15 Best Website Builders UKHi, I am Nick. Writing is my passion and web design is my profession. Together with my friend Munni, a web developer, we started this webpage after reading a disheartening stat: “2 million businesses in the UK still don’t have websites”. This struck us as odd as there are hundreds of website builders out there helping millions of small business owners without any technical knowledge build their own websites.
Researching the issue deeper made us realise that a few misconceptions might be standing between those 2 million business owners and their first professionally looking website.
We decided to dispel these common delusions. We put to work our combined expertise in the field of web design and web development, poured in many hours of research and found out how all top website builders work and how they can be useful for small business owners.
For all those business owners without a website and for those enthusiasts who want to start a website on their own but don’t know how: all research and work on this website is for you
As it is a huge topic to explain, we have divided this comprehensive guide into chapters:
Chapter 1: Why You Need a Website and How Easy It is to Build One
Chapter 2: Not All Websites Need Custom Coding
Chapter 3: How to Choose The Best Website Builder Software—?
Chapter 4: Our Pick on Top Website Builders
Chapter 5: Website Builders and E-commerce Platforms are Different
If you are not keen on reading all of that, click on these website builders to know more about them. I am quite sure one of these should have all the features you are looking for.
Some 89% of the adult population in the UK use the internet on a regular basis, and this percentage is bound to grow even higher.
I hope business owners read this carefully: 89%. And still increasing.
You might be running a small store or a local service and might be thinking that you are doing reasonably well without a website — this is the first misconception. The thing is that if you haven’t had a web page, you have no real basis for comparison.
A recently published study provides an insightful perspective: a website could boost the revenue of businesses with one employee or with a sole proprietor with over £30,000 per annum. The situation is, even more, promising for businesses with ten or more employees.
I know, word of mouth is important and builds a loyal client base. However, today mostly everybody’s pocket is beaming with connections to the global network. Reading reviews online, instead of asking neighbours, feels more and more natural and it becomes easier by the minute.
What is also much easier nowadays is the building of a website. Let me rephrase that:
“Building and maintaining a website today requires no technical knowledge, nor is it costly.”
Here comes misconception 2: the myth that you have to be a techie to run a website is probably older than the one that a site is not necessary to grow your business. Admittedly, hiring a developer and dealing with webmasters still is a thing, but it is far from necessary, especially for small and medium businesses and personal websites.
Thanks to one website builder or another, millions upon millions business owners, photographers, designers, artists, and bloggers have established a successful online presence without an ounce of technical knowledge or a line of code.
Not convinced yet?
Allow me to dispel your belief in myths from the past with facts from the present. Facts, which, if embraced and understood, could have unforeseeable positive implications on your immediate future.
Are Website Builders People Who Come and Build Sites?
Website builders are not quite like real-life builders or developers. The people who build sites are called web developers or web designers.
The website builders provide you with all the tools necessary to make a web page by yourself, though.
As long as you have an internet connection and can launch a web browser, you can construct your website.
There are no additional requirements.
(At least no technical ones. Most website builders have a monthly fee.)
If you think that all of the 100 million registered Wix users have a technical background, I’d have to counter with incredulous laughter.
It’s more likely that none of them knows how to code, and that’s one of the reasons why such platforms are so popular. Elementary scripting skills could prove useful with some website builders like Weebly, but familiarity with HTML or CSS is an added value and not a necessity.
All site builders discussed below come with a good selection of templates and themes. They would allow you to flesh out your website exactly as you imagine it.
Website builders make the website building process very easy
With website builders, you can enjoy virtually limitless creative power through simple drag-and-drop or point-and-click interfaces. Editing and modifying the existing templates is easy and pleasant and so is adding the desired functionality. Well-developed, tested and optimised apps are waiting there, ready to mould any interaction you can think of. Not just that, every builder has extensive guides on how to build your own websites using their apps.
More importantly, the industry-standard dictates that any self-respecting and easy-to-use website builder must provide responsive designs, i.e. templates optimised for mobile devices. This feature alone saves a lot of manual tweaking and increases the reach of any website.
Statistics reveal that 23% of the sites in the UK are yet to adapt to modern times and are not mobile-friendly.
This might be due to the fact that many websites on the internet are built on open source website building platforms like WordPress. Such websites often need a lot of manual refinement to get started and to become mobile-friendly. But with website builders, even with absolutely no experience in web design, you could establish a mobile-friendly online presence within a day or two.
Just to be clear here, the best website builder reviews and feature comparisons speak about the ease of use of one platform or another, but you should approach them with an open and inquisitive mind. However simple and well-designed it may be, a new interface inevitably requires some time to reveal all its secrets. The learning curve of any online website builder is much lower than that of all other site building tools, but it exists.
The people developing website builder software take this into account, and the good platforms have informative tutorials, which help you learn their functionality while actually designing your web page. Armed with curiosity and desire to learn you could experiment freely and use any website builder the way that suits you the most. Most of them have a free website builder option or a trial period that lets you acquire a very good idea of what you are getting into.
This brings up the most important question: Which is the best site builder for you? There are hundreds of them, but how many free website builder versions are you going to try before zeroing in on one?
Read on a find the answer in the next chapter.
Technically speaking, there are three ways to develop a website.
You could actually code it from the ground up, or you could design and customise it using an open-source solution, or you could just use a website maker to drag and drop elements and construct your website.
A custom-coded site can take months before launch; mastering a CMS also requires some serious time investment and a degree of technical knowledge.
I work closely with to web developers, who share the sentiment and are quick to point out that any drag-and-drop website builder is a great solution for a vast number of websites.
If you consider the time to be the most valuable resource and then calculate the actual resources necessary for the maintenance of custom coded websites and open-source platforms, then it becomes obvious that these two solutions are unsuitable for many people.
Ordering a custom-built site makes sense only if the expected profit from the web page surpasses a certain amount and if you are ready to deal with designers regularly.
For small to medium businesses, blogs, portfolios and even for small e-commerce websites, Weebly and Wix are among the best free website builders in UK. They are all-around solutions that are very easy to learn and manage.
Those interested particularly in selling products online should consider the likes of Shopify and BigCommerce. They are more narrowly specialised and compete for the title of the best UK ecommerce website builder.
Certain sites need this extra customisation and technical optimisation, and solutions like WordPress, Magento or another open-source website builder would be the way to go. This is especially true for big sites, with numerous and constant content updates or a huge gamma of products.
Indeed, these open source solutions – WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Joomla, etc. – have way more features than even the best website creators, but this versatility comes at a cost. It takes considerably more time to learn and to manage these systems. They require updates, their plugins require updates, their themes require updates. Some of these operations are automated but by far not all.
Their steeper learning curve and the need for extensive maintenance are two of the things that can spell a technical nightmare for a small businessman who knows nothing about building websites. It is not always easy to find adequate support when things go wrong with any part of the CMS, whereas the support of the Top 10 website builders is quite comprehensive.
The other option, paying a developer for an entirely custom-built website costs much more than a CMS or website builder. It also entails continuous payments for further maintenance and updates of the page.
These are some general considerations, a set of loose guidelines to help you understand better the role website building platforms can perform. They are easy to use and tend to provide excellent solutions in their areas of specialisation.
In many, many cases, thanks to the website builders, UK business owners could bring their ventures to the next level thanks to the unparalleled ease of use and multiple features.
Now that we know website builders can be better website building solutions for most of the small and medium businesses, the question remains: how to choose the best website builder, DIY?
At the end of the day, the answer differs according to the individual needs, but there are several factors to consider before making the final decision.
In the next chapter, you will get to know the key points of evaluation. Luckily, there are a few platforms with free plans and many with a trial period, so testing out a free website builder or two is always an option.
The number of site building platforms is huge.
Before you can make an informed decision and create your own website using a website creator, you must understand what the different platforms offer, what actually hides behind the flashy marketing terms, and how their pricing structures work.
Getting the right best website builder for you is important, as one of the main restrictions nearly all DYI site builders face is the inability to transfer a site from one platform to another.
There are some key factors I check extensively when testing new website building solutions. They provide a solid ground for evaluation of any type of builder; still, for an online shop, a closer look at the features of each ecommerce website builder is necessary. You can check more details about a few store builders in Chapter 5.
Ease of use is the first thing to consider. It should be paired with the functionality of the platform because having a user-friendly interface that can do nothing is not particularly helpful.
Take for example BoldGrid, the platform with the most templates. This particular website builder software runs on top of WordPress and transfers the immense functionality of the CMS in its entirety. Only that BoldGrid is anything but an easy website builder to use. Granted, you can do amazing things with this WordPress website builder, customise and change absolutely everything, but the steep learning curve and the time investment are not to be underestimated.
Speaking of Bold Grid and its 3000 designs, the number of templates is another thing to consider.
Jimdo is on the other end of the spectrum. With its meager 17 themes, it is the very definition of an easy website builder, but it is also a limiting platform for people who don’t want to waste time fiddling with blank layouts.
A good collection of templates is important as it gives you more options and helps you create unique sites. The quality of the templates plays its role too, though. Squarespace doesn’t have the most designs, but each theme is a real beauty.
Starting off with a high-quality layout makes everything much easier, especially if you have no distinct skills in design.
Another major factor is the responsive design, the optimisation for mobile devices. You do not want to join this 23% of UK websites in their parallel reality where smartphones are yet to be invented.
Every “best website builder UK” reviewed on this website comes with responsive designs.
All characteristics of the templates are closely related to other key factors, like speed and SEO.
Well-executed templates contribute to the site’s speed and performance. Checking website builder reviews and running benchmark tests allows me to compare the different platforms and acquire a good idea of how fast a web page might become.
Fast pages see a much lower bounce rate (people navigating away without checking the content of the page) and better ranking with Google and other search engines. Nobody likes slow pages.
SEO is another major contributor to better visibility and exposure. Most site builders have the basics well covered, but some platforms go the extra mile and provide a really extensive set of SEO tools.
Integrations and applications could also help a lot with traffic generation and retention. Being able to establish a serious presence on social media and allowing the visitors to interact with your page however they want is the way to go.
In any case, a responsive website builder with great SEO strategy and awesome functionality would generate no traffic if it is offline. Reliability and uptime are crucial for any web endeavour. Outages and technical issues are bound to happen at one point or another. How such unsavoury moments are handled is what really matters. Having a strong, knowledgeable and friendly support team and an extensive knowledgebase can turn a potential disaster into a hardly noticeable hiccup.
Cost
Probably the trickiest part of evaluating an online site builder without actually subscribing is the pricing.
The so-called free website makers or builders can give you a good idea of what they are about, even though their free plans are rather poor in features. All the same, testing many platforms is time-consuming.
How can you get to know the multitude of site builders without actually signing up for all of them?
First and foremost, come up with an idea about what your site should be, create a concept. Decide how much time you are ready to put into mastering the platform and roughly how much money you are ready to invest.
Then read the features of each platform carefully. It is not an uncommon marketing strategy to advertise a certain price and then to pile on top of it a bunch of fees attached to paid but necessary applications and tools. Whenever you encounter an unclear point, finicky wording or incomplete information, contact the support team and ask for clarifications.
Most commonly, site building platforms charge unreasonably high fees for email accounts. When you are a business owner, an email is quite necessary for branding purposes and smooth operations. Usually, it is much more feasible to set up an email service with a third-party provider.
Spending some time researching can save you lots of headaches down the road. Professional reviews are always there to help and so are the opinions of the end-users.
Read both as critically as possible because many website builder reviews tend to be exclusively praiseful and many user accounts are isolated cases, which often don’t tell the whole story.
In Chapter 4 you can get acquainted with some of the best the general-purpose site builders. Chapter 5 covers ecommerce solutions, which have their specifics. This theoretical advice is all good and dandy, but in order to give you a better idea of how website makers are evaluated, go through the next two chapters.
In-depth reviews are useful but before narrowing down your search, a nice overview could give you an idea of whether it is worth to invest more time in researching and testing.
Pros: Arguably the best option for beginners, Wix website builder comes with unmatched functionality, great ease of use, decent SEO options, many templates with nice, modern and responsive design. On top of that, there are many third-party applications, which can boost the functionality and productivity of your website.
The Wix monthly fees are among the lowest in the industry, technically making it the cheapest website builder.
Cons: The sheer size of Wix (nearly 110 million users) increases the support reaction time; cannot switch templates once you have picked a design.
Recommended: Highly, especially for beginners. If you want to know more details and how real WIX users rated it, check my detailed WIX review page
Pros: Duda was designed with mobile-friendly websites in mind and it delivers. Fully optimised templates with many features and embedded functionality can get your site going in no time. For greater optimisation, you can dive into the HTML code, too.
Duda is a particularly sound choice if you want your website to have multilingual versions. The plans include numerous nice perks, with the multi-language support standing head and shoulders above the competition.
Cons: Plans are rather pricey; no apps store; not that suitable for e-commerce.
Recommended: Excellent choice, especially if you want to have a multilingual site. Check my extensive research on Duda review page
Pros: Weebly is one of the most famous website creating software for a number of good reasons. Economic plans and great ease of use are the first two to come to mind, but the great templates are not that far behind. They are plenty and have an excellent base design.
All Weebly websites can be edited on the go via the respective Weebly Android and iOS apps, which is an awesome perk. The rich application store adds unprecedented functionality, allowing you to create any type of website you want.
Cons: Somewhat limited template customisation options for non-coders; plans are a bit more expensive than the average.
Recommended: Highly.
Amongst all the best website builders UK, Weebly alone is having UK specific page and with pricing in GBP (£).
Pros: A platform as straightforward as its name suggests, SiteBuilder is simple webiste builder to use, versatile and diverse. It has improved a lot since its first iterations, which were quite clumsy and limiting. At the moment, SiteBuilder offers over 10,000 templates (more than any other website builder), drag-and-drop interface, fantastic SEO toolset, good loading speed, and excellent support.
Its pricing is leaning toward the low end of the spectrum, but before you prepare your credit card you can check its free plan
Cons: No third-party apps, backend could be a bit faster, billing could be much better.
Recommended: An OK choice.
Pros: GoCentral is the revamped version of the GoDaddy website builder. It is very easy to use, with all the basic functionality covered.
Cons: A rather expensive choice, GoCentral’s functionality is too bare-bones to contest seriously with more popular site builder options out there. Yes, everything is included and yet so much is lacking. The customisation of the templates could be better, especially since it is needed – the designs are uninspiring.
Add to the mix the questionable GoDaddy support, and you get a product you have no reason to pick up.
Recommended: No. Too many drawbacks.
Evaluating online shop builders is a touch harder than comparing general-purpose platforms like Wix website builder with Weebly. A functional web store has many more characteristics to consider than a blog or a portfolio site.
You should always take into account the characteristics listed in Chapter 3, but also the features specific to the actual shop management.
Key factors are the number of products listed and the transaction fees, but there are many other details to go through like: product management, shipping options, abandon cart management and SSL certificate.
Pros: With over 140 excellent templates (24 free ones), over 1,500 applications and a good SEO toolset, Shopify is one of the best ecommerce website builders out there.
All their plans include an SSL certificate and do not limit the number of products you can display. Only their smallest plan does not include abandoned cart recovery, but all plans include fraud analysis and 24/7 support.
The Basic Shopify plan costs $29, the most popular one $79 and the biggest package comes at $299 per month. The main difference between the plans is the reduced transaction fee when customers pay with credit cards.
For the Basic Shopify plan it is 2.2% + 20p, while for the standard plan it drops to 1.9% + 20p. It might not seem like a lot but with a hefty number of transactions, this difference really matters. As long as you use their payment gateway for online payments, there are no transaction fees.
Overall, most ecommerce website builder reviews agree that Shopify is a very reliable and versatile platform, which can accommodate the needs of online shops of any size.
Cons: Transaction fees included in all plans; Liquid, the language Shopify templates are coded on, is not exactly user-friendly.
Recommended: Highly recommended for ecommerce.
Pros: BigCommerce store builder is the easiest and most versatile ecommerce solutions out there. It comes with a great number of inbuilt features, no transaction fees, unlimited products, unlimited staff accounts, integration with Amazon and eBay, Facebook, Pinterest, Google Shipping and encrypted connection over HTTPS from the get-go.
The Standard plan comes at $29.95/mo but does not feature an abandoned cart saver. The Plus ($79.95/mo) and the Pro ($249.95/mo) include this useful feature and increase the limit of annual turnover from $50,000 to $150,000 and $400,000, respectively.
BigCommerce is easily one of the most comprehensive ecommerce solutions out there. Its pricing structure is very reasonable for the huge amount of features and shipping options included.
Cons: The main downside is the limited number of free templates but the 15-day trial period would allow you to gauge whether this is the best ecommerce site builder for you and whether the additional investment is justified. BigCommerce has only 7 free templates and 76 paid ones, making its initial setup costly.
Recommended: Highly; BigCommerce gives Shopify a run for its money.
NOTE: Although Shopify and Bigcommerce have their UK specific domains for their Ecommerce platforms in UK market, their pricing is in dollars ($) instead of pounds (£).
Pros: Volusion users can choose among 50 templates, but about 40 of those cost $180, making many design choices rather costly. Add to that the limited selection of only 60 plugins (and nearly 50 of them are paid too) and you begin to understand how the feeling of limited creative freedom intensifies.
Volusion does not have any transaction fees.
Cons: Their ecommerce platform attempts to streamline the design process, but it can feel a bit restrictive instead. None of their plans includes SSL, which is a must for any online shop and would burden your budget further.
There are four plans to choose from, but only the Premium ($135/mo) allows you to feature unlimited products. It still puts a cap on your monthly bandwidth.
The Pro plan ($75/mo) allows you to have 10,000 products, with 10GB of bandwidth. These restrictions become tighter with the other two plans.
The smallest plan ($15/mo) doesn’t even allow you to import and export products.
Recommended: despite the 15-day trial period, all these plan limitations scream “hidden fees”, making Volusion a rather shady platform for serious ecommerce intentions. Best avoided.
These overviews of top site builders and store builders should give you an idea what to look for when searching for the ideal website or store building platform.
Finding the right solution might take a while, but this initial research is crucial for your future success. Take your time to research to save time spent on maintenance!
Getting to work with the most suitable website builder would make running your site a pleasant and meaningful experience, which can enrich your life in many different ways.
Q: What is a hosted platform?
A: Hosted is a platform, which provides you with the tools to build a website and then takes care of hosting it. All site builders are hosted platforms.
Q: How can I use a third-party email service provider?
A: Once you have a registered domain name, you can point its MX record toward the servers of your email service provider. Ask the support team of your domain registrar and email service provider for help.
Q: What’s the difference between an online payment and credit card payment?
A: Credit card payments typically involve an extra fee to be processed. Online payments are made through an e-wallet like PayPal and often don’t include extra processing fees.
Q: What’s the best website builder, UK for shops?
A: That depends on how big your shop is and which interface you find the easiest to use.
Q: What is a responsive website builder?
A: Any site builder with templates optimised for mobile devices can be considered responsive.
