Get Started: Must Know Website Builders for 2023 — boldercloud.com.au

In today’s digital world, having a professional-looking website is crucial for any business to succeed online. Keeping up with devlopment trends is a tough gig and not everyone has the technical expertise required to build a website from scratch. This is where website builders come in handy. Website builders empower anyone to create stunning websites without needing to know coding or advanced web development skills. With so many options to choose from, it can be overwhelming to decide which website builder is the best fit for your needs in 2023. In this blog post, we will take a look at five of the top website builders you should consider using this year.

Wix

With over 240 million users across 190 countries, Wix is undoubtedly one of the most widely used website builders globally. Wix provides an intuitive drag-and-drop editor that allows you to create fully-functional websites within minutes. All you need to do is pick from their collection of thousands of designer-made templates and customize them using Wix’s user-friendly platform.

Wix is ideal for small businesses, online stores, portfolios, and blogging sites. It offers a free basic plan, but this includes Wix branding and limited features. To remove Wix ads and access more advanced functionality like connecting your own custom domain, you’ll need to upgrade to one of their premium paid plans.

Squarespace

Squarespace is a popular website builder known for its beautiful, elegant templates. It’s especially great for creative professionals like photographers, artists, designers, and writers.

Squarespace makes it easy to customize any template by letting you seamlessly inject your own text, images, videos, and more. Reordering or deleting content blocks is simple. Squarespace also provides built-in e-commerce capabilities, so you can easily sell products or services through your site.

While Squarespace’s pricing plans are slightly more expensive than competitors, they offer advanced features and functionality that justify the extra cost. Squarespace also provides award-winning 24/7 customer support.

Shopify

Shopify is the best website builder for anyone wanting to launch an online retail store. It powers over 1 million businesses globally across 175 countries.

No matter what stage your e-commerce business is at, Shopify offers the tools and functionality to build and manage a successful online store. All Shopify plans, even at the basic level, come with integrated e-commerce features like secure checkout, shopping carts, and product listings. More advanced tiers provide capabilities like gift cards, abandoned cart recovery, and shipping calculators.

Shopify seamlessly integrates with all the major payment gateways. This makes the checkout process easy and painless for your customers. Shopify also has a thriving app store with thousands of add-ons to further customize and scale your business.

WordPress

WordPress is the world’s most popular open-source website builder, currently powering over 40% of all websites online. Its wide adoption comes down to its versatility and flexibility.

WordPress is highly customizable thanks to its open-source nature. There are literally thousands of themes and plugins available to add new features and functionality to your site. Although WordPress has a steeper learning curve than some other builders, the possibilities are endless.

WordPress caters to bloggers, small business owners, developers, and advanced website builders. It can be used to create all kinds of sites including e-commerce stores, portfolios, membership sites, forums and more.

Webflow

Webflow provides a visual web design platform that lets you build responsive websites through a drag-and-drop interface. It empowers designers, freelancers, agencies, and small businesses to create elegant sites quickly without needing to code.

The learning curve is steeper compared to website builders like Wix or Squarespace. However, Webflow allows for finer control over the design and development process. It also generates clean underlying code for each site.

Webflow is ideal for launching custom sites like portfolios to showcase work and client websites. Designers can easily import templates, add animations, customize CSS, and experiment rapidly using Webflow’s visual interface.

More Custom Options

For those wanting complete design control or a more technical website building experience, there are a few other options:

HTML, CSS, JavaScript: You can fully customize a website by coding it manually using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This provides the most flexibility but requires strong coding skills and time.

JavaScript Frameworks: JavaScript frameworks like React, Angular, Vue, and Svelte allow you to build interactive sites. They have a steeper learning curve but enable complex functionality like single-page applications. These are great for web developers.

Static Site Generators: Options like GatsbyJS, Jekyll, and Hugo are static site generators. They build sites using your content and templates/themes to output HTML files. They provide speed and security benefits.

Headless CMS: You can build the front-end of your site using a JavaScript framework while managing content in a headless CMS like Contentful or Strapi. This is a decoupled approach popular with developers.

While these technical options require more skill, they provide the most customization potential. They are great choices for complex or large-scale websites and web applications.

Conclusion

Whether you’re a coding pro or total tech newbie, there’s a website builder out there for you in 2023. Wix and Squarespace provide drag-and-drop simplicity for stunning sites. Shopify is the premier choice for online stores. WordPress offers endless customization potential. For visual design control, turn to Webflow. If you want complete code-level capability, HTML, CSS and JavaScript frameworks like React give you unmatched flexibility.

The right website builder depends on your goals, skills, and project needs. With this overview of the top options, you can confidently choose the best platform to create the website of your dreams this year.

Originally published at https://boldercloud.com.au on August 1, 2023.