Last week, we walked you through key questions to help you determine if your business needs a website. If you read that post and decided that you do need a website, you’re in the right place!
In this post, we’re going to help you choose the right website builder for your business. A website builder is a software tool that helps you build, design and edit your website, many website builders also help get your website online once it’s built. There are plenty of comparison articles about the most popular website builders, so today we’re going to focus on how you should be evaluating these tools, and we’ll give you some of our recommendations for common use cases.
Before you look into any website builders, create a mockup of your future website. We recommend sketching out your vision for your website’s homepage on a piece of paper, or you can also write up an outline or list of elements you want to include on your website. As you evaluate different tools, you’ll use this mockup to determine which website builder will be able to bring your website to life.
Your mockup will help you determine what features you need in a website builder. A feature is just a specific capability or functionality that one of these tools offers.
When you look at your mockup, you should be able to break down your future website into different elements, such as:
As you go through these elements, decide which ones you need to have on your website and which ones would be nice to have. This will help you quickly rule out website builders that can’t provide your “need-to-have” features. For example, if you’re selling a physical product online, you’ll need to have an e-commerce functionality in order for customers to complete a transaction on your website, which means you will need to pick a website builder that offers this feature.
To figure out if a website builder offers the specific feature you need, you can check their “Features” page, or search for “does (website builder name) have (feature)” .
Most website builders offer a ton of features now, but some still require integrations, or link, with other tools for certain features to work. For instance, this website (thecultivatemethod.com) was built in Webflow, but Webflow’s e-commerce functionality doesn’t support digital products, so we’ve integrated it with Gumroad, a digital product selling platform. Another example is if you want your website builder to also help you manage your emails. Some website builders offer that capability built-in, while others integrate with popular email platforms like Mailchimp, Klaviyo and ConvertKit.
When you look at website builders’ features, make sure you decide whether you prefer an “all-in-one” option, where there are little to no integrations required, or a website builder that is customizable depending on which integrations you choose.
Websites can be low-cost to create and manage, but there can also be higher costs associated with this process. You need to decide how much money you are willing to spend on your business’ website, both to get it online (upfront costs) and keep it online (ongoing costs). Pricing for website builders can range from free to a couple hundred bucks a month and is generally listed on their websites. We’ve found the majority of average pricing plans are under $20 a month.
Aside from paying for a website builder, you will also have to pay for:
Most website builders now offer bundles, where they buy a domain name and host your website for you, for one flat fee. However, you may want to see if it’s cheaper to pay for these services separately or if you can get better service from other specialized domain name or hosting providers.
Don’t forget: many tools offer discounts when you pay annually, instead of monthly, and you should always check to see if there are any promotions or coupon codes available before signing up.
When considering cost, you will also want to factor in the time and energy you will need to put into your website. Decide how much or how little time you will have to dedicate to upkeep and updates each month or quarter. If you don’t have much time, do you have the resources to hire an agency or freelancer to help you? If you don’t, make sure you prioritize finding a website builder that is easy to manage and includes automatic software updates.
The last major consideration you should make is often overlooked, but extremely important: you want to consider what kind of support you want and prefer from your website builder. If you are building a website for the first time, or not technically savvy with maintenance, you will probably need help at some point. Even customizing a template on the most “foolproof” and “easy-to-use” website builder may cause you some frustration, and a good support option can help, which is why you should decide what kind of support you would be comfortable with before you run into any issues.
Most website builders offer a tiered level of support, meaning the more money you pay them, the more high-touch support options you get. These options generally look like this:
If you decide you may need more hand holding or support than is offered by a website builder, you may consider hiring an outside agency or freelancer, too.
Some businesses have very similar requirements for their websites, so we wanted to share our recommendations for the most common use cases we’ve encountered. We recommend using this list as a starting point and doing more research to evaluate if a particular website builder is right for your business, and before you pay for any website builder, see if you can use a free trial to play around and compare their tool with any other options you’re considering.
*We are not affiliated with any of these website builders and we do not earn any money from any of these links. For transparency, we wanted to share that this website (thecultivatemethod.com) is hosted on Webflow via a paid plan and we have highly enjoyed our experience with the tool and their support team.
If you have a services-based business, for instance:
You may just need a simple landing page with text, photos and a contact us form. Squarespace is one of the easiest tools to use because they offer plenty of templates that meet these requirements. Many templates also allow you to create multiple pages where you can showcase your portfolio, previous work or testimonials from happy customers.
If you sell physical products that need to be ordered (or pre-ordered) and shipped to a customer, such as:
You will need a website builder with built-in e-commerce functionality. If you don’t want to list your products on a platform like Amazon Marketplace, eBay or Etsy, or you want to have a separate shop on your domain, Shopify is a solid choice. They are well known for their integrations with payment processors and shipping companies, and optimize most of their features for e-commerce businesses.
If you run a restaurant and want to build your own website, then Squarespace or Wix may be a good choice for you. Both options have plenty of restaurant-focused templates for you to choose from and customize, and Squarespace even offers the option to embed reservation platforms like OpenTable (click here for how to) in your website. Both platforms offer their own scheduling and ordering options as well, in case you want to avoid ordering platforms like GrubHub, Uber Eats, Postmates and Doordash:
Squarespace:
Wix:
A runner up in this category is Square, which started out by offering an easy-to-use point of sale (POS) system and now offers an additional online store capability. If you already use their POS system, they make it easy to make your menu customer-facing for online ordering.
If you create written content online, like a blog or other publication, Webflow is our recommendation. It offers plenty of free and low-cost blog templates, strong customization capabilities and control over your SEO settings, which is important for ensuring customers can find your content.
The platform offers a strong content management system (CMS) capability, so you can create content templates and easily fill them in each time you need to schedule a post. You can also set up your website to populate dynamic content, like your latest posts or posts in a specific category, on your blog’s front page or in a section of another page.
One notable benefit is that if you choose to switch website builders later, you can easily export your content from Webflow, too.
WordPress offers one of the most popular website builders and content management systems in the world and claims to power 38% of the world’s websites. The reason so many websites use the WordPress platform is because it is highly customizable. There are thousands of free and paid themes that have been built for WordPress over the years and many businesses who contract with an agency or freelancer to build a custom website will end up with a WordPress site.
WordPress offers 2 options:
We find that most businesses don’t necessarily need WordPress’ level of flexibility or customization on their websites, and that oftentimes WordPress can be confusing for beginners to navigate. We’re relatively well-versed in WordPress and have used it off and on for years, and still get confused! However, if you have the time, money and energy to put into it, WordPress can produce a great result for your business.
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Ada Chen
Ada Chen
