5 Website Builder for Small Business Owners
We have selected five of the best website builder for small business because we understand that small business owners are busy. With so many options, finding an affordable and user-friendly platform offering built-in marketing tools to help grow your company is important. Here is our list of the top website builders for business and the reasons they cut.
1. Wix
Wix is at the top of our list of website builders for small businesses because it is user-friendly, suitable for any industry, and offers affordable features for small business owners. According to Google’s John Mueller, Wix has made significant progress in SEO, which is great news if you want your audience to find your new website.
Wix provides purpose-built templates for various industries and goals, including blogs, e-commerce stores, portfolios, digital resumes, events, photography, and restaurants. These templates make it easy to build a website for your small business, and you can also use Wix’s Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) editor to speed up the process. With the WixADI editor, you answer some questions and let the AI do the work.
If you’re more confident in building websites and want more customization, you can design your website using the Wix Editor. It’s still beginner-friendly.
Wix’s Top Features for Small Businesses
Wix provides tools for improving search engine visibility, creating and managing social media ads, and maintaining communication with email subscribers.
SEO
Wix provides a range of SEO features already included in their platform, eliminating the need for additional integrations. Small business owners can easily set up an optimized website.
According to Wix, their goal is to provide users with the best default SEO settings while allowing customization. They aim to support users who may not be familiar with SEO, providing them with a strong technical foundation so they can focus on their business and creating valuable content.
Some of the Wix SEO features that are highly regarded include:
– SEO infrastructure: Wix designs their website templates with search engines in mind, making them easily navigable and indexable by bots.
– Automatic mobile optimization: Wix ensures all websites are optimized for mobile and desktop users.
– URL structure: A proper URL structure makes it easier for search engines to crawl and navigate your site.
– Image compression: Wix automatically compresses and converts images to WebP format, improving page load speed without sacrificing image quality.
– Google Search Console integration: You can verify your domain within the Wix dashboard to directly track your site’s performance within the platform.
– Customizable advanced SEO options: Customize your URL structure, meta tags, canonical tags, structured data markup, robots.txt file, and more.
– Bulk 301 redirects: If you’re migrating from an old site, you can easily manage bulk redirects with up to 500 links in a spreadsheet.
– Accessibility Wizard: Wix’s Accessibility Wizard helps you identify and resolve accessibility issues on your site.
You can use tools like Semrush’s Wix integration to enhance your SEO efforts further. This allows you to find low-competition keywords, automatically generate page titles and meta tags, and boost your search optimization directly from the Wix Dashboard.
In addition to SEO features, Wix also offers AI-managed social media ads. If you subscribe to Facebook Ads by Wix, you can create, launch, run, and track your Facebook and Instagram ads directly from your Wix dashboard. Wix’s AI algorithm manages your ads 24/7, tracking changes, monitoring data from your website, and making adjustments to ensure optimal results.
Furthermore, Wix provides email marketing tools to help drive more visitors to your site. The free version allows you to send up to 200 emails per month, and you can upgrade to a paid email marketing plan for additional capabilities. The intuitive email editor includes ready-made templates, making it easy to create visually appealing emails quickly.
Start with a template, then customize it to match your brand. You can also automate your campaigns and track their performance in real-time.
WixPricing and Plans
If you’re looking for a free website builder for your small business, Wix is one of the best options. They offer four pricing tiers, with the top plan providing advanced shipping, multiple currencies, and automated sales tax. However, their free plan does have basic functionality and includes Wix branding and ads on every page.
Pros and Cons of Using Wix
Pros
– User-friendly drag-and-drop editor for easy website creation
– Over 800 fully editable templates designed with industry best practices
– Advanced marketing tools for SEO, social ads, and email marketing
– Powerful e-commerce site builder with features for online reservations, ordering, appointment setting, and inventory management
– Integration with 500+ leading finance and marketing tools through Wix App Market
– Automatic image compression and schema markup for improved site speed
– Great value at every price point
Cons
Automatically generated mobile versions may require manual adjustments. It is not suitable for those without design or coding experience. Limited storage options, even in the highest-tier plans. No Google Analytics integration is available on the free plan.
2. Squarespace
Squarespace is the top choice for creatives and business owners who want to build attractive, image-heavy sites. High-quality, large images can slow down a website, and Google’s Core Web Vitals have shown that page speed is critical for website ranking. This is bad news for those who want to showcase their photography or products in high definition.
However, Squarespace has a solution. Its site builder automatically creates seven versions of each image uploaded and chooses the best version based on the user’s screen size. This helps Squarespace websites load quicker, allowing you to maintain image quality and rank higher in search engine result pages (SERPs). Additionally, creators can choose from various site templates designed by world-class designers. Here are some of the most popular designs:
You have a range of customizable Squarespace website templates to choose from in various styles, such as dark, light, minimalist, and high-contrast. There is something to suit every brand. Squarespace is well-known for catering to image-loving bloggers and creatives, but it also offers a range of features for e-commerce business owners.
It lets you showcase product images and provides easy-to-use shop tools like customer emails, abandoned cart recovery, and low-inventory alerts. To access these features, shop owners need at least the basic commerce plan. Even the lowest-priced plans include unlimited storage, a highly sought-after feature for e-commerce stores and creative brands.
Squarespace’s Top Features for Small Businesses
Squarespace’s top features for small businesses help improve your search engine results, create mobile-friendly websites, and provide a seamless branding experience.
SEO
Squarespace, like Wix, offers built-in SEO features that are useful from the start. These include mobile-responsive websites, auto-generated sitemaps, clean URLs, SSL security, site translations, a local SEO map, the ability to hide a page from search results, and an SEO checklist. The SEO panel is conveniently located on the side of the page as you edit, providing a preview of your page’s meta title and meta description on a search results page.
Device view lets you preview your site on different-sized screens, such as mobile or desktop. You can even edit it in these views to see what it will look like with the changes.
Social Media Marketing
Squarespace does not have built-in ad management options like Wix, but it does offer social media integrations to help you sell products on Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Tumblr. It can push new site content to these social media accounts in real-time and allows you to pull content from social media to your website.
Squarespace’s social blocks display content from sites such as Instagram, Foursquare, Soundcloud, and Flickr, providing an external source of social proof to grow your brand’s trust. Additionally, Squarespace has unique mobile apps, including Unfold.
It has a free plan for all users, but you’ll need a Squarespace account to take advantage of advanced features such as templates.
Email Marketing
Here is an example of what Squarespace’s template selection tool looks like.