Top 5 Website Builders

Over the last few months I have spent a lot of time looking at different website builders.

In this post I’m going to share with you my top 5 website builder recommendations. These website builders are all designed to be easy to use and to help you get your website up and running without you needing to deal with the complicated technical aspects like hosting, website management and website security. These website builders handle all of the technical details for you. So you can just build your website and run your business.

My goal with this website is to help you find the best website building tools to help you quickly and easily build your website. My reviews are based on my experience and opinion. Some links in this review are affiliate links and may provide me with a commission. I thank you for your support!

Check out these Website Builders for yourself.

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Wix

Why is it a top pick?

Wix is a website builder that is easy to use and to understand. It works like a basic page layout or graphic design program. If you have ever used something like Powerpoint you’ll be able to get started with Wix pretty quickly. That’s what wix is all about. It’s an easy to use powerful website design tool.

Why is it good?

The main thing that makes Wix stand out is it’s design flexibility. Page layout and design is as simple as adding content elements and placing them where you want them.

Wix also helps you to keep your designs consistent across your website by allowing you to set up default colors and text styling options. Having consistent fonts and colors across your website is one of the best and easiest ways to keep your website looking professional.

Wix also offers some of the best looking website templates. Even if you don’t use Wix to build your website with it’s a great place to look for website inspiration.

Along with design flexibility Wix also offers the most options of any of the easy to use website building platforms that I have tested for adding additional functionality to your website. They have an app marketplace where you can find an app that will help you do just about anything with your website.

For example:

• Create an online store
• Restaurant website with online ordering, reservations and menu pages
• Sell subscription plans
• Build calculators to help visitors make decisions
• Portfolio modules

And just tons of options for adding additional functionality to your website.

It has the most options for added functionality of any of the other website builders that I have seen outside of WordPress.

Wix also has really good blogging functionality. One of the things that I think is important to have for blogging is to have the ability to have and link to different category pages. Surprisingly a lot of easy to use website builders don’t have this. You just get one big blog feed. With Wix you can add categoreis and your visitors can then more easily find more of the type of content that they are looking for.

What’s not so good?

Because of all of the design flexibility and options I found that it took me longer to build websites with Wix. I think that more options just leads to more build time.

Wix also has you design the desktop view of your website first, and then it makes an attempt at building the mobile view for your pages. This works ok… but it’s really important that for every page you create you check and modify the mobile view. The mobile view of your website is as important or more important than the desktop view of your website.

Wix also is not the fastest when it comes to page loading speed. One tip I found to keep that page speed up be sure to pay attention to the add ons that you have running on your pages. Removing unnecessary add-ons can help improve your page loading time.

Wix Summary

Wix is great if you like to have precise design control over the look of your website pages. Wix also offers some of the best options for adding additional functionality to your website. It offers good blogging and additional marketing functionality.

Wix is great for building a small business website where you want design control and you may want to add some advanced functionality directly to your website.

I particularly like Wix for restaurant websites if you are looking for an all in one solution. Wix also is great for creating portfolio websites because of all of the different gallery view options that they offer as well as the flexibility and design control.

If you have a real creative drive and you want to have control over the layout and design of your web pages. You can’t beat Wix for design freedom.

Wix Alternative PageCloud

If you like this style of website builder, but want better performance check out PageCloud. PageCloud offers a very similar page building experience to Wix, but in my testing it was a bit faster on page load performance. What you don’t get with PageCloud are all of the options for apps and additional functionality for your website.

Weebly

Why is it a top pick?

Weebly is a top pick because it offers a nice blend of being easy to use with just the right amount of design control.

Why is it good?

If you are new to building websites Weebly is easy to use and easy to understand. Weebly features a drag and drop builder style builder. Some drag and drop builders can be a little confusing, but I found Weebly to be really easy to understand. When I wanted to add or move something on my page it worked as I expected.

If you are looking for an inexpensive website option Weebly does offer a 6.00 a month plan. This plan even allows you to connect your own domain name! The catch is that your website will display a Weebly ad at the bottom of your website, but if you are looking to keep costs down that might be a trade off you are willing to make.

Weebly also offers some of the better blogging functionality of the Website builders that I have tested. The blog module offers blog categories, so you can organize your content and make it easier for your viewers to find more of the content that they are looking for. (Categories seem like an obvious thing to include, however many of the easy to use website builders I have tested don’t offer blog categories.) You also get a good amount of design control over your blog posts. With Weebly you can use many of the same content blocks used for building your pages to build your blog posts.

Weebly also offers several apps for adding additional functionality to your website.

There are even some pretty good features for selling online. So if you have a limited number of items that you wanted to sell online Weebly could help you out with that.

What’s not so good?

Weebly offers the basic theme function of choosing between light and dark, but if you create a completely black website like the one I have the menu navigation is also black. If you switch it back to light then default items like the forms change their default display colors to black. The builder should either be more intelegent about light versus dark or just give me the option to choose the colors for all content that I add to the builder.

For some reason you can’t access images that you have previously uploaded to your website. Every-time you want to add an image you need to re-upload that image. That can be kind of annoying.

Weebly Summary

Weebly is a platform that is designed to be easy to use. For the most part is is.

It is also pretty good for adding additional functionality to your website with Apps, the ability to add an online store and decent blogging capabilities make Weebly a good choice for novice website builders that want a little more control, but don’t want to be totally overwhelmed.

Weblium

Why is it a top pick?

Weblium offers an easy to use streamlined page building experiance that makes building and designing websites easy and fun.

Weblium is specifically designed to help small businesses create and manage their own website.

Why is it good?

Weblium has a clean easy to use interface. I love the inline plus icon that you can use to add content or page sections as you go. All website builders should have this, it just really speeds up the process of building pages.

I like all of the pre-designed page sections that you can add to your website and then modify as you like. This helps speed up the page building process.

The builder also has some other nice touches, here are some of the builder features that really wowed me.

AI design supervisor

It’s AI design supervisor that will automaticlly switch text color from dark to light depending on the background you choose. I really helps you build your website faster when you don’t need to constantly keep adjusting the color of your fonts to work with the background that you have choosen.

Image focal point

There are some other nice touches to the details of the builder. For example when you are setting up the image focal point it also brings up a mobile preview of what that will look like on a phone! So Freaking Cool!

Unified site styling

I love the simple great controls for creating a unified style to your website. Set your site colors and fonts and your ready to go.

Lots of really great thoughtful touches to the builder that help you get your website built quickly and looking great.

I was impressed by their tech support response. They were able to get back to me really fast. In fact I was able to chat with a tech support rep in just minutes. This is a big help if you are new to building websites and need help and don’t want to have to wait until the next day to reach tech support.

What’s not so good?

The different themes have a few different styling cues that can’t be changed. For example on the theme I chose the top of each section has this dot and line design feature, which can’t be removed, and you can’t change themes. Be sure to look carefully for things like that when you start building your website and just choose a different theme if you find something like that that you don’t like.

Weblium does offer a blog which is good, but the blogging functionality is pretty basic.

There also isn’t much in the way of additional functionality that you can add to your website.

Weblium Summary

This builder is great for small businesses, because it’s easy to design and create a website with. The platform is specifically designed with the small business owner in mind.

Weblium offers a nice balance between being easy to use and giving you design control.

Godaddy

Why is it a top pick?

The Godaddy Website Builder is the easiest to use on this list. In fact you don’t really need to do any design to build your website. You just need to pick a design that looks good and start filling in the blanks.

What is it?

Godaddy website builder is the prefect choice for local small businesses like restaurants, Real Estate agents and local service businesses who want to quickly make their own websites and don’t want to have to think about design.

Why is it good?

The builder is very basic. You simply choose from the pre-designed page sections. You then use the form on the right to add in the content to fill out those sections. This not only makes it easy for you to build your website, but it also makes it possible for you to build your website using not just a desktop computer but you can even build your full site from a tablet or phone.

You can change themes even after you have built your site, so it’s easy to change the over all look later on.

Along with being really easy to use this builder also offers a lot of options for additional functionality. Some of the things you can do with the Godaddy website builder are

• Book online appointments
• Add ecommerce with the higher level plans
• Email marketing features are included even in the base plan. The higher tier plans allow you to have more subscribers.
• Real Estate agents who need to build their own website can use the a special module for connecting to the MLS/IDX to show listings.
• There are also several modules for restaurants that help you display your restaurant menu, add a link to reservations with open table or a link to online ordering with chownow

This easy to use website builder even has has surprisingly good blogging functionality. With several blog feed display options and links to your different blog categories.

The website builder also has a great tool to help anyone improve the search engine optimization of their site by walking thru the steps in their SEO tool.

The Google pagespeed score and page loading times were also really good with this builder.

What’s not so good?

The biggest downside to the Godaddy Website Builder is that you don’t have much control over the layout of your sections or design of your website. So if you would like to have more control over your deign Godaddy probably isn’t for you.

The Godaddy website builder also does not offer a lot of additional functionality, most of the additional functionality relies on linking to outside websites.

Godaddy Website Builder Summary

If you are a busy business owner and you don’t want to spend a lot of time building your website you should consider using the Godaddy Website Builder. You’ll be able to quickly build a website that also offers great performance. It’s as simple as choosing the right design, add the content blocks and filling in the blanks.

Even though the design platform isn’t all that flexible the add ons and additional functionality that you can add to your Godaddy website is surprising. This makes the Godaddy website builder a great choice for building a website super easily.

Godaddy Alternative Jimdo

If you like this style website builder but want a different option also check out Jimdo. It’s a similar builder style, but offers a few more design options in their page sections

Duda

Why is it a top pick?

Duda is probably the website builder that I’m most excited about. Right from my first impression of it I could tell that it was a really great tool. I like that the builder has a lot of advanced controls without being totally overwhelming.

What is it?

Duda is designed for professional website designers, but don’t let that hold you back from giving it a try. I found that it was surprisingly easy to use. I think most people with good computer skills would find Duda easy to use.

Why is it good?

Duda builds really fast websites. In fact of the website builders that I have tested, Duda performed the best by far! I used googles pagespeed rankings and GTMetrics to test each of the builders. Duda was way ahead. Really impressive.

Duda offers great balance between being easy to use and offering powerful design and functionality features.

As you are building your pages you can choose from lots of nice looking pre-designed page sections to help you get started.

You get a good amount of control over the styling of your website on desktop, tablets and mobile so that you can make sure that your website looks great no mater what device your viewers are using.

If you are a website designer and you want to build websites for other people Duda is specifically designed for you.

• The higher level plans you can white label the builder with your company branding so that your clients only see your branding and not Duda’s
• There are also special tools like site comments to get feedback from your clients.

If you are interested in ecommerce. Duda offers what seems to be a really well though out online store solution.

If e-commerce is your main purpose for your website you should check out my Shopify review.

Duda is also designed for mobile editing on a tablet or phone. You won’t be able to build an entire website using a tablet or smart phone, but you shouldn’t have a problem editing text or making some basic adjustments to your website.

What’s not so good?

It is a little bit more complicated to use then some of the other builders on this list. Some of the building features are designed for people who understand website building techniques, but I do think that with a little effort most people can work with and get good results using Duda.

The blogging functionality is just ok. You do have some control over the design of you blog feed page and your blog post pages which is great. What Duda is really lacking is blog categories. If you have a lot of content on your website it’s great to break it out into categories so your viewer can find more of the type of content that they like. This is so frustrating, because so much of Duda is so good. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they are working on improving their blogging functionality.

Duda Summary.

If you build websites for other people you should absolutely give Duda a try. The platform makes great websites and has all sorts of tools to help you build websites quickly and to deliver those websites to your clients.

If you are building a your own small business website and want more control over the design of your website Duda strikes a great balance between being easy to use while still offering powerful design tools.

Plus Duda makes really fast websites!

If you want to see why I’m so excited about duda for yourself!

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Conclusion

These are my top 5 recommendations for website builders. I think that there is something for just about everyone on this list.

If you want to find out more about any of these website builders you can watch my full reviews on YouTube or check out my other website builder reviews.

I really do want to help you find the best tools for building your websites with. You can help me with that by leaving a comment down below telling me about what kind of website you are looking to build, or what kind of functionality you need from a website builder. I’d also love to hear suggestions for the kinds of tutorials that you would like to see on this channel.