Crises strike, and they strike small businesses the hardest. The impact of the COVID-19 crisis revealed, once again, that small business owners are ill-equipped to withstand such adversities. Global research has revealed that the average small business with monthly expenses in excess of $10,000 has just two weeks’ worth of cash reserve at hand.
One of the biggest reasons for small businesses’ fragile financial state is that about 64 percent operate without any digital fitness. The best way to remedy this shortcoming is to make a business website and increase online interaction with your customers. Website builders are the perfect tool for this task.
What is a website builder?
A website builder is software that eliminates the need for manual code editing, enabling you to create your own website simply by choosing from a set of available templates and features and customizing them to your liking. The current generation of website builders offers fast, economical website building tools that allow for the integration of features such as blogs, newsletters, and mobile optimization.
The best website builders for small business
Based on their popularity, user reviews and relevance to the needs of small businesses, these are the top ten website builders for you:
1. Wix
With more than 200 million users in 190 different countries, Wix is one of the best, easiest-to-use website builders for small businesses. Wix has hundreds of powerful design tools, including Wix Stores for creating an online store capable of accepting money, Wix SEO Wiz for improving your website’s Google ranking, and Wix Video Maker for making promotional videos for your products and services.
Best features
Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI)
Wix’s ADI is the world’s first-ever Artificial Intelligence (AI) for designing websites. The AI learns from your choices and behavior to suggest the best layouts, images, and themes for your taste and business needs.
Absolute Positioning
Wix’s Absolute Positioning feature allows you to position elements such as images, text, and forms by pixel instead of positioning them relative to the screen. This allows for an incredible degree of flexibility in designing your website’s user interface.
2. Shopify
Shopify is an all-inclusive e-commerce platform that powers over 1.000,000 businesses in 175 different countries. Shopify offers virtually every conceivable tool required to create and market an e-commerce store, including a wide range of templates, email marketing tools, a payment processor, and a blog.
Best Features
Marketing tools
Shopify’s Campaign Creation tool allows you to start your own online marketing campaigns through channels such as email, Google, and Facebook advertisements. Your dashboard gives you access to frequently updated marketing reports so you can keep track of the performance of your campaigns.
Point of Sale (POS) payments
Shopify POS allows you to accept payment for your products and services in the real world, just like at a brick-and-mortar store. This is achieved through a card reader. All sales are automatically linked with your account so your account balance and inventory remain up to date irrespective of the location of the business transaction.
3. Weebly
Weebly is one of the world’s top website builders for small businesses, particularly for e-commerce stores, restaurants, musicians and photographers. Weebly uses a straightforward, user-friendly box-type model. Its template library has plenty of wonderful options for virtually every type of business. Even a free account gives you access to the entirety of the template library.
Best Features
Design flexibility
Weebly allows you to change the theme at any point during the process of building your website. Unlike most website builders where you’ll have to start from scratch if you change the theme at a later stage, Weebly ensures you don’t lose any of your existing content when you change the design.
Media integration
With Weebly, you get access to a huge library of photos including both free and paid professional photos. You can also embed video content from YouTube and a number of other sources. The media integration process is quick and easy, allowing for a great deal of design flexibility.
4. SITE123
SITE123 is one of the easiest to use website builders for small business units, and you can actually create a website in just three steps – pick a design, upload content and publish. The design process is similar to filling out a form, with plenty of pre-defined options for everything, ranging from the mobile-responsive templates to text font and color.
Best Features
Unlimited free plan
SITE123’s free plan is unlike most other website builders’ free offerings. You get your own domain and a free e-commerce page. You can also keep using the free plan forever which is great for businessmen who have little to no prior experience at creating a website.
No fee on sales transactions
While most other e-commerce platforms charge a sales commission (approximately 3 percent), SITE123 doesn’t. The only cost you’ll incur for a sales-related activity is the fee charged by the payment processor. All sales transactions are secured via SSL/HTTPS encryption.
5. Webnode
Webnode is a multilingual website builder that supports over 20 languages and a wide range of design elements. It features 8 different template categories, with over 100 fully responsive templates each. The site editor has simple drag-and-drop functionality and Smart Tips to help you through every step of the design process.
Best Features
Excellent SEO tools
Webnode has excellent, easy-to-use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools to help your website rank higher in a Google Search. It has a separate code field for HTML header and allows you to optimize every single page in a matter of minutes.
Multilingual websites
Webnode allows you to create a copy of your content in another language of your choosing, so your original content is still available to you as a separate version. It then uses the site visitors’ browser preferences to ascertain which language to display.
6. Squarespace
Squarespace powers over 2.6 million websites around the world. This hosted platform has over 115 beautiful, professional-looking templates, over 1600 different web fonts, and an extensive collection of royalty-free photos that you can incorporate in your website.
Best Features
Video backgrounds
Squarespace lets you choose YouTube and Vimeo videos and set them up to play in a loop in the background of your website. You can control the video playback speed and use a range of different filters to create the desired visual effect.
Subscriptions feature
The Subscriptions feature allows you to sell products through subscriptions by charging your customers periodically. While this is a common feature of e-commerce stores, Squarespace is among the rare website builders that support this feature.
7. BigCommerce
With BigCommerce, you can sell both physical and digital products and services without using an additional app. It powers approximately 90,000 e-commerce stores in 65 different countries. BigCommerce has an extensive range of add-on apps that you can integrate with your business website. These include B2B wholesale and marketing apps, Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) solutions, accounting, payments, and data transfer solutions.
Best features
Excellent inventory management system
Inventory management is a breeze with a BigCommerce website. There is no bandwidth limit so you can upload any number of products to your e-commerce store. BigCommerce’s inventory management tools help you create personalized shopping experiences for your customers by categorizing the products for different customer groups.
Multiple marketplaces
A BigCommerce website allows you to sync your inventory with major online marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon and Facebook and simultaneously sell your products at multiple marketplaces. Changes made to product listings on your website will automatically appear in the listings across every other marketplace you’re selling the product on.
8. WordPress.org
A whopping 40.7 percent of all the websites on the internet have been made on WordPress. The world’s most popular website builder features thousands of different plugins and themes to ensure your website looks and functions just like you want it to. A WordPress website gives you the flexibility to make changes at any point, so you can incorporate any number of advanced features that you may not have been aware of at the time of building your website.
Best Features
Absolute data ownership
Your WordPress website is self-hosted, which means the website data is stored on your web hosting instead of on third-party servers. You retain complete ownership of the website data and have the freedom to customize everything, including the underlying database and software.
WordPress Community
The vast international community of WordPress users makes finding free, relevant information and support as easy as typing your query and hitting ‘Search’.
9. Jimdo
Jimdo is a flexible, Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered website builder that uses the information collected through the users’ inputs, their Facebook and Google account to create a customized website draft that the user can later customize. Jimdo powers an estimated 20 million websites around the world and is optimized for all types of mobile devices.
Best Features
Legal Text Generator
Jimdo’s Legal Text Generator helps you generate General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) proof legal text customized to the nature and requirements of your business website. These include text for your website’s Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy, and Return Policy sections
Artistic, modern design features
Jimdo features a number of fully responsive modern design options. If you’re artistically inclined and have some coding knowledge, you can use Jimdo’s design kit to create your own templates. Jimdo also has a logo design feature that allows you to create unique, breathtaking logos for your company.
10. GoDaddy
GoDaddy is a handy website builder with amazing customization options and an award-winning customer support team that offers support via phone, email, ticketing, Twitter, and chat. GoDaddy offers features such as one-click app installation of popular Content Management Systems (CMS), fast page loading speed, and extensive learning resources.
Best Features
Excellent security
GoDaddy’s team of cybersecurity experts provide round-the-clock Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection, safeguard your website against harmful bots and monitor the client usage on your server to ensure their behavior doesn’t impact your website’s performance.
Custom Action Plans for your business needs
GoDaddy analyzes your website and industry trends to create a custom action plan for your particular business goals. The analysis covers your website’s reach, user experience, social media presence, and level of visitors’ engagement to recommend measures for improving your website.
Even if you have no knowledge of how to create a website for business, these website builders can help you get from ‘start’ to ‘publish’ in no time. Make sure to carefully compare these website builders based on your budget and business requirements before selecting one to create a rocking new website for your business. If you insist on a single suggestion, it will have to be Wix. To it, it’s easy to use, and bafflingly amazing.
