stores (you’d be better off with a dedicated eCommerce platform like Shopify for the latter). Those use-cases aside, I can’t imagine anybody not being able to build their website using Hostinger’s website builder.
Buy it if...
You’re not interested in the technical side of building a website
You want to combine your website builder and hosting provider into one subscription
Don't buy it if...
You need or prefer good human customer support
Your website is a SaaS product or complex eCommerce store
The Verdict
9.5
out of 10
Hostinger
The Hostinger website builder is a serious contender in the website building space, not just another feature of a hosting provider that you think will ‘be handy’ but won’t ever use. It does everything that must people will need it to do, and does it exceptionally well with its visually appealing, speed-of-light interface and intuitive controls. Striking the perfect balance between professional UI design tools and just making it work, I encourage you to think of Hostinger as not just a hosting provider but as a platform that enables you to build and host all kinds of websites (even online stores). Honourable mention for the AI support, which is surprisingly decent (human support not so much). All-in-all, more website builders like this please.
Previously a design blog editor at Toptal and SitePoint, and before that a freelance product/UX designer and web developer for several years, Daniel Schwarz now advocates for better UX design alongside industry leaders such as InVision, Adobe, Net Magazine, and more. In his free time, Daniel loves gaming, café culture and Wikipedia, and also travels perpetually when there isn’t a pandemic.
