Wix vs Weebly vs Squarespace – In Search Of The Best Website Builder

Website builders are evil!

How do I know?

Because I’ve tried quite a few of them, and I always end up wasting time and getting extremely frustrated.

I know, there are quite a few website builders out there, and all of them claim to be, “easy to use”. Unfortunately, one man’s definition of, “easy”, is different than another’s.

So what I’ve done is gone out and tested three supposedly, “easy website builders”. I’ve tested Wix vs Weebly vs Squarespace to see which comes out on top.

I used these three popular website builders to create a one-page website with basic elements on it. I rated each one on four important factors that I believe are most important when choosing a service. And those are as follows…

• Price: This amount will reflect the price for the yearly plan of each service.
• Website Templates: We want them to be simple, look professional and have all of the elements in place before starting.
• Website Editor: We want a drag & drop type of editor that makes it easy for the user to customize all elements on the page.
• Technical Help: It’s important that help is offered when getting started and along the way. The more type of help options, the better.

My final selection of the “best website builder” is based on how easy it was to create a professional looking webpage with minimal investment of time, effort and money.

The final result you see is what I was able to accomplish with 1 hour of work on the site. That includes the signup process; figuring out how to get started; and building the site.

The Good Website Builder… Weebly

Price: $3.99/month

Templates:  Weebly had fewer website templates to choose from and the ones that they did offer for free weren’t very impressive. None of the page elements were in place, so, unlike Squarespace and Wix, you had to create your pages from scratch.

Editor:  The drag & drop interface was okay, but I found it to be quite inflexible when attempting to customize certain elements such as images and forms.

Help:
Help Guides – Yes
Get Started – No
Tutorial Videos – No
Technical Support – Email

Recommendation:  The website builder was difficult to figure out and the templates need a lot of work. You might want to give Weebly a try to see if you can make it work for you. It was a bit too much trouble for me when compared to the other options.

The Better Webite Builder… Wix

Price: $8.25/month

Templates:  Wix offered a good variety of templates that were all well designed and professional. They already had all of the page elements laid out so that all you had to do was change the text and publish your page.

Editor:  I found the Wix WYSIWYG editor extremely easy to use. I was able to easily drag and drop, resize and position elements on the page and see the changes instantly.

Help:
Help Guides – Yes
Get Started – Yes
Tutorial Videos – Yes
Technical Support – Phone/Email/Forums

Recommendation:  Wix is a great free website builder solution. It truly was easy to use and I would recommend giving them a look if you don’t want to spend anything to get started.

Wix used to only have Flash based templates, but fairly recently updated almost all of them to be HTML5 based. This is great news for those who thought Flash websites didn’t rank well in the search engines.

The Best Website Builder… Squarespace 6

Price: $8.00/month

Templates:  Squarespace offers 20 very clean and professionally designed templates. Therefore, they didn’t require a lot of editing. They were basically good to go, right out of the box, and I was able to easily tweak the fonts and colors.

Editor:  Their page editor, when I did need to use it, was extremely simple and intuitive. The navigation for the editor always remained in the upper right-hand corner and consisted of three simple choices: Content, Structure and Style.

Help:
Help Guides – Yes
Get Started – Yes
Tutorial Videos – Yes
Technical Support – Email 24/7 Chat 11am-7pm

Recommendation:  Squarespace truly is the best website builder. It took very little time and effort to create a page that I would be proud to put my name on and publish to the world.

I highly recommend giving Squarespace a try. They have a full-featured, 14-day FREE trial, no credit card required, with 24/7 support.

Also, if you decide to stick with Squarespace, you can get 10% OFF by using the Squarespace coupon code, “GIMME10” with any of their plans.

Conclusion

So there you have it…

Three, “easy website builders”. I’ve tried them and know which one I would use to design and build my site.

Now it’s up to you to give them a try and make a decision. Hopefully, I’ve helped you narrow the field and save a bit of time and effort.

Let me know which one you like the best in the comments below.

Features Summary

	Wix	Weebly	Squarespace
Yearly Plan	$8.25	$3.99	$8.00
Monthly Plan	$9.90	N/A	$10.00
Hosting	Included	Included	Included
Domain Name	FREE (1 Year Plan)	Not Included	FREE (1 Year Plan)
Drag n' Drop	Yes	Yes	Yes
Free Themes	100+	100+	20
Support	Phone/Email/Forum - 24/7	Email - 24/7	Email - 24/7 Chat - 11am - 7pm
Statistics	Only Google Analytics	Weebly + Google Analytics	Squarespace + Google Analytics
SEO Optimized	Yes	Yes	Yes
Mobile Website	Yes	Yes	Yes
Social Sharing	Yes	Yes	Yes
Image Editor	Yes	Yes	Yes
Form Builder	Yes	Yes	Yes
Custom HTML/CSS	HTML Only	HTML and CSS	HTML and CSS

Photo by: Saad Akhtar