Here you will find the best free website builders for your first website! These pages builders are easy to use, fast to set up and affordable to run.
Investing in an agency to build you a new website can turn out to be a fairly costly venture, with average prices for unique designs ranging anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000 — depending on the project requirements.
While it certainly helps to have a professional web design built exclusively just for you, in more cases than one, all we need is a good website builder platform to build a good-looking (and fully functioning) website at a fraction of the cost.
Website builders advertise that anyone, with no experience in design and development, can create a website with them. If they are so great, why aren’t the web designers out of work yet? In most cases, they become practical tools for web designers.
What is the reason for this? It is simple; a web builder offers an easy way to design an attractive and professional website for your business, but it is based on a template, and therefore, basic and indistinguishable.
Web designers, however, have the capability to transform the basic template available from the web builders to create something unique. It is, therefore, a good idea for a designer to use this tool to design a customized website that looks and feels distinct.
Here is a list of seven of the best website builders that you can use when you begin.
Wix
Do you want to start your own online store? Perhaps you need a website for your new restaurant, or the event that you’re going to be hosting?
Wix has got you covered! With hundreds of unique styles to choose from, each style is categorized — making it very easy for you to find the exact style that you need to build.
Wix provides an easy-to-use drag-and-drop website builder, designer-made templates, beautiful galleries, mobile-optimized, domains, huge image collection, secure hosting, SEO, 24/7 full support and more — all wrapped up in one free website builder.
Recently, Wix rolled out a new and beautiful website builder that has taken some inspiration and logical understanding from the social giant Facebook. Full parallax and video background integration are just some of its newest features.
Weebly
Easy To Use But Going Through A Transition — Weebly is an excellent, easy to use website builder — but it’s also going through a transition to a new editor called the Square editor.
The Square editor is significantly less customizable than the old Weebly editor. For example, you can’t add individual elements. Instead you add sections.
So you can toggle individual elements on and off within a section but you can’t actually add additional elements:
This is a major step backwards in flexibility. The old Weebly editor let you add sections but also allowed you to add individual elements. With the Square editor you can only add sections. It’s unusual to see a website builder purposefully remove options.
The new Square editor is also short of several features that the old Weebly editor covered: no blog, no app store, no video backgrounds and no membership system.
You can still use the old Weebly editor but Weebly has told me that they are shifting users towards the new Square editor. And while the new Square editor is easy to use (especially for ecommerce) it’s too limited for me to give Weebly a perfect 5 star rating as I have in the past.
Webflow
Outstanding Custom Design Design — Webflow feels magical. Go ahead, roll your eyes. I get it. I just called software magical. But let me explain.
The big innovation with Webflow is their Designer tool. It’s the first tool to provide the flexibility of front-end coding without requiring you to actually code.
It does this by not shying away from the complexity of code— to use Webflow, you need to understand the fundamentals of web design. This includes concepts like style hierarchy, box model, floating, absolute and relative positions.
This makes it a categorically different tool than website builders like Squarespace or Wix. Squarespace and Wix aren’t designed for you to have complete freedom. They provide templates and smart defaults— they abstract you away from the complexity of code and they’re much easier to use.
On it’s own, Webflow’s Designer is excellent but what takes Webflow to the next level is that you can integrate Webflow’s CMS into the Designer— allowing you to create custom, repeatable content types, something you can’t do in any other website builder!
Weblium
Weblium is definitely amongst the top free website builders that you can currently get your hands on. It is a powerful and practical software that suits users of all skill levels.
Not just that, but Weblium is great for building pretty much any website you can think of. With a broad selection of ready-to-use templates (200+!), you can quickly find the right one for your business or project. From then on, you activate the drag and drop page builder, style the appearance according to your liking and call it a day.
As for all the other technical aspects, let Weblium and the integration of AI take care of it. Some more goodies of the free plan are unlimited storage, SSL certificate, Google Analytics integration and event tracking. The creation of a sophisticated website starts now.
Carrd
Carrd is for simple, one-page websites— that’s it. All it’s themes are designed for one page websites:
Because Carrd is only for one page websites, they can do things differently.
For example, Carrd is way, (way) cheaper than competitors. Below is Carrd’s cheapest plan compared to the cost of the other 7 recommended website builders cheapest plans:
Plus Carrd has the best editor and themes for one-page websites. You can technically make one-page websites with other website builders but their interace can feel hacked together. Carrd is exclusively for one-page websites so the interface is designed for that.
You’ll only want to use Carrd if it makes sense for your website to be one page. If you’re not sure if one page works for you, I’d suggest just trying Carrd for 15 minutes— you might surprise yourself with how much you can fit into one page!
Jimdo
If your project involves creating multimedia sites, this is the web builder you need. With its easy and efficient tools, customizable layouts and great speed, this can be used to create websites and stores, which are mobile compatible too.
You can get a free version; but the numerous advantages are available only if you pick the paid options. What do you get? Search engine optimized layouts, photo galleries, social media tools, forms, widgets, images, RSS feed, blog, and many things more.
MotoCMS Website Builder
Building beautiful and cross browsers friendly website has become easier with MotoCMS website builder. It comes loaded with a slew of powerful features that include – wide range of widgets, drag and drop website builder, music and media player, HTML and rich content widgets and more. It just takes 3 steps to create a website with this website builder. So, try this and have fun.
SquareSpace
Squarespace is like the Apple of website builders. It’s intuitive, curated and thoughtfully designed. I highly recommend it.
Squarespace templates are fresh, sophisticated and share a similar look and feel: lots of whitespace, bold typography and room to showcase photography.
It’s of course a bit subjective, but in my opinion Squarespace has the best templates of any website builder:
Squarespace also has excellent features. They have the best blogging, podcasting, audio players and photo galleries of any website builder. Plus, their ecommerce is a viable alternative to pure ecommerce website builders such as Shopify.
To top it all off, Squarespace has honest, up-front pricing. You won’t be nickle-and-dimed further down the road— an unfortunate problem with many other website builders.
Finding the Right Website Builder for You
Website building is definitely taking a new turn, whether for the best or worst is still undecided. The idea of a simple dynamic platform overtaking the task of building a quick and fast website is building up.
A lot of designers and developers in the community feel resentful towards this idea. The truth of the matter is, nobody is going to spend thousands of dollars to build something unique. They can do this by just spending a couple of bucks and get pretty much the same result.
If you are looking to build a website based on WordPress you might want to read our detailed beginner’s guide on how to setup a WordPress powered website.
You’ve got a point Michael when you asked this: “…If they are so great, why aren’t the web designers out of work yet?” The reasons are many, but one thing’s for sure, you can’t be a web designer overnight nor can you become a coder; it’s both an art and science. There’s more than just draggin’ and droppin’ that makes a website, that is. These are awesome suggestions, thanks!
This is a great roundup for web designers, very nice. Thank you for sharing!