Storage and Bandwidth Limits
Many website builders include web hosting as part of their service, eliminating the need to purchase a web hosting plan from a third-party provider and manually connect it to your content management system (CMS). Two major components of web hosting are storage and bandwidth.
- Storage is basically how much data your site can contain. So, if your storage limit is low, you may not be able to have large image galleries or videos or numerous web pages, and in doing so, you will likely slow down your site speed considerably. Therefore, storage is an important element to consider.
- Bandwidth is the amount of traffic your website can handle. A popular business with a large number of site visitors will need a high bandwidth.
Together, these two factors play a key role in your site’s general performance. For that reason, we reviewed storage and bandwidth limits for each provider, across all of their plans, giving preference to those that provided higher limits.
Drag-and-Drop Site Editor
The purpose of a site builder is to make the process of building and maintaining a website easy—even for the pure beginner. One of the ways in which a website builder achieves a high degree of ease of use is through its site editor—or more specifically, a drag-and-drop editor. While nearly all of the leading website builders include this feature, the degree to which a site builder is user-friendly varies greatly and not all offer a true drag-and-drop editor. Instead, some employ content blocks where users can select certain types of content (or “blocks”) to add to designated areas of a web page.
While the block-style editors can help those with no web design experience build a clean website, it is much more limiting for more experienced users who are looking for more customization capabilities. For this reason, we personally tested the site editors of each website builder and allocated more points to those with a true drag-and-drop editor.
Pre-Built Template Library
Templates take the guesswork out of designing a website, making them a critical part of the website building process for web design beginners. When determining our rankings, we consider the number of templates available, variety of templates in terms of both design and use cases (e.g., service providers that accept online bookings or online retailers selling products), the template quality and the ability to swap out templates without losing content. Templates save users a tremendous amount of time and can make all the difference in creating a site that not only looks the way you would like it to look, but also has all the functionalities you need.
E-Commerce Capabilities
In order to further determine how robust a provider is, we considered each provider’s e-commerce capabilities. Part of this consideration included the starting price to accept online payments, as well as which types of goods can be sold. For example, e-commerce means more than selling physical goods. It also includes selling digital goods, such as downloadable content, services and subscriptions that require the ability to set up recurring payments. Though not every business will be looking to sell online, it is good to consider which offer the online selling tools you might later need as your business grows.
Extras and Inclusions
Part of the reason why users opt for a website builder is because they generally include everything needed to build a website. However, not all site builders offer the same inclusions, so we considered not only pricing and features, but also which extras a provider offers. For example, this metric includes whether or not plans include a free domain name, a free SSL certificate and more. These extra features not only help users save money, but more importantly, they help make the process of building a website easier—which influences the user experience and overall quality of the provider.
