Today, having a visually appealing and functional website for your brand has become a necessity. It’s the face of your business and how people perceive it. A website helps you promote and sell products and services, enables you to stand out among your competitors, retains old customers, attracts new ones, and builds trust.
Now, as intimidating as building a website may seem; first, there are website builders available today that make it a piece of cake. There is a wide variety of website builders out there that can help you build a compelling website in minutes. But how do you decide which is the best suitable option for your brand?
Worry no more. In this blog, you will discover 9 things that you must consider when selecting a website builder.
9 Things to Look for in a Website Builder
1. Ease of Use
A website builder must ease the process of building a website. When looking for a website builder, consider the ease of use. Check whether you’re able to access its features and perform actions efficiently. Another thing that eases the process of building a website is a simple interface and editor, either drag and drop or a WYSIWYG editor. With a drag and drop functionality, you can quickly move things around easily through your mouse, which doesn't require any prior experience or learning a new skill.
2. No Requirement for Technical Skills
You’re probably looking for a website builder because you don’t want to get involved in the complexity of coding, programming, or technical skills. A website builder doesn’t require you to have any of these skills; they even relieve you of the stress of making your website actually appear online. The website builder takes care of all the technical stuff for you. In fact, many website builders also provide domain name registration services along with the necessary steps to link your website to your domain name, so you don't have to worry about that.
3. eCommerce Capabilities
People are more accustomed to online shopping nowadays, which means eCommerce capabilities are an essential feature to look for in a website builder. Though you might not be selling any kind of product or service online at the moment, you must look for eCommerce features that can help scale your business in the long run.
4. Templates and Customization Options
The best website builder always gives ample customizable templates. Moreover, many website builders often offer industry and niche-specific templates. Website templates always make your work easy. All you need to do is select the best suitable template/theme as per your brand personality and adjust a few things accordingly. This saves you the time to build a website from scratch.
5. Social Shareability
Once your website is up and running, you would want to promote it to increase its reach and traffic. Also, you would probably want the visitors who like your website to share it ahead too. But how do they do that easily? Copy-pasting the link everywhere can be annoying; hence, look for social media share features in a website builder for a small business. This allows you and your visitors to share your website on social media platforms with just a single touch.
6. Responsiveness
73.1% of web designers believe that a non-responsive design is one of the top reasons why visitors leave a website. Considering that billions of people are using the internet on their mobiles, it’s essential that your website is optimized for both smaller screen sizes and desktops.
7. SEO Tools
Getting people to find and land on your website can be a challenge when so many others are already present on the internet. A website builder with necessary SEO features can give you a little head start to optimize your website’s pages for better visibility in the search engines.
It allows you to add relevant keywords to each URL, meta description, and image tags to communicate to Google what your website is about to include you in searches for that term. A good website builder will make this an easy task.
8. Customer Support
Suppose you’re stuck with an issue while building your website. In that case, you’ll need someone to resolve the issue quickly. This is where a good customer support service comes in. You must look for a 24/7 customer support feature in a website builder, one that is known to offer help faster and can be relied on.
9. Affordability
Last but not least is the pricing. You sure need all the modern features in a website builder but not necessarily at a higher cost. Usually, website builders charge according to a subscription model. So, you must consider the long-term costs and choose a website builder that falls within the already set budget of your website. Make sure to make a list of website builders and compare their features and pricing to select the one with all the necessary features yet is affordable.
Conclusion
With ample website builders out there, it can be a tedious task to go through each of them to decide which is the best one for you. But that is when you don’t know what exactly to check for. We’re optimistic that after going through the list of features to look for while selecting a website builder, it won’t take you much time to choose the right one.
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