WebsiteBuilder.com review - efficiency over style
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WebsiteBuilder.com offers a very quick way to make a website, and run a small business. Classic drag and drop editors and theme selections are no more! Here, it's all about speed, efficiency, and your own personal design decisions.
At their core, most website builders are exactly the same. You sign up, pick a website example that you like, and mercilessly spend the rest of the day trying to keep it pretty, but also make it yours.
WebsiteBuilder.com is not doing any of that. There are no templates to pick. Instead, you just choose whatever sections you need, put them together, and press "Publish". If you prefer pre-made modern templates, a chance for artistry, and overall more control over how your site looks, we recommend choosing another website builder, such as Hostinger.
When for this WebsiteBuilder.com review, I signed up to make a website of my own (which I'll show later!), I was surprised by the system, and how different it was to other website builders. But honestly, it makes sense.
WebsiteBuilder.com gets you the kind of website you actually need – not the kind of website that just looks good. It's a simple, functional, no-frills way of putting you and your business online.
Of course, you can miss all the fun stuff and go straight to the riveting conclusion by clicking here. Or just carry on reading – and see what I discovered, as I kept doing my research.
| Hostinger Website Builder | Websitebuilder | |
| ⭐ Rating: | ||
| 🥇 Overall rank: | #3 out of #32 | #20 out of #32 |
| 💵 Price: | From $1.66/month | From $7.58/month |
| 🪄 Ease of use: | Extremely easy to use | Easy to use, limited functionalities |
| 🎨 Templates: | 150+ modern templates | - |
| 🏢 Business features: | eCommerce functionality, analytic tools, SEO settings | Professional email, eCommerce, marketing tools, secure checkout |
| 👨💻 24/7 live support: | Yes | No |
| ✂️ Free domain (first year): | Yes | Yes |
| 🔒 Free SSL certificate: | Yes | Yes (1 month) |
| 🔥 Coupons: | Hostinger Website Builder Cyber Monday 87% OFF! | Website builder coupons |
Pros and cons of WebsiteBuilder.com
Websitebuilder.com for different websites
| Website type | Benefits | Limitations |
| Blog | Decent minimalist blogging editor that allows editing SEO settings | The blog editor could be more extensive |
| Portfolio site | The website is very focused on images – it’s easy to replace stock photos with your own artwork | Not a lot of features for portfolios not focused on visual art |
| Business site | Decent and minimalist features for small businesses | The features may be a little too simplistic |
| Online store | Very simple setup with guides for beginners | Only the most expensive plan removes the 3% transaction fee |
Websitebuilder.com for blogs
Websitebuilder.com has a fairly simple blogging editor – this editor allows you to write blog posts straight from your dashboard. The SEO settings that come with the blog are fairly extensive as well – it’s possible to add in custom URLs and configure individual posts. And if you have more questions, read the full blogging section here.
Websitebuilder.com for portfolio sites
This builder offers great customization when it comes to the design of your website – you can easily replace all the images of the template that you choose with your own artwork. Websitebuilder.com makes it very easy to get your work online if you’re a visual artist.
Websitebuilder.com for business sites
The features that this builder offers are well-curated for businesses – you can do email campaigns, sell online, and blog for better SEO. All of these features are available on all plans, even the free one. For basic selling, marketing, and blogging the features are more than enough. More about these features is said in the business features section.
Websitebuilder.com for online stores
Websitebuilder.com offers a very guided experience when it comes to starting to sell online. The guides are easy to follow and are extremely helpful for beginners. Not to mention, you can start selling online even with the free plan – more about selling online is in the full eCommerce section here.
WebsiteBuilder.com pricing
WebsiteBuilder.com offers one free, and three premium plans. The premium plans range from $7.58 to $10.40 a month, making them rather affordable.
Here's what the options are like.
| Plan | Features | Price |
| Free | Best for testing out the problem – no custom domain, has builder’s branding but allows selling up to 3 products | $0.00 |
| Premium | Sell up to 5 products, do bookings, and email campaigns: Get up to 60% OFF WebsiteBuilder!! | $7.58/month |
| Business | Sell up to 10 products, and do more emails – better for bigger businesses | $9.18/month |
| eCommerce | No eCommerce transaction fees and even bigger email campaigns | $12.38/month |
As you can see, there's one very interesting thing right from the bat – WebsiteBuilder.com allows eCommerce on all, even free plans. There's actually plenty to talk about! So, let's do that and cover all of these options in detail.
Free plan
Free plan is still best for testing the platform. This can become quite you take a deeper look at the features:
- Online store with 3 products
- 3% transaction fee
- 2 email campaigns per month
- 100 unique emails
- Builder's branding on your website
- No custom domain
WebsiteBuilder.com branding on your website, and no custom domain is not a good look for any business. And honestly, 100 emails is nothing, if you're even remotely serious about doing proper email marketing.
Plus, while there is some eCommerce – it's actually very limiting, with a 3% transaction fee quickly turning this free plan into something....rather expensive. If you sell products worth a modest $500 in one month, WebsiteBuilder.com will take $15!
Sounds like bad business to me.
Premium plan
The only problem this premium plan ($7.58/month) really solves is removing the builder's branding and letting you connect your own domain. Other than that, it's still a rather limiting plan:
- Online store with 5 products
- 3% transaction fee
- 3 email campaigns per month
- 250 unique emails
- Booking features
It's a good pick if you want a simple personal website – or maybe do some bookings, without accepting payments through the site. Not the best pick, if you want something to sell and run a business with.
Business plan
This plan (at $9.18/month) is literally called "Business", so it's got to be good for it...right?
Ehh...nope, not there yet:
- Online store with 10 products
- 3% transaction fee
- 5 email campaigns per month
- 500 unique emails
- Priority support
The 3% transaction fee is still here! That's not good! This is a very awkward plan, as it keeps rather low limits on email marketing and eCommerce. The only you'll be getting in priority support: but I don't think it's worth paying a premium for.
eCommerce plan
The eCommerce plan ($12.38/month) is the only plan I recommend if you're looking to make an online store. Why? One look at the features tells the entire story. You get all things available in the plans above, plus:
- Online store with unlimited products
- No transaction fee
- 10 email campaigns per month
- 3,000 unique emails
- Advanced shipping management
No transaction fee, at last! This means that you won't have to give away a massive chunk of your profits to the platform. And while the email campaigns are still limited at 10 a month – this should be more than enough, and 3,000 monthly emails is enough for a small business to manage.
When all of that is available at just over $10 a month, you have to be paying very close attention.
Also, pay attention to the renewal prices of all these plans.
You see, these prices you see right here are legitimate only for the first term. This can be 1 or 2 years. Once they fly by, you'll be asked to renew – at an increased rate.
- Premium plan, purchased for 12 or 24 months will cost $7.58 and $7.98 a month respectively.
- Business plan will be $9.18 and $11.18 respectively.
- eCommerce plan will cost $12.38 and $16.38 respectively.
So – while you might (and absolutely should!) enjoy the low prices as they come, this is something to keep at the back of your mind. Hey – don't say I didn't warn you, alright?
If you want to sell online and don’t know which plan to choose, WebsiteBuilder.com's eCommerce plan is really cheap and offers good value for businesses. I would suggest straying away from other plans – they all have additional 3% transaction fees.
Is WebsiteBuilder.com easy to use?
- The Setup Process – the entire setup process is incredibly streamlined: in just a few clicks, I already had a base website ready.
- Creating Your Website – everything is done by you: you choose the niche, the relevant pictures, color, and menu schemes. Everything is customizable and quite simple.
- Managing Your Website – you can't edit all that much. Instead, you can choose from a selection of sections, and choose the specific layouts that you like. Bit restraining, but very simple.
Overall, WebsiteBuilder.com is very easy to use. Everything about this platform was created in order to make things fast. Seriously – instead of using pre-made website templates as most website builders do, WebsiteBuilder.com simply lets you choose all the required elements, and edit their styles. Then, it puts them together in one, fully-working website, bows, and gracefully leaves the building.
I'll show you how it works – and I'll also show you what I made! In order to test everything thoroughly for this WebsiteBuilder.com review, I made my own test website. Here it is: click on the image below to open the full thing.
Here's how everything went:
Getting started with WebsiteBuilder.com
The starting process was super simple. After clicking just one button to get started, I was immediately transferred to the website builder, which asked me a rather existential question: what's your site about?
This is where I could choose the niche of my website, and also pick the elements that it needed, such as a blog or a store.
After that, you'll start a quick designing process. Depending on the niche that you picked, WebsiteBuilder.com will automatically add some images to the website, and also give access to its stock image library. This is where you can find high-quality pics to look good at the top of your website.
You'll be able to quickly edit the website's fonts...
And color scheme! I actually really enjoy this system here, as you can quickly select a color scheme closest to the one of your business. Later in the editor there'll be an option to handpick any color possible, so if you have a specific scheme in mind, you can do all of this later.
At the next step, the platform will suggest some layout styles for the menus. There are only 5 options, but they all look pretty nice and diverse.
Once that is said and done, the platform also asks for some contact info of your business. Don't worry, they won't spam you or anything. It's just to add some helpful contract info for your visitors to see.
And finally – we make our way to the website editor. The setup process here was an eventful one: but now, the base website is created, and all a user has to do is to finetune it and add the content.
Editing the WebsiteBuilder.com website
This is how the editor will look like once the setup is completed:
Overall, I like the simplicity. All the editing options are on the left. This is where you can edit the colors and pages of your website, as well as tackle general settings or access some of the business tools.
At the center, you can select any section of the website, and on the right is where you'll get to edit everything.
Now, there's one thing to remember straight from the bat: WebsiteBuilder.com is not a drag-and-drop website builder. Instead, I was only be allowed to mix and match all the available sections and choose from the available layouts. That means no placing anything everywhere. There are strict guides of what can and can't be done.
Luckily, this also makes using this platform an absolute breeze.
There are over 30 different types of sections you can add: all of them some with several variations, called layouts.
When building a website, I simply picked whichever sections I wanted. And then – I could edit them all on the right-hand side menu.
Here, the menu option has seven different layouts. You see the option 1 up top.
Here, for example, is menu layout 4. You can see that on the right-hand-side menu, now there's an option for how many columns this menu should have. Depending on your choice, the editing options will also differ.
There will also be buttons for turning various elements off. It's super easy to remove a title, descriptions, or add some additional subtitles. Just click the toggle.
The same is true for the website's top section. There, I found it very easy to change its size, elements, and even select one of the 7 available layouts. This is a pretty good replacement for custom themes.
WebsiteBuilder.com dashboard
The platform's dashboard is very clean and simple. On the left, there will be a list of things you can do, and in the very front, I could quickly edit and manage my site.
The dashboard is where I could check out my store, and add products to it, run a blog, or even send out some emails to my list.
The account section is where I got to assign Premium features to one of the free websites. This is also where you'll be able to connect your custom domain to a website (or just claim a free domain, that's given with the plan!).
Overall, I was pretty impressed with the WebsiteBuilder.com dashboard. Same way I was impressed with its overall ease of use. This platform is very simple, and it didn't take long for me to have a completely custom, fully functional website.
WebsiteBuilder.com business features
- Selling online – eCommerce is rather basic but entirely functional. It's a simple way to sell online.
- Email marketing – WebsiteBuilder.com offers free email marketing to all users. While the send limits are pretty low, the platform offers a very simple way to send out tidy-looking emails to all of your contacts.
- Blogging – simple, but entirely functional, blogging lets anyone make a quick blog post straight from the dashboard.
WebsiteBuilder.com offers an impressive set of business features for all of its users – even the ones using the free plan.
Email marketing, eCommerce, and blogging are available on all plans. Sure, there's a strict limit on how many email campaigns you can do, and how many emails you can send out. Also, eCommerce means very limited features and a 3% transaction fee on all plans but the most expensive "eCommerce" one.
But – even with those things in mind, I found these WebsiteBuilder.com features worth talking about:
WebsiteBuilder.com eCommerce
Starting a website on the platform is easy. All I had to do for this WebsiteBuilder.com review was just to go to my dashboard, click "Online Store", and follow a very simple startup guide.
I love these kinds of guides. If you're a beginner with no clue on how to run a store, this will be massively helpful. Everything on it: from setting up your address, to adding a payment gateway, managing taxes, or adding items, is well-curated and easy to understand,.
On top of that, there will also be some additional features, like integrated Shippo shipping or Ecomdash for multichannel inventory management. There's also an opportunity to add discounts, global variants, and product categories for a more expansive selling experience.
Email marketing
WebsiteBuilder.com offers simple, but rather lovely email marketing. On the dashboard, I found not only a simple way to get started, but also some helpful resources so I know my way around a little bit better.
The platform offers several types of emails, fulfilling different purposes:
You can also choose either to follow the color and image scheme of your website, or to use one of the premade ones.
After everything's selected, and I was transported into the email editor, I saw a very familiar sight.
Yes – WebsiteBuilder.com email editor is virtually the same as the website editor. In here, I loved it even more than I did on the websites. You get several section and layout options to pick from.
And when done, it's super easy to send everything to the contact list, which you can add either manually, or via an exported file from a different platform.
Overall, I quite liked this.
Blogging
Starting a blog on WebsiteBuilder.com is almost deceptively simple. A simple visit to the dashboard, clicking on the "Blog" section, and I was already allowed to manage the blog on my existing site.
The editor is quite minimalist, but it does the job. Overall, I prefer this experience over having to write the post in the middle of a website editor.
Here, I could write everything distraction-free, and also there was an option to immediately edit the post's SEO settings, add title, description, and set a custom URL.
Pretty basic. But if you're not a seasoned blogger, and this isn't the primary purpose of your site, it can be entirely serviceable.
Overall, I quite liked the WebsiteBuilder.com business features. They're quite minimalist, but for basic selling, marketing, and blogging – everything looks fine, and feels right.
Customer service
Websitebuilder.com offers different outlets for you to choose from if you have any problems with their website builder:
- How-to guides
- FAQs
- Billing support
- Tech support
- Live chat
- Phone line
- Email support
The variety is great, and it gives you an opportunity to check the problem in the knowledge base first before having to contact support. Besides that, most of the elements of the builder come with help icons, where you can get answers to some of your problems immediately, while you’re still in the builder itself.
Other than that, if you end up utilizing the live chat feature of the customer service you’ll have an answer to your problem in a couple of minutes or so.
All in all, the variety of help you can get in this builder is pretty great – you can urgently and efficiently solve any problems you may have.
WebsiteBuilder.com performance
Website builders are not really known for being very well-optimized or fast. But if you want to run an online business, website performance is crucial – your visitors won't waste their precious time, waiting for your snail of a page to load.
Luckily, in terms of performance, WebsiteBuilder.com is actually doing quite alright. For this WebsiteBuilder.com review, I put my very own test site to the test of GTMetrix. GTMetrix is a platform that measures the performance and optimization of both the platform, and the website built with it. Here are the results:
Pretty good. Not perfect, but pretty good. The visitors would take around 2 seconds to see the majority of the website load. And it would take a total of 4 seconds for everything to load fully.
This is slower than Google's recommended 3-second threshold. The website may not be as fast as on some other platforms. But in terms of user experience, this is perfectly acceptable.
WebsiteBuilder.com alternatives
This builder is an unusual one, so maybe during this WebsiteBuilder.com review, you only learned that you wish to look elsewhere. I get it: the pricing may be a bit confusing, and lack of proper design capabilities can also be a bit of an issue.
So....what are the alternatives, then?
Wix
Wix includes over 700 themes, so if you're looking for a theme-based builder, it's the best option to go. An intuitive pixel-perfect builder can help nearly anyone make nearly any kind of website. Add that to thousands of third-party tools with plenty of different features, and we got ourselves a feast.
SITE123
SITE123 offers a rather similar website-building experience, allowing you to edit various pre-made sections. The only difference is that it's bigger, faster, and has more business features that WebsiteBuilder.com. It's more expensive, sure. But if you want something similar, taken to the next level – here it is.
WebsiteBuilder.com review - final verdict
WebsiteBuilder.com is a very simple website builder. Sometimes, that simplicity may turn into a bit of a problem. While I loved the editing process, and I found everything to be super easy to use, I also wish that there were more options to choose from.
What you're given is a few fonts, and a bunch of section of pre-made layouts. Everything made with the platform has a danger of looking very samey. This is probably not enough to make a beautiful, modern website.
But it's certainly enough to quickly make a functional website – on a budget.
Can live with cookie-cutter designs? Are you more interested in making sure the website is functional and can be made quickly? If so, WebsiteBuilder.com will be a terrific option.
Don't forget – there's a free plan that you can use. So if you're not sure yet, you can always give WebsiteBuilder.com a shot yourself.
WebsiteBuilder.com FAQs
Is WebsiteBuilder.com any good?
WebsiteBuilder.com is pretty good if you don't mind a minimalist design. Everything is simple to use, and you can get a website going in just a few minutes.
What kind of websites can you make with WebsiteBuilder.com?
WebsiteBuilder.com is best suited for personal websites. It's quick to set up, and even includes some blogging and business tools, if you wish to expand the website even further.
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