There are plenty of good reasons to build your own personal website. Perhaps you’d like to share archival photos and documents with friends and family members, exhibit your prized baseball card collection, publish a novel, or simply blog about your life and travels. These are all good motivators to sign up for a reliable and reasonably priced web content-management toolset.
Beyond the free “personal” web pages offered by Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and other social networks — in which your personal information becomes part of the network’s lingua franca — there are several excellent yet free or inexpensive web services that offer alternative ways to establish your own internet stake in the ground. These website-building products enable users to design, provision, and maintain a personal website in minutes or hours, depending upon how much time and effort one chooses to spend on the project.
Working with a website builder is relatively easy because they offer a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing interface — meaning what you see. At the same time, you edit your site is what you will actually see if your website was live and viewed in a browser. The best website builders are rich in features that include professionally designed website templates, easy-to-use, drag-and-drop editors, and onboard hosting services.
Chief criteria used for this list include
- Intuitive usability (easy-to-follow instructions and performance)
- Ease of design (drag and drop controls, wizards, pre-built templates)
- A domain name included
- Professional email
- Mobile device-readiness
- Security options
- Special features (is it commerce-ready?)
- Optimization for search engines
Some of these listed services will have all of the above; some will miss one or more of these but may offer other features.
See more: ZDNet’s list of best e-commerce site builders
One thing that comes out clearly in research here is that Wix is a head-and-shoulders No. 1 by acclamation of the resources we used. Wix is an intuitive-to-use site builder with hundreds of page templates — most of which are attractively designed — drag-and-drop elements, easy-to-follow wizards, and a menu of helpful widgets.
For people looking to get a website online with minimal effort and maximum creative freedom, Wix should be one of your test choices. No coding or FTP knowledge is required. All a user needs is an email address to get started with Wix’s web hosting. If you don’t mind ads, you can publish a site free of charge for as long as you like. It’s that way with all the free sites.
Wix offers total creative control in that you can drag anything, anywhere. It also offers online storage for site assets, e-commerce tools, useful video backgrounds, and title animations. Wix’s new Editor X interface is intuitive to use and respected in the highly competitive field of website-building services. In summary, Wix is a simple-to-use, multi-faceted tool that is well worth a test drive–whether for its free or paid versions.
Wix’s most important features:
- Intuitive Editor X interface.
- Many optional widgets.
- Hundreds of templates for specific businesses and other uses.
- Good mobile-site-building tools.
- Rich web-store features.
- Excellent uptime and customer service support.
- Many commerce options, including the ability to sell digital downloads.
- Free version option.
Wix pricing plans: Basic: no cost, ad-supported; Combo account (3GB of storage and 2GB of monthly data transfers), $14 per month; VIP plan (35GB of storage, a domain name, unlimited monthly data transfers, a professional logo, and priority support), $39 per month.
Business sites with shopping carts and other features go for between $23 and $49 per month.
Enterprise-level plans require consultation with Wix and start at $500 per month. For details, go here.
Established high quality based on open source
WordPress is by far the most utilized internet content management system in the world, powering 37 million sites — about 40% of all websites in 2021, according to market analyst Kinsta and researcher Netcraft. WordPress also owns a commanding 60.8% share of the CMS market; Digital.com reports that it powers 30% of the world’s top 1000 websites.
Since its founding in 2003, the open source-based WordPress provides hosting for more than 500 sites built each day somewhere in the world. WordPress’s Plugin Directory features 54 000+ free plugins; its WooCommerce version powers 22% of the world’s top 1 million e-commerce sites. The main reasons why so many people put WordPress to work are simplicity in usability, its free option and generally low cost, and numerous features, mostly from the open-source community.
The term “WordPress” is often used interchangeably when referring to two software variations. There are significant differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org that you’ll want to know before picking the platform for your project. WordPress.org is an open-source content management system, while WordPress.com is a popular blogging platform with basic functionality that can be accessed free of charge.
WordPress is available in 196 languages, far more than other competitors.
WordPress’s most important features:
- Simple-to-use editing interface.
- A forgiving design system that preemptively identifies and notifies users of mistakes.
- A large number of optional widgets.
- Online storage for web assets.
- Hundreds of templates for specific businesses and other uses.
- Free version option and other modestly priced versions.
*Be advised that some coding is required for the upper-level editions.
WordPress pricing and monthly plans: Basic: no cost; all others go for between $5 and $100 per month, depending upon features and hosting options.
An alternative to consider for making a fast and clean-looking site.
Site 123 is a rising developer-created website builder with about 5 million users that wants to be the easiest-to-use platform now available for do-it-yourselfers. Of course, lots of services make the same claim, but Site123 deigns to prove their point with an easy-to-use interface and templates.
Site 123 is best for building a small, quick website on a premade template, and it has a generous free plan along with straightforward onboarding and web design options.
Instead of operating like a traditional drag-and-drop website builder, Site123 has users pick their preferences and customize a curated template based on that niche, which appeals to beginners with no design or development experience.
Site 123 does have limited design and technical features and doesn’t offer a lot of customer support. Again, if you’re keeping it simple, these caveats aren’t a problem.
Site 123’s most important features:
- Provides all the basics someone needs to get started.
- No-frills design and layout promote fast development.
- An adequate number of easy-to-use templates.
- Free of charge based on ads.
- Instead of operating like a traditional drag-and-drop website builder, Site123 has you pick your niche and then customize a curated template based on that niche, which appeals to beginners who have no design or development experience (think DIY-ers who need to create a website ASAP without having any website experience).
*Be advised that a basic Site 123 account isn’t optimal for equipping and maintaining a commercial website.
Site 123 pricing and monthly plans: Basic service is free of charge; paid plans start at $12.80/month, which includes a free domain for a year, the ability to connect your custom domain, 10GB of storage, 5GB of bandwidth, and the ability to send 100 email messages to your mailing list per month — It also removes the Site123 branding that comes with the free plan.
Good for beginners, but the free version might be too restrictive for most users.
SimpleSite certainly lives up to its name, giving its users an easy, straightforward path to building basic websites. SimpleSite emphasizes speed over perfection, which is evident in its simple page editor. If you want creative freedom to try new things and experiment with others, a free SimpleSite won’t be the builder for you.
It’s not particularly intuitive; straying from the chosen template can cause problems. If you want to stay on the straight and narrow, you’re fine with SimpleSite.
SimpleSite’s most important features:
- Free version: no-frills design and layout promote fast development.
- Software guides users through the building process; simply choose a color scheme, add images, title, and domain name, then create a login. This final step automatically publishes your site, which you can then go back and finish editing.
- SimpleSite is beginner-friendly. It wasn’t always the most intuitive; at times, its simplicity becomes restrictive, making it difficult to do some basic design functions.
*Be advised that SimpleSite isn’t optimal for equipping and maintaining a commercial website.
SimpleSite pricing and monthly plans: Basic: no cost (includes SimpleSite ads, 15 pages, limited design options, five online store products, mobile-optimized); other options range from $15.49 to $30.49 per month for e-commerce and full-featured personal sites.