The 5 Best Website Builders for Small Businesses in 2023

The best website builder for small businesses is Wix, offering hundreds of sleek, customizable templates, and an entire suite of advanced, business-friendly tools — including CRM, which makes it the perfect choice for small, growing businesses.

There are other excellent website builders out there depending on your needs, including Squarespace for design-focused businesses and GoDaddy for businesses that need a website online fast.

By reading this guide, you'll discover how all the best website builders for small businesses compare. Our top recommendations are:

Whether you're working from home or setting up in an office, these website builders will help you get your website up and running quickly and easily.

You can also use our 1-minute website builder comparison quiz to find the best website builder for your needs. Just answer four questions and we'll provide you with tailored recommendations based on your criteria, backed by hours of in-depth research.

In this guide:

• What to Look For in a Website Builder
• Best Website Builders for Small Businesses
• Why Avoid Free Website Builders?
• How We Test and Rate Website Builders for Small Businesses
• 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. On our 2023 tests, Wix scored 4.8/5 overall – it's affordable, intuitive, easy to use, and packed with hundreds of customizable templates — but, there are many website builders on the market.

Through rigorous 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. GoDaddy — Best for setting up quickly
4. Shopify – Best for selling online 
5. Hostinger — Best for uptime reliability + low starting price

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.

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 4.8/5 for features, the highest score out of any website builder we tested, and an impressive 4.9/5 for help & support services.

Check out our in-depth Wix review for more information

In comparison to other website builders, our research found Wix scores high in nearly all of our ranking categories, including ease-of-use, help and support, customer experience, and number and quality of business features. 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 which 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.

“Wix has been a fantastic platform for the restaurant to communicate their identity and offering. It enables us to track visitor activity and traffic which is hugely beneficial and is something that was lacking on the previous website” — Matthew Widdowson.

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

Wix ease of use

Wix is also one of the easiest website builders to use, scoring 4.4/5 for ease of use (the same as Squarespace) thanks to its quick, drag-and-drop feature, and we love how it offers an entire suite of advanced business tools like CRM software. Additionally, the AI text generator makes building your site out super easy, with a drop-down menu for every topic of text, like product descriptions or FAQs.

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 The Five Fields also found Wix to be super intuitive — and even made it to the final of the 2021 Wix Awards with the website they built — 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!” — Matthew Widdowson, General Manager, Five Fields Restaurant.

Wix also has a high average customer score, with an impressive score of 4.6 out of 5 – second only to Shopify – and proved to have the most useful functionality and built-in capabilities. This includes translation functionality, making it the perfect website builder for businesses looking to grow, diversify, and manage their business with ease.

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 113 templates — which is a little weak in comparison to Wix and its extensive offering — they're all absolutely stunning and will set you well on your way to creating a beautiful website.

Squarespace is the best website builder we tested for design functionality, scoring 4.5/5. It also tied with Wix when it came to customer support (both score 4.9/5 and offer phone and email support) and ease of use (both providers score 4.4/5). Specifically, our researchers found that the preview tool was great for getting a look at your site, as it loaded quite quickly, so you aren't waiting around to see how changes impact your site.

Squarespace features

All that's not to say that Squarespace sites are all about style and not about substance. It offers an incredibly robust feature catalog, including tools for email and social marketing, as well as an in-depth analytics board, scoring 4.6/5 for features overall.

Plus, Squarespace offers a much more comprehensive knowledge center than solutions like WordPress and GoDaddy, 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.

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. GoDaddy for Small Businesses

Best for setting up quickly

With 76 million domains to its name, GoDaddy is a very popular website builder— and for good reason. It offers a very easy-to-use and, more importantly, easy-to-set-up platform that won't scare off beginners.

Compared to Wix and Squarespace, however, GoDaddy offers a slightly more basic package and scores 4.1/5 overall, with a middle-of-the-road features score of 3.1/5.

Check out our GoDaddy review for more information

The web design is relatively restrictive, and the feature and templates it does have, doesn't make for the most customizability, which is why GoDaddy only scores 3.5/5 for design capabilities. While the SEO features are easy to use, there's less guidance than Wix and Squarespace offer, so you aren't getting a whole lot of information needed to help your business grow. Still, it is on the more affordable side, so if these cons aren't a dealbreaker, it's worth a try.

GoDaddy also provides some seamless SEO guidance that will help you get your site noticed and visited by more users. It actually improved its SEO score on our 2023 tests, from 3/5 to 4/5 having added keyword support.

In fact, GoDaddy has improved greatly since our last bout of research — which we conduct regularly, to ensure that the advice we provide is as accurate and as timely as possible — adding more features, better templates, and overall ease of use previously not found on the platform. This improvement shot the popular website builder into the top three, so we highly recommend checking it out.

GoDaddy setup

When we say that GoDaddy provides a quick setup process for even the most novice of beginners, we weren't exaggerating. In fact, we were able to get a full-on online store set up in just 60 seconds, which was notably faster than other competitors on this list.

Unfortunately, there is a catch. GoDaddy has so few features that anything beyond setting up an online store is quite limited. Basically, the ease of use comes from a lack of functionality rather than a super intuitive platform.

GoDaddy pricing

For its part, GoDaddy offers four pricing plans — Basic, Standard, Premium, and Ecommerce plans —  all of which include a 30-day free trial and your own domain.

The Basic plan costs only $9.99 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 Standard plan adds a lot more at $14.99 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 chatbot — which is huge for customer service — and a whole bunch of advanced appointment features.

As expected the Premium plan, which costs $16.99 per month, adds real ecommerce features, opening up your online store with social selling, gift cards, discounts, and lots more. Finally, Commerce Plus is $29.99 per month and boosts the caps on how many products can be listed or sold through social marketplaces.

For the plans in the table below, please note that all four of them include website hosting, a custom domain, and 24/7 support — quite a deal!

4. Shopify for Small Businesses

Best for small businesses selling online for the first time

Shopify is undeniably one of the biggest names in website building, particularly for online stores. In fact, it's one of our top picks for ecommerce website builders, scoring 4.2/5 overall according to our 2023 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.

Because Shopify is an ecommerce-focused website builder, a lot of focus in the beginning of setup is primary aimed at which products you're going to sell rather than your actual web design. In fact, compared to Wix and Squarespace, design functionality is quite limited.

While its design is more restrictive than other platforms on this list, Shopify does offer a wealth of apps and multi-channel integrations that make transitioning to selling online for the first time really simple. It also offers one of the most advanced stock management tools, meaning that the platform is able to cater to more complex inventories as your small business begins to grow. So, if scaling your small business is in your plans, Shopify is undeniably a solid bet.

Even if sales tools aren't a top priority for your business at the moment, you're likely to have a positive experience with Shopify, especially as your small business starts to grow. Our researchers awarded the platform a customer satisfaction score 4.6/5, making it the second most popular website builder we've ranked, beaten only by Wix.

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. We discuss its pricing in greater detail below.

Shopify ecommerce functionality

If you're looking to build a high-quality website that shifts stock quickly, Shopify should be on your radar. The platform's advanced design tools let you create a polished online store quickly and easily, making it perform for new, emerging and small businesses. Like Wix, Shopify also offers a broad range of templates, or ‘themes' to build your site upon, created by its community of independent designers.

But while Shopify is primarily a website builder, its strengths really lie in sales and marketing. After all, its slogan is “your store, your way” because it allows people loads of flexibility options when it comes to selling their products online.

The platform offers powerful multi-channel integrations with major platforms like Amazon, eBay, and Instagram, allowing small businesses to sell their goods across a variety of channels. 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.

Overall, however, Shopify was awarded a 3.6/5 score for features – not nearly as impressive as Wix's 4.8/5. Granted, Shopify has good ecommerce features, but it's not got the breadth of website design capabilities offered by Wix.

Shopify pricing

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

Shopify Basic 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.

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

5. 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

Hostinger downfalls

However, Hostinger did not score nearly as well as Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, and Shopify, and was only awarded a score of 3.6/5 overall. In fact, Hostinger scores just 2.7/5 for features, which was one of the lowest features scores achieved by any website builder we've tested.

Obviously, Hostinger ease-of-use stems for a lack of functionality above all else. The website builder 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 Hostinger vs Wix comparison guide for more info

Hostinger pricing

Outside of the assorted free plans on this list, Hostinger's single-price plan offers the most affordable website builder plan on this list. The original price is $11.99 per month, which is already pretty low, but 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). It will cost $6.99 per month when you renew after the first three months, but that's still an incredible deal compared to other options on this list.

Check out our Hostinger review for more information

With only one pricing plan, Hostinger makes it as easy as possible to get set up, with minimal customization options. Obviously, the low cost comes at a price, as the website builder 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.

Click here to get set up with Hostinger today

Why Small Businesses Should Avoid Free Website Builders

While it may seem cost effective at the time, free websites could actually cost you a lot more in the long-run. 

1. Limited features

With a free website, you won't have access to the same roster of features as you would with a premium package. With limited insights, analytics and ecommerce features, you'll be more likely to miss out on potential customers, as you won't be able to monitor or optimize your website in the same way that you would with a premium package.

2. Poor SEO

A free website is also more likely to tank your SEO, as they often don't come with a personalized domain. Unlike premium packages, sites built using free website builder software automatically become part of the website builder's own site, making it notoriously difficult to rank well in search engines, like Google. This is because it takes longer to crawl and is more difficult to index, meaning less customers will find you.

3. Ads

And, unless you're happy with your website advertising the software you used to build it — therefore telling your customers that the software you used to build it was free — we'd advised to opt for ad-free premium website builders, so that the only business your customers are focused on when they come to your website, is yours. Most website builders offer a scaling pricing plan, meaning you can find a plan that is affordable and best suited to your business' needs.

Wix's plans, for example, starts at just $16 a month, and includes some of the best features for small businesses our researchers have recorded to date. That's why so many customers recommend it, and why it came out on top as our overall best website builder

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.

1. 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. Whether you're looking to build a simple portfolio or need to create a full-on online store, most website builders offer a range of templates that will cater specifically to your needs.

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.

2. 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 setup 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.

3. Tracking and analytics

These might sound complicated, but tracking and analytics are basically the way you 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.

These reporting tools will help you work out whether you need to change your design, move things around, or change the tools you use. They'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.

4. App selection

A website builder needs to have a good app selection if you’re planning to create a business website. These apps are what 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.

5. 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 ads.

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.

Wix, for example, offers a free forever plan that will let you get your side 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, which also has Wix all over it. Suffice to say, 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

All of our research at Tech.co is completely independent and is based on user feedback and expert analysis. For this review, our researchers ranked the website builders based on an extensive list of criteria specifically for small US businesses, including usability, functionality, features, design, and price.

For small business owners we know that scalability and affordability is crucial to growth, which is why we not only consider pricing plans, but also the number of features vs price to evaluate which website builder is best value for money when ranking.

We also know that for small business owners, building a website should be both simple and hassle free. With limited resources, you'll want a website builder that is able to build both basic and complex pages without having to hire or dedicate specialist resource, which is why we rank website builders with good design flexibility, UX, features and functionality more favorably.

Tech.co's impartial research team takes a hands-on approach to checking the quality of every website builder that we review (learn about our research). To ensure that our hundreds of hours of research turn up every unique benefit or downside, our team of testers use six in-depth research categories. 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?

Once every brand is analyzed and ranked within each category, our team condenses a brand's scores down into one overall rating. This allows our reviews to dive deep into every feature offered, while also letting you know how each website builder compares to the rest across the board. Here is the full table of our research scores for the top website builders on the market:

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