The Top 5 Website Builders For Small Businesses In 2024

Most reputed online businesses do have a website. However, when it comes to small-scale businesses, many still lack a website for various reasons, like not having enough expertise, not knowing where to start, or having an insufficient budget.

However, having a website has become essential for every small business, especially after the pandemic. Whether you own an offline physical store or run an online ecommerce business using social media platforms, your small business must have a website to create a solid online presence and brand image.

Now, if you are convinced to get a website for your business, you will search for ‘best website builder for small business’ on Google. And another wave of confusion starts there!

So many options are available online, and most claim to be the best free website builder for small businesses; it becomes hard to choose one. And choosing the right one, depending on your business type, is even trickier.

That is why we have listed the top five website builders that can satisfy different types of businesses in this article, making the task of finding the best website builder for small businesses easier.

Wix

Wix comes at the top of our website builder’s list as it offers an easy user interface, is suitable for almost all businesses, and offers a pack of features to small businesses at an affordable price. The following is the list of purpose-built templates for various business types and goals,

1. Blogs
2. Ecommerce stores
3. Events
4. Restaurants
5. Portfolios
6. Photography
7. Digital resumes

These templates make website building a breeze for small businesses. However, you can also use Wix’s ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) editor to speed up the process.

You only need to answer a few questions asked by the WixADI editor, and the artificial intelligence of the website builder sets up your site in the blink of an eye. However, if you are an expert and want to build a customized website, you can avoid artificial intelligence and simply use the Wix editor. 

Top Wix Features For Small Businesses

No matter what type of small business you run, if you are looking for the best website builder for small businesses, you can opt for Wix. The Wix website builder for small businesses offers valuable features to rank higher on search results, build and manage social media advertising, and stay in touch with email subscribers.

SEO

The Wix website builder for small businesses allows you to quickly build an optimized website by offering a bunch of SEO features that do not require any integration. Following are a few top SEO features that Wix website builder for small businesses offers,

SEO Infrastructure: Wix website templates are designed with search engines in mind; hence, crawlers find Wix websites easy to crawl, navigate, and index.

URL Structure: The best small business website builder ensures easy crawlability and navigation by providing the proper URL structure.

Google Search Console Integration: Wix allows you to integrate your Google Search Console account with the website builder, allowing you to track website performance directly from the Wix dashboard.

Automatic Mobile Optimization: Wix website builder for small businesses ensures your website is optimized for mobile and desktop.

Customizable Advanced SEO Options: Wix website builder allows you to customize your URL structure, canonical tags, meta tags, robots.txt file, Schema markup, and more.

Image Compression: Wix website builder for small businesses ensures a fast page loading speed by compressing and converting images into WebP format.

Bulk 301 redirects: The Wix website builder makes website migration a cakewalk by allowing bulk redirection of up to 500 links in a single shot.

However, to be safer, you must check the redirection path using the RankWatch URL redirect checker tool when migrating your website. 

Accessibility Wizard: You can quickly identify and fix accessibility issues using Wix’s Accessibility Wizard.

Tracking Social Media Ads

Subscribing Facebook Ads by Wix allows you to create, manage, and track your Facebook and Instagram ads directly from the website builder dashboard. The AI algorithm of the website builder for small businesses ensures tracking your ads 24/7 and monitoring ad campaign performance.

The Wix AI algorithm runs your campaign performance data through a decision-making model to accurately predict the campaign performance. It tweaks your ad campaigns accordingly to achieve the best possible results.

Email Marketing Campaigns

The email tools of the best free website builder for small businesses allow you to send up to 200 emails per month to drive more website traffic. It would help if you upgraded to a paid Wix email marketing plan to avail of other advanced capabilities. The Wix email editor offers built-in templates to create interactive and eye-catching emails quickly.

You can select any of the templates and add or delete attributes depending on the needs of your business, or you can start designing the campaign from scratch.

Wix email editor also lets you automate your email campaigns and track real-time performance.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Plans And Pricing

Wix offers the following five types of plans.

Pros And Cons Of Using Wix

It would help to remember the pros and cons of using Wix website builder before selecting a plan for your small business.

Pros

1. The drag-and-drop makes website building easier.
2. Wix website builder offers more than 800 fully customizable templates designed according to industry best practices.
3. The tool offers a heavy ecommerce website builder with advanced tools for managing online ordering and reservations, setting appointments, and inventory management.
4. It offers advanced marketing tools for SEO, social media ads, and email marketing campaigns.
5. The Wix App Market allows an integration of more than 500 advanced finance and marketing tools.
6. WebP image format and structured data markup boost website loading speed.
7. Each of the plans offers excellent value for money.

Cons

1. The automatically generated mobile version needs to be manually tweaked. You must have coding and design skills to do that.
2. Even the top tier ‘Business Elite’ plan does not offer unlimited storage.
3. You cannot integrate your Google Analytics account using the free version.

Shopify

If you want to run an online ecommerce store, Shopify will be the best website builder for small businesses for you. Building a Shopify website can also help you to move your existing online store from other marketplaces like Etsy or eBay.

Shopify offers a simple user interface that is helpful for beginners with less expertise in website design and building ecommerce stores. The Shopify website builder for small businesses ensures that you are always up to date with your product availability by providing real-time inventory updates.

The website builder allows you to automate and streamline your dropshipping, and the Shopify sales dashboard allows you to check a summary of your online sales.

Shopify website builder for small business offers additional security compared to other website builders. Besides, the Shopify fraud analysis tool helps beginners to identify fraudulent orders quickly.

Moreover, the best website builder for small business for e-commerce assures the user can quickly build the website without coding skills.

Top Shopify Features For Small Businesses

The Shopify app store offers over 1800 marketing apps and various built-in features.

SEO

Shopify website builder for small businesses offers the following SEO features,

1. Shopify website builder offers mobile responsive themes.
2. Shopify ensures users and search engines quickly find your site by automatically generating XML sitemaps and Robots.txt files.
3. It prevents the ranking of duplicate content in SERPs by automatically generating canonical URLs.
4. Shopify allows you to edit meta tags, meta descriptions, and image alt texts for further optimization. 
5. It offers a built-in blog tool for quickly adding fresh content to your new website, driving more organic traffic.

Social Media Marketing

The Shopify website builder for small businesses allows you to sync your Instagram and Facebook accounts with your product catalog, which allows you to design shoppable posts and social media ads. The Shopify admin lets you share your product pages on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Pinterest, and Reddit. Moreover, the Shopify dashboard lets you directly manage orders received via social media, sales, and returns.

The Shopify website builder also provides a sharing button on each blog post published, allowing readers to share them effortlessly. This, in turn, helps your brand grow.

The Shopify app store also offers various social media apps that allow you to create Snapchat ads, import Google reviews and testimonials, and sync your Instagram feeds.

Email Marketing

Shopify email templates help you create, automate, and track up to 10,000 emails per month at no extra cost. Besides, Shopify’s customizable email templates and drag-and-drop feature makes email marketing a breeze.

The following is an example of a Shopify email template for order confirmation.

The Shopify email templates offer you the following benefits,

1. The pre-built email templates can automatically fetch product and brand details from your store for you to use when creating email content.
2. The Shopify automated email templates allow you to run email campaigns like welcome sequences, upsell campaigns, and winbacks.
3. The Shopify Magic tool can generate subject lines for your email campaigns if you provide a few relevant keywords.

Plans And Pricing

Shopify offers three types of plans.

Pros And Cons Of Using Shopify

Before selecting a plan for your business, consider the pros and cons of using the Shopify website builder for small businesses.

Pros

1. No previous coding experience is required to build your website using the Shopify website builder.
2. It allows you to sell both offline and online.
3. Shopify offers dedicated sales and marketing dashboards, making monitoring sales and creating in-depth reports easy.
4. The website builder offers various marketing and SEO tools for business promotion.

Cons

1. Other website builders offer more customization options than Shopify.
2. The free plan offers only twelve built-in templates.
3. Shopify charges transaction fees when using third-party payment gateways. 

WordPress

WordPress.org is considered the most popular content management system in the world. If your website’s primary focus is content, then WordPress.com can be the best free website builder for the small business you own.

The website builder is, by default, optimized for SEO, which helps websites rank higher in search results. Moreover, opting for WordPress.com paid plans offers a range of additional SEO functionalities via plugins. 

Setting up a WordPress.com site is way easier than a WordPress.org site. The latter requires initial investment and in-depth technical expertise to set up and maintain the website. On the other hand, WordPress.com comes in handy for beginners, offering more than 11,000 mobile-responsive themes for free. Due to this, you can set up your website and get going quickly.

However, WordPress does not offer true drag-and-drop features like Squarespace or Wix. Instead, it works on the principle of ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG). However, the WordPress WYSIWYG editor offers various blocks to perform different tasks.

If you want to build a new page or create a new post, select the ‘Paragraph Block.’ If you want to pick another block, you can type or click the ‘+’ icon.

The lack of a drag-and-drop interface makes WordPress website builder for small businesses less user-friendly. However, it makes up for this by offering more versatility and ultimate creative control than other website builders. Their premium plans offer limitless design opportunities and feature options by offering tons of themes, templates, plugins, and third-party integrations.

Top WordPress Features For Small Businesses

The tools offered by the WordPress website builder help you make your website mobile responsive, improve page loading speed, and boost SERP rankings.

SEO

The basic plan of WordPress site builder offers the following SEO features,

1. The WordPress website builder for small businesses automatically generates sitemaps to help search engines, and users find your website easily.
2. SSL certificates offer an extra layer of security.
3. WordPress ensures improved page loading speed through the Content Delivery Network (CDN).
4. WordPress creates a clean URL structure to ensure smooth crawling and indexing of your website.

However, optimizing your meta titles and descriptions is essential for higher SERP rankings. Choosing the RankWatch on-page SEO checker can provide accurate suggestions for optimizing your meta titles and descriptions.

However, the basic WordPress plan does not allow you to edit your meta titles and meta descriptions. You need to switch to a premium plan to edit and optimize them. Subscribing to the premium plan will also offer you tons of useful plugins.

Marketing Integrations

WordPress offers marketing integration tools that help you run both email marketing and social media campaigns. The WordPress website builder for small businesses offers almost 1000 email and 2000 social media plugins.

The best part is that you will know exactly how your social media campaign will look before going live by viewing the WordPress preview pane.

Plans And pricing

WordPress offers the following six types of plans to choose from, as well as a free trial plan.

Pros And Cons Of Using WordPress

You need to remember the following pros and cons of using the WordPress website builder for small businesses before selecting a plan for your business.

Pros

1. WordPress offers a beginner-friendly website setup.
2. It comes with thousands of built-in themes and templates.
3. The website builder helps you to build a content-focused website.
4. The premium plans allow you to add third-party plugins and features that open up limitless design possibilities for your website.
5. WordPress website builder for small businesses automatically backs up data.
6. The WordPress premium plans offer unlimited bandwidth and storage.
7. It comes cheaper than other website builders, considering the flexibility and features it offers.

Cons

1. A true drag-and-drop interface would make it more user-friendly for beginners.
2. If you use the free plan, your website needs to bear the pain of showing WordPress ads.
3. You need to opt for a premium plan if you want your website to earn from running third-party ads.
4. The WordPress themes allow limited customization.

Squarespace

If you own a creative business or want to create a visually appealing website that showcases high-quality images, Squarespace should be your choice. 

One of the major issues that creative businesses face is the site’s loading speed. It is well-known that top-quality, high-resolution images can slow down the page loading speed due to large file sizes. As per Google’s core web vitals, page loading speed is a ranking factor. Hence, if large image files slow down your website, it will hamper your website’s rankings. 

That can be a big concern for creative websites unless you have opted for Squarespace. It is the perfect website builder for small businesses for image-heavy sites.

When you upload an image, the Squarespace site builder automatically generates seven different versions of that image. Depending on the user’s screen size, the website builder for small businesses decides which version to display. It ensures quick website loading despite displaying top-quality images. This, in turn, ensures that you do not need to compromise on image quality for higher SERP rankings. Besides, Squarespace offers built-in website templates designed by world-class designers.

You can choose from the available options a customizable website template that suits your brand. Though Squarespace is known for its suitability for creative sites, it also offers valuable features for ecommerce websites as well.

It allows ecommerce websites to display high-quality product images and offers shop tools like customer emails, abandoned cart recovery, low inventory alerts, etc., which are pretty simple to use. The best part of using Squarespace website builder is that even its basic plan offers unlimited storage. That is equally essential for both ecommerce and creative sites.

Top Squarespace Features For Small Businesses

The best website builder for creative small businesses helps business owners improve their website’s search rankings, design mobile-friendly websites, and offer a premium user experience.

SEO

The following are a few top SEO features that Squarespace website builder for small businesses offers,

Mobile-friendly websites: Squarespace website builder for small businesses ensures your website is well-optimized for mobile devices. However, it would be safer to check your website’s mobile responsiveness at regular intervals, no matter which website builder you opt for your business. The RankWatch mobile friendliness checker comes in very handy for this purpose.

Auto-generated sitemaps: The website builder for small businesses automatically generates XML sitemaps to help search engines crawl and index your website effortlessly.

Clean URLs: The website builder ensures hassle-free crawling by providing clean URL structures.

SSL Security: Squarespace websites come with an extra layer of SSL security to ensure users’ data privacy and security.

Site Translations: The Squarespace website builder for small businesses translates site pages to help business owners reach broader audiences and tap new markets.

Local SEO map: The website builder provides a local SEO map, which ensures better visibility of your website in local search results.

Hide a page: You can use this feature of the website builder if you do not want a specific web page to appear in search results.

SEO checklist: Squarespace website builder for small businesses offers an SEO guide to check your website’s SEO. You can easily access it from the website builder’s SEO panel.

When editing, the SEO panel fits at the left side of the website builder page and offers a preview of your page’s meta title and meta description on the right side.  

If you want to see your website’s preview for different screen sizes, you need to click ‘Device view’ for the same. Even the view allows you to make necessary edits and preview how the website looks after implementing those changes.

Social Media Marketing

Squarespace does not offer built-in options for managing social media ads like Wix. However, the website builder for small businesses offers social media marketing integrations to help ecommerce websites sell their products on Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, and LinkedIn.

The website builder allows you to showcase your new website content on these social media platforms in real time and pull out content from social media platforms like Instagram, Soundcloud, Flickr, and Foursquare to your website as well.

Squarespace offers its own mobile app, ‘Unfold,’ which offers advanced features like built-in templates to its users for free, provided you have a Squarespace account.

Squarespace also offers a CMS (Content Management System) app for mobile devices that allows users to create content, upload images & videos, and check commerce analytics on the go using their mobile devices.

Email Marketing

Squarespace Email Campaigns allows you to gather email addresses, design your email marketing campaigns, and track campaign performance by measuring email opening rate and number of unsubscribes.

The following are the key benefits of using the Squarespace email campaigns tool,

1. It allows you to automate the process of sending emails to your users after they buy your product, subscribe to your service, or sign up for your newsletter.
2. The same tool interface can be used simultaneously to update your website and send email campaigns.
3. Squarespace email campaigns interface your brand logo and blog posts directly to your emails.
4. The tool automatically generates browser-based copies of each email campaign.
5. The tool provides a separate URL for every email campaign, which you can easily share as a link.
6. Creating a website using Squarespace website builder for small businesses offers a free email marketing campaign trial that allows you to build your mailing lists, create email drafts, and send a maximum of three trial blast emails.

Plans And pricing

Squarespace offers the following four types of plans to choose from with a 14-day free trial period.

Pros And Cons Of Using Squarespace

You need to remember the following pros and cons of using the Squarespace website builder for small business before selecting a plan for your business.

Pros

1. Each plan offers various SEO features.
2. The Squarespace website builder for small businesses prioritizes the design and branding of your website.
3. The website builder offers built-in website templates designed by award-winning web designers.
4. All website templates are optimized for mobile devices.
5. Each Squarespace plan comes with unlimited storage. 
6. The website builder for small businesses offers built-in features for branding and marketing.

Cons

1. Though Squarespace offers customizable website templates, it offers less design flexibility than other small business website builders.
2. The Squarespace website editor is less intuitive than other website builders.
3. The Squarespace website editor does not offer an auto-save option. You need to click the ‘save’ button to save the changes you made.

Webflow

If you are a beginner with no technical expertise and looking for a no-code website builder for a small business, Webflow is what you need. It offers a vast content management system with tons of customization features. You only need to design the web pages, and the website builder handles the coding.

For example, if you want to design a content-rich web page, the tool allows you to drag and drop HTML design elements.

Besides offering a fast page loading speed, Webflow offers you the following design elements in ‘the box model’ to create a website like a pro,

Parallax Scrolling: This design element moves your website’s background slower than the foreground.

Multi-step animations: These design elements allow you to create animations with multiple changes.

Microinteractions: These design elements help you design subtle animated visual feedback, like a page loading bar, that lets users know what happens on the page.

Webflow website builder for small businesses ensures easy collaboration among team members by offering easy access and edit options, provided the right permissions are assigned.

Top Webflow Features For Small Businesses

Webflow offers effective tools to ensure an SEO-friendly website, and Webflow University offers an in-depth knowledge base to its users. The knowledge base describes each feature and provides simple instructions to understand the process.

SEO

Webflow small business website builder offers robust SEO features that ensure your website ranks higher on search engines.

Mobile-friendly design: Webflow ensures a mobile-responsive design to offer enhanced user experience and describe search engines that your web page is mobile-friendly.

Highlighted top-level pages: Webflow website builder ensures search engines that your top-level pages at the root domain are aesthetically pleasing.

Meta optimization: Webflow’s CMS allows you to optimize your meta titles and meta descriptions for better SEO.

Sitemaps: Webflow automatically generates XML sitemaps to ensure search engines crawl and index your website.

Creative 404 pages: The website builder creates and ensures that users land on creative 404 pages instead of missing pages.

Image alt text: Webflow creates optimized image alt texts to ensure a smooth experience for users with visual impairments.

Disabled subdomain indexing: The website builder ensures your website does not face a Google penalty for showing a duplicate site during the migration or testing phase by disabling the indexing of subdomains.

301 redirects: It helps you to assign 301 redirects correctly at the time of permanent relocation. 

Robots.txt file: The website builder allows you to edit your robots.txt files to tell bots not to crawl specific pages.

Knowledge Base

Webflow University ensures its users do not face difficulties while learning about the tool features and processes by offering one of the most in-depth knowledge bases among website builders.

The knowledge base offers courses, videos, single lessons, and a community forum to help its users understand all the website builder’s features.

Plans And Pricing

Webflow offers the following five types of plans and a free trial plan.

Pros And Cons Of Using Webflow

You need to remember the following pros and cons of using the Webflow website builder for small businesses before selecting a plan for your business.

Pros

1. Webflow allows beginners to build their websites without any prior coding experience.
2. It offers easy collaboration among clients and other team members.
3. Webflow offers an extensive range of built-in themes and templates.
4. Webflow University offers a vast knowledge base.
5. It ensures 100% system reliability with a money-back guarantee.
6. The premium plans offer an ad-free user experience.

Cons

1. Webflow demands a steep learning curve.
2. It offers limited social media marketing integrations.
3. It does not offer any built-in newsletter tool for email marketing campaigns.
4. Building a multilingual website using Webflow can be tricky.
5. The tool does not offer a mobile application.
6. Webflow does not offer any call or live chat support. 

Choosing The Right Keywords Is Essential For Driving Traffic

If you want your website to rank higher on search results and drive sufficient organic traffic, you must ensure your content is optimized with the right keywords, irrespective of the website builder you chose to build your website.

RankWatch offers the best free keyword research tool to perform ultimate keyword research to identify the right keywords.

If you enter the primary keyword in our keyword research tool, it will provide you with a list of organic and long-tail keywords related to your primary keyword.

The tool also provides search volume, cost-per-click, keyword difficulty (competition), and keyword trend for each keyword. 

Conclusion

Whether you run a brick-and-mortar store or sell online, having a website has become essential to creating brand value and reliability. Small businesses often fear creating their websites due to the cost implications of hiring expert web developers.

There are small business website builders that allow even beginners to design a pro-like website by offering tons of customization options. However, choosing the right website builder for your small business with so many options can be confusing.

We hope our choice of the top five website builders will benefit most small business owners and help them choose the right one for their business.