Best Free Website Builders (March 2023) – Forbes Advisor

To find out the best website builders for small businesses, Forbes Advisor dived deep into the industry and determined the top 10 competitors in the field based on their strengths, such as the ones that are best suited for local businesses and are easy to get your site up and running. And running faster or planning more to bloggers. We scored these providers in four categories using 14 different metrics to appreciate the features that small business owners find useful in a site builder.

Pricing

Offering a website building plan for free was a requirement to qualify for our list, so providers are evaluated on the merits of their free plans and then how affordable and valuable their paid plans are to users. The more value a user can get from upgrading to paid website builder plans, the better the provider does in this category. More affordable pricing plans have also performed well. This accounts for 20 percent of our weight score.

Main characteristics

One drawback that comes with some free plans is that they either have few features or the features are only available for additional fees. For general features, we looked at what a web developer offers as part of their base plan and then upgrade to paid plans or pay for add-ons like plugins. Some of the features we consider most important in basic plans include offering mobile responsive sites, drag and drop functionality, unlimited storage and bandwidth, email marketing and social marketing tools. Features accounted for 40% of our total score.

Third party reviews

How well real users of these website builders viewed their experience with them was important to our final evaluation. We turned to third-party review sites, such as G2 and Trustpilot, to gauge their opinion of each provider’s usefulness, customer support, and other factors. By looking for reviews of at least 3.5 out of 5 or more, we can get a clearer picture of the best website builders available today. These amount to 10% of the total score.

Professional analysis

Tying all of this together, we ranked additional criteria such as ease of use, prominent and detailed features, popularity and value for money. In total, these criteria received 30% of the final score.