Best Website Builder for Small Business - Top 7 Best Website Builders

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Best Website Builder for Small Business

When starting a new business, it is important to start with the right tools. One of the most important choices you make is choosing the right website builder. This article walks you through how to choose the best website builder for small business. There are many different website builders to choose from, so it can be difficult to choose the right one. To help you get started, here are some questions to ask yourself when picking a website builder:

Pricing:

Price is often going to be one of the main deciding factors, with custom professional development services, you are looking into paying a few thousand dollars depending on the scale of your business. Website builders are meant to save you the hassle and the money needed to build your site, so comparing website builder costs is a must.

Maintenance:

While coding a website from scratch may offer greater flexibility on the programming language and frameworks you choose to work with, website builders will be easier to update and maintain, especially for a small business, considering there are lots of moving parts when starting out you may decide to change things often.

Accessibility:

Website builders are usually built with accessibility in mind, they need to appeal to the average Joe who’s limited in resources and needs to put in most of the work themselves. Plus, tutorials and documentation will be vastly available to guide you through the development process.

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7 Best Website Builders:

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Weebly

Weebly makes website building easy and simple. You can build beautiful, responsive websites that suit your business needs thanks to their clean, understandable drag-and-drop editor and appealing template designs. Plus, having a ton of e-commerce tools at your disposal gives you the opportunity to really show off what your company has to offer.

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Weebly Key Features

Drag-and-Drop Editor

Video Backgrounds

Template Library

E-commerce

Built-In Image Editor and Animations

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Weebly Pricing

Weebly features 4 plans, they do have a free plan you can test out for as long as you want. The other 3 plans, range from $7 for their personal plan to $30 for their performance plan. In my opinion, having a free plan is a great advantage, although you won’t be be able to scale a proper website using the free plan, it gives you the option to test some of their features and get a feel for their builder.

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Weebly Pros

Very easy to use

Free plan with a good amount of features to test

Mobile app

Built-in analytics dashboard

Great for beginners

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Weebly Cons

Personal plan hosts square ads

E-commerce features not included in free and personal plans

Limited design features

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Webflow

Webflow is a web design and development tool that has been changing the way people build websites. It has attracted lots of attention lately because of its stellar visuals and animation capabilities. Its very customizable, perhaps the most customizable out of this list, which makes it a great tool for those who are looking to create a website that is both visually appealing and functional.

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Webflow Key Features

Advanced Editor

Animation and Interaction Capabilities

E-commerce Plans

Template Library

Access to CMS

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Webflow Pricing

Webflow has two pricing models, one for personal sites and blogs, the other for e-commerce sites. Their most basic plan starts at $12 and can run as high as $212 per month for their E-commerce advanced plan. In total, there are 6 pricing plans, 3 for each pricing model, so you’ll be sure to find a plan that suits you.

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Webflow Pros

Powerful editor that allows for greater customizability

Code friendly, for if you want to have greater personalization

100+ responsive templates

Motion design

Dynamic SEO templates

CMS white-labeling

Extensive documentation

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Webflow Cons

Limited out of the box integrations

Not beginner friendly

No live support

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Elementor

Elementor is a landing page builder plugin for WordPress, while it’s not a website builder on it’s own, it’s a very popular option to build websites on top of WordPress. It’s a viable option for people that want to stay within the ecosystem of WordPress or want to use WordPress as a CMS.

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Elementor Key Features

Drag-and-Drop Live Editor

Popup Builder

150 Pre-Designed SEO Templates

100+ Widgets

Reusable Template Kits

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Elementor Pricing

Elemntor’s base subscription is priced at $49/month and comes with all the bells and whistles they have to offer, but since Elementor targets web development agencies too, It has three other different pricing plans for more website activations, these plans are useful if you want to build 25+ websites at the same time.

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Elementor Pros

Very powerful editor for WordPress

Tons of out-of-box integrations

Plenty of widgets to use in builder

Reusable components for different landing pages

Resources on 3rd party marketplaces

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Elementor Cons

Must be a WordPress website

Performance issues

Learning curve

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Format

If you are photography business, Format is for you. It’s a dedicated portfolio website platform for photographers to showcase their work. They also offer workflows and a set of different tools to help build and scale your photography business. With dozens of website builders on the market, Format truly stands out and is the perfect solution for building a visual portfolio, but if you are looking to focus on features such as blogging or e-commerce then you may want to skip Format.

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Format Key Features

Ease of Use

Stunning Templates to Choose From

Design Functionality

Image and Video Hosting

Built-In CRM

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Format Pricing

You can’t beat Format’s pricing, it starts out at $3.5 for their basic subscription, although It won’t get you very far In terms of features, their Pro and Pro Plus plans are only $7.5 and $12.5. The Pro plan offers access to hosted videos, photo storage, a free custom domain, access to custom editor, and the Pro Plan gives you access to all the above plus premium design features and an email subscriber form.

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Format Pros

Mobile optimized templates

Tailored themes for portfolio based businesses

Success tools

Ease of use

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Format Cons

Very basic blogging and e-commerce features

Limited to portfolio websites

No free plan

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Landingi

Landingi is an all-in-one landing page builder for your marketing campaigns. It enables businesses of all sizes to easily create and launch landing pages in minutes. While website development platforms are focused on building a website and then integrating with marketing software to do the heavy lifting, Landingi does things a bit differently by offering marketing tools within their platform.

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Landingi Features

Landing Page Builder

Popup Builder

300+ Landing Page Templates!

Funnel Building

AI Solutions for Optimization

E-commerce capabilities

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Landingi Pricing

Landingi has four plans to choose from, the Core plan starts at $29 per month and includes unlimited conversions and landing pages but has a limit of 1,000 visits a month, it also includes a custom domain and SSL. The Create plan is $65 per month and has all the features under the Core plan and a limit of 20,000 visits per month plus 2 custom domains instead of 1 under the Core plan. Next, comes the Automate plan at $89 per month, with double the amount of visits per month plus 4 custom domains. They also have an Agency plan priced at $109 per month, which allows for unlimited subaccounts and white labelling.

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Landingi Pros

Free 14 day trial

Emphasis on high quality images

Business tools for photographers

24/7 support

Funnel creation

Landingi Cons

Sluggish editor

Analytics only offered at high-end plans

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Pagecloud

PageCloud allows you to build fast, beautiful websites in minutes. Its one of the newest additions to the highly competitive web development marketplace, it’s visual editor is quite unique, and is packed with a few interesting features that makes it stand out.  

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Pagecloud Features

Advanced Website Layouts

Built-In Animations and Interactions

E-Commerce Capabilities for Both Services and Digital Goods

Form Creation

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Pagecloud Pricing

Pagecloud pricing starts at $19 per month for their Small business plan, $29 per month for their Business plan, and $58 per month for their Pro plan. The main difference between plans is the number of sites and pages you can build.

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Pagecloud Pros

Customizable visual editor

Teams can build together

Has built-in marketing tools

Good mobile customization

Supports custom code

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Pagecloud Cons

Limited e-commerce functionality

Limited analytics

Not made for blogging websites

No free trial

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Instapage

Instapage claims its the best landing page platform, and there is good backing to that claim. They have recently changed their strategy to focus on upping their marketing offerings, it now features a huge amount of templates, AMP landing pages, collaboration tools, and advanced analytics and attribution features. It’s a close competitor to Unbounce and Leadpages, two leading landing page builders, I wrote an in-depth article on both landing page builders here.

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Instapage Pricing

One plan to rule them all!, Their building plan is $199 per month and has unlimited everything! unlimited domains, unlimited conversions, A/B testing features, server-side A/B testing, and team collaboration.

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Instapage Pros

Cross-domain attribution

Reusable components

Superior marketing analytics

Team collaboration tools

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Instapage Cons

Pricey

Not as many landing pages as other landing page builders

Limited e-commerce features

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Conclusion

There are many website builders to choose from, so which one is the best website builder for small business? After looking at website builder costs, pros and cons, and features, I would say Webflow wins this race by far. Why? Because it’s the closest thing to real web development, see, while I can develop my own website using JavaScript and React and serve a blazing fast custom website, Webflow offers me the ease of updating my website easily without having to go back to code every time I want to do so and It delivers all the functionality I could ask for out of a custom-built website, reusable components, e-commerce features, blogging (this article is written on Webflow), animations, CMS, you name it, Webflow has it. The pricing is not too bad too! I currently pay close to $36 per month per website. But its also worth mentioning that Webflow has a learning curve, so if you do decide to use it, maybe learn some HTML, CSS and Flexbox for a week or so before signing up.

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