Best Website Builders for UK Business in 2023

If you need a website for your business – you're in the right place. We've tested over a dozen website builders on 70+ different features and come up with final scores.

Wix is the top performing website builder: easy to use no matter your tech skills. It's affordable (from £7.50 a month, if you pay for one year upfront) and its appointment booking features are particularly useful.

But you may need another tool instead, depending on your business type. Shopify is our expert recommendation if you're looking to scale up a growing retail outfit.

Read on for our comparison guide to the best website builders – looking at value for money, ease of use, range of features, and design options.

Head to head: Best website builders

Rivalry is high between the major website builder brands. Although many contain really similar features, there are differences in the quality and performance of each. We'll go into more detail in the individual reviews below, but for now let's look at the overall comparison.

Click the left and right arrows to scroll the table and compare features:

Pricing is wildly different depending on which product you're looking at. For instance, you'll notice that Shopify is much more expensive than GoDaddy. The reason is they're aimed at completely different people: if you're a microbusiness, or focused more on services and appointments, then you should choose GoDaddy.

But if you're scaling up a business selling products, (either online only or to support a brick-and-mortar shop), Shopify is a better choice. Shopify's sales features (including inventory oversight, order management, and shipping options) are far more advanced than GoDaddy's, hence the higher price tag.

1. Wix: Best All-Rounder

• Mid price range
• Beginner-friendly website editing
• More templates than any competitor
• Best suited to: hospitality and gyms

Scoring a mighty 4.9/5 in our comprehensive testing, Wix certainly earns its place as best website builder. Its range of features goes above the basic expectations. Sure you can book appointments, sell products, and install a chatbot – but its Fit By Wix app gives health and fitness clubs a digital platform to host community groups.

While its editor is not hard to use, you may find it takes an irritatingly long time to load. One of our focus group users complained they were “sat watching the spinning wheel of doom” on a loading screen a little too often. But the prebuilt sections allow you to create a well-functioning website much quicker than typing everything yourself.

How does Wix stack up to the competition?

Wix beats rival platforms in most key areas: scoring 4.8/5 in our ‘Website Features' category, its nearest competitor is Squarespace, which scored 4.6. Wix came top of the charts in ‘Design Functions', ‘Customer Support', and ‘Ease of Use' as well.

But Wix lacks unlimited storage space, unlike Weebly, GoDaddy, and almost all other competitors which offer this as standard. That's why we recommend it for smaller business owners who are looking to promote services online or locally.

If you're running a larger retail business, Shopify is definitely better than Wix since it offers unlimited product listings (Wix's maximum is 50,000).

Wix pricing

Wix offers a 14-day free trial on its premium plans, with several plans to choose from. Only three Wix price plans offer the chance to sell online, so look carefully at the features included in each one:

Wix also recently launched an AI text generator to save you time thinking up your own headings and paragraphs for each web page. It's more of a suggestion engine than a replacement for hiring a professional writer, because you'll get three options to choose from. And I don't know any professionals who'd triple their workload like that!

You can find more details on its highs and lows in our detailed Wix review.

2. Squarespace: Best for Portfolios

• Strong value for money
• Unlimited storage space and bandwidth
• Focus on beautiful design
• Best suited to: photographers, visual artists

Nipping at Wix's heels is Squarespace with an overall score of 4.8/5. The key difference is you'll get photo uploads without limits on Squarespace. That, combined with its world class template designs, is why it's best suited to image-centric websites. If you need to sell a vision, Squarespace is the web platform for you.

This year, Squarespace has upgraded its editor so editing your design is more precise. Drag-and-drop blocks now align and resize to match nearby elements. A grid pattern appears while you're moving pieces around, which is useful as a set of guidelines.

How does Squarespace compare with rivals?

Squarespace offers a higher quality editing experience compared with GoDaddy and Weebly. GoDaddy only allows you to move blocks up and down, and you won't be able to drag and drop individual images or text boxes like you can with Squarespace.

That said, it's a less sophisticated online shop option compared with Shopify. For instance, you can't accept multiple currencies on your Squarespace shop but you can with Shopify.

Squarespace pricing

Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial period and has two ecommerce-specific price plans to choose from. Also, don't forget you can save 10% on Squarespace by using code EM10 at the checkout.

How good is Squarespace's AI text generator?

We're impressed with the ingenuity of Squarespace's new AI text generator, launched this May. It offers prompts to help you request the exact type of text you'd like it to create for you. When we tested it out, the AI produced some appealing, accurate text based on the request inserted.

But – unlike Wix's text generator, which just offers you three options to choose between – Squarespace then asks how you'd like it edited.

If you think the paragraph it's written is too lengthy – you can click “Shorten” for more a concise version. Or if it seems overly wordy, pick “Simplify” for a shorter description. At least – that's how it's supposed to work.

Unfortunately, when I tried to select an editing prompt, the lightning bolt icon greyed out. It seemed unable to cope with an edit request for such a long piece of text. Instead, highlighting a small section and clicking “Simplify” again did the trick, producing a summary of the entire paragraph it sat within.

It's only a beta release, so it's likely to improve in functionality over time. For now, though, it's a really decent way to save time writing words for your website.

If you need a closer look at all the features included in your subscription, check out our Squarespace review.

3. Shopify: Best for Sales Features

• More expensive than most
• Variable transaction fees
• Synch inventory across multiple locations
• Best suited to: SMB retailers looking to scale

Shopify is rather different to your standard website builder because it's really focused on retail and inventory management. With Squarespace and Wix, you begin by customizing your website's design. But Shopify's dashboard is mainly for managing orders, products, and sales channels. Design is secondary.

Unlike Squarespace, you can link Shopify to Point of Sale hardware (such as Shopify POS) in the UK. Shopify is also introducing AI features to help retailers. As of April 2023, you can use Shopify Magic to generate product descriptions in your preferred tone based on a few keywords.

How does Shopify match up to competitors?

Shopify is more expensive than any other website builder on this list. That's because it's designed to make you money through advanced retail operations; Shopify has far superior sales features (particularly when it comes to selling abroad) compared to Wix, GoDaddy, Squarespace or Hostinger. For a quick example, you can list limitless products with Shopify, whereas Hostinger only allows up to 500.

It's a little light on templates though – there are around 130 Shopify themes to choose from, and only 12 are free (Wix has 900 at no extra cost, and there are thousands for WordPress). If you need a pretty website more than you need excellent sales features, you should choose Squarespace over Shopify.

We've recommended more affordable options than Shopify in our guide to the best ecommerce platforms for small businesses.

Shopify pricing

Shopify used to offer a 14-day free trial period, but this has shrunk to just three days in 2023. Instead, there's a new offer to get the first three months of your subscription for just £1.

We recommend the Basic plan for most readers because it's an affordable investment in return for up to 1,000 inventory locations. Even though it's not the cheapest credit card rate, you'd have to pay more than 13 times the price of the Basic plan to get just 0.5% shaved off each online transaction.

Here's an overview of the plans:

If you're still unsure about which online sales platform is best for you, take a look at our Shopify vs WooCommerce comparison.

4. GoDaddy: Best for speedy set up

• On the cheaper side
• Easy to use
• Send hundreds of marketing emails monthly
• Best suited to: time-poor entrepreneurs

GoDaddy is known as a domain registrar and hosting provider, so its websites are highly secure and unlikely to drop offline. Its website builder works well, but you'll get absolutely no frills on the cheaper plans. Even the ability to take payments for appointments only starts at the £16.99 a month Premium plan.

One of the best things about GoDaddy is its simplicity – creating a web presence is a low stress experience. That's why it scored 4.1/5 in our ‘Ease of Use' category. The Ecommerce plan is suitable only for smaller shops, as there's a 5,000 product limit. So if you're looking to market a wider inventory or sell overseas pick Shopify over GoDaddy.

How does GoDaddy fare against its foes?

GoDaddy has less precise design options than Squarespace, fewer business features than Wix, and limited selling options compared with Shopify. But GoDaddy is faster and simpler to use than all of them. And definitely lighter on the wallet than Shopify.

Honestly, GoDaddy doesn't come with the perks of its near-priced competitors. While Wix and Squarespace come with a year's free domain, GoDaddy (surprisingly, as it's a major domain registrar) does not.

GoDaddy pricing

GoDaddy has a 30-day free trial, plus a 30-day money back guarantee if you change your mind after buying it. That makes it pretty low risk for you, financially. Here are the GoDaddy price plans (only one is for selling online):

How easy is it to use GoDaddy website builder?

Although it's convenient and simple, GoDaddy has some serious limitations in its features for business. So you should check out our full GoDaddy review before going ahead with it.

Unfortunately there's no “undo” button with GoDaddy (unlike Wix) which made editing a little tricky at times. When I deleted all the placeholder writing in a text box, the entire text box vanished. Which isn't what I wanted. It took a lot of clicking to finally find how to add that text back in, because you can only edit within strict pre-defined spaces.

The Wix editor was much more flexible in its design options, compared with using GoDaddy. While GoDaddy prioritises speed and simplicity, Wix will let you add in a text block (or an image block or something else) wherever you like on a page.

On the other hand, you'll get a really neat and slick final impression with GoDaddy. Since you can't move text boxes around too much, everything is going to be aligned really well by the end.

5. Hostinger: Best for Multiple Websites

• Up to 100 websites
• No app store
• AI website writing tool
• Best suited to: entrepreneurs looking to scale up fast

Hostinger is a less well-known website builder provider (it bought Zyro in 2022, using it as a blueprint for its own product). As you can likely tell from the name, Hostinger is a hosting and email provider, but also a domain registrar. For that reason, it's well placed to offer secure web hosting, DNS firewall, and unlimited bandwidth. You'll also get the added bonus of daily and weekly backups, with the option of restoring your website if needed.

You're able to build up to 100 websites with unlimited SSL security certificates included. Plus these all come with AI tools and the ability to sell up to 500 products on each. That makes Hostinger a cost-savvy solution to scaling at speed.

How does Hostinger measure up to similar providers?

For a provider that specialises in hosting and web security, Hostinger's design editor is surprisingly high quality. Far more flexible than GoDaddy, and easier to use than Shopify, Hostinger's editor has a similar grid alignment to Squarespace. The unique “Add shape” feature gives you more creative freedom than GoDaddy.

Yet Hostinger lacks a couple of features you'd get as standard with Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy; for instance, you can't create and post social content from within your Hostinger site.

Hostinger's website builder isn't a good choice for bloggers or subscriber content, either. You can't create a paid members area, and there's no blog archive or comments. You'd be better off with WordPress, which has blog analytics and specific SEO tools (that Hostinger lacks).

Hostinger pricing

There's just one Hostinger website builder price plan, named ‘Website Builder & Hosting'. At £2.59 per month (for a four year term) or £2.79 per month (for a one year term), it's very affordable compared to competitors.

Hostinger pricing is displayed in a slightly confusing way on its website, because the discount offer makes it seem like the website builder costs £2.59 monthly. Which would be the cheapest premium website builder on the planet.

But pay attention to the terms: you have to pay £149.18 upfront (including VAT) which buys you a four year term. You have to make a long-term commitment to get that low price. 

If you want to try Hostinger's website builder month-to-month, the contract price is £11.99. By comparison, that's £2 less than Wix Unlimited but £1 more than GoDaddy Premium.

Read our full review of Hostinger here.

6. WordPress: Best value for money

• Over 9,000 free templates
• Customisation through apps or code
• Unlimited pages and contributors
• Best suited to: Publishers and content creators

Professional grade web content management: it's yours for free with WordPress. There's a good reason 43% of all websites use WordPress; the wealth of handy plugins make it endlessly versatile. Not to mention the opportunity to upload your own theme (meaning web layout design), which you can't do with Wix (a platform that won't even let you export your website).

The main benefit of WordPress is the ability to edit the website according to your exact preferences. Sure, you may need some knowledge of computer programming, but it's a great platform to start learning that. And there's plenty you can do without that skillset. The plethora of inbuilt features and free add-ons is why WordPress.com scored 4.4/5 for ‘Value for Money': higher than any other leading website builder we tested.

How does WordPress look next to similar website builders?

It's tempting to class WordPress in a league of its own due to its highly customisable nature. But the truth is, WordPress may be more than you need. If you're not interested in fiddling around with plugins and aren't fussy about exactly how your website looks, a Standard GoDaddy plan may be just what you need instead.

That said, if you want to publish articles, blog posts and company updates (or make money from paid content), you'd be a fool to pick any other platform than WordPress.

WordPress pricing

There's a generous free WordPress plan to get started with – and you'll get far with that plan. But if you're ready to invest, we recommend the Business plan for improved website performance and better scaling capacity.