Network Solutions review: web builder for beginners

Network Solutions offers multiple ways to build a website. You can use its DIY website builder, choose web hosting, or have its design team create a site for you. No matter the option, the provider promises a quick and hassle-free setup.

Its drag-and-drop editor is simple and beginner-friendly. The in-house team can handle design and content creation, while built-in eCommerce tools support online selling.

These features sound promising, but do they deliver? I tested Network Solutions to see if it lives up to its claims. Keep reading to find out if it’s worth your time.

⭐ Rating:	4.3 ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
🥇 Overall rank:	#9 out of #33
💵 Price:	From $1.95/month
🪄 Ease of use:	-
🎨 Templates:	150+
🏢 Business features:	-
👨‍💻 24/7 live support:	-
🔥 Coupons:	Network Solutions builder coupon 70% OFF

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Pros and Cons of Network Solutions

What website to use Network Solutions for?

Network Solutions is mostly seen as a website builder for small businesses, online stores, or entrepreneurs that are looking to create a custom website design and expand their online presence. Let’s check out how the builder does with some of the most popular niches.

Website type	Benefits	Limitations
Online shops	Can sell up to 500 products, templates designed for online stores	Only available on the most expensive plan, limited eCommerce tools
Businesses	Google Analytics and social media integrations many business-oriented template designs	Limited business tools, SEO tools not included in entry plan
Portfolio site	Easy to use, social media integration	25 available templates, portfolio sites are not Network Solution's main area of focus
Blogs	Simplistic blogging platform integration, Google Analytics	40 templates, not a blogging platform, limited functionalities

Network Solutions pricing and plans

Network Solutions is one of the most budget-friendly website builders. Its cheapest plan starts from $1.95 for the first month. If you’re looking for long-term value, there are also annual plans available.

Network Solutions has 3 basic website builder plans, priced from $1.95 to $3.95 for the first month. All 3 come with free domain registration for a year (for yearly plans), free professional email for 3 months, 150++ templates, and 1 hour of website design support.

As for differences:

• Website ($1.95/month) – includes only the basics mentioned above.
• Website + Marketing ($2.95/month) – everything from the Website plan plus social media and marketing tools, appointment scheduling and including to Google My Business listing.
• eCommerce ($3.95/month) – everything from the Marketing plan, plus secure checkout on your domains, as well as the ability to sell products on Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, and eBay.

If you just want to try out the builder, monthly plans are a good option to get started.

Annual payments are also available, with prices starting from $50.00/year for the Website plan.

All in all, Network Solutions is cheap if you opt for yearly billings. However, the builder is pretty minimalistic with its resources and advanced features, which makes the pricing points slightly questionable.

Is Network Solutions easy to use?

Network Solutions is designed to make the website creation process as simple as possible. From the initial setup to ongoing management, the platform offers an intuitive experience for users of all skill levels.

• Getting started. The Network Solutions setup process is a breeze. You can start by choosing a template or answering some questions for the system to generate a few site design options.
• Designing the website. Network Solutions comes with a simplistic yet functional block-based editor for further edits and customization options.
• Managing the website. Network Solution's dashboard is pretty minimalistic and straightforward. With it, you can manage your billing, domain name registration, and email setup, as well as access the main editor.

Overall, Network Solutions promises to get you online in minutes, and it lives up to that promise.

Getting started with Network Solutions

Starting out with Network Solutions builder is easy. Users can access their sites from the main dashboard menu. Clicking on the website will take them to the web builder.

Once you choose to launch your website, this is where the site-building process starts. Here, Network Solutions offers 2 different approaches to website making:

• A traditional do-it-yourself approach where you pick a template from the Network Solutions template gallery.
• An automated website generator where all you have to do is answer a few questions, and the system shortlists the best-fitted Network Solutions templates for you.

Network Solutions offers an AI-powered website builder designed to simplify the site creation process, especially for beginners. Instead of manually selecting a template and customizing it from scratch, users can answer a few questions about their business, industry, and design preferences. The AI then generates a personalized website with a layout, images, and content tailored to their needs.

Overall, getting started with Network Solutions is easy and quick, whether you use its website generator or choose a template.

Designing the website

No matter which setup you choose, you'll end up with the drag-and-drop editor. However, I must point out that while Network Solutions advertises itself as a drag-and-drop website builder, in reality, it’s more of a section-based one.

Regardless, on the left-side menu, you’ll see a few elements, like Pages, Blog, Appointments, and a couple more. To start editing, just click the blue + icon, and you'll see different element options.

Elements like buttons, text, galleries, and even Google Maps can be easily and quickly added to your site.

At the bottom left of the web builder, there’s an option to view the layout of your website. It shows little squares in the design, helping you see how much each element can be moved. While it might seem like a limitation for more detailed design work, if you’re a beginner and prefer a simpler approach, this is a good option.

You can also customize the elements once placed on your page.

You can change the background color, font, size, alignment, and shape of elements. Once you're done, you can preview your site on both desktop and phone, before publishing.

Additionally, on the same left-side menu, you’ll also find other items. For instance, Themes lead to basic template customizations like background colors, fonts, and links.

Meanwhile, Settings houses multiple configuration options. Here, you can connect your business accounts like Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager accounts, as well as customize legal information (cookie banner, website analytics). Here, you can also easily add files for search engines, like robots.txt or sitemap.xml. These files help search engines understand your site’s structure or know which pages shouldn’t be crawled.

Lastly, once you’re done building your site completely, do not forget to access the Marketing section, which is located in your main dashboard. Here users can manage various tools, including SocialBooster to connect Google, Facebook, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn; AdSpend for managing Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Microsoft Ads; Email Marketing tools; and MyLinks, which lets you create a custom link for your brand and build a link-in-bio page to drive traffic to key pages like services, products, or blogs.

All things considered, Network Solutions is very easy to use. The builder simplifies and streamlines its setup, design, and management processes to make the platform accessible to all, including total beginners.

Network Solutions templates

Network Solutions offers templates across 4 different niches, including online store, business and services, personal, and community. The templates are clean, simple, and professional-looking, and best of all, they are completely free.

These templates all have responsive designs, meaning that they’ll look equally good whether viewed on a desktop or mobile device. And, if you’re on its eCommerce plan, you’ll appreciate that many of the templates are eCommerce-oriented with call-to-action features.

As you go through the collection, you’ll likely also notice that most of the templates are designed to appeal to the business crowd.

Take this one for example:

It’s not going to knock you over with its cutting-edge design, but it’s certainly professional, clean, and modern. And, at the end of the day, your website will look good and ready for business, which is what most of its users are looking for.

To sum up, Network Solutions has a solid selection of templates to suit different users. Businesses will especially appreciate its professional visuals.

Network Solution's designer services

If you feel like building a website on your own is too much of a hassle, Network Solutions offers a service called “Design by the expert”, where you can get your site built professionally for you.

If you're ready to invest (pricing isn’t disclosed), Network Solution's design experts can create a fully customized website for you. They’ll handle everything from designing a unique template to adding SEO-friendly content, ensuring a professional look tailored to your needs.

The process is simple – choose Network Solution's website builder or hosting services and contact support. A consultant will then guide you through sharing your vision. From there, Network Solution's design, SEO, and copywriting teams will work together to bring it to life. Whether you build a site yourself or opt for a custom-made one, Network Solution's focuses on delivering quality.

Network Solutions performance

Network Solution's performance has pros and cons. It’s reliable and offers fast page loading times, but it struggles with traffic surges.

Network Solutions uptime and response time

To test out the builder’s reliability, the first test examines the provider's uptime and response time.

For that, I have monitored Network Solutions for 3 weeks. Over this time, the provider had a 100% uptime.

While Network Solutions does not officially issue an uptime guarantee for its builder, its hosting packages come with a guarantee of 99.9%. Keeping this in mind, the actual results are much better than expected.

The response time has averaged a 623ms. Since it's good, just a bit above the market’s average of 600ms, I consider Network Solutions servers to be reliable, but it could be faster.

All in all, Network Solutions is a trustworthy website builder that comes with great uptime and response time.

Network Solutions website speed

Next is a speed test to check how fast the builder loads an empty and fully built site. Some reviews mention speed issues, but Network Solutions performed flawlessly in our test.

Before we jump to analyze results, here are 2 important measures to know:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – the time required to load the largest chunk of the page. Google recommends keeping the LCP below 2.5s for a fully-built site for better search engine ranking
• Fully Loaded Time – the time it takes for the site to be fully loaded. Keep it below 3s for a better user experience.

Network Solutions only has data centers in the US (Florida and Georgia). Due to that, all tests took place in the US too.

The best LCP is in the US at just 1.088s. As expected, the further from the origin server, the higher the LCP, leading to a slight increase in other locations.

However, neither of them has even come close to the undesired 2.5 seconds.

As for the fully built website, Network Solutions yet again surprised me with its excellent loading times. This time around, the LCP was at a speedy 1.2s, not even a half of Google’s suggested maximum of 2.5s.

Its Fully Loaded Time was a fast 1.6 seconds, leaving plenty of room before reaching the unwanted 3-second mark.

Additionally, considering that website builders usually offer many design-heavy features that significantly slow down the website’s loading time, this is an even better result.

In short, the builder is incredibly fast and more than proved the negative Network Solutions hosting reviews wrong. Both its LCP and Fully Loaded Time came in well under the benchmarks.

Network Solutions stress testing

The final hurdle for this Network Solutions review is a stress test to gauge the builder’s ability to tackle on-site traffic surges.

To test the site, I sent 50 visual users (VUs) to explore for 5 minutes. Ideally, the site should handle this traffic without any crashes (red line) or significant delays (blue line). However, if the site had 50 VUs continuously for a month, it could reach 50,000 visits – quite a lot of traffic that could overwhelm a server. Unfortunately, Network Solutions struggled to handle 50 VUs and failed during the test.

While the response time (blue line) was relatively stable and fast, the main issue was that half of the requests failed (red line).

Therefore, I kept on decreasing the number of visitors by 5 until I get a pass. The first pass was with 10VUs.

This time around, there were no failures (red line), and the response time remained speedy.

While the full 50VUs has been too much for Network Solutions, 10VUs – which is less than 20,000 monthly visitors – is far more than what most small to mid-sized websites would see. So, the provider is surely capable of withstanding some decent traffic.

Overall, high traffic increases overwhelmed Network Solution's server, but it still did reasonably well and rallied to support a less intense surge.

All things considered, Network Solution's performance is still one for the win column. It’s extremely fast and its ability to handle traffic, while not amazing, is still pretty decent.

Is Network Solutions secure?

If Network Solutions has a weak spot, it’s its security. The builder doesn’t offer much in this department and even charges for some essential security measures.

Here’s what Network Solutions provides security-wise:

• Perfect privacy – a premium feature that conceals your personal data in the WHOIS databases.
• SSL certificates – a ranking factor for search engines, this is a must-have. An SSL helps to create an encrypted and secure connection between the server and the visitor. Network Solutions offers free SSL with all web builders plans.
• Cyber security solution – provider offers several website security plans, with the lowest tier including daily malware scans, automatic malware removal, blacklist monitoring, automated bot blocking, the SiteLock seal, unlimited web page scanning, and a 12-hour response time.

In terms of security, Network Solutions is not very well-rounded. While it likely has more measures in place, like monitoring or a firewall, the builder’s site nor its customer support could disclose the specific protection offered.

Will Network Solutions support help me?

Network Solutions website builder offers several ways to contact its support team: 24/7 phone support, 24/7 live chat, and tickets. It also has a knowledge base with heaps of articles.

However, a common complaint in user reviews of Network Solutions is that the quality of help that you get varies wildly. Some of its agents are rather abrupt and less than keen to help. Meanwhile, others are more forthcoming and willing to extend a helping hand.

Luckily, you could also hit up its knowledge base as an alternative. There, you’ll find hundreds of articles sorted into 8 different categories, including domain, email, and website builder. These articles are brief but well-written and often come with pictures for better clarity.

In short, Network Solutions offers quite a few customer support channels where you can get help fairly quickly and easily. Some of the agents come across as blunt and not very eager to assist.

Alternatives to Network Solutions

Network Solutions is a solid option for many, especially small businesses. Yet, if you’re unsure and plagued by doubts about whether Network Solutions is the one for the job, you can choose from a large variety of good website builders. Some of the best Network Solutions alternatives worth checking are Wix, Hostinger Website Builder, Site123.

Wix

Wix web builder is a highly flexible drag-and-drop website builder that offers complete design and customization freedom. Additionally, the builder is also well-known for its robust functionalities as well as its largest variety of professional-looking and responsive templates. All that and more at a starting introductory price of $10.50/month.

Visit Wix

Hostinger Website Builder

Hostinger Website Builder is one of the cheapest website builders in the market, with plans starting from a very affordable $2.33/month. Beyond its cheap pricing, Hostinger Website Builder's other appeals include its functional and flexible drag-and-drop editor, well-developed blogging platform, and eCommerce features, as well as AI-powered marketing tools.

Visit Hostinger Website Builder

Site123

A no-frills website builder, SITE123 offers one of the simplest and fastest ways to get online. On top of that, its users also get access to in-depth analytics, the SEO Adviser app, and more. More so, Site123 is one of the best website builders for blogging, which makes it that much more tempting. As for the prices, is plans start from $12.80/month.

Visit SITE123

Network Solutions review – conclusion

From this Network Solutions review, it’s clear that the builder could be a good option for small businesses with tight purse strings. The builder is cheap, easy to use, and very fast. However, its plans lack value. Plus, its security and support departments could be better.

Here’s a quick recap of how it stacks up:

Feature	3.7 ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆	Simplistic section-based builder for fast site creation
Pricing	★ ★ ★ ★ ☆	Network Solutions pricing is pretty affordable, starting from a little over $1.95/mo. However, the builder is very tight-fisted with its resources and features.
Ease of Use	★ ★ ★ ★ ☆	The builder prioritizes the ease of use at every step of the way, from setup to design and site management. It also has reliable AI tools to make the website-building process easy and understandable even for beginners.
Templates	★ ★ ★ ★ ☆	150++ templates covering 4 niches. The templates are basic but professional-looking, responsive, and customizable.
Performance	★ ★ ★ ★ ☆	The builder proved to be very reliable and fast. However, its traffic-handling abilities could be improved.
Security	★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆	Network Solutions isn’t very transparent with its security measures. Worse, the builder also charges for security essentials, like SSL certificates, that are often included for free.
Support	★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆	Its customer service agents are fairly fast and knowledgeable, yet cannot be reached 24/7.

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