Web.com Review

Not many companies can legitimately claim to own the web. Web.com can.

We’re not just talking about the insanely valuable domain name. Web.com – the $1 billion internet services company and main sponsor of the PGA Tour – powers 100,000 websites. Their SEO strategists keep small businesses in Google’s good books, and their web designers consult for major brands like World Gym and Merry Maid.

In short, Web.com handles everything from hosting your website to marketing your business.

That’s far more than web services providers like Wix and GoDaddy promise. After all, making a great website is one thing; acquiring customers is quite another. Can Web.com really help you do both? That’s what we’ll discuss in our review.

How Much does Web.com Hosting Cost?

Let’s start with the basics. Web.com offers shared hosting, which means that your website shares bandwidth with other Web.com customers. Unless you’re a subscription video streaming giant like Netflix, shared hosting is usually the most affordable and scalable option. Around 90% of business websites are hosted on shared servers.

Web.com offers three shared hosting packages with different bandwidth and user limits:

These plans stack up well compared to other hosting providers, especially because they all include Web.com’s DIY website building software. However, it’s worth highlighting two points about these pricing plans so that you’re clear about what you’re signing up for:

Now let’s look at the total costs for a one year Web.com subscription:

For a .com domain, a powerful website builder and the most reliable shared hosting around, that’s not bad at all.

How Much Difference Does 99.99% Server Uptime Make?

Web.com’s server uptime guarantee of 99.99% is the best in the business. This means your Web.com site is live for at least 99.99% of each month. That equates to less than five minutes of unplanned server outages a month.

To put those numbers in perspective, the industry standard is 99.90% uptime. That translates to 44 minutes a month when your website won’t be available to customers. If that seems trivial, consider that a single hour of downtime is estimated to cost the average business $100,000.

When it comes to your bottom line, the difference between 99.99% and 99.90% couldn’t be bigger.

Designing a Site with Web.com

Web.com gives you more flexibility to design your dream website than any other company we’ve used. You can create your website in two ways: do it yourself, or enlist Web.com’s crack design team to do it for you. Each method has pros and cons, but remember that the best websites are built with the expertise and advice of real web designers:

Do It Yourself (DIY)

“Do it yourself, not by yourself”

Every serious website made with Web.com’s DIY website builder looks unique, thanks to the unrivalled flexibility of their templates. There are more than 9,000 to choose from, and you can style almost every aspect to create the look you’re after. Borders, padding, drop shadows and custom fonts are just a few of the tools in your arsenal. We also appreciate the ability to use custom colors. It might seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many other website builders don’t let you use your brand colors.

You can even delete everything and start a new design from scratch, though we’d warn against it. While we think it’s brilliant that the website builder enables creative freedom, it’s easy to make a mess of your design if you stray too far from the templates. If a completely bespoke design is your wheelhouse, enlisting a professional designer is probably your best bet.

Do It For Me (DIFM)

“You do you” while we build it for you.

If you let Web.com’s design team take care of making your website, we think you’ll be pleased with the results.

But, even if you’re set on doing it yourself, you can still benefit from a free phone consultation with a member of their team. For one thing, if you don’t know exactly what features your website needs, they certainly will – Web.com has been in the business of web design for almost 20 years. We came away from several phone calls with their design consultants, impressed with the knowledge and advice we’d received each time. We’re confident in saying that these are safe hands to entrust with designing your website.

Letting Web.com design your site for you doesn’t just save you time and effort. It also guarantees your website will be optimized for all devices and platforms. With mobile web browsing on the rise, it doesn’t matter how good your website looks on a desktop; responsive websites win every time. Today, that’s still something that no DIY website builder does consistently well.

A Word on Web.com SEO

All Web.com website templates are fully-optimized for search engines. Then again, what website builder doesn’t make that claim nowadays?

You need to pay continued attention to SEO if you’re going to hit your organic growth goals. Luckily, Web.com’s dedicated SEO experts are on hand to assist with keyword optimization, link building, and more.

Calling toll-free for an initial business consultation works the same as for an over-the-phone web design consultation. After discussing your business goals, your consultant will develop a keyword strategy and set up reporting to track your site’s search engine standing. Web.com even supplies professional bloggers to write new content that will help your site to rank for key search terms.

Given the traffic boosts that result from ranking well organically, it’s a really useful add-on service that can quite easily pay for itself within six months. If you’re designing your website at the same time as planning your SEO strategy, it can actually make sense to contact Web.com to negotiate a combined quote for an all-in-one web design and SEO package.

What Kinds of Sites Does Web.com Design?

Web.com excels at working with all kinds of businesses, thanks to years of experience doing just that. Check out these recent examples of their handiwork:

At this point, it’s important to mention that Web.com’s DIY website builder doesn’t support e-commerce. If you’re going to be accepting online payments through your site, other companies like GoDaddy have proven solutions that can help you out.

Thankfully, Web.com’s design pros are walking, talking e-commerce design encyclopedias. Soon after discussing your needs with a member of the team, you can have a slick custom-built site live in hours. Among the e-commerce features you can ask for are:

• Automatic product information update scheduling
• Inventory management
• Custom promotion creation
• Sitewide SSL encryption for secure online payments
• Customer behaviour analytics and reporting

Web.com Features

Web.com shines in several ways and dazzles in others. Here are the standout features of their web design services:

• A website builder with amazing template customization; no two websites look the same
• Industry-leading web design expertise is always just a click or a call away
• Competitive pricing plans

Web.com Customer Service

For most queries, Web.com support staff are quick to respond via email. But, best of all is the toll-free support number that always seems to put you through to a human without delay.

The Web.com customer service agents we spoke with were all courteous and professional. You can tell that they use the website builder, because it’s rare to find a product-related question that they can’t answer.

Aside from email and phone support, Web.com has a strong presence on Facebook and Twitter. Since there’s no live chat support on their website, Facebook Messenger is the best way to get a swift response from someone:

Time to get a response through Facebook Chat: 11 minutes