Website Builders Taking Hold for 2016

The days of paying a dedicated website designer thousands for a relatively basic site have long since died; but the race to the lowest price point for a finished website isn’t finished yet, thanks to the rising competition between website builders. Website builders make building a relatively simple website cheap, incredibly fast, and easy even for the coding impaired. A website owner doesn’t need to learn any coding or tech skills at all, and often the only costs associated with a website builder is a small monthly fee: making website builders often cheaper for a year’s worth of service than the cost of a designer to build a product.

Website builders often employ an easy to use template interface with drag and drop customization options, text adding toolbars, and even lots of support or extra features. Shop carts, product inventory systems, blog capabilities, analytics, even event calendars are made readily available by website builders.

But there are clearly a few frontrunners in the website builder race which stand apart from the others, and help users (even the tech challenged) make a mobile-friendly and well-designed website in just a few hours. Sure, a major corporation or informational outlet might need a more scalable option than a website builder can provide, but individuals and small businesses often don’t need any more than a great website builder can provide. And for the most part, the masses have spoken, and there are a few website builder brands which have pulled ahead of the pack, offering superior services at lower costs… often as low as 5 dollars a month.

Sure, you might want to compare website builders on your own, but here are our picks for those which are pulling ahead in 2016!

Weebly Top for 2016

Weebly is one of the top website builders coming into 2016, and for good reason! It has a free account option for smaller sites with fewer pages, and a remarkably intuitive site building toolset. Weebly supports all the tools you need to run a fully optimized online shop, and gives you stats on your websites for free. And unlike many other builders, its templates look stellar, and the website builder will auto-save your edits. Even better? You can download the coding for your site if you decide to migrate to your own hosting!

The cons of Weebly are relatively standard for website builders, including a lack of a newsletter feature and a weak photo editing tool.  

DudaOne a Big Competitor

DudaOne is a big up-and-comer into 2016, and like Weebly, has a free option for smaller sites. It has incredibly powerful statistics for visitors and interactions, and has powerful social media integration options. But unlike Weebly, DudaOne has a mobile site building option so that you can continue adding pages, posts, and information to your website even on the go. But unlike Weebly, there’s no ability to save the website or download its coding, meaning that if you ultimately decide to leave DudaOne, you lose all the work you’ve put into it. There are also some moments when the page editor bugs out.

Wix No Longer Reigning King

Wix started off 2015 being one of the top options for website builders, with a strong and easy-to-use site builder with hundreds of plugins to help optimize a new website. There are hundreds of site themes to search, all organized by industry. But its websites aren’t automatically responsive, and a separate mobile version must be made. Add that to the face that there are absolutely no standard statistics for its websites, and you can begin to see why more aggressive competitors are starting to overtake its popularity.

SQUARESPACE

Squarespace is relatively new on the website builder scene, and is a high-impact, pared-down alternative to many others on this list. Its themes are incredible to look at and very attractive, making the end result look professionally designed. All their themes are mobile responsive, there are fine-tuned selling tools, and great analytics tools. Even better, if you’re familiar with HTML and CSS, it gives you full ability to customize a site that way, affording builders the best of both worlds in terms of control over the look of their site.

But while Squarespace comes on strong, they still have a few pitfalls to worry about. For example, there’s no free option, as there is on most of its competitors, and you don’t have enough coding access to be able to transfer the site you build to your own coding, should you choose. There’s relatively few ways to plug in third-party apps. But the biggest blow, especially for ecommerce sites? Squarespace doesn’t yet support Paypal integrations.