Regardless of your web development experience, you can create a high-quality website. Apart from a rich library of templates, Squarespace has all the necessary tools for effective work.
It is the best website editor for photographers, digital artists and anyone who want to showcase their creativity. Verdict: The name of this software may give the impression that it is an average web design tool. Google Web Designer lets you incorporate animation and interactive elements in your work to show off your unique style.
The distinctive feature of this software is that it comes with pre-installed templates for creating advertisements. There are three different types of ads: banner simple fixed-size ads , expandable small banner-size ads that expand when clicked and interstitial suitable for mobile devices, since the vertical and horizontal position of the page is automatically determined. Moreover, you can create an advertisement without a code of a particular platform.
Verdict: Wix is a popular program with a free plan that allows you to test out this service. Using its rich functionality, you can create a stylish and visually interesting website. Wix has an ADI Artificial Design Intelligence mode which has an intuitive interface to make the design process as simple as possible.
This service is a perfect choice for beginners as you can put together your website just following simple guidelines. Besides, Wix offers an array of beautiful templates to make your website even more appealing. This website creator is so user-friendly and well-thought-out that designing your website turns out to be an interactive game.
In addition, Wix has great support for different media and responsive customer service even for free-plan users. Verdict: Figma is an excellent web design tool that is aimed at real-time collaboration. It allows several people to view and edit the same web template simultaneously. Using this powerful design tool, you can share the project with your clients and make changes in real-time.
This is a whole new level of interaction for the web site creator software. Figma has an editing panel with fonts, colors and other useful settings. It comes with all the necessary tools and functions to create icons and amazing web templates. To check whether Figma is a winner in Figma vs Adobe XD battle, you can use a trial version and then buy a subscription if you like it. Verdict: Webflow is a feature-rich web design tool that is a great alternative to WordPress.
Although Webflow is a fairly new product on the market, it includes the most important tools and functions to create content-driven websites. It has everything a user can expect from the best website editor.
You do get thrown into navigating the dashboard which can be slightly daunting at first. With both free and premium templates, Webflow does a good job of identifying which templates are going to be better for your individual requirements. Although, there is no actual search functionality which limits the amount of templates on view and whether it accomodates for a certain industry. Usually website builders have a set of templates for the blogging industry, for example, which provides a good indication as to what works for you.
This is something Webflow could definitely include to make the overall user experience much more enjoyable. Your domain name will look something like this lucyscupcakes. Site has an ecommerce plan that is much better suits for growing traffic and marketing tools.
Account Plan offers two choices of either Individual or Team plans. You can kind of figure out which features these both entail! With Teams, you can collaborate with other team members with a shared dashboard, and is a lot more customizable. Webnode is a popular choice of free website maker with more than 30 million users around the world. You can move elements around, but they will conform to predetermined designs.
For example, if you move an image from the middle of the page to the right, the page design will change to accommodate this, rather than simply letting you drop the image where you want it.
It lends itself really well to building simple, minimalist sites — we recommend it for events websites rather than, say, business websites. One of the big drawbacks to Webnode is the limited storage you get on the free plan.
You only receive MB storage, which is five times less than most of the other builders on our list. The domain we got for our cupcake website looked like this: lucy-s-cupcakes0. Most of its templates have visuals taking up most of the page — This means its ideal for ecommerce websites that really want to show off their products!
A Ucraft watermark is attached to all free websites — you can remove this when upgrading to Pro plan! The image-driven platform lets you showcase your products or services in a bold fashion from large visuals, to flashy fonts. The main focus on aesthetics really makes this builder enjoyable for the user! The onboarding process for Ucraft is pretty straightforward. When signing up, you get asked to choose your template and to type in your business name — Ucraft then gets to work creating your site.
Without a drag and drop editor, it was little more difficult to move elements around the page! The design process was, overall, super fun to play around with and you can achieve a lot of page character when using Ucraft.
With Ucraft being a very image-driven builder, its templates are really focused on large images covering the page, rather than text. Ucraft templates are pretty slick and clear with minimal content — the visuals are clearly doing all the talking! Although this may sound pricey, Ucraft does have a pretty good value for money with the array of features you get in return.
You can select either the Pro Website plan which is its most popular plan , Pro Shop, or Unlimited plan. SimpleSite lets you easily edit your site from your mobile. Its mobile editor in particular is a great feature for those on the go. If you want a builder that walks you through setting up the different parts of your website step by step, then you might enjoy using SimpleSite. Its onboarding process uses an animated beaver character to guide you through setting up each page, before you get to enter the main editor.
SimpleSite has a very thorough onboarding process, where it walks you through each step of setting up your website before you even reach the editor. SimpleSite is a mobile delight. It has a really impressive specialism — it gives you the ability to create a website to the same extent as on a desktop, but from your mobile device. As part of the setup process, you have to choose your website layout.
There were only two options to choose from, which felt extremely limiting — especially compared to builders like Wix and Weebly! Showing the mobile preview alongside the desktop view is a nice touch, but more template choice would be even better! You can sell up to five products on the free plan, and your site will be mobile optimized, too. However, you have limited design options, and will need to upgrade if you want to remove adverts — as well as get rid of that page limit.
However, there are some big downsides. SimpleSite has two premium plans, and both are pretty expensive for what they offer. Free website builders may have once seemed too good to be true, but we set out to demonstrate that this is not always the case.
A question we often get asked is just how do these free website builders make their money? Is there something sketchy going on? That said, there are some elements that you should pay close attention to when deciding on which free website builder you choose. To create this ranking of the best free website builders, we drew upon our extensive research and user testing for each website builder as a whole, and combined this with a specific focus on their free plans, paying close attention to whether or not the builder ticked these boxes:.
Our screenshots should help you evaluate the ads of each website builder, and decide on the least intrusive option for you. Most free website builders have a cap on the amount of content you can upload to your site.
If you need to sell through your free website builder, this limits your options a little. The process and learning curve differ slightly from builder to builder, but here are the steps you can expect:. This process could take anything from 15 minutes to a few hours, depending on how much you switch up in steps three and four. Again, yoursite. As your site grows and your traffic increases, you may find you simply outgrow your free plan.
You may need to upgrade to have enough storage, and so that enough people can access your site at once. Many paid plans offer unlimited storage and bandwidth, so you can have total peace of mind. The features and tools needed to take your business or hobby to the next level will often be waiting for you in that premium plan, so make sure you at least take a look! Our list of the top 10 free website builders ranks Wix as the best all-around builder, with tons of free features. Just remember that free website builders nearly always limit the features and functions that are available to you — you may be ok with this now, but it could prove extremely frustrating further down the line.
While we always recommend making the most of free plans to build, play, and experiment with different builders, we never recommend staying on a free plan forever. In the meantime, enjoy trying out your favorite free builders — come back and let us know which one you liked the most!
Another way for website builders to make money is through advertising on your site the ads can be removed by upgrading your plan. Free websites are not very SEO-friendly because you cannot connect a personalized domain. Yes — website builders make it super easy to create professional looking sites for no money at all.
With these free platforms you get most of the features you need to get your site up and running, but, of course, upgrading your plans gives you access to better tools. You can upgrade to a paid premium plan whenever you want to. Doing so will provide you with far more tools, templates, storage space, and other important features for growing your website.
Yes, they are totally free to use. You can sign up, create, customize, and publish your site without paying a thing. However, most website builders lock certain features unless you upgrade to a paid plan, but these costs are completely optional, so the overall costs are up to you. Wix came top in our research for ease of use. Its intuitive drag-and-drop design makes it easy to create a professional looking site without any tech knowledge. It also gives you tons of creative control so you can build a really developed, personalized site.
Weebly takes top spot for best free ecommerce builder — it lets you sell an unlimited number of products on its free plan! This feature is for US sellers only. Strikingly is great for creating modern websites quickly, but only lets you sell one product through its free plan.
Mozello is more limiting in terms of design, but lets you set multiple languages for your site, and lets you sell up to 10 products on its free plan — great for selling internationally! Keep in mind though that, like storage, free plans often have a cap on bandwidth, so you may need to upgrade to a paid plan in order to access more resources once you start getting higher traffic levels.
All the platforms featured on this list should reformat your site so it displays properly on mobile. The ten builders featured on this list all offer a free plan you can stay on for as long as you wish, with no pressure to upgrade. There are currently no free services, but check out our article on the Best Cheap Web Hosts if price is your main consideration when choosing a provider. Found this article helpful? Share this article or comment below! Written and researched by. Natasha Willett Researcher.
Lucy Carney Author. Updated: Oct 27, Comments: Our methodology We tested each free builder to rate them on the criteria you told us mattered most — we paid special attention to features, ease, design, and support. Weebly — Ideal for Small Businesses. Jimdo — Small Online Store Builder. Site — Made for Simple Websites. Browsershots furnishes screenshots of your website as it will look in various browsers. Browserstack actually gives you full remote access to virtual machines so you can test your site in the most common environments.
Alternatively, you can set up your own virtual machine, but that takes some expertise. If you're going that route, Microsoft has some tools for developers including a ready-to-use virtual machine at modern.
By all means run some tests on a real device, especially on real mobile devices. Mobile device simulation is a new, evolving technology and less reliable than desktop simulation. Mobile devices cost money, of course, so we suggest taking a look at the Open Device Lab initiative. You can also share devices if you want to test on many platforms without spending too much.
Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to select language Learn web development Common questions What software do I need to build a website? Change language. Prerequisites: You should already know the difference between webpages, websites, web servers, and search engines. Objective: Learn which software components you need if you want to edit, upload, or view a website.
Canva offers a free plan with over templates. Visit Canva. Vectr is a free, cloud-based illustration tool with features similar to Sketch and Adobe Illustrator. If you want to create complex illustrations, or simply design a website or mobile app, Vectr offers everything you need to get started. Visit Vectr. While you can use Pixelmator for illustration or interface design, it works best as a tool for editing and retouching photos, with features for color correction, retouching, and applying filters.
Pixelmator also offers a free, day trial on its website. Visit Pixelmator. GIMP packs quite a bit of power and is capable of nearly everything that Photoshop can do. Visit Gimp. All of the abovementioned tools can help you be more productive and creative at the same time. Disclosure : This content is reader-supported. If you click on our links, we may earn a commission.
Karol Krol Staff Writer. Twitter Facebook. Last updated: Jan 4, 52 Comments. Further Reading: How to Use Bootstrap step-by-step.
Further Reading: How to Use Wix step-by-step. Further Reading: How to Use Dreamweaver step-by-step. Further Reading: How to Use Squarespace step-by-step.
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