Cloud hosting, which stores a website on several interconnected servers in different geographical locations. This makes it easy for the host to provide more resources (like bandwidth and storage) as your site grows. Cloud hosting may also provide better uptime and site speed than traditional hosting types. Cloud hosting is more expensive than shared hosting. Companies like Wix and Squarespace use cloud hosting.
Shared hosting may be the best option if you're building a small business website and you want to keep costs low. Cloud hosting is a great option if you've got a bigger budget and/or you expect your small business to experience rapid growth.
Website builders typically use templates to dictate your site's appearance. You can customize most elements of your site, the template gives you a starting point with preset places for images, text and interactive elements like buttons. Templates also feature preset color schemes and fonts.
The best website builders for small businesses have templates for various industries like fashion, tech and marketing. Many also have functionality-focused templates for things like e-commerce stores, blogs or portfolios. There should be a broad selection of designer-made templates and a search function to help you find the right one.
Most website builders include some generative artificial intelligence tools, ranging from full AI site generation to simple text creation. If you're interested in using AI, look for reviews and tutorials that document the AI processes of the website builder you're considering. You can also test it yourself if there's a free trial or plan.
Before you commit to using AI, however, make sure you understand the potential ethical and legal implications of using these tools. Many generative AI tools are trained by scraping content from the web, often without the original creators' consent. Creators aren't compensated for this work either. This has led to many ethical concerns and some lawsuits against generative AI companies, including a class action lawsuit against Stable Diffusion. AI work also can't be copyrighted in the US at this time.
All website builders are designed to make site creation easy for people without any tech experience, but they still require different skill levels. What's simple for one user isn't necessarily easy for another, either. I found Wix easier to work with than Squarespace. The opposite might be true for you.
You can learn how intuitive it is to use a specific website builder by reading reviews, watching tutorials and, if there's a free plan or trial, testing it yourself.
Some website builders, like the GoDaddy website builder, ensure ease of use by limiting design options. This is fine if you're looking to build a simple site, like a freelance writing portfolio, but it's not great if you're looking to build something truly unique or showcase your design skills.
If you want to build something unique to your business, look for a website builder that lets you customize everything, from overall fonts and color schemes to the placement and formatting of individual content blocks.
There are three things to pay attention to here:
Storage dictates the number of images, videos and pages you can host on your website. Many popular website builders have unlimited storage but others, like Wix, restrict your storage based on your plan. Understanding how much storage you'll need to start your website is important.
You can generally expect to host 10 large pages (like image-heavy product pages) or 100 small pages (like blog posts with only one or two images) per GB of storage. Some estimates claim you can host up to 1,000 pages per GB, but I prefer to stick with the smaller estimates because having more storage than you'll need is better than running out.
Bandwidth is the amount of data your site can send per second. Most web hosting companies use bandwidth interchangeably with data transfer, the measurement of how much data your site can send in a given month.
Most website builders offer unlimited or unmetered data transfer. There are often technical limits, but they're so high that the company assumes most sites won't exceed them. You can often find out what these limits are by reading the terms of service or asking customer service.
Some website builders list data transfer limitations with specific measurements in MB or GB. You can ask customer service how many monthly visitors these plans can accommodate.
The percentage of time your site spends online. Uptime is important because users who can't load your site will often go elsewhere, resulting in lost traffic, audience trust and potential revenue.
Most website builders guarantee 99.9% uptime, meaning your website won't go down due to server issues for more than 10 minutes a week. Some promise 99.99% uptime, meaning your site won't experience server-related downtime for more than two minutes per week.
The number of seconds it takes for your site to load. Your site speed should be under three seconds because bounce rate (the percentage of users who leave your site after only viewing one page) decreases by 32% when your site speed goes from three to one seconds.
Most website builders don't promise a specific site speed because it's largely dictated by the layout of your site. They may offer two tools to improve your site speed:
These features often aren't listed on website builders' pricing pages. You can find out if they're offered by a specific website builder by searching the company's help center or asking customer service.
At minimum, your website builder should offer two layers of security:
Many popular website builders also offer things like distributed denial of service protection to keep your site from being overwhelmed by malicious traffic and two-factor authentication to prevent unauthorized users from accessing your account.
Customer service should be available 24/7 through your preferred method of communication, whether that's live chat, email or phone. Many of the best website builders offer customer support through two or more of these channels. Channel availability doesn't make the customer support good -- website builder customer support is often slow and representatives may or may not be knowledgeable enough to help with your issues.
You can get a feel for a company's customer service by reading their reviews on sites like Trustpilot, looking at their Better Business Bureau profiles and reading hands-on website builder tests right here on CNET.
There are two pricing models you'll encounter when looking at website builders: traditional web hosting pricing and website builder pricing.
Traditional web hosting pricing offers steep introductory discounts for your first contract term if you commit to two to four years of hosting. These prices often rise by 50% or more when your contract renews. This pricing model is used by companies like Hostinger and Ionos.
Website builder pricing has one permanent price point for each plan, billed annually. You can't get a discount by paying for two or more years up front, but you won't have to worry about the price increasing significantly when your contract renews either.
You'll also need to consider some additional costs: