we’re gonna be talking about the top Website Builders available to you for building your website. Exactly what these web builders are capable of as well as what some of the biggest drawbacks are so that you can choose what works best for you. Creating a website can be a daunting task for beginners, especially if you don’t have any coding skills or experience. Fortunately, there are many website builders available that can help you design and launch your own site with ease. Website builders are online platforms that allow you to create websites without writing any code.
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They usually have drag-and-drop features, pre-made templates, and various tools and integrations to customize your site. However, not all website builders are created equal. Some are more suitable for beginners than others, depending on your needs, budget, and preferences. In this article, we will review the best website builders for beginners in 2023, based on our extensive research and testing. We will compare their pros and cons, pricing, features, and design options. By the end of this article, you will be able to choose the best website builder for your project and start creating your own website in minutes.
1. Squarespace:
Squarespace is a website-building platform that’s ideal for beginners because of its flexibility and ease of use. Its streamlined UI is very intuitive and user-friendly. It doesn’t require coding skills and offers a ton of beautiful templates as well. Whether you’re a small business owner, an artist, or a blogger, Squarespace helps you create professional-looking websites without the hassle because they’re basically a one-stop shop for building a website.
Most of the web builders on this list are all gonna be all-in-one web builders which basically means that you can purchase a domain name, your hosting and build your website all in one place. Now Squarespace provides reliable hosting and customer support making it really easy to get started and to grow your online presence. With all of those introductions out of the way, let’s go ahead and talk about the benefits and drawbacks of Squarespace.
Probably Squarespace’s biggest strength is simplicity. It’s incredibly intuitive and so easy to use that an absolute beginner could probably learn it in a day or two and then get their website up and running after using a template and then make it work. They have an incredibly large library of templates that you can use so that you can get something started without having to do a whole bunch of work. The Squarespace templates are some of our favorite templates out there compared to other web builders.
They’re just very modern and minimalistic and they look really clean and neat. After you choose a template, you’ll have a menu on the left-hand side where you can add things to your website. But if you already like how your site is and you just wanna make changes to the pictures and text, you can click on the edit button in the top left corner and start making changes inside of their web builder.
Not only is this already one of the easiest page builders to use, but they also include an assistant over here on the right-hand side to walk you through any changes that you might need to make to the website in order to customize it to make it yours. But that was a really nice feature to have for beginners. The clean web builder interface. When you enter into the editor, you don’t have a bunch of menus all over the place.
You basically get a full-screen preview of your website the whole time that you’re editing. Whether you wanna edit a heading or a button, all you gotta do is just click on it and then click on the pencil icon and you can make changes as you need without getting a whole bunch of giant clunky menus appearing, taking up half the screen. We really liked this minimalistic approach.
If you ever wanna add a block, you can literally just click on the add block button in the top left corner and add whatever you want to your website. Overall, for simple websites, this is the perfect page builder option for beginners who don’t wanna waste too much time. Unfortunately, Squarespace doesn’t offer a free plan. However, they make up for it with a 14-day free trial that you don’t even have to add anything. You can literally just create your account and then start using Squarespace to find out if you actually like it or not. So definitely recommend giving it a try.
2. Wix:
Wix is probably Squarespace’s biggest competitor. After using both of these software, we have got to say that personally, I really enjoyed using Wix a lot more than I did Squarespace. Their web builder just felt way more powerful and customizable than Squarespace, even though they’re pretty much the same thing. Their UI just felt way cleaner and updated and more tech-savvy for some reason, which we appreciate a lot. I will say that Wix definitely has a bit more of a learning curve than Squarespace.
Not too much, but it’s there. Obviously, Squarespace’s biggest advantage is simplicity. On the other hand, Wix is a bit more complicated, but still just as easy to learn, if that makes any sense. It gives you a lot of creative freedom and it’s just much more fun to use in my personal opinion. Now I was incredibly impressed with the building process for Wix. So first off, when you first get to their website, create an account, and say you want to get started, they ask you what kind of website you want to build so that you can further customize your web-building experience.
After you explain what kind of website you want to build, they’re going to ask you what apps you want to install onto your website before you even get started. And it’s really simple and easy to understand. This was the most impressive part for me. we could choose to add a bookings app, a portfolio, a live chat, and anything else that I wanted to onto my website. After that, we just go to my dashboard and click on the design site.
Now you get to decide if you want to let Wix build the website for you, where it will proceed to ask you to upload any files on what you want to be included on your website, as well as your business and information about it and a whole bunch of other questions, which almost gets overwhelming, but it’s still pretty cool. It’ll ask you to upload pictures, update personal information, choose a theme, give contact information, give an outline, a template that you get to choose, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
And what they’re going to do is input all of that Information that you just gave it and fully build a website for you. It basically feels like a web designer just built it for you. But to be honest the website didn’t look that great in my personal opinion Yeah, it’s cool that it was built for you But we could do better on the other hand you could choose to design the website using a template instead. If you choose to use one of their templates, personally I wasn’t that impressed with the design styles of their templates.
You can select to use AI to fill your website with text content as well as a bunch of pretty cool stuff and then once you finally get your website. Wix has their booking app installed on my website and a live chat button in the bottom corner. It was flawlessly integrated. Wix is definitely a couple more degrees harder to learn than Squarespace. But it’s so cool how fast you can build complex websites with Wix comparatively easier than doing it with other builders. So if that makes any sense, that’s why we like Wix a little bit more.
3. Website Builders Hostinger:
Hostingers website builder is an incredibly user-friendly tool For beginning websites the hostinger builder is just as simple and easy to understand as Squarespace’s web builder It might even be a little bit more intuitive, but that’s a personal opinion What sets hostingers web builder apart is its AI integration after you purchase your domain name and hosting through hostinger You’ll automatically be placed into an easy setup process where you can choose to build your website And if you want to use their AI website builder, or if you want to use templates hostingers templates are really modern and Wix’s templates a little better than Squarespace’s templates as well.
They’ve got a large variety of templates that you can use completely for free On the other hand if you want to choose to build your website using AI It’s similar to having Wix build the website for you But instead of being interrogated with all those questions like Wix did hostingers just gonna ask you one AI prompt Which is a much better process if you’re the whole goal is trying to build a website for someone They want to make it easy and simple and fast and not be interrogated.
So all you have to do is enter your brand name the type of website that you’re gonna try to build and then enter In one short AI description of your business so that hostingers AI can decide what text content and images to place in your website for you After AI is done building a website for you You have three different AI built templates that you can choose from and you can choose the style options for your color and fonts as well As add additional pages to your site after AI has built it for you.
After you have your website built either through AI or a template you can choose to use hostingers website builder Which is just as simple and easy to use as Squarespace’s builder To build your website personally, hostinger web builder a little bit more than Squarespace It just felt more simple and intuitive than the others in addition to its ease of use and AI features Hostinger also offers domain and hosting services so that you can get everything you need in one place.
Overall hostingers web builder is an excellent choice for anyone who’s trying to create a website Effortlessly with its user-friendly interface and AI integration and bundle domain and hosting services You’ll have everything that you need to make this happen Honestly, hostingers web builder is second place on my list for these reasons.
4. Webflow:
Webflow is a web design and development platform that packs a serious punch. It’s not the most beginner-friendly tool out there. It’s actually a pretty good size learning curve. The reason it’s a bit more advanced is that it offers incredible power and flexibility for creating top-notch websites similar to the other web builders. webflow has a drag-and-drop editor that lets you create websites just by dragging elements around wherever you want on the website However, unlike other builders on this list web flow doesn’t stop you at the basics.
They give you full control over layouts. But they also include pretty complex functions that you’re able to harness as well when you’re building a website. You can create a specific style of whatever element you’re working on web flow calls these classes. If you build an entire header section or a hero section like this, you can literally create one. Similar to it just by selecting the class after creating another one. In the same way, you can create a button, and then just add the new button to that class and instantly apply the preset of the previous button like this.
You can have lots of different classes of buttons so that every time add a new button on a website, apply one of my saved presets. This can be pretty handy for intermediate to advanced web designers, but it could definitely be overwhelming for beginners. So this is just one example of the power that Webflow has inside of it so that it’s providing it to you. You’ve got more complex widgets inside of Webflow than you can do in any of the other page builders. Now here’s where Webflow really shines.
It allows you to add dynamic animations and transitions as well as interactions to your website. It’s like waving a magic wand around and bringing your site to life. These advanced features give your website a really polished and professional look, but mastering them might take a little bit more time and effort. Using Webflow to build a website is like using Adobe Photoshop to just edit a picture. Literally, the sky is the limit because you have every photo editing tool under the sun.
The only limiting factor is how much you know how to do. Now Webflow does come with an impressive amount of templates that you can download for free, but what we like the most is their starters. They’ve got a portfolio starter, a business starter, and a store starter. Not only do they have a bunch of templates that you can use with a bunch of demo content, but these starters are the equivalent of a template just without the demo content.
So it feels a lot less cluttered and complicated. They also have free templates as well as paid templates so you can decide which ones you like. Long story short, Webflow is probably one of the most powerful on this list. It just comes at the cost of a significant learning curve as well. This being the case though, Webflow does have an incredible and interactive tutorial that’s built in that walks you through the basics of Webflow impressively well.
They even have courses on their website called Webflow University that teach you all of the complex features and those courses are actually very well done in my opinion. But to be honest, we assume that most of you are absolute beginners trying to find out which software you should use or what you should learn to use. That being the case, if a beginner has any reason to try and use the software to its fullest potential. You’d probably be better off just using one of the other web builders that are a lot more simple and easy to use.
5. WordPress:
Now WordPress is still to this day the most popular web builder on the entire internet. There are around 810 million websites on the internet to this day that use WordPress out of the 1.66 billion websites that there are on the internet to this day, which means that WordPress makes up like 43% of all the websites on the internet. And if you look for yourself, you’ll find that there are tons of big-name companies out there that still use WordPress to host their website. Some of them are eBay, Sony, GM, UPS, Forbes, CNN, Samsung, IBM, and the list goes on.
WordPress is trusted by millions across the globe to host their websites because of the sheer breadth of its power. Now, unlike the rest of the web builders on this list, WordPress is not an all-in-one solution because it’s a content management system. So it’s going to require you to manage some parts of your websites yourselves, like the hosting and security on your own. That being the case, though, every single hosting provider out there knows how to integrate with WordPress because of its popularity.
So hosting isn’t an issue, and the 58,000 free plugins available on WordPress’s store give you a ton of options, to say the least, for customization and security solutions. Another thing that’s really cool about WordPress is it’s completely free to use for anyone who wants to download it onto their website. All you have to do is purchase your domain name and web hosting, and then you can install WordPress onto your website.
You want to create a new website or migrate an old one. And if you create a new website, you’ll be asked if you want to use WordPress or Hostinger’s web builder. It’s pretty simple. Now, honestly, the learning curve aside, WordPress is the powerhouse of web builders by far, which is why it’s so popular. You can literally download whatever page builder inside of WordPress that you want, depending on your preferences.
And then inside of those page builders, you can still download multiple plugins to add hundreds of widgets and templates and blocks or whatever you’re looking for inside of your website. Most of them are free. You can even download multiple plugins with hundreds upon hundreds of website templates that you can use to speed up the process of building your website. You can also build e-commerce websites completely for free inside WordPress by using a plugin called WooCommerce. But that’s not even the bread and butter of WordPress.
Originally WordPress was built to be a blogging platform, which is what it’s actually made for and why it was so popular in the beginning. Its content management is top-tier. So if you’re looking to build any kind of website, WordPress has got you covered. Now WordPress is by far the strongest and most capable web builder in existence, in my opinion, and it’s completely free to use.
The only drawback is learning how to use it. Personally, WordPress is any more difficult than Webflow to learn, but it has exceptionally more freedom when it comes to customization and integration. And if learning how to use WordPress is the only thing that you’re worried about, then I’ve got you covered.
Now that we’ve talked about every single page builder on the list, now comparing them side by side, just to make it really simple for you. Squarespace is the best option for absolute beginners who don’t want to waste time learning anything too complicated and just want to get a super simple website up and running. Now Wix is a semi-better option compared to Squarespace because its interface is much more fluid and integrated and you have a bit more customization freedom with Wix.
You can also just have Wix build the website for you, which is pretty nice. A little bit more of a learning curve than Squarespace, but they also provide a better experience just overall. Hostingers website builder feels like a hybrid between Wix and Squarespace where you have all of the best features. So you can have Hostingers AI website builder generate a website for you without being interrogated as Wix does.
And then their manual builder is just as easy and intuitive as Squarespace’s builder. So it’s the best of both worlds. Now Webflow on the other hand is the most powerful out of the other previous three web builders. With great power comes great learning curves. You can get a basic understanding of how to use it on YouTube, but if you want to learn its full potential and advanced customization controls, you might have to look at investing in Webflow University.
And finally, we have WordPress, which is my personal favorite. It got a lot less of a learning curve than Webflow, but definitely more power and capability by far WordPress being the powerhouse of web builders far and wide allow you to download any plugin that you might need for whatever functionality you want. Since they’re the most popular and have been around for the longest amount of time, the list is literally infinite. So at the end of the day, you have to look at this list and keep your own personal project in mind and try and decide which one of these is best for your conditions.
