The 5 Best Website Builders for Small Businesses in 2024

If you’re a small business, selecting the best website builder for your team can be a daunting task, especially considering the number of options available and the drastic price differences between them.

Among the top contenders, Wix really stands out as the website builder that’s best placed to keep up with the demands of a rapidly-growing, ever-evolving small business. Wix combines a huge range of templates, on-page components that will enhance the customer experience, built-in SEO tools to get your site ranking highly, and ecommerce features you need to run a diverse product inventory.

I’ve tested a range of website builders that claim to be suitable for small businesses, and Wix certainly isn’t the only option. For example, Square Online can be set up quickly and has quite an extensive free plan, while Shopify has the widest range of ecommerce features available and an AI tool that can write product descriptions for you.

If you don’t have time to read our reviews, you can just use our 1-minute website builder comparison quiz, which will sort providers based on your business’s size, goals, and needs. All you have to do is answer four questions and we’ll provide you with relevant, research-backed recommendations.

In this guide:

• What to Look For in a Website Builder
• Best Website Builders for Small Businesses
• Are Free Website Builders Worth it?
• How to Choose a Website Builder
• Will You Own the Website You Create?
• How We Test Website Builders
• Our Final Verdict
• Frequently Asked Questions

What Is the Best Website Builder for Small Businesses?

According to our research, the best website builder for small businesses is Wix. In our most recent tests, Wix scored 4.8/5 overall, because it’s affordable, intuitive, easy to use, and packed with hundreds of customizable templates — but, there are many website builders on the market.

Through testing, our researchers found that while every website builder will claim to do the same thing — build the site of your dreams – fast, quick, and on the cheap), not all website builders were cut out for the demands of a modern business. The best website builders we list below, however, were. In this review, we explain why.

1. Wix — Best for small businesses overall
2. Squarespace — Best for growing businesses
3. Shopify – Best for selling online 
4. Hostinger — Best for uptime reliability + low starting price
5. Square Online — Best for selling online for free

1. Wix for Small Businesses

Best for small businesses overall

Our top pick, Wix is an incredibly powerful website builder platform, packed with 800+ customizable templates, sophisticated features, and advanced business tools, so it should come as no surprise that it scores so highly in our independent testing.

What Wix does well

Well, first up, Wix has a template for almost every type of website you can think of – as we just said, there are over 800 in total, which is the biggest selection we’ve found on the market.

Picking a template in Wix is easy because they’re so many of them, and they’re of such high quality.

In comparison to other website builders like Hostinger, Wix offers a lot of value for small businesses across the board, with one of the most intuitive, feature-rich platforms on the market. Wix scores 4.6/5 for website features and an impressive 4.5/5 for help & support services – 24/7 phone support is available, as well as support via social media and live chat.

Most impressively, Wix is full of useful features that most other providers don’t offer. One is automation – Wix will let you set triggers for actions – like sending an email – when certain events take place on your site. Cheaper and less functional providers like Square Online don’t offer this sort of thing, so while you might pay a little more for Wix, it’s definitely worth it.

I created an automation that will send an abandoned cart email reminder to customers. Image: Tech.co testing

Wix has an AI site generator as well as Wix ADI, an artificial intelligence design platform that helps speed up the website process. After I generated a basic site, I found the AI text generator really useful for building out my site content. It has a drop-down menu for every type of copy you’d typically find on a website, like product descriptions or FAQs.

I used Wix’s AI text generator to create copy for my site quickly. It wasn’t perfect the first time round, but easier than starting from nothing. Image: Tech.co testing

The onboarding experience for Wix is also very straightforward, making it perfect for businesses with limited back-end knowledge or tech capability. London-based restaurant and Wix awards finalists The Five Fields found Wix to be super intuitive – taking advantage of its many useful business features, in the process.

“We can easily update the images with each season to give it a fresh look as well as the daily changing menu. The ability to distribute newsletters via Wix email marketing is a great benefit. The myriad of analytics available can be a bit of a rabbit-hole, but incredibly enlightening!” explains Matthew Widdowson, General Manager at the Five Fields Restaurant.

Wix can cater to all businesses though – not just ones interested in appealing to customers in their local victiny. This includes an extensive translation functionality, which makes it the perfect website builder for businesses looking to grow, diversify, and manage their business with ease.

When I wasn’t sure what to do next, I used Wix’s easy-to-access SEO guides and tips to optimize my site for Google even further. Image: Tech.co testing

Wix’s SEO tool-kit is particularly strong, thanks to its partnership with Semrush which gives users access to over 21 billion keywords, and its revised search optimization settings give businesses greater control over their SEO data. Wix scores 5/5 for SEO and was our best website builder for SEO and optimizing your business for Google. And with almost 92% of all web traffic going through Google, prioritizing SEO is a safe bet.

Check out our in-depth Wix review for more information

What Wix needs to improve

Wix doesn’t have many points of improvement, but there are still some to be aware of. For example, Shopify offers a POS app and its transaction fees are 2% on the basic plan, and 1% on all other plans. Wix takes 2.6% on all of its plans, so there are cheaper options out there if you already have a physical store and want to build an online counterpart.

Another big downside is that there’s only unlimited storage space on the Business Elite plan. It’s not that the other plans have small amounts of memory – the Core plan has 50GB – but if you plan to include a lot of rich media on your websites (like video tutorials or product reviews) you might find you’re run out of storage sooner thank you think.

Wix won’t be the best fit for every business – so scroll down to discover our other recommendations or read our in-depth summary of the best Wix alternatives.

Wix pricing

Wix pricing start at $16 per month, but you’ll have to pay at least $27 per month if you want ecommerce functionality, while will allow you to create an online store.

These plans are a tad pricey, but Wix still managed to attain a 3.6/5 for value for money — users will pay more for Wix than they will for Hostinger, for example, but you get a much vaster array of useful features. Plus, the website builder offers a solid free plan that can get you started, which obviously gave it a big boost.

For the plans in the below table, please note that website hosting is included in every plan, as is the case for pretty much all web builder products. A domain is also included for every plan.

Check out our in-depth guide to Wix pricing for more information

2. Squarespace for Small Business

Best for growing businesses

Priding itself on its aesthetic appeal, Squarespace offers the best-looking website builder templates on the market hands down. While Squarespace only offers 168 templates — which is a little weak in comparison to Wix and its extensive offering — they’re all very eye-catching.

What Squarespace does well

During a recent group testing sprint, Squarespace was the builder most members of the group said they’d recommend to a friend. In fact, it scores 4.7/5 for user experience, higher than Wix. Squarespace strikes a fine balance between being user-friendly, while still having lots of features and customization opportunities.

If creating a highly unique website is important to you, check out our guide to the most customizable website builders.

I loved the range of templates on offer from Squarespace – it might have less than Wix, but they’re just so stylish. Image: Tech.co testing

Squarespace has a decent range customer support options, as both providers offer email and phone-based support, which is great to have on hand if you find yourself experiencing downtime during peak trading hours. There’s also a wide range of SEO tools including best practice prompts and keyword support.

Square is a great option for growing businesses that want to expand their customer reach. If you’re using Squarespace version 7.1 – the most recent version of Squarespace – you can use the built-in Weglot integration to create a multilingual site, and there’s no limit to how many items you can store in your inventory.

On top of this, Squarespace offers an incredibly robust feature catalog, including tools for email and social marketing, which are crucial if you want to increase your recurring visitor rate. The email designer is the best I’ve come across during my time testing websites:

An email marketing email I created with Squarespace. Image: Tech.co testing

There’s also an in-depth analytics board that will help you get a handle on how users are interacting with your site, which paired with the platform’s design tools, ensure you can optimize the user experience.

Plus, Squarespace offers a much more comprehensive knowledge center than solutions like WordPress and Square Online, allowing users to solve problems and learn about the platform to an extensive degree.

Read our guide to Squarespace vs WordPress to learn more about how these tools compare

What Squarespace needs to improve

While Squarespace has the most impressive-looking templates, the same can’t be said for its design functionality. It only scores 3.6/5 overall – I found the drag-and-drop functionality a little more limiting than some other providers on this list that deploy a similar feature. That won’t matter too much to most users, but you might find it a little frustrating if you have a very specific idea of what you want in mind.

Squarespace also lost marks for its AI tool, which just isn’t as impressive as what’s on offer from the likes of Wix. You can build an entire website in seconds with Wix’s AI site generator, and all you need to do is type out a couple of prompts. Squarespace won’t let you do this, so if you want to get up and running quickly, I’d look elsewhere.

I was also surprised that Squarespace performed so poorly on our site speed tests, scoring just 2/5 – turns out, that a powerful, hefty feature catalog comes at a cost. Site speed is a vital component of SEO – if your site is slow it won’t be useful to users, so Google is unlikely to rank it highly.

Squarespace pricing

Squarespace pricing plans include two standard website builder plans — Personal and Business — as well as two ecommerce plans, which include a Basic and Advanced plan. All Squarespace plans include hosting, a one-year domain, 24/7 support, plus unlimited storage and bandwidth.

The Personal plan will cost you $16 per month and comes with your standard features for getting a site live, like a custom domain and SSL security certificate. The Business plan costs $23 per month and is, as you can guess, aimed at small businesses, allowing them more marketing features to attract users and analytics to see how you’re doing.

The ecommerce plans in Squarespace pricing, however, add a bit more — the ability to sell and market products. The Basic plan only costs $27 per month and allows you to sell unlimited products with a few simple features. The Advanced plan costs $49 per month, and adds more complex features, like abandoned cart recovery and subscriptions, while giving you access to commerce APIs.

Find out more in our full Squarespace for Ecommerce review

For the plans in the below table, please note that website hosting is included in every plan, and a domain is included in every one-year contract.

3. Shopify for Small Businesses

Best for small businesses selling online for the first time

Shopify is one of our top picks for ecommerce website builders, scoring 4.2/5 overall according to our website builder testing criteria. When it comes to sales and marketing features, Shopify is in a league of its own, and its ease of use makes it especially helpful for small businesses.

What Shopify does well

If you’re looking to build a high-quality website that shifts stock quickly, Shopify should be on your radar. Like Wix, Shopify also offers a broad range of templates, or ‘themes’ to build your site upon, created by its community of independent designers.

Shopify is an ecommerce-focused website builder, so I wasn’t surprised to find that the setup process is primarily centered around the products you’re going to sell rather than your actual web design. In fact, compared to Wix and Squarespace, design functionality is quite limited (more on this later).

Shopify also offers one of the most advanced stock management tools, meaning that the platform can cater to more complex inventories as your small business begins to grow. What’s more, Shopify’s POS software ensures you can sell online and in-person and constantly keep your inventory up-to-date.

I found adding an categorizing inventory items in Shopify easy enough. Image: Tech.co testing

While its design is more restrictive than other platforms on this list (more on this later), Shopify does offer a wealth of apps that make transitioning to selling online for the first time simple and effective. For example, the Cart Whisper app will send pop-ups to users if they’re about to exit – but there are hundreds of apps for your site.

The platform offers powerful multi-channel integrations with major platforms like Amazon, eBay, and Instagram, allowing small businesses to reach their customers, wherever they are. Shopify’s industry-leading reporting features also make it easy for users to track and analyze sales, helping businesses to gain an edge in an increasingly competitive landscape.

I generated multiple product descriptions using Shopify’s Magic tool. Image: Tech.co testing

Another standout Shopify feature is Shopify Magic, the company’s powerful AI tool which is integrated deeply into its website builder so it can be called upon to complete different tasks, such as generating product descriptions, as well as things like email subject lines and image adjustment. Aside from Wix’s suite of AI tools, it’s probably the most advanced on the market.

What Shopify needs to improve

Despite Shopify’s strengths — of which there are many — the platform is slightly pricier than its rivals. This is what prevents it from appearing any higher on our list.

Of course, you’re likely to make more money with Shopify due to its focus on selling products – but now website builders like Wix and Squarespace offer lots of ecommerce features – and often for cheaper. This makes Shopify’s pricing less justifiable than it would have been a few years ago, when ecommerce website builders were a lot more primitive.

The other key downside I found when using Shopify is the design functionality – it only scores 3.2/5. Because it’s designed to help people set up an online store – which is no easy task – it feels like the design has been relegated to a secondary consideration.

Shopify pricing

Shopify offers four pricing plans — Basic, Advanced, Shopify and Plus.

The Basic plan retails for $29 per month. It allows for two staff accounts and up to four inventory locations, making it suitable for smaller businesses just starting out. The plan doesn’t offer the same hardware support available on more premium plans and prevents international domains.

The confusingly named Shopify plan costs $79 per month. Subscribers will be eligible for an 88% shipping and insurance discount rather than the 77% discount available to all Basic plan users, plus five additional staff accounts. There are also slightly lower transaction fees for Shopify payments and also third-party payment apps.

From left to right: The transaction fee rates for Shopify’s Basic, Shopify, Advanced, and Enterprise plans. Image: Tech.co testing

The Shopify Advanced is available for $299 per month, and it includes all the features you need to run a slick, profitable ecommerce website, including sophisticated reporting, custom reports, and sales tracking tools. Users of this tier also benefit from slightly smaller transaction fees and credit card rates, making it suitable for small businesses on the verge of massive growth.

Shopify has also recently added the Shopify Plus plan, which costs a staggering $2000 per month, and requires a year-long subscription, so you’ll need to have a hefty $24,000 ready to go if you want this plan. Suffice to say, it’s reserved for enterprise-level organizations, so small businesses don’t need to worry about it.

Check out our complete guide to Shopify pricing for more information

4. Hostinger for Small Businesses

Best for beginners

Hostinger is a great website builder for small businesses with admittedly limited tech capabilities, making up for it with an extremely reliable and very simple to set up website builder, scoring 3.9/5 for ease of use in our research.

It provides a stripped-down, easy-to-use platform with simple grid-based templates that any member of your team will be able to pick up with ease. Plus, its AI web builder generates copy and images quickly and effectively, which is a huge time-saver when building a website.

Check out our AI website builder guide for more information

What Hostinger does well

Hostinger has made significant improvements since our 2023 tests, many around the user experience. I found the platform a lot less clunky than when I tested it last year, and the setup process felt significantly quicker too. In fact, I was able to generate a website in just three steps, which took less than a minute to complete.

Hostinger seems to have prioritized developing and integrating AI into the platform than it has developing fundamental website features, which is why it lags a bit behind Wix. For example, it’s missing SEO tools like keyword support that a lot of competitors now provide, yet it’s got an AI logo and text generator.

A logo I used on one of my website’s, create by Hostinger’s AI logo generator. Image: Tech.co testing

The most impressive AI feature is definitely the heat mapping tool, which will show you which parts of your site users are clicking on. This kind of functionality is something that some businesses pay a lot of money for and I like the way it gave me the freedom to actually make changes based on real data, rather than just what I thought looked good.

Hostinger’s heatmapping tool meant I could alter my design to be more amenable to website visitors. Image: Tech.co testing

What Hostinger needs to improve

However, Hostinger only netted a 3.6/5 overall rating on our final tests. When I used the platform, I found it noticeably more restrictive than Wix in several areas, most notably design functionality and ecommerce options. Hostinger’s 2.7/5 score for features was the lowest score achieved by any website builder we’ve tested for this assessment category.

One big downside is that Hostinger doesn’t integrate with any marketplaces. Other providers, like Square Online, can be connected up to Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Walmart, Google Shopping, and Wish, as well as several others. There’s also no way to integrate with a POS system which will make it a less attractive option for businesses that already have physical stores.

To make matters worse, the website builder doesn’t have an app store, so you’ll be stuck with the basics when it comes to building your website. Customization is understandably limited, but at this price, you can’t expect too much.

Check out our Hostinger vs Wix comparison guide for more info

Hostinger pricing

Outside of the assorted free plans on this list, Hostinger offers the most affordable website builder plan on this list. The premium website builder plan costs $11.99 per month, which is already pretty low. On top of this, there’s also now a business website builder plan, which costs $13.99 per month.

However, it’s possible to get Hostinger even cheaper. The website builder is now offering three free months and an impressively low price of $2.99 per month for all users (although you can get up to 78% off by using the code TECH at checkout), or $3.99 per month for the business website builder plan.

The premium will cost $7.99 per month when you renew after the first three months and the business plan costs $8.99 per month, but that’s still an incredible deal compared to other options on this list.

With only two pricing plans, Hostinger makes it as easy as possible to set up a website, with minimal customization options. However, the premium plan is limited. There are no AI tools aside from the initial builder, and no ecommerce features at all. Even the business plan is missing some key features, most importantly an app store, but if speed, ease of use, and affordability are important to you, Hostinger is likely your best bet.

Check out our Hostinger review for more information

5. Square Online

Best free ecommerce builder

Square Online is an ecommerce website builder created by POS software provider Square. The provider offers an excellent free plan with no limit on how many products or items you can upload to your website. However, it’s design functionality is limited compared to Wix.

What Square Online does well

Square Online has a range of ecommerce features to go with its limitless inventory. There are also lots of basic ecommerce features such as pick up/click and collect facilitation and lead capture forms.

However, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan if you’d like the product review feature or item badges, which let customers know what’s on sale or currently dicsounted

Square Online will suit small teams or solo users looking to begin their journey into the world of ecommerce. Considering the price, it offers a lot of features. You can accept payments via Apple, Google, and Square Pay on all of the provider’s plans, and it’s easy to sync up your Square Online site with your social media pages.

However, it’ll also be a good choice if you want an online storefront for your existing physical store – you can create multiple Square Online sites, even on the free plan, and assign products to different physical locations. The seamless integration with Square POS, on the other hand, makes it a top contender for hospitality businesses.

Square has also recently released a range of AI features to streamline the website-building process, including an AI-assisted copy generator, AI message suggestions for communicating with buyers, and an AI background photo editor to improve the quality of site images.

What Square Online needs to improve

Square Online is one of the few major website and ecommerce builders that has no AI capabilities. Wix has loads that aid with design functionalities, like Wix ADI, while Shopify’s “Magic” tool can assist with things like writing product descriptions. With Square Online, however, you’ll be doing everything yourself.

Another place where Square could improve is its design functionality. Compared to Wix and Squarespace, there are very few options – you don’t even really get website templates, but “styles” instead. It’s not that the software is clunky, it’s just there isn’t much to adjust.

I found Square Online’s editor quite limiting – there weren’t many ways to display components like social media fees. Image: Tech.co testing

While Square Online’s phone-based support is great to have if you’re a free plan user (some free plans don’t even provide phone support), paid plan users are not afforded 24/7, round-the-clock support that’s offered by the likes of Wix. I’d like to see Square Online increase its available customer support hours soon.

Square Online pricing

As we’ve covered, Square Online has a free plan, as well as a Plus plan that retails at $29 per month, and a Premium plan on offer for $79 per month.

While the free plan is excellent value for money considering you’ll be able to build a working store for absolutely nothing. A lot of providers, like WordPress, don’t offer any ecommerce features on their free plans at all.

The paid plans add advanced customization and controls, including the ability to add videos and social media content to your webpages, as well as embed custom code. If you want to make your online store your own, we’d recommend the upgrade as the free plan is quite restrictive in this sense.

Are Free Website Builders Worth it?

Although there are some genuinely useful free website builders, like Square Online, you’ll be better off with an upgrade if you want to sell a wide range of products, market them in targeted ways, and make the design your own.

Most free website builders have limited features, so you’re always going to end up missing something. For example, Square Online’s free plan has very few order and fulfillment features. It’s also common for website builders to lock their SEO support features away on their paid plans, which are crucial to ensuring your site is visible to users searching for your products, as well as the analytics tools you’ll need to make data-driven improvements.

Site123 is a basic, free website builder – but as you can see, half of its features aren’t accessible. Image: Tech.co testing

But perhaps the biggest issue is that lots of free plans force you to display ads for the provider on your site, and some make you keep their name in your URL. In this way, many free sites make you a walking advertisement for the website builder itself.

Do You Own Your Own Website?

Although all website builders will have slightly different rules, if you’re a paid plan user and you’ve purchased your own custom domain (which you can do through most popular website builders), then it’s yours. Your site isn’t owned by Wix, Squarespace, or any other provider you’ve chosen to build one with.

You also own all the content on your website – but certain website builders will reserve the right to use your site and content in their promotional material. This also means that you’re exclusively responsible for all the content that appears on your site – as well as if you lose it. You can’t blame your provider in this scenario.

What to Look for in a Website Builder for Small Businesses

What you should look for in a website builder for small businesses will depend entirely on your business’ needs, but there are some features that our researchers found to be especially beneficial to small businesses. Below, we run through the most important website builder features, specifically for small businesses.

Choice of templates

First impressions count, and if your website looks great, customers are more likely to think your business is great, too. This means you’ll need to find a builder with a good range of template designs, and hopefully ones that are tailored to the industry you’re working in.

Squarespace is inarguably one of the best on this front, providing plenty of stunning templates that will be sure to impress any visitor. Experts and users agree that Squarespace not only has a lot of great templates, but that they also look beautiful compared to other options. Still, with over 800+ website templates to choose from, Wix is also a valuable option.

Ecommerce options

If your business sells products, you’ll need an ecommerce function. Most website builders will allow you to sell products on the website you’re building, although not typically with every plan. Make sure you’re getting set up with an ecommerce-capable pricing plan before moving forward.

The Wix ecommerce package is especially good for small businesses because it’s great value for money, but you’ll have to do a fair amount of manual setup. Website builders often add fees per transaction on cheaper ecommerce plans — if you’re selling in high volumes, or work on low-profit margins, you’ll want to read the small print.

Squarespace will let you send abandoned cart reminders to customers, reminding them to return to their order. Image: Tech.co testing

Tracking and analytics features

Top website builders provide numerous ways for users to better understand how their customers come to, interact with, and leave their websites – the same way you’d want to know how many people come into your store every day. Are you searching for businesses like yours on Google, or are they coming straight to your site? You can answer these questions with good analytics tools.

Crucially, analytics features will help you decide whether you need to change your design, move things around, or change the tools you use. This type of information will help you adapt your website and pick up customers you might be missing out on. We’d recommend a website with a Google Analytics plugin — this is the gold standard for analytics tracking.

App selection

A website builder needs to have a good app selection if you’re planning to create a business website. These apps will help you stand out from your competition by providing a wide range of functionalities that can handle everything your business needs to be successful.

Contact forms, appointment or reservation booking, coupon codes, gift cards, chatbots, and more can all be added to your site — as long as you pick the right website builder. Take note, though; a lot of website builders will charge extra for these kinds of add-ons, so make sure your budget has room before going crazy on third-party integrations.

Wix has one of the most diverse app markets in the website builder space, and even includes user reviews of each app so you can work out if you need it. Image: Tech.co testing

Branding

If you’ve spent years building up your brand’s name and logo recognition, the last thing you want is to have a website covered with someone else’s branding. Most website builders will remove adverts when you sign up for a paid-for package, but not all of them will remove their branding. We’d suggest choosing a plan that will allow you to put your branding front and center, not someone else’s.

Wix, for example, offers a free forever plan that will let you get your site online at no cost to your business. However, it will be covered in Wix ads, and you’ll have to endure a non-customizable URL. in this way, free forever plans are really just extended free trials, and moving onto a paid plan eventually should always be the goal.

How We Test and Rate Website Builders for Small Businesses

At Tech.co, we conduct extensive research into the products and services we review. We’ve been testing, ranking, and rating website builders for years, continuously building on our methodology which now includes over 250 different parameters, site speed testing, and separate scoring weightings for free, paid, and ecommerce-focused sites.

These parameters and criteria are sorted into six umbrella assessment categories, so our readers can quickly understand the areas in which they excel. These categories occasionally change in response to the pace of product development and business priority shifts. For 2024, they are:

• Features: What SEO, blogging, and AI assistance tools are offered?
• Design functionalities: How useful are the themes and mobile editor?
• Value for money: How many features does a plan offer in relation to its cost?
• Help and support: What types of support are offered, and with what hours?
• Customer score: Is customer and user testing feedback positive?
• Ease of use: Is the software intuitive to use?

Although we have commercial partnerships with some of the products we talk about on our site, it’s our independent research that allows us to stay editorially independent. Our on-site product rankings and ratings are determined exclusively by the results of our investigations and testing.

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