If you’re jumping into the world of entrepreneurship, ecommerce is a smart way to go. This is especially true with the retail ecommerce market expected to hit a whopping $5.4 trillion by 2022.
But how can you compete with all the ecommerce brands out there?
One of the secrets is having the right tools. Once you find the best website builder for your small business, you’ll be able to tap into a whole world of features and resources you need to build a gorgeous, high-converting ecommerce website.
So what exactly are those tools and how do you use them? (And how much will they cost?)
In this article, we’ll look at a few of the top website builders for small businesses. We’ll discuss the platforms, what they can help you achieve, and how you should choose the one that’s best for your unique situation.
Don’t wait for someone else to do it. Hire yourself and start calling the shots.
Get Started Free 9 top small business website builders in 2021
Wondering which small business website builder to use and what you’ll get out of your subscription? Let’s break down the top options and their features to help you decide.
1. Shopify: Best overall ecommerce site builder
If you ask around, many people will tell you that Shopify is the best website builder for small business. It’s built such a positive reputation because it has a lot to offer new and experienced entrepreneurs alike.
Shopify offers thousands of free and paid pre-built themes to help you jump right into building your website—no coding experience necessary. It also has built-in tools and resources to help you run comprehensive marketing campaigns to grow your store traffic and customer base, as well as comprehensive tracking tools to keep you on track.
If you’re interested in growing into an omnichannel brand, Shopify integrates with many other channels, including social media like Facebook and TikTok, as well as online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. You can even use Shopify to sell in-person if you decide to open a storefront or host a pop-up shop at local events.
Price: Basic plan starts at $29/month, plus transaction fees.
2. GoDaddy: Best for quick-and-easy websites
You may know GoDaddy as one of the world’s biggest website hosting companies, so it would make sense that the company offers a website builder too. If you want to get up and running as soon as possible, GoDaddy is one of the best small business website builders to choose from.
The website builder offers many of the features you can expect, like a design studio for content and videos, sales and marketing management tools, and tracking metrics to make sure you hit all of your business goals.
Many users report that GoDaddy offers a bit of a trade-off: the experience is simple and streamlined, but you lose some of the customization and capabilities that are typically offered by other website builders.
Price: Basic plan starts at $9.99/month.
3. WordPress: Best for custom web experiences
WordPress is truly a force to be reckoned with—it powers more than one-third of the world’s top 10 million websites. And as you can imagine, this means that WordPress has the benefit of a massive ecosystem. If you need a plug-in or integration, you’ll almost certainly be able to find it.
Some people say that WordPress is for “dreamers,” meaning that if you can dream up an idea for your small business website, you can accomplish it through WordPress. That’s why this website builder is a great choice if you have a website idea that requires some extra tools and customizations to bring to life.
Keep in mind, though, that the more complex a website you’d like to create, the more likelihood there is that you’ll need to hire a professional developer if you don’t already have those skills.
Price: Personal plan starts at $3, though you may want a higher-tier plan for better website functionality.
4. Squarespace: Best for beautiful, responsive websites
Squarespace is a design powerhouse with a large collection of stunning, fully responsive templates. Each Squarespace template has elements that you can customize to suit your brand, from the fonts and colors to the background images and banners.
For small businesses, Squarespace offers the perfect blend of modern design and ease of use. It keeps site-building really simple and gives you all the necessary marketing tools to work with. Embedding popups and announcement bars is as easy as dragging and dropping them wherever you want them to appear.
Squarespace also offers ecommerce tools you can use to build an online store. These include order management, point of sale, product image zoom, and more.
However, Squarespace has a bit of a learning curve, and it lacks some of the crucial functions of more established store builders.
Price: Personal plan starts at $12/month. If you want fully integrated ecommerce for your website, the minimum plan is $18/month, plus transaction fees.
5. Wix: Best for extending site functionality
Wix is a solid, beginner-friendly site builder for small businesses. Its drag-and-drop feature lets you design your site by placing elements where you want them.
Aside from typical site building, Wix offers ADI (artificial design intelligence) for less-tech-savvy business owners. This tool will ask you a few questions about your design and feature preferences, then create an attractive website for you.
And once you’ve created a website, Wix lets you extend its functionality via its App Market. Wix has over 250 apps you can choose from if your core setup is missing the features you need.
One thing to keep in mind is that if you’re looking to sell products online, Wix may not be the best choice. The platform allows you to add a maximum of 100 pages to your online store—and you don’t get integrations for newer channels like TikTok.
Price: Basic plan starts at $4.50/month but includes limited features and Wix ads. You’ll probably want to start with the Personal plan, which costs $8.50/month.
6. Site123: Best for simple websites
Site123 is one of the best free website builders for small businesses. Whereas some builders give you a limited free trial to test the waters, Site123 offers a completely free plan with enough storage to host a simple website.
When building a site, you can choose from over 180 mobile-responsive templates. And while Site123 doesn’t allow the adjustment of elements, you can reorder and add content sections to your preferences.
If you want to access Site123’s repository of plug-ins and ecommerce tools, you’ll need to sign up for its Premium plan. However, not every tool will be included in your package. The good news is that Site123 has an App Market where you’ll find several important tools not offered with your subscription.
The one caveat is that Site123 doesn’t offer a drag-and-drop editor like some other small business website builders. Instead, you get a point-and-click editor with limited creative freedom.
Price: Basic plan is free, but you’ll need to put up with ads and limited bandwidth on your site. Ad-free plans start at $7.25/month.
7. Weebly: Best for intuitive editing
Weebly is one of the easiest website builders around. Its new editor makes it simple to edit your website’s navigation and content. You can also choose from a variety of preset layouts, plus add or remove elements according to your preferences. On top of website building simplicity, Weebly offers a range of features to help you grow online. These include strong SEO features and support, marketing tools like coupons and newsletters, and integration with Square Payments.
Want to create an ecommerce website? Weebly offers an intuitive store panel where you can customize your design, add inventory, manage payments, and more. Plus, you’re able to access all the built-in features meant to help you establish and scale your business online.
On the flip side, Weebly lacks the depth and power of more specialist ecommerce platforms. In building a store for the long haul, its limited capabilities might become a major stumbling block.
Price: Basic plan is free but doesn’t connect to a custom domain name. Plans that allow a custom domain start at $6/month.
8. Square Online: Best free website builder
There are few website builders that offer completely free plans, and Square Online is one of them. You can build, launch, and drive traffic to your store at no cost.
Square Online also integrates with other channels like Facebook and Instagram, and offers SEO tools to help you continue growing your business.
Keep in mind, though, that the free version has limitations compared to paid plans from Square Online, as well as many of the competitors we’ve discussed. For example, your site will show ads that Square Online chooses, and you can’t use a custom domain like www.yourstore.com.
Of course, if you’d like more ability to customize your ecommerce experience, you can always upgrade to a paid plan.
Price: Forever free plan, plus transaction fee. Plans with custom domains start at $12/month.
9. Zyro: Best for entrepreneurs who want full support
Zyro has gotten a lot of praise for how easy it makes the web development process. No matter your skill level—even if you’re starting from zero—Zyro has a clean, minimalist, and user-friendly interface.
You’ll also find robust tools to guide you through the web design and launch process. And if you get stuck or have trouble figuring something out, Zyro’s customer support team is ready to help.
Like other website builders for small business, Zyro comes pre-loaded with tons of templates, free high-quality images, and presets that ensure you have a beautiful website without having to do all of the hard parts yourself. It even has AI-driven branding tools to cut out the guesswork when it comes to creating a truly impactful and high-performing store.
Price: Basic plan starts at $8.90/month.
Summary: 9 best website builders for small business owners
Here’s a recap of the best website builders for small businesses and what they’re best used for:
Shopify: Best overall ecommerce site builder GoDaddy: Best for quick-and-easy websites WordPress: Best for custom web experiences Squarespace: Best for beautiful, responsive design Wix: Best for extending site functionality Site123: Best for simple websites Weebly: Best for intuitive editing Square Online: Best free website builder Zyro: Best for entrepreneurs who want full support
When deciding which website builder to use, there are a few key considerations: the type of website you want to build, the complexity and customizations you want, how much time and money you can invest, and your current skills and resources.
Once you have an understanding of your needs and capabilities, choosing the right website builder will be a much simpler decision.
All that’s left to do is get out there and bring your business to life!
Want to learn more? Top 25 Small Business Ideas for 2021 [Updated] Small Business Accounting: How to Manage Your Own Books 14 Best Marketing Automation Software Tools 9 Marketing Strategies That'll Level Up Your Small Business
Read more: oberlo.com
SiteGround is one of the most popular web hosting services available on the market today. It’s a safe and reliable way to host your website in 2019.
More than 2 million active domains are hosted with SiteGround.
One of the reasons why this service is so popular is because they offer hosting options and plans suitable for a wide range of websites and businesses. Small personal websites, business websites, and large ecommerce sites alike can all use SiteGround.
For those of you who are looking to find a hosting provider for your new website, SiteGround is definitely a top option for you to consider.
It’s also a great choice for anyone who wants to switch hosting providers for their existing website since SiteGround has plans with a free site transfer. But we’ll talk about this in greater detail as we continue.
I’ll give you a better understanding of the plans, types of hosting, and top benefits offered by SiteGround. You can use this guide to make an informed decision to determine if SiteGround is the best web hosting plan for your needs.
SiteGround Web Hosting Plans
Like most web hosting services, SiteGround offers different plans for websites with varying needs. In this case, there are three tiers for most of their hosting types.
With the exception of cloud hosting and dedicated server hosting, the prices of these three plans will remain the same across the board for shared hosting, WordPress hosting, and Woocommerce hosting. We’ll dive deeper into those plans later in this guide.
For now, I’ll focus on the pricing and features of the three most popular plan options offered by SiteGround.
StartUp
As the name implies, the SiteGround StartUp plan is ideal for new websites. With rates starting at $3.95 per month, this plan is suitable for websites with less than 10,000 monthly visits.
You can only host one website with the StartUp plan, and it comes with 10 GB of web space. Other top features include:
Free site builder Free SSL and HTTPS Free email accounts Free CloudFlare CDN
It’s a basic plan, but definitely appropriate for new websites that are starting from scratch. For those of you who want more features and better performance, you’ll need to upgrade. You’ll also outgrow the StartUp plan as your traffic increases (which is a good thing).
GrowBig
The GrowBig plan starts at $5.95 per month. This is ideal for medium-sized websites averaging up to 25,000 monthly visits. GrowBig has 20 GB of web space and can host an unlimited number of sites.
Unlike the StartUp plan, GrowBig has enhanced caching ability. The SiteGround Supercacher has three levels.
Level 1 — Static content caching Level 2 — Dynamic data caching Level 3 — Database queries caching
StartUp only caches at the first level, but GrowBig caches on all three levels.
If you sign up for the middle-tier plan offered by SiteGround, you’ll also get free on-demand backups, a free site transfer, as well as a staging feature for WordPress and Joomla sites. I’d say that the GrowBig plan will be suitable for most of you who are reading this guide.
GoGeek
GoGeek can accommodate up to 100,000 monthly visits and has 30 GB of web space. Obviously, this plan is made for bigger websites with high volumes of traffic.
Rates for GoGeek start at $11.95 per month, but the plan comes with all of the bells and whistles. In addition to everything that’s available in the GrowBig plan, GoGeek offers:
Advanced priority support (expedited customer service to the most experienced agents) PCI compliant servers (necessary for those of you who process payments online) Git pre-installed (for creating repositories on your site)
The name for this plan was inspired by technology geeks. So it’s made for those of you who want more control of your site. If you don’t understand some of the tech lingo that’s being mentioned in the GoGeek plan, it’s probably not for you. The only other reason why you’d need to upgrade to GoGeek is if you’re getting tons of monthly site traffic.
WordPress hosting
SiteGround offers hosting options specifically designed for WordPress users. This will save you time since you won’t need to manually download, install, and configure WordPress.
With SiteGround, you can take advantage of their automated process that’s as simple as clicking a button. This plan also makes it easier for you to customize your WordPress site by choosing a theme, picking your site functionalities, and installing marketing tools.
The WordPress Starter Kit from SiteGround is a great added feature for new WordPress sites. You don’t need any technical knowledge or experience to set this up.
If you have an existing WordPress site, SiteGround offers a free WordPress transfer. The SiteGround Migrator plugin takes care of everything for you. This is a secure way to transfer your site.
Alternatively, if you have a GrowBig or GoGeek plan, you can get your WordPress site migrated by one of the experts at SiteGround. This is a free service for one website before rates start at $30 per site.
WooCommerce hosting
SiteGround also has hosting options for ecommerce shops using WooCommerce.
The quick install and integration with WooCommerce is an easy way for you to create a professional theme for your online store. You can get the site up and running in minutes.
Just migrate your WooCommerce site using the migrator plugin. Just like WordPress hosting, WooCommerce migrations done by a SiteGround expert is free for one website if you’re on the GrowBig or GoGeek plan. Then you’ll have to pay $30 per each additional site.
If you have WooCommerce, you’re going to need to the GoGeek plan anyways, since that comes standard with PCI compliant servers.
Cloud hosting
Cloud hosting is a new way to host websites. The process uses multiple remote servers and is a great option for those of you who have websites that have outgrown the shared hosting plans.
With cloud hosting, SiteGround gives you guaranteed resources to meet your needs. Your own RAM and CPU won’t be shared with any other websites.
It’s also easy for you to scale your website with this type of web hosting.
You can upgrade your RAM, CPU, and disk space on-demand at any time. You don’t need to get approval to do this, and it happens without any website downtime.
Rather than always doing this manually, you can set up automatic scaling with SiteGround. It will adjust your CPU and RAM to meet the needs of unexpected traffic surges, but you still have control of all the parameters.
There are four plans for SiteGround Cloud hosting. As you can see from the image above, the plans range from $80 to $240 per month. So there’s definitely plenty of options to choose from.
I’d say that the business plan will likely be a suitable choice for most of you who are using a cloud hosting service for the first time.
Dedicated servers
For those of you who don’t want to use cloud hosting or shared hosting, SiteGround offers dedicated server options as well.
This is perfect if you don’t want any restrictions in terms of the software you use on your website. You’ll also be able to make changes directly to your server if you go with this route.
All servers are managed by the experts at SiteGround. They also offer software designed to boost the performance of your server and provide added functionality.
You can also choose the location of your data center.
United States Europe Asia-Pacific
There are three dedicated server plans offered by SiteGround:
Entry Server Power Server Super Power Server
These plans start at $269 per month, $349 per month, and $729 per month, respectively.
Benefits of SiteGround for web hosting
There is plenty of upside to using SiteGround as a web hosting service. I just want to quickly highlight and explain why this platform stands out from its competitors.
High uptimes
When it comes to measuring how good a web host is, uptime is the ultimate metric. By definition, this is the amount of time that a server stays up and running.
A recent study shows that SiteGround has exceptionally high uptimes, on average, over a twelve-month stretch.
In 2018, SiteGround ranked fourth compared to other web hosts judging by average uptime. As you can see, they were just barely beat out for the third place spot by a one-thousandth percentage point.
Overall, the average uptime for the 32 shared web hosting services in the study was 99.59%. SiteGround was significantly higher than the average and near the top of the list.
High uptimes ensure that your site will nearly always be up and running around the clock.
Fast load times
Just because your site is up, it doesn’t always mean that it will be fast. But take a look at the response time for this SiteGround test website that was set up by Hosting Facts.
We already talked about the great uptime, but now you can refer to the response time column.
The average response time for the first six months of 2019 was 662 ms. That’s phenomenal. In addition to using a good web host, you should also know the other top principles that boost website loading times.
Great customer support
Hopefully, you don’t have any issues with SiteGround. But in the event that you run into a problem, have a question, or need some assistance, it’s nice to know that they provide excellent customer support.
You can access phone support as well as live chat 24/7. As I mentioned earlier, you’ll have priority support if you have a GoGeek plan. This means that you’ll be connected with the most experienced SiteGround technicians whenever you need help.
Free features
Web hosting services will always try to hit you with add-ons at an upcharge. But SiteGround throws in some great features at no extra charge.
Your membership comes with one free site migration. This can be done with their migrator plugin, which we talked about earlier. If you have the GrowBig or GoGeek plan, a SiteGround professional will do the migration for you.
SiteGround plans also come with a free CDN and free SSL certificate.
Cloudflare CDN keeps images, videos, and other large files off of your server. As a result, your server is always fast. Since SiteGround users servers all over the globe, the CDN makes sure that files are stored closer to website visitors for fast delivery.
The SSL certificate is required for all websites. It protects private information being transmitted between devices and websites. SiteGround throwing this in for free is a nice touch since you’d need to get one regardless.
Flexible
Nearly any website can be hosted on SiteGround.
It’s a great web hosting service for beginners and experienced users alike. You don’t need to be too tech-savvy to understand how the platform works and get your site hosted. But on the other hand, if you like to be more hands-on with the server and take advantage of certain features, SiteGround has plans with you in mind.
There are also enough options on SiteGround to accommodate different web hosting needs, such as shared hosting, dedicated server hosting, and cloud hosting.
They have plans suitable for a wide range of average site traffic as well. So as your website scales, you can always upgrade to a plan that will meet your needs.
Money back guarantee
SiteGround offers a 30-day money back guarantee for their shared hosting plans. This shows that they stand behind the services that are offered.
Dedicated servers and cloud hosting plans have a 14-day money back guarantee, which is still enough time to tell if you’re happy with your service.
SiteGround will also refund you if they fail to meet a 99.9% uptime rate. This is clearly written in their terms of service.
This relates back to what we talked about earlier, in terms of their high uptime rates. There’s a reason why it’s so high—SiteGround has a promise to stand behind.
Other considerations
There’s no such thing as a perfect web hosting service. While SiteGround is great, there are a few downsides that you should be made aware of before you proceed.
Setup fee
SiteGround charges a one-time setup fee for $14.95 with all of their plans. It’s not a deal breaker by any stretch, but it means you can’t just sign up for their lowest plan and be out the door for $3.95.
Renewal rates
At first glance, SiteGround’s pricing is very attractive. But those are only promotional rates.
When you renew, your rates will jump as follows:
$3.95 to $11.95 per month $5.95 to $19.95 per month $11.95 to $34.95 per month
The cost essentially triples across the board. So I’d recommend locking in the longest contract possible when you first sign up, which is 36 months. This will guarantee you a low rate for a while before you’re forced to renew.
Limited budget plan
For those of looking for the best cheap web hosting service, SiteGround’s StartUp plan for $3.95 per month is definitely attention-grabbing.
It’s a great choice for those of you with smaller websites, but it’s fairly limited for anyone who plans on getting more than 10,000 visitors per month. You may have to upgrade faster than you anticipated if you start with their lowest priced web hosting plan.
No free domains
While SiteGround throws in a fair amount of free features, a free domain isn’t on the list.
That’s a bit surprising, considering that this tends to be the standard with other reputable web hosting services. At the very least, the cost of the domain is covered for the first year. But again, SiteGround doesn’t offer that.
Conclusion
I’ll get straight to the point—I would definitely recommend SiteGround for web hosting.
This platform offers a wide range of hosting types and plans to accommodate the needs of nearly any website, large or small. SiteGround stacks up well compared to its competitors in terms of features and performance.
While the hosting service it’s perfect, it still gets the nod from us here at Quick Sprout. I’m confident that it will fulfill your web hosting needs.
Read more: quicksprout.com