Top Website Builders for Small Business in 2015
Your website can make or break you when you’re a small business. Sending visitors to a poorly designed website (or worse, a poorly functioning one) is roughly akin to handing out a business card with a comic sans typeface. And unfortunately, most small businesses can’t afford the cost of a custom website developer. Often, this leaves them with one of the many website builder platforms. But when you’ve got little know-how where websites are concerned, how do you rifle through them all to pick the best one?
The first place to start is to browse through the available templates or themes a website builder has to offer. The more variety, generally, the more likely you’ll be able to find one you like or which suits your business. After that, you should dig deep into the builder’s available information. How well can you customize your template? If you decide you’d like to switch templates over the court of your website’s life, will you lose all of the information you’ve put on it and be forced to start at square one? What sort of SEO tools, mobile responsiveness, or social tools can you easily integrate?
Below is our list of top website builders for small businesses in 2015 based on the answers to those questions.
Bigcommerce
Bigcommerce is great for large online stores, and they have a massive suite of great plugins and options to help give any store created with their platform the same coding perks you’ll find on the websites of larger stores with their own development teams. Importantly, they also offer fantastic marketing and email campaign management, which is a crucial differentiator. They also offer great SEO options and partner well with third party services.
Imcreator
Imcreator offers free hosting and unlimited bandwidth: which are the two things you may spend the most on for a larger website: and are the most difficult to get from website builders. Their templates are visually impressive, and they come in low on the cost spectrum, unlike some of the larger-named website builders.
Website Builder
Website Builder offers free domain names, which you can generally only purchase from third parties and then redirect to your website builder. The free templates at Website Builder are absolutely stellar, and they offer 10,000 of them, neatly categorized by industry. This reduces a lot of legwork and time wasted. They offer great SEO tools and free business emails as well.
Shopify
Shopify, like Bigcommerce, is a website builder tailor made for online stores. It’s particularly great for those who do business on-location, such as pop up shops, events, trade shows, flea markets… you name it! Their app allows easy maintenance of the website and purchases, and has great retail options for if you’re just trying to make a website for an existing retail store.
Sitey
Sitey offers round-the-clock support, great mobile responsiveness, and google analytics: an important element if your website relies on volume of visits. They also have a vast library of stock images to use while you’re making your site. Unfortunately, they do place some pretty strict limits on storage and file upload size.
Squarespace
Squarespace is one of the few website builders which gives a free domain, and combines some of the benefits of Sitey, offering a great library of high resolution images which you can use when building your website. They also have a logo-generating element, which can design a logo for you if you haven’t got one already.
Volusion
Volusion is very reasonably priced, and offers great integration into Amazon and Ebay. Volusion has great SEO markups as well, with access to meta tags and other variables which will help your website get a leg up on competition. For ecommerce, their product upload options are a breeze, and they help you easily track purchases and clients.
Webs
Webs is a free website builder which gives you access to premium features for a small fee. They’ve got a great roster of articles and help to teach you about website management, traffic, and SEO if you’re jumping into owning and managing a website cold, and help guide you through the process.
