Best Free Website Builders For March 2023 – Forbes Advisor INDIA

To determine the best website builders for small businesses, Forbes Advisor did a deep dive into the industry and determined the top 10 contenders in the field based on their strengths, such as those that were suited better for local business, easier to get your site up and running faster or geared more towards bloggers. We scored these providers across four categories of features using 14 different metrics that were weighted to favor features that small business owners find valuable in a site builder.

Pricing

Offering a website building plan for free was a given expectation to qualify for our list, so providers were then gauged on the merits of what was available with their free plans and then by how affordable and valuable their paid plans were to users. The more value a user was able to get from upgrading to paid website builder plans, the better a provider did in this category. More affordable pricing plans were also looked upon favorably. This accounted for 20% of our weighted scoring.

Features

One catch that comes with some free plans is that there are either few features available or that the features are only available for additional fees. For general features, we looked at what a web builder offered as part of its base plan and then what was available either through upgrading to paid plans or by paying for add-ons, such as plugins. Some of the features we consider essential in base plans include offering the ability to create mobile-responsive sites, drag-and-drop functionality, unlimited storage and bandwidth, email marketing and social marketing tools. Features accounted for 40% of our total score.

Third-party reviews

How well real users of these website builders viewed their experiences with them was also important to our final review. We turned to third-party review sites, such as G2, and Trustpilot, looking to gauge their opinion of each provider in regards to usefulness, customer support and other factors. Seeking reviews of at least 3.5 or higher out of 5, we were able to get a clearer picture of the best website builders available today. These accounted for 10% of the total score.

Expert analysis

Tying all of this together, we also ranked additional criteria such as ease of use, stand-out and detailed features, popularity and value for money. Altogether, these criteria made up 30% of the final score.