Best Website Builders for Small Business 2022

According to our in-depth research, the best website builder for small businesses is Wix, offering plenty of features, well-designed templates, and advanced business functionality, all it a reasonable price. That being said, Wix would work for a business of almost any size – it's a seriously powerful piece of software.

However, it's not the only website builder you should consider. Squarespace is unrivaled when it comes to design quality, and is a great choice for ecommerce sites and portfolios. GoDaddy, meanwhile, is super straightforward, especially when it comes to set up. Weebly has a great free plan, which could help for businesses on a strict budget. And of course, there's Zyro, which would be ideal for smaller businesses that are new to website builders.

We'll go into more detail on each website builder below.

In this guide:

• What is the Best Website Builder for Small Business?
• What to Look for in a Website Builder for Small Business
• How Much Does a Website Builder for Small Business Cost?
• Should Small Business use a Free Website Builder?

What is the Best Website Builder for Small Business?

Every website builder claims to do the same thing: they'll allow you to create your dream website quickly, easily and cheaply. However, not all website builders are cut out for the demands of modern businesses, no matter how big or small.

1. Wix – Best overall website builder
2. Squarespace – Best for growing businesses
3. GoDaddy – Best for setting up quickly
4. Weebly – Best free plan
5. Zyro – Best for beginners

Wix for Small Business

Best overall website builder

Wix is our favorite website builder, and it’s the perfect way to get your business online. The provider offers a range of great-looking website templates, all of which are mobile responsive – a crucial feature for this day and age, as most internet traffic now comes from mobile devices.

The onboarding experience for Wix is very straightforward, so you won't have much trouble figuring it out, in spite of the many features available. London-based restaurant The Five Fields did exactly that – and even made the final of the 2021 Wix Awards in the process.

“Wix has been a fantastic platform for the restaurant to communicate their identity and offering; it's enabled us to track visitor activity and traffic which is hugely beneficial and is something that lacked on the previous website” explained General Manager Matthew Widdowson.

Wix is unmatched for the amount and quality of the features it offers – everything from SEO tools to CRM functionality, which can really take your business to the next level.

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

Wix Pricing

Wix also offers a great variety of pricing plans, which makes it an ideal website builder that will scale alongside your business as it grows. Wix price plans cost between $14 and $39 per month. Its ecommerce plan, which gives you access to an online store from $23 per month, is a great choice for anyone in the retail industry.

Squarespace for Small Business

Best for growing businesses

Squarespace prides itself on having the best-looking website builder templates on the market, and we have to agree. Squarespace only offers 91 templates, but each of them is fantastic, and will set you well on your way to creating a stunning website.

However, that's not to say that Squarespace sites are all style and no substance. It offers an incredible robust feature catalog, including tools for email and social marketing, as well as an in-depth analytics board. Plus, it offers the most comprehensive knowledge center available, allowing users to solve problems and learn about the platform to an extensive degree.

Squarespace Pricing

Squarespace offers two standard website builder plans — Personal and Business — as well as two ecommerce plans — Basic and Advanced.

The Personal plan will cost you $12 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 $18 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, however, add a bit more: the ability to sell and market products. The Basic plan only costs $26 per month and allows you to sell unlimited products with a few simples features. The Advanced plan costs $40 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

GoDaddy for Small Business

Best for setting up quickly

With 76 million domains to its name, GoDaddy represents a popular website builder for good reason. It offers a very easy to use and, more importantly, easy to set up platform that won't scare off beginners. GoDaddy also provides some seamless SEO guidance that will help you get your site noticed and visited by more users.

Compared to Wix and Squarespace though, GoDaddy does come off as a bit basic. The web design is quite restrictive and its few templates don't make for the most customizability. Plus, while the SEO features are easy to use, their scope is limited, so you aren't getting a whole lot of information. Still, it is on the more affordable side, so if these cons aren't a dealbreaker, it's worth a try.

In fact, GoDaddy has improved greatly since our last bout of research, adding more features, better templates, and an overall ease of use previously not found in the platform. This improvement shot the popular website builder into the top three, so we highly recommend checking it out.

GoDaddy Pricing

GoDaddy offers four pricing plans —Basic, Premium, Commerce and Commerce Plus — all of which include a 30-day free trial.

The Basic plan costs only $6.99 per month, providing you with the basics of website building and that's about it. You get some simple ecommerce functionality too, but you can only use it through GoDaddy Payments, which isn't ideal.

The Premium plan adds a lot more at $13.99 per month, and adds some marketing features, including the ability to be found on Google, which is vital for any burgeoning business. It also includes a website chat bot — which is huge for customer service — and a whole bunch of advanced appointment features.

As expected the Commerce plan, which costs $14.99 per month, adds the real ecommerce features, opening up your online store with social selling, gift cards, discounts, and the lot. Finally, Commerce Plus is $29.99 per month and boosts the caps on how many products can be listed or sold through social marketplaces.

Weebly for Small Business

Best for a straightforward set-up 

Weebly can’t quite match Wix, but it's still an excellent website builder. Creating an account and starting to create your website is incredibly straightforward and fast – you can even sign up with a Facebook account alone. You’ll then be able to take a look at the excellent website templates on offer, which – unlike with Wix – can be changed later after you’ve first published your site.

As with Wix, there’s a great variety of apps – everything from Facebook Messenger chat boxes to product review widgets. Integrating these apps into your site is straightforward, and you won’t need to add a single line of code. They will help to enhance the usability and usefulness of your business’ website, and should keep customers coming back for more!

Weebly Pricing

Weebly also offers a Free version, which you can use indefinitely. It's actually quite robust, allowing you to get a website live, with features like inventory management, SEO, lead capture, and more. This makes Weebly one of the best values on the market, but it's still a bit limited compared to its paid-for competitors. There's also a Personal plan for $6 per month, which adds a bit more functionality, and drops the Weebly branded URL.

Those are for individual users though. Business users will prefer to pick one of the three paid versions. The Performance plan costs $26 per month, and gives you functionality for hosting an online shop. The Professional plan costs $12 per month and is great for service businesses, such as construction companies or restaurants.

Zyro for Small Business

Best for beginners

Website builders are often pretty intuitive, but some of them can be a bit intimidating. With all those features and complicated design choices, beginners can get overwhelmed at all the options. Fortunately, Zyro is perfect for beginners, as it provides a stripped down, easy to use platform featuring simple grid-based templates that even the freshest newbie should be able to figure out.

Obviously, this ease of use comes at a price though. Zyro doesn't have an app store, so you'll be stuck with the basics when it comes to your website. Customization is understandably limited, but at this price, you should be more than happy to get a site live that looks good.

Check out our Zyro vs Wix comparison guide for more info

Zyro Pricing

Outside of the assorted free plans, Zyro offers the most affordable option on this list. The original price is $8.99 per month, which is already pretty low, but with this special deal from Tech.co, you can get started with Zyro's Website plan for only $2.61 per month, a staggeringly low price to get a website live.

Zyro offers a few other pricing plans if you're looking for something a bit more robust. The Business plan, which is usually $11.49 per month, but with our deal is only $4.41 per month, adds more functionality, like unlimited bandwidth and storage, along with some social integrations and analytical tools, and support for 100 products, though you'll have to use Stripe payments.

Finally, the Online Store and Advanced Store plans, as you can guess, add some ecommerce features, allowing you to launch your online store. Whether it be 100 products with the eCommerce plan or 2500 products with eCommerce Plus, you won't have to pay much to get started. Only $15.90 per month ($8.01 per month with our deal) or $25.90 per month ($14.31 per month with our deal) will have you selling products from your store in no time.

Click here to take advantage of this special Zyro deal

Why use a Website Builder for your Small Business?

Simply put, creating a slick, professional-looking website using a builder allows you access to a range of tools at your disposal that you wouldn't have otherwise.

For example, you'll be able create contact and booking forms to get more information out of your customers earlier. When do they want an appointment? What sort of service are they looking for? All these questions can be answered by the customer, without you wasting time on the phone. Many website builders will also help you craft email marketing campaigns to bring customers to your site – if you're running a promotion, for example.

Website builders are significantly cheaper than hiring a website developer to build you a site from scratch. Plus, you won't be locked into a lengthy retainer with a developer, and you'll be able to update your own website quickly and easily.

If you're looking to sell products online, a website builder is the best way to get started, with dedicated ecommerce templates and built-in features to help you add products and manage your inventory.

What to Look for in a Website Builder for Small Business

Of course, different types of website require different features. As you’re running a business site, a platform that’s great for blogging isn’t likely to be at the top of your priority list. However, easy-to-use contact forms might be. Below, we run through the most important website builder features for businesses.

Choice of Templates

First impressions count, and if your website looks great, customers will likely think that 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 for the industry you’re working in. This should make things far less stressful when it comes to building and running your website. For instance, many web builder platforms have excellent templates for restaurants, or for building firms.

Squarespace is inarguably one of the best on this front, providing plenty of stunning templates that will be sure to impress any visitor.

Ecommerce Options

If your business sells products, you’ll need an ecommerce function. Most website builders offer you the ability to sell products on the site you’re building. However, some do it better than others.

The Wix eCommerce package is 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.

Tracking and Analytics

These might sound complicated, but they're basically the way to track how customers come to, interact with, and leave your website – the same way you’d want to know how many people come into your store every day.

This will help you work out whether you need to change your design, move things around, or change the tools you use. It’ll also help you understand how customers arrive on your website. Are they searching for businesses like yours on Google, or are they coming straight to your site? This type of information will help you adapt your website, and pick up customers you might be missing out on.

Most website builders will offer some analytics software baked into your package. However, these solutions can be a bit limited, so look for ones that will allow you to install a Google Analytics plugin – this is really 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 can help turn your website from a boring, bland text fest into an all-singing, all-dancing, clickable extravaganza.

Contact forms, appointment or reservation booking, coupon codes, gift cards, chat bots and more can all be added to your site – as long as you pick the right website builder.

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. Or, even worse – someone else’s adverts.

Most website builders will remove adverts when you sign up to a paid-for package, but not all of them will remove their own branding from your site. Make sure the website builder you choose will keep your branding front and center – not someone else’s.

How Much Does a Website Builder for Small Business Cost?

When building a website for your small business, you should expect to pay somewhere between $10-40 per month. Yes, there are more affordable plans, but the reality is that most of them simply aren't equipped for the needs of a business, as there aimed at individuals.

As for where you end up on that spectrum, the price for your small business will depend on the features you need from your website.

For example, if you're looking to make a fairly straightforward site with a contact or booking form, testimonials, and some online marketing tools, you could certainly use Wix's $18 per month Unlimited plan.

The unlimited plan will give you all the features you need to run a small business website. For example, you'll get unlimited bandwidth — meaning that there are no restrictions on the amount of people that can visit your site every month. Plus, you'll get 10GB of storage for videos, photos, or other content you want to upload.

What's more, you'll also get access to the Site Booster and Form Builder apps. The Site Booster app gives you a range of SEO tools, while the Form Builder app lets you create interactive forms to engage with potential customers.

However, if you're looking to run a small online store, you should expect to pay slightly more. Wix's ecommerce plans start from $23 per month. However, we like Squarespace for ecommerce.

Squarespace's ecommerce plans start from $26 per month. They'll give you all the tools to run a small online store, with easy accounting and product management features.

Should a Small Business use a Free Website Builder?

If we're honest, no. There are simply too many downsides to using a free website builder for your business for us to recommend this as a smart business decision.

Pros and cons of free website builders:

Pros

• It's free
• You can get your business online quickly

Cons

• Limited customization
• Poor SEO, meaning no one will find your site
• Weak branding
• Little to no customer support

Branding

If you opt for a free website builder, it's likely that your site will be covered with adverts for the website builder you've used – or even worse, other companies. This won't make your business look particularly trustworthy or professional.

It's also likely that you'll still have the website builder's name at the end of your site's URL – meaning it would read as something like “yourbusiness.weebly.com”. Again, there's a reason the biggest businesses in the world don't do this.

Features

With a free site, you won't have access to the same roster of features as you would with a paid-for package. This can leave you missing out on analytics, or even ecommerce features.

This might mean that you could miss out on potential customers, as you won't be able to optimize your site to give them the best experience.

Availability

Not all website builders even offer free packages. Big names such as GoDaddy completely eschew a free version in favor of giving their paying website owners access to 24/7, on-the-phone support in case they have any problems – useful if your site goes down in the middle of the night just before Thanksgiving.

Even popular services, such as Squarespace, offer limited time free trials (typically between a week and a month), so you might not be able to access the service you want for free anyway.

Overall, if you're serious about your business, you should be serious about its website. Best to opt for a paid-for package, rather than a free one, and you won't regret it.