There’s no point in telling you what you already know. You need a website for your small business. 

What’s harder to figure out is how–and where–to get said website. We’d like to help make that a little easier.

We rounded up almost a dozen of the most popular website platforms and evaluated them based on five criteria to give you our honest take on each, along with a few recommendations you might consider when you’re trying to get started. 

How We Evaluated Each Website Platform

Each website platform was evaluated based on a variety of criteria:

Design Process

There is a delicate balance between having design support and still maintaining your creative freedom when building a new website. Platforms should have an intuitive interface that’s easy to navigate. Drag-and-drop builders have thankfully become the norm, simplifying the design process for everyone who doesn’t have a background in web design.

We also considered additional customization features available as you design your site. How many templates are available and how flexible are they? How many are free v. paid? What design tools are available within the platform itself and through third-party integrations? 

Price

Starting a small business often involves a small budget. If you’re not careful, the costs can stack up with a new website. Common costs include—

• Domain name
• Website hosting
• Your website builder
• SSL certificate
• Themes or templates
• Plugins and extensions
• E-commerce features (payment processing fees)

You also need to factor in additional costs that may be associated with your website. These expenses are less necessary but can serve to boost the appearance, credibility, and functionality of your website. Think of services like a website designer, copywriter, and brand photographer. (For businesses on a shoestring budget, these are things that can absolutely come later as you grow.)

Responsiveness

You have to have a website that’s mobile-friendly. Here’s why.

More than half of web traffic happens through cell phones. 

Almost three-quarters of users will revisit a mobile-friendly website. 

Visitors are 67% more likely to buy something if you have a mobile-friendly website. 

Without a mobile-friendly version of your website, you’re losing at least half of your potential visitors and sales, so part of our evaluation looked at the ease of building a phone friendly version of your website. 

Features

Features lists can be long, but often fit into a few main categories.

SEO and Marketing Tools: Whoever said, “if you build it they will come” wasn’t talking about your website. You need to help people find your website online if you want to build your audience.  92% of online traffic comes from Google. We looked at the SEO and marketing (social media, email, ads) features of each platform. 

Content Management: Ideally, a website platform should include a user-friendly content management system and blogging capabilities. 

E-commerce Functionality: If you’re going to be selling products through your website, you need tools for product management, payment, and inventory management. 

Security and Performance: It doesn’t matter how pretty your website is if it doesn’t work well. Remember the days when we’d patiently wait through the screech of an AOL connection? That doesn’t happen anymore. Your site has an average of 2-3 seconds to load before users navigate away and try a different website. 

Customer Support: 

When (not if) you run into a glitch, are you going to have access to the support you need for a quick and relatively painless resolution? Or will you need to jump through a dozen hoops and visit 18 different forums to find the answer you need? 

We vote for option A, and we noted which platforms provide top-tier, readily available customer support.

The Best Website Platforms for Small Businesses

Showit

Best for creatives, bloggers, photographers, and small business owners. 

Paid plans start at $19/month.

Key Features

• Drag-and-drop website builder
• Customizable templates
• Unlimited web and custom fonts
• Integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, ConvertKit, HoneyBook, etc
• Visual website design and blog design
• Brand kit keeps branding uniform
• Website content management system
• WordPress integration
• Responsive design
• SEO tools
• E-commerce integrations with Shopify and other solutions

Brief Review

Showit excels in providing creative professionals and small business owners with a highly customizable and visually appealing web design experience. It offers true drag and drop capabilities that let you place elements anywhere on your website– not just along a certain grid where their design gods have deemed it appropriate. 

If you’re a little more tech-savvy than the average Joe or you want to venture into the world of website coding, you also have the option of including custom code as you design your website. In true Hannah Montana style, you get the best of both worlds— a beginner-friendly website builder and the creative freedom to build a website that’s completely tailored to your needs. 

We love that Showit utilizes a custom mobile design process, meaning you create your mobile site separately from your desktop site. You’re able to create a mobile experience that’s as unique and tailored as your desktop site, instead of just a smaller version the platform creates for you. (This tutorial dives deeper into the side-by-side design process that Showit offers.)

Showit also offers tools and features to help optimize your website for search engines including the ability to edit meta tags, descriptions, and alt text for images. Don’t listen to any rumors that Showit is bad for SEO— they have no idea what they’re talking about. Showit websites regularly rank well, even with minimum maintenance.

Showit’s support team is also known for it’s incredibly friendliness and eagerness to help their clients succeed.

WordPress

Best for bloggers, small to medium sized businesses, and e-commerce businesses. 

Paid plans start at $4/month.

Key Features

• Pre-made, professionally designed customizable themes
• Drag-and-drop editor that includes pre-built block pattern options
• Built-in SEO tools
• Custom domain, which is free for the first year with a paid annual plan
• More than 50,000 plugins
• Security features including DDoS and WAF protection, as well as malware removal 
• Free SSL certificates on WP hosted websites
• Site management tools such as post scheduling and automated content recommendations for visitors

Brief Review

WordPress is, in one word, a beast. This is a little bit of a double-edged sword. It’s one of the most powerful content management platforms available, allowing users to share new blog content, boost website traffic, and host online storefronts. It’s insanely customizable thanks to the availability of thousands of themes and more than 50,000 plugins. (There’s a reason that 43% of websites are hosted on WordPress.)

But it’s also a beast to use. The Elementor drag-and-drop builder does simplify the design process, but even then you’re still the one in charge of setting up website hosting and keeping the back end of your site updated. There’s a steep learning curve associated with WordPress that often requires some type of investment: spend the time to figure it out or spend the money to hire a professional.

WordPress customer support includes a resource library with over 200 guides, a community forum, and the ability to submit questions via a form. There is no phone support available, and no live chat available. 

Shopify

Best for people in e-commerce including start-ups, entrepreneurs, dropshippers, and small businesses. Shopify’s point-of-sale system integrates with physical stores, so it’s a strong contender for businesses who need to manage both in-person and online sales. 

Paid plans start at $29/month.

Key Features

• Drag-and-drop store creator
• Customizable website templates
• Integrated marketing suite including a blog, SEO tools, email campaigns, and social media tools
• Lead capture forms
• Analytics tab to help manage products
• Customer segmentation 
• Detailed analytics and marketing reports
• Shopify App Store with thousands of apps and plugins for marketing, social media, inventory management, etc.
• Free, built-in SSL certificates and fraud analysis tool
• 24/7 support

Brief Review

Shopify is known as the e-commerce solution for anyone with an online store, and even people with a physical store. It offers over 8,000 apps, which gives you a great deal of flexibility, but it also means that you have to install an extension for almost any additional feature you want on your website. 

Shopify only has a handful of free templates, so consider that you may end up shelling out more if you don’t like any of the free options. We do want to note that unless you opt for Shopify payments, you’ll also pay transaction fees for using a third-party payment gateway like Stripe, Afterpay, or PayPal.

Out of all the popular e-commerce options, Shopify definitely comes out as one of the priciest options. Even the basic plan is one of the most expensive basic monthly plans, and it doesn’t include a custom domain name, which will rack up an additional charge.  

Shopify offers several customer support channels including 24/7 live chat with a virtual assistant (the AI live chat will try to help, and then direct you to a human if you need more support), a help center with guides and tutorials, email support, a community forum, and social media channels. 

Squarespace

Best for bloggers, small businesses, beginning e-commerce stores, and creatives like artists, photographers, and designers.

Paid plans start at $16/month.

Key Features

• Drag-and-drop editor
• SEO features
• Video hosting
• 24/7 customer support
• Mobile optimized website
• Free custom domain for the first year
• Free SSL certificate
• Built-in e-commerce capabilities
• Acuity Scheduling tool
• Marketing tools including email campaigns, social media integrations, and analytics

Brief Review

Squarespace is known for its modern designs that always look good. The drag-and-drop editor is actually really easy to use with a low learning curve, so setting up your website isn’t a nightmare. If you want to further simplify the design process. you can try Squarespace Blueprint, which is a guided design experience that’s powered by AI. But be warned: Squarespace has no autosave feature, so don’t make the mistake of leaving your page before you save your progress. 

We love that Squarespace is full-on committed to responsive design, so all of their templates are optimized to look good on computers, tablets, and smartphones. You won’t have to tweak your website for each screen size. 

Squarespace includes a free SSL certificate with every custom domain you purchase. You can also enable two-factor authentication and password-protect specific pages of your website. 

There’s no phone option to talk with customer support, but Squarespace offers 24/7 email support, live chat (Monday-Friday, 4 am- 8 pm EST), a community forum, and a Help Center. You can also hire a fully vetted Squarespace Expert, all of whom are trained to offer eight different services, encompassing everything from full site builds to improving your site functionality. 

Wix

Best for entrepreneurs and small business owners, artists, bloggers, e-commerce, and nonprofits. 

Paid plans start at $17/month.

Key Features

A note about these key features– the Light plan is very light, and many of these features are unavailable with the Light plan. We’ve starred the features that are unavailable with this basic plan.

• Custom domain
• Lead capture forms
• Automated marketing tools
• More than 900 templates available for a variety of industries
• Ability to schedule jobs
• 24/7 customer care
• Site analytics*
• Customer accounts for loyal shoppers*

Brief Review

While Wix’s drag-and-drop options, coupled with their template options, make it easy to create a beautiful website, it also comes with limitations. Once your website goes live you are locked into the template you chose. The only way to switch to a new option is to completely rebuild your site. They offer a code editor if you want to customize your website beyond the template options, but the editor isn’t as flexible as other options like WordPress.

Wix is strong in the SEO game, with built-in features to help your website get found (like customizable URLs) as well as access to a ton of SEO integrations (like Semrush). It offers built-in email marketing  (typically an additional cost with website platforms) which helps you streamline your marketing efforts from fewer platforms and easily keep your branding consistent. Wix takes it even further by allowing you to sync your social media accounts to your website and post to your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and YouTube channel directly from your Wix dashboard. There’s something to be said about such a comprehensive all-in-one option.

The Light plan offers very limited access to e-commerce tools, so if you’re looking to set up an online shop you’ll need to spend a little more and upgrade to a more robust plan. With the Core plan you’ll be able to accept payments, sell on online marketplaces, list up to 50,000 products, and offer abandoned cart recovery and automatic discounts. 

One standout feature from Wix is the new Artificial Design Intelligence builder. To use it, you complete a brief about your business and goals. From there, the AI will generate a new website that includes pre-built images and text that align with your band. You can make all the tweaks you need, asking AI to regenerate certain sections or making the changes yourself. At this point you can change the site theme, layout, profile, structure, and description. After making your initial tweaks, you can go to the Wix Editor and make additional adjustments such as adding new page elements or changing copy. 

If you’re looking for insanely accessible customer support, Wix is your guy. Their customer support options include 24/7 phone support, live chat during the weekdays, a community forum, a help center, online courses and video tutorials, and social media platforms. 

Webflow

Best for startups, content creators, freelancers, and small businesses. 

Paid plans start at $14/month.

Key Features

• Custom domain
• Lead capture forms
• Ability to add custom code
• Two-factor authentication
• 150 website pages plus unlimited blog pages
• E-commerce abilities starting at 500 items up to 15,000 items
• Custom design your checkout page and shopping cart
• Ability to offer paid user accounts to access gated content
• Payment options include Stripe, PayPal, and Apple Pay
• Unlimited sales
• Integration options with Facebook, Instagram, Google Shopping, and Mailchimp
• Minimum of 3 staff accounts for e-commerce website

Brief Review

If you’re looking for a simple website designer, Webflow isn’t going to be your cup of tea. It was created to appeal to website designers and developers and offers an insane amount of customization options. That’s great if you have a good idea of what you want to do, but it’s going to be completely overwhelming if you’re completely new to the website design process. Be warned. 

Webflow has top-notch customization options and a huge range of templates (50 free options and more than 2,000 templates available). All of the templates are mobile-responsive without any work on your end, Built-in SEO features include the ability to add metadata, create image alt text, and utilize automatically generated sitemaps. E-commerce options are available, but you’re limited to the number of products you can list, with some plans as low as 500 items. 

Customer support is a little lacking considering the platform can be tricky to navigate. There is no phone or live chat support. You can send an email asking for help, and the customer support team is available from 6 am-6 pm PT during weekdays; they generally respond within 24-48 hours. For immediate answers, you can access the help center or visit Webflow’s community forum.

Duda

Best for agencies and SaaS platforms. 

Paid plans start at $19/month.

Key Features

• Unlimited storage and bandwidth
• Hosted on Amazon Cloud
• Up to 1,000 site pages
• Unlimited form submissions
• AI content Assistant
• AI SEO Assistant

Brief Review

Duda advertises itself as a website builder for agencies that offer web design services for small businesses. Everything on the platform is geared toward this target audience (kudos to Duda for knowing exactly who they want to reach) but don’t be fooled– you don’t have to be an agency to use Duda for your website.

Almost 100 templates are available to choose from, but know that your creative freedom is limited to the confines of that template. All of the templates can be customized for each type of device. Their SEO features hit all of the basics, but you may need to put in some extra effort to help your website rank well. 

Duda offers a unique ‘Hire an expert’ service, where you can hire vetted professionals to help you design your website, design personalized templates, create automated workflows, personalize your site with custom coding, and any other projects you can think of. 

Customer support depends on the plan you choose. Most small businesses will go for the Basic or Team plan, and that only includes email support, no phone support or live chat.

BigCommerce

Best for fast-growing e-commerce businesses. 

Paid plans start at $29/month.

Key Features

• 24/7 support
• Single page checkout
• Marketplace and social integrations
• Integrations with popular payment gateways
• Customizable checkout experience
• Ability to add multiple unique online storefronts
• Multiple inventory locations
• Customer segmentation
• Product ratings and reviews
• Built-in blog
• Professional reporting tools 
• Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Amazon Pay
• Single page checkout
• Product filtering options
• Persistent cart and abandoned cart saver

Brief Review

BigCommerce is one of the leading e-commerce platforms that’s designed to support growing online businesses. It’s the only option that allows you to sell physical, digital, and service-based products without needing to utilize any plug-ins or extensions. The pricing plan from BigCommerce is different from other options because it’s based on how much revenue your business earns. 

When you start designing your website, you can choose from 15 free themes and more than 100 paid themes (ranging from $150-$300). Themes are categorized by industry to include features helpful for that specific industry. Every BigCommerce theme is fully mobile responsive. You don’t have to edit the mobile version of your website, because it automatically reconfigures to work on mobile devices. 

BigCommerce’s customer support options are impressive: 24/7 phone and live chat support, along with email support and a massive Help Center. 

Canva

Best for small businesses who need a landing-page type of website. 

Paid plans start at $12.99/month.

Key Features

• One-page websites
• Thousands of free templates
• Drag-and-drop editor
• Collaborate with other editors
• Brand kit keeps branding uniform
• Access to Canva apps that customize your site like Bitmojis, Giphy, and more
• Website insights help track traffic
• Ability to create private websites that utilize password protection
• Access to millions of free images and graphics
• Magic Write AI text generator

Brief Review

Diehard Canva users, rejoice. The platform that makes graphic design accessible for all makes web design accessible for all. 

The Canva website builder is great for building a great-looking single-page website in a matter of hours without pulling your hair out. However, a Canva website probably won’t get found on Google, and unless you want to navigate some tricky workarounds, you probably won’t be able to add multiple pages (like a blog). Ultimately, you get a gorgeous landing-page-esque website. 

To purchase a unique domain through Canva you’ll have to have a Canva Pro account, which runs $12.99/month. The domain itself will run between $10-$20 a year. You can also link your one-page website to an existing domain, but again, you’ll have to have a Canva Pro account to make that happen. 

Our Choice: What’s the best website platform for small businesses?

If you look closely at the key features of the most popular website platforms, they all have similar things in common. Drag-and-drop editor. Website templates. SEO tools. But when you start digging deeper (and even trying out different options) you’ll start to notice the standout features that make certain platforms shine. 

From our digging, it’s clear that Showit is the best choice for small businesses. And you should know, we use Showit.

Its WordPress integration means that you have the power of WordPress without the steep learning curve of WordPress websites. The ShowIt team installs WordPress for you, so you can spend your time working on other aspects of your business. The team will also help with launching your website (because how many of us actually know how to update your DNS settings?). 

ShowIt also has effective-but-not-overwhelming SEO tools. For a small business that’s just getting off the ground, getting found on Google can be key to your success. Getting a Showit website to rank well doesn’t require a huge investment of time or effort, it just requires you to be intentional about using the SEO tools that are available. 

How much does it cost for a small business to build a website?

The cost of building a new website is a little like the cost of buying a new car. It depends entirely on your budget and tastes. A few factors can cause the cost to increase or decrease.

• What platform are you going to use?
• Are you going to hire a designer or try to DIY?
• Are you using a free template or buying one?
• Do you need a copywriter to create the copy for your site?
• Are basic features enough or do you need to spring for advanced features?
• How many e-commerce items are you listing?
• What plug-ins or add-ons do you want/need to buy?
• How much is a custom domain?
• Do you need custom logos or branding for your website?

According to research published from Forbes, the average cost of designing a basic website hovers around $3,200. 

What is the most beginner-friendly website builder?

If you’re dipping your toe into the website design world, you want an option that combines simple design with gorgeous results. You want drag-and-drop. Helpful customer support. Excessive community resources. 

You want Showit. 

Showit is insanely easy to use thanks to the drag-and-drop interface and gorgeous line of templates. 

Their support team is made up of real people who are more than thrilled to help resolve any issue you run into with friendly, personalized support that’s becoming more and more difficult to find. 

Basically, Showit checks all of the boxes we’re looking for in a website builder and then some. It’s straightforward enough that beginners should have no problem using it, but advanced enough that it’s used by website designers and agencies for their clients. 

Are there any free website platforms? Can I create my website for free?

Many of these website builders offer a free plan, but we don’t recommend using a free website. 

Sure, you’re saving a little bit of money, but you’re losing a lot of opportunity. 

With a free website you’re typically not using your own domain (goodbye SEO opportunities).

The platform will put their own branding on your website (goodbye branding recognition opportunities). 

You don’t gain access to advanced features (goodbye uniquely customized website).

What are the key features for a small business website?

Consider these characteristics as you wade through the sea of website platform options. 

Flexibility

The days of high school are long gone, and you don’t want to look like all the other small businesses in your industry. You need to have the flexibility to create a unique website that mirrors the unique offerings your business has. 

Community

Being a small business owner is great and exciting but also isolating at times. Your friends and family may not understand the challenges you face. You can quickly feel the weight of all the hats you have to wear. You don’t have a team of co-workers to turn to when problems come your way. And you bear all the responsibility for the fate of your business. Not everyone in a web platform community is going to be in the same situation, but they will be people you can turn to when you need answers or support. 

Support

When you run into tech issues, how quickly can you access support to get it resolved? You probably don’t have the time or bandwidth to add website developer to your list of titles, so the best website platform offers a deep library of tutorials and accessible customer support to keep you from pulling your hair out when things get tricky. 

Lead Capture

Lead capture is critical to growing your email list and scaling your business. You have to have the ability to turn visitors into leads, either through the platform itself or a third-party integration (like BDOW! 😉). 

Integrations

There may be One Ring to rule them all, but there isn’t one platform to do it all. The most effective website platforms offer a variety of plug-ins and extensions without relying on them for all of your website’s functionality. 

How should I choose a website platform for my small business?

Here’s the good news— there isn’t one single platform that is the best for creating your website, and you’re not eternally stuck with a platform that doesn’t feel like a good fit. 

You can’t necessarily make a choice that’s bad or wrong, just one that’s not the right fit. And that’s an easy problem to fix. 

When you’re choosing your website platform, ask yourself a few questions—

• Can the platform grow with me as my business grows?
• Does it have the functionality I need?
• What’s my budget?
• How much creative freedom do I want?

Test out multiple platforms until you find one that offers the right balance to meet your needs, and don’t be afraid to switch if you’re unhappy with your first choice. 

Create Your Free BDOW! Account

Once you’re created your gorgeous website, you need to put it to work. That’s where lead capture comes in. You can turn clicks into customers with our high-converting lead magnet Canva template.