6 best website builders in 2022

Web design

• Intuitive visual editor
• Build with CSS grid and flexbox
• Use CSS filters to create beautiful effects
• Use global swatches to update every instance of a color used
• Over 2,000 web font families from Google and TypeKit collections or upload your own
• Automatic image optimization for every device size and resolution
• Responsive design by default from desktop to mobile
• Create reusable and editable symbols
• W3C compliant semantic code which is exportable
• Easily add your own custom code to a page or part of a page
• Use the audit panel to detect duplicate IDs and avoid bugs

Website management

• Custom 404 pages
• Custom favicon and webclip
• Organize your projects with folders
• Password protect certain pages or entire projects
• Website backups and versioning

Motion design

• 3D CSS transforms and animations without having to write code
• Complex interactions and animations without having to write JavaScript

Components

• Forms
• File upload for forms
• Dropdown menu
• Tabs
• HTML embeds
• Sliders and carousels
• Background videos
• Interactive Google maps
• Lightbox
• Responsive website navigation
• Rich text
• Simple social sharing

CMS

• Fully customizable content structures with over a dozen field types
• Create CMS items with Zapier
• Use the CMS API to add, update and delete items from collections
• Dynamic SEO and Open Graph (OG)
• Dynamic content filtering and sorting
• paginate collection lists
• Export CMS content as a CSV
• RSS feeds for CMS collections

SEO

• Meta titles and descriptions for SEO
• Open Graph (OG) settings
• Auto-generated XML sitemap
• Alt tags for images
• Search engine optimized websites

Integrations

• Google Analytics integration
• Purchase Google Domains from inside Webflow
• Google Optimize integration for A/B testing
• MailChimp integration
• Zapier integration

Hosting

• Fast load times via Tier 1 Content Delivery Network, Amazon Cloudfront and Fastly
• Custom 301 redirects
• Daily website backups and versioning
• Instant software and website updates
• Add search to your website
• Staging and production databases
• Custom domain names

Support

• Email support
• Webflow Community Forum
• Webflow Help Center

Webflow also has tonnes of free cloneable websites and templates for purchase. There is also a robust Webflow community.

The above information has been sourced from webflow.com.

Site plans

These plans are added per-site when you’re ready to add your custom domain and host on Webflow.

Starter plan is free and includes:

• A free Webflow.io domain
• 50 CMS items
• 1 GB CDN bandwidth

Basic plan is $18 USD per month and includes:

• A custom domain
• 0 CMS items
• 50 GB CDN bandwidth

CMS plan is $29 USD per month and includes:

• Custom domain
• 2,000 CMS items
• 200 GB CDN bandwidth
• 3 guest editors

Business plan is $49 USD per month and includes:

• Custom domain
• 10,000 CMS items
• 400 GB CDN bandwidth
• 10 guest editors

Enterprise plans require you contacting their sales team.

Workspace plans

You can start with a free workspace and upgrade once you need to create more sites or add more collaborators.

Starter plan is free and includes:

• 1 seat
• 2 unhosted sites

Core plan is $28 per month and includes

• Up to 3 seats
• 10 unhosted sites
• Billing permissions
• Custom code
• Code export

Growth plan is $60 per month and includes:

• Up to 9 seats
• Unlimited unhosted sites
• Publishing permissions
• Custom code
• Code export

Enterprise plans require you contacting their sales team. This plan includes advanced security, performance and a dedicated customer service.

Web design

• Choose from over 500 mobile optimized templates from a number of categories including business, ecommerce, design portfolios, education, blogs and much more
• Easy-to-use drag and drop design tool
• Over 100 fonts to pick from or you can upload your own
• Advanced design features such as parallax, reveal, zoom-in or fade-in scrolling effects.

Website management

• Personalised professional mailbox
• Password protected pages requiring member login
• Track site performance and statistics with Wix analytics
• Contact management system
• Media galleries to allow you to showcase images, videos and more files.
• Wix Bookings lets you manage appointments, classes, courses and workshops from you website
• Wix Music offers you a customizable music player and the ability to sell your music
• Wix Restaurants offers customizable menus, online ordering functionality and the ability to accept reservations.
• Wix Chat allows you to conduct live chat with visitors
• SSL certified sites

Components

• Text
• Media
• Button
• Menu
• Contact forms
• Social icons
• Store
• Bookings
• Events
• Members
• Sections
• Content Manager

CMS

• The Wix content manager feature allows you to create and store content in collections
• Add and manage multiple writers

SEO

• Wix automatically generates a robots.txt file for every site, which you can edit if you need to tell bots how to crawl and index your site.
• Structured data markup is automatically added to pages so that your content can show up as rich result in search.
• Wix is built using Server side rendering (SSR) which speeds up load times improving the user experience and helping you rank better in Google search results.
• URL customization
• SEO-friendly meta tags for title tags, meta descriptions and open graph tags are automatically generated for all pages.
• Cutomizable canonical tags
• Social sharing optimization
• XML sitemaps are automatically created and maintained for you.
• Wix has a custom tool called SEO Patterns which lets you create and apply customized meta tags, structured data markups and social sharing functions using variables so that you don’t need to edit each page and can keep things consistent across pages.

Ecommerce

• Storefronts to display and sell digital or physical goods
• Product pages to showcase products and in-stock inventory
• Store management system to track orders and manage inventory
• Multiple payment methods available so you can accept credit cards, PayPal, offline payments and more
• Coupons and discount functionality available
• Set custom tax and shipping rules

Integrations and plugins

• A robust App market with over 300 apps that you can use to enhance your marketing, SEO, sales, design and much more.

Hosting

• Free plans include 500MB of cloud storage and 500MB bandwidth.
• Premium plans include 50GB of cloud storage and unlimited bandwidth.
• Wix websites are hosted on a global content delivery network (CDN)
• 99.9% uptime and data backup protection
• Versioning available
• 24.7 security monitoring, HTTPS and SSL protection
• Custom domain names

Support

• 24/7 customer care experts
• Wix Forum Community

Wix has a range of pricing from simple website plans to ecommerce plans to sophisticated enterprise plans:

• Free plan: – $0
• Combo plan: – $16/month
• Unlimited plan: – $22/month
• Pro plan: – $27/month
• VIP plan: – $45/month
• Business Basic (ecommerce): – $27/month
• Business Unlimited (ecommerce): – $32/month
• Business VIP (ecommerce): – $59/month
• Enterprise: – $500/month

Web design

• Drag and drop website builder
• Mobile responsive designs
• Customizable templates
• Pre-built layouts for pages such as contact, about, portfolio, products and more.
• Design panel for fonts, color, animations, padding and more.
• Google and TypeKit fonts
• Custom CSS

Website management

• Commenting system to manage discussions
• Password and page locks
• Multiple contributors and access levels
• Custom  301 and 302 redirects
• Custom site search engine
• Squarespace App to edit and manage your site on the go.

Ecommerce

• Sell products, services, subscriptions and digital content.
• Product merchandising
• Inventory management system
• Order management system
• Flexible product variants with unlimited SKUs
• Store manager permissions
• Mobile optimized checkout experience
• Express checkout mode
• Point of sale with the Squarespace iOS app
• Product quick view
• Limited availability labels
• Discounts and digital gift cards
• Sell on Instagram integration
• Multiple payment methods including credit cards, debit cards, Apple Pay, Afterpay and more.
• Accept multiple currencies through Stripe and PayPal.
• Flexible shipping methods including flat rate, depending on weight, carrier calculated or add a shipping extension.
• Product reviews
• Members-only pages for paying customers.

Components

• Text
• Images
• Videos
• Galleries
• Newsletter sign-ups
• appointments
• calendars
• tour dates
• reservations
• menus
• forms
• maps
• links
• files
• social links
• buttons
• quotes
• custom code
• charts

CMS

• Blog workflow management for publishing, drafts and scheduling posts.
• Category and tag support
• Multiple author support
• Supports markdown
• Supports podcasts
• Email campaign integration so you can automatically reformat the post content into a draft for an email campaign.
• AMP integration to help posts load quicker for mobile devices
• RSS syndication
• RSS blocks for visitors to add your feed to their newsreader

SEO

• Sitemap
• Robots.txt
• Canonical tagging
• Clean urls
• Automatic redirects
• Structured data
• Automatic tagging
• Google rich image search for products
• Mobile optimization
• Clean HTML markup
• AMP
• Built-in meta tags
• SSL certificates
• Location management

Integrations and plugins

• Finance extensions
• Inventory and product extensions
• Marketing and sales extensions
• Shipping and fulfillment extensions

Hosting

• Purchase domains through Squarespace.
• Domain registration
• Connect third-party domains through providers such as GoDaddy, Google or NameCheap.
• Free custom domain for the first year.
• Transfer domains
• Google Workspace integration
• Free SSL certificate

Support

• Circle community - A community of professionals designing websites on Squarespace.
• Community Forum
• Help Center
• 24/7 email support
• Live chat support
• Hire an expert

14-day free trial is available

Paid plans:

• Personal plan - $16/month
• Business plan - $23/month
• Basic commerce plan - $27/month
• Advanced commerce plan - $49/month

Contact Squarespace for enterprise plans.

Web design

• Thousands of themes available for purchase from sites like Themeforest
• Code generated is fully compliant with standards set by the W3C

Website management

• A number of web hosts offer one-click WordPress installers to help you get up and running quick
• User management system for administrators, editors, authors and subscribers
• Drop and drop media uploads
• WordPress comes with default content types, but you can create your own custom post types, taxonomies or metadata with a few lines of code.

Components

Gutenberg is the WordPress content editor that lets you create content layouts with drag and drop blocks. The blocks available include:

• Headings
• Buttons
• Columns
• Media
• Tables
• Embeds
• Shortcode

Other popular drag and drop component plugins include Elementor which lets you building entire websites.

CMS

• Publishing tools that let you create drafts, schedule posts and view your post revision
• Content can be public or you can keep them private by securing them wth a password
• Comments tools allows for readers to comment on your post and gives you the tools to moderate discussions.

SEO

• Sites include search engine optimisation by default
• There are also more advanced SEO plugins available such as SEO Yoast which is popular

Integrations and plugins

• The plugin directory has thousands of plugins available across categories such as search engine optimisation (SEO), forms, social media widgets, spam protection, image galleries, payments, booking management and so much more.
• Access the WordPress API to create your own plugins

Hosting

• WordPress.com has both free and paid hosting plans available.
• Other popular hosting services for your WordPress sites includes:
• Bluehost
• WP Engine
• HostGator

Support

• WordPress has support forums where you can ask questions and get help from volunteers.

• The WordPress software is free, however you will have to pay for hosting.

Web design

• Thousands of themes available for purchase
• Drag and drop editor
• CSS grid
• Theme manager to view and edit a site’s typography and color themes.
• Custom animations and scroll effects
• Custom fonts
• Design system

Website management

• Online store management
• CMS management
• Database APIs to manage and organize data
• Multilingual sites in over 180 languages
• Online booking and scheduling system
• Payment solution for both one time payments and recurring subscriptions
• Live chat
• Workflow automations
• Add members to any site
• Quotes and invoices that are branded
• Import and export content via a CSV file into a database collection
• Built-in IDE with syntax highlighting and code completion

Components

• Text
• Media
• Button
• Menu
• Contact forms
• Social icons
• Store
• Bookings
• Events
• Members
• Sections

CMS

• The in-built content manager allows you to use database collections, accept data inputs from visitors and create page templates for displaying data.

SEO

• Robots.txt is generated for every site
• Structured data schema markups to help search engines
• XML sitemap is generated for every site
• Custom meta tags
• Instant Google indexing
• Personal SEO plan to help rank on Google
• EditorX has a custom tool called SEO Patterns which lets you create and apply customized meta tags, structured data markups and social sharing functions using variables so that you don’t need to edit each page and can keep things consistent across pages.

Integrations and plugins

• Marketing integrations with tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel and HotJar.
• Integrate with third-party logging system to view and track application logs and errors.

Hosting

• Enterprise-grade security
• SSL certified
• Search, purchase and register domains through EditorX

Support

• 24/7 Customer support is available in multiple languages including English, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese and more.
• A community discussion forum called Community X is also available.

EditorX has a range of pricing from simple website plans to ecommerce plans to sophisticated enterprise plans:

• Free plan - $0
• Essential plan - $22/month
• Extra plan - $35/month
• Ultra plan - $49/month
• Launch plan (ecommerce) - $29/month
• Boost plan (ecommerce)  - $69/month
• Scale plan (ecommerce)  - $219/month
• Enterprise plan - $500/month

Web design

• Drag and drop builder
• Over 70 professional and free themes
• Mobile responsive design
• Designer focused programming language used called Liquid

Ecommerce

• Accept payment methods such as Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Apple Pay and Google Pay
• Shopify Payments is PCI compliant and supports 3D Secure checkouts
• Track your orders and payments in your Shopify dashboard
• Create coupon codes for percentage or fixed amount off, free shipping and more
• Comparison price settings for sales
• Add and edit products from the CMS interface
• Inventory tracking
• Multiple variants for each product
• Keyword tags to help customers search and browse your store
• Fulfillment by Amazon is available

CMS

• Products, blogs, pages and site are all managed through an administration dashboard
• Easy to add, list, edit and organise CMS items from an intuitive CMS interface

SEO

• Robots.txt is generated for every site
• XML sitemap is generated for every site
• One click submission to Google Product Search comparison shopping search engine
• Editable title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs for blog posts, webpages, products, and collections

Integrations and plugins

• Shopify App store has over 6,000 apps including popular apps such as Octane AI, Instafeed, Facebook channel, Referral Candy, Judge Me and more.

Hosting

• Secure domain name hosting
• Certified Level 1 PCI compliant to ensure the security of customer data
• Hosted on secure Debian Linux servers, guarded by ultra secure OpenBSD firewalls
• Backed by MySQL databases

Support

• A community forum is available
• Live chat, email support, phone support and a help centre are also available

Shopify has a range of pricing from basic website plans to larger enterprise plans:

• Starter plan - $5/month
• Basic plan - $29/month
• Shopify plan - $79/month
• Advanced plan - $299/month
• Shopify Plus plan - $2,000/month

Shopify offers a free 14 day trial with no credit card required.