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Best Website Builders

I test every website builder so you don’t have to. These are my rankings of the best website builders in 2024.

By Steve Benjamins,
Juhil Mendpara

Steve Benjamins

Updated
Oct 22 2024

I’ve published my rankings of the best website builders every year since 2014.

Year upon year, including this time, Squarespace and Shopify have proved to be the top website builders. Wix and Webflow have followed closely each time, including in 2024. [And inevitably, many have lost their rankings, and some have disappeared into oblivion.]

This is your ultimate guide—and my rankings—to the best website builder in 2024.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of real-life users, manage several websites made with website builders, and have personally tested all website builders in this guide (and many, many more).

My websites have been featured on HuffPost, Forbes, CNET, The Next Web, and more.

Let’s get started…

Overview

Website Builders Rankings

Before You Start

In this section, we’ll cover questions to consider before you choose a website builder and start building your website.

Best For...

In this section we take a closer look at the best website builder for specific use cases. For example portfolios, blogs and small businesses.

Cost & Pricing

Website builders almost all have the same pricing model: different plans available on monthly or annual terms. If you choose an annual term, you’ll likely get a free domain name for the first year.

Here are some things to know about costs and pricing:

Ecommerce

The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the transition of retailers into ecommerce stores. Now every retailer is expected to offer online shopping and curbside pickup.

Website builders saw this opportunity and invested heavily in ecommerce features.

As a result, there are actually a lot of great options for ecommerce website builders — Shopify is the leader in this space but Squarespace, Wix and Square Online are getting competitive on ecommerce features.

Here’s what you should understand about choosing a website builder for your ecommerce site.

SEO

Here’s a common question:

What’s the best website builder for SEO?

And here’s my answer: There is no best website builder SEO.

All of the top website builders I recommend have the important SEO functionality you’ll need to rank a website:

Some website builders do offer more advanced SEO features— for example, Squarespace has support for Google AMP. But overall the differences won’t move the needle in SEO.

If you want to do advanced SEO— for example, you want to embed recipe JSON markup— then I would suggest you look at WordPress, not a website builder.

An example of JSON markup.

An example of JSON markup.

All this being said, there are definitely some website builders that have limited SEO capabilities. They are typically the lowest ranked website builder on my list.

Domains & Email

Common questions around domains and email.

What about WordPress?

WordPress is not a website builder— it’s a content management system (or CMS).

It is the most used tool for creating websites but I stopped using WordPress about five years ago.

One of my biggest frustrations with WordPress editor is not being able to see a live preview as I create.

Here is a comparison of WordPress and website builders:

Website Builders Are Good For...

  • Ease Of Use

    Website builders typically have drag-and-drop editors that are easy to use. WordPress’s page editor isn’t quite as intuitive. And while there are WordPress plugins (like Elementor) that try to make it more like a website builder, they always feel like a halfway solution.

  • Hosting

    Website builders include hosting. You don’t even have to think about it. WordPress needs to be installed on a 3rd party web hosting service. That’s just one technical thing I don’t want to have to think about.

  • Everything Just Works

    Website builders typically just work and WordPress… rarely just works— especially when trying to integrate 3rd party WordPress themes and plugins.

  • Security

    You are in charge of keeping WordPress up to date— and it’s important that you do. Missing a security update can leave your website vulnerable to hackers. This is one more technical thing I don’t want to have to worry about and website builders automatically take care of security.

WordPress Is Good For...

  • Plugins & Templates

    Since WordPress is open source there are tons of WordPress themes and plugins available.

  • Flexible

    WordPress is open source so you can code it to do whatever you’d like to— you could code your own template from scratch or even code your own ecommerce checkout flow.

  • Move Your Site Between Hosts

    With WordPress, it’s your own website. If you want to move to a completely new host, you can! You can’t do that with website builders (other than Tilda). Website builders provide hosting so you’re stuck with their host.

In the end, both WordPress and website builders may end up frustrating you— but for completely different reasons. Website builders just work but are less flexible. WordPress is more flexible but rarely just works.

If you’d like to read more, check out my Squarespace vs WordPress comparison.

Note: When most people say WordPress they mean WordPress.org — not WordPress.com. WordPress.com is a separate service built on top of WordPress that offers more of a website builder like experience.

Helpful Tools

In this section, we take a look at common marketing tools you might add to your website.

Dealbreaker Features

Here are three examples of features that might be a dealbreaker for you: