If you are the owner of any type of business, you cannot do without a website anymore. You must have a presence on the web. Of course, it can be done through Facebook and other social media platforms, but that is never enough by itself.
Your digital footprint has to begin with your own site regardless of if you have a physical brick and mortar business, an e-commerce store, or a hybrid of some sort.
The question we get asked quite often is how to build your own free website for business. It has become enormously easy with the new drag and drops editors that website builders have. To make it even more comfortable, we have narrowed down the best among them.
The Best Free Website Builders
Wix Free Website Builder
Wix has become the most loved and used free business website builder. They have almost 50 million users, and it is very suitable for hosting a business website. What are its plus points?
- Wix allows you access to hundreds of free templates. These are already optimized for SEO.
- The builder has an Artificial Design Intelligence assisted setup. Al that you need to do is answer a series of questions, and the primary site will be built for you using AI.
- You could use a capable drag and drop editor for making final touches, adding text, images, videos.
- Personalized email address and SSL certification are included in the price of the subscription, which is $29 per month.
Weebly
The major competitor of Wix is from San Francisco and carries the touch of innovation of Silicon Valley startups always possess.
It is not the most sophisticated website builder, but it is effortless to set up a website using Weebly. Back in 2006, they were one of the first companies to bring in drag and drop editor, and the maturity shows in every step. What does the best business website builder offer?
- An uncluttered editor that has all the extras you want neatly tucked away in menus.
- Fully optimized sites complete with contact forms and social media integration.
- Ecommerce plugins with advanced shopping cart features.
- Business Plan starting at $25 monthly with superb analytics dashboard showing traffic, sales, fast-moving items, and also an inventory management software.
Webnode
It has been around for more than a decade but not gained the popularity of Wix and Weebly yet. The main strength of this website builder from the Czech Republic is that it offers seamless support for a multilingual site.
With more and more businesses catering to a global clientele, it is essential to have support in many languages, and Webnode does it perfectly. What are its features?
- Create a site in over 20 different languages.
- Create a shopping cart with local address and currency in check out form.
- The editor makes it easy to create filters based on products, price, colour, and other variations.
- Priced between $4-20, its only drawback is that you have no access to the HTML code.
Strikingly
Strikingly is a website builder based out of China that is making rapid strides. It offers something quite unique – a website in 15 minutes but with a single page layout.
- Strikingly editor is the last word in simplicity. Even if you have no idea of technology beyond writing emails, you will find it easy to use.
- You can change from one template to another without losing the content. This cannot be done on most website builders.
- The Pro Plan priced at $16 allows you to remove advertisements and install third-party plugins.
- Strikingly is not meant for those who wish to have a full-fledged website but rather for those who seek to provide information such as doctors and local businesses.
Ecwid
Ecwid is a specialized best free business website builder aimed at local businesses. Started by Ruslan Fazylev, who pioneered online shopping site design with X-Cart, Ecwid is meant to be a shopping system plugin that can be added to any existing site. What are its advantages?
- Complete turnkey solution that can easily be integrated into any pre-existing site.
- The storefront can be tailored to suit your needs, and you have total access to HTML code.
- Possible to add a catalogue and populate it with product pages.
- Each page has its own meta description and tags making it possible to extract maximum SEO juice.
- Unsuitable for large stores, and any backup has to be done by your primary site host.
Jimdo
Jimdo stresses on how simple it is to use it. You don’t get hundreds of templates and thousands of plugins.
- Jimdo gives you an innovative AI-based editor that is known as Dolphin that it claims can create a fully functioning multi-page site in an hour.
- Its biggest attraction is that it is really cheap. The cheapest plan is $8 and the most expensive $24 per month. That is easily the most affordable e-commerce solution.
- E-commerce plugin that allows inventory management, abandoned shopping cart recovery, product page optimization at a click.
- You also get unlimited storage space on the higher-priced plans and several email addresses.
SITE123
Site123 also takes a question and answer based approach to setting up a website. It cannot create a complex site with multi-layered navigation, but it is a quick and efficient business website builder. What are its best features?
- It allows you to launch a site quickly.
- A complete ecommerce solution is available.
- Well designed and sleek templates make a visually appealing site in very little time.
- Perfect for small businesses that have a hybrid model of an online and physical store.
- The easiest to use multi-page website builder.
Bookmark
Bookmark is one of the newer kids on the block and rapidly gaining a foothold in the ADI based website market. You can sign up for the service using Google or Facebook, and the company claims that you can build a site in 2 minutes. That is much faster than the 15 minutes claimed advertised by some others.
- Its uniqueness lies in its responsive templates and stylish design.
- The AI-based assistant shows how different elements containing text and images can be arranged and even fills them with samples.
- The entire process is highly intuitive, and you can tweak the font and colour to suit your taste.
- Bookmark allows you to choose and use from its library of over a million stock images.
Ucraft
Ucraft is a brand new service that launched in 2015 and provided mobile-optimized sites and superb looking templates. An easy to use WYSIWYG editor allows you to set up a website with maximum ease. Let us take a close look at its advantages.
- The editor has a video tutorial for those who have never built a site before.
- There are several business categories that have hundreds of templates available.
- There is blog functionality that is useful for hosting content aimed at SEO.
- Supports product recommendations carousel through Ajax code.
- Pricing starts at $10 for Pro plan and goes up to $39 a month for e-store options using the BigCommerce platform.
Webstarts
A reliable website builder that also has a steep learning curve, Webstarts is a powerful tool in the hands of an experienced developer.
The editor has lots of options that may be daunting to someone unused to such a layout.
- Equipped with a full-featured image editor that can rotate, crop, and resize images as well as name them correctly for alt-tag.
- Easy to integrate images from facebook into the site. There is a highly appealing gallery section.
- Built-in SEO optimization and the ability to add Google Analytics makes it easy to rank the site quite high.
- Straightforward small e-commerce store integration is possible but not capable of providing comprehensive e-commerce solutions.
Conclusion
Your website is your own personal channel to broadcast to the world your products, services, price, availability, and above all, customer testimonials. Most importantly, it is nearly free since the only recurring cost you incur is monthly hosting plan charges.
All of the above website builders are good. But some are definitely more popular since they have been around for long and have a matured product.
Select something that suits your niche and use the knowledge base to build yourself a stunning business website with minimal effort.
Written by Rajiv. He is writing content for Serpwizz.com. You’ll find me playing with my dog Gizmo in between copious cups of coffee and even the odd donut or three 😛