© Unsplash / Ben Kolde
Building a website is no longer a luxury reserved for large corporations or tech-savvy individuals. Nowadays, with many cheap website builders, literally anyone, from a small business owner to a creative lover or an enterprising freelancer, can establish their professional online presence without breaking the bank.
The challenge now is to choose the right affordable website builder from the many available options that fit your needs and budget, but do not worry; we are here to help.
Our experts recommend that the most affordable website builders for most users would be Wix and Hostinger Website Builder. Now, let’s walk you through the top 5 best cheap website builders in 2024, assessing their features, pricing, and customer support.
By the end of this article, you will be equipped with the knowledge to select the perfect inexpensive website builder to bring your online vision to life.
The 5 Best Inexpensive Website Builders – Our List for 2024
Best Cheap Website Builders for 2024 – Full Overview
We will discuss the most affordable website builders for making any website of your choice. This guide, informed by expert analysis and review, highlights the top 5 affordable site builders with the best value for money.
Keep reading to find the website builder that fits you best.
1. Wix: Overall Best Cheap Website Builder
© Gizmodo
Wix is the clear favorite in our search for the top affordable website builders because of its extensive toolkit and unparalleled customization options. Whether you’re building an extensive e-commerce platform, an interactive business website, or a personal blog, Wix offers user-friendly solutions and an intuitive editor to suit your needs.
Our in-depth investigation demonstrates that Wix is the best option for individual creators and companies since it balances functionality and simplicity.
Here are some of the reasons why Wix is at the top of our ranking.
Pricing
Starting at just below $20 per month, Wix offers a variety of affordable pricing plans to suit different needs. The cheapest plan is perfect for a small business website and includes 2GB of storage, which is probably enough to handle website uploads and basic functionality.
Discover Wix’s offers
© Wix
We like that it allows you to remove Wix branding from your site with a custom, free domain for one year, presenting a professional appearance to your visitors.
You also benefit from basic marketing features to help promote your site and attract visitors. While the plan is limited, it allows you to add up to 2 collaborators, making it easy to manage and maintain your website with a small team.
Features
Another reason why Wix is our favorite choice for the best cheap website builder in 2024 is that its editor is packed with easy to use features. With Wix, you can choose from over 900 templates across various categories to find the perfect fit for your needs. These templates have been carefully curated by Wix designers to align with current trends, ensuring your site looks modern and professional.
We also found out that Wix allows you to create a site in minutes with their AI website builder.
This allows you to chat back and forth with AI to create a site brief, which is used to generate a site template from scratch based on your responses. Once you generate your site with AI, you can continue to use other AI tools to tweak the theme, layout, and text.
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Compared to other website builders on our list, Wix stands out with superior blogging capabilities and eCommerce features. You can add the Wix blog from the app store, which allows you to create and manage engaging content in one place. If you also prefer to set up an online store, you can do that effortlessly with multichannel selling options, Wix’s POS solution, and multiple online payment methods.
Wix also comes with a suite of marketing and SEO tools to optimize your site for search engines and attract potential customers. Our choice of Wix as the top website builder is based on the quality and range of features it offers rather than cost. Check out our comprehensive Wix review to see how easy it is to create a website with this builder.
Customer Support
Wix offers comprehensive customer support to help you resolve any issues or questions you may have. Their customer support agents are responsive and can be reached via live chat, ticket submission, and callback support for English speakers.
One thing that interests us about Wix is that it allows you to explore web designs by other Wix users. This can help you get inspiration on the best way to build your site.
Wix’s extensive blog also provides a rich library of knowledge-based articles, tutorials, and video guides to help you troubleshoot and learn about various features.
The Wix Help Center is also another centralized resource where you can search for answers to common questions and explore various support topics. This highlights Wix’s commitment to delivering a high-quality website-building experience.
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Pros
- Impressive template library for various industries
- 99.9% uptime guaranteed
- Robust eCommerce and blogging capabilities
- Free website building
- AI website builder
- Free Business tools
Cons
- Free plan includes Wix branding and ads
- Higher-tier plans can be relatively expensive
Expert Advice: You can explore the Wix app store to add more functionality to your site for free. We recommend that you run and grow your business on Wix with a website built for success.
2. Hostinger Website Builder: Best for Business on a Budget
Another excellent option for anyone looking to create a visually striking online presence is Hostinger’s website builder.
Our #2 best cheap website builder offer the necessary tools to create a website at a very low cost. Hostinger is well-known for its affordable prices and can handle a variety of website requirements.
© Hostinger
Hostinger website builder is an excellent choice for anyone looking to create or enhance their online presence without spending heavily, regardless of their experience level.
With an impressive range of features and plans to fit your needs, you can use HWB to build a personal or business website to grow online without technical skills.
Hostinger’s website builder is not just about affordability. It brings a host of features designed to make website creation a breeze. Here is why they are among our top picks for the best cheap website builders in 2024.
Pricing
Hostinger offers two website builder plans to help you get started. The premium website builder plan is only below $3 per month and renews at under $8/month. This plan also comes with a free domain and hosting, allowing you to choose a custom address to appear in search results.
However, the only limitation is that the premium plan lacks access to the AI tools offered on the business plan. For less than $4 for the first term, you can grow with advanced AI tools and eCommerce. You can also use this plan to speed up your content creation with AI. You will get tools to generate text, images, and SEO keywords instantly created to suit your site goal.
Discover Hostinger’s offers
Our experts also discovered that these website builder plans support shared hosting only. If your site needs another type of hosting, like Cloud or VPS, you can scale your plan to handle your growing or large-scale projects.
© Hostinger
Features
Hostinger offers an AI-powered drag-and-drop website builder that allows you to create a website in minutes or use pre-made templates. They offer up to 150 template designs, which can be used as a foundation to inspire your own unique website. Within the website builder, you can use the site setup checklist to tweak your site sections, headings, and text before going live.
Another interesting thing about Hostinger website builder is its AI tools. They offer an AI page generator, which allows you to create a new page by providing a description of what you want the page to look like. Likewise, other tools like AI writer, image generator, blog generator, SEO assistant, and logo maker also require you to follow the same process.
They also allow you to integrate third-party marketing tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and Google AdSense to track performance, optimize ads, and monetize your site effectively.
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Customer Support
Hostinger website builder offers 24/7 customer support services. You can reach their agents via live chat, with an average response time of less than 3 minutes. The agents are fluent in over 10 languages, including English, ensuring smooth communication.
If you need additional help, you can also access their knowledge base and tutorials to search for advice and FAQ from their customer success team.
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Pros
- Extremely affordable pricing
- Impressive AI tools
- Free email and domain
- 24/7 customer support
- Mobile Editing
Cons
- No free plan
- Limited customization options on lower-tier plans
- Fewer third-party integrations compared to Wix
Expert Advice: The Business Plan offers the best balance of features and cost, ensuring access to essential AI tools and better website building experience.
3. Jimdo: Best Cheap Website Builder for Beginners
Jimdo is another very affordable website builder for beginners. It offers a beautiful balance between design aesthetics and ease of use, which is why it is ranked as our #3 best inexpensive website builder.
This platform offers a point-and-click design model, allowing you to customize your web pages to design and choose elements.
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Following are some of the reasons why they are one of the best cheap website builders.
Pricing
One of the reasons Jimdo is considered a low-cost website builder is its free plan. The plan offers a starting point for beginners who want to build a basic website only. It comes with all base features, including a .jimdosite.com subdomain, 500 MB storage, and 2 GB bandwidth.
Furthermore, Jimdo also offers 3 paid plans to build a website starting from a bit above $10 per month. This start plan includes a custom domain and removes ads from your website.
Discover Jimdo’s offers
The online store plans start at a basic price of $18 per month. It is recommended if you want basic functionalities for your online store project. We also liked that Jimdo’s higher plans offer unlimited storage and bandwidth, making them powerful enough to handle media-heavy websites and extensive data transfers.
© Jimdo
Features
One of the reasons why we recommend Jimdo as one of the least expensive website builders is because its interface is very intuitive and mobile optimized. It offers multiple minimalist templates which can be used as a foundation to design your own website or an online store.
Another impressive feature you will get is the media library. It allows you to choose from a huge selection of free, high-quality photos tailored for every industry to customize your website. Jimdo also offers advanced SEO, using smart technology to fill in your SEO settings and providing customized instructions to fully optimize your website. This ensures fast loading speeds and enhanced visibility in search engines.
In addition, higher plans include free website analytics, giving you valuable insights into your website visits and user behavior to help you create successful marketing strategies.
Customer Support
Unlike Wix and Hostinger website builders, Jimdo doesn’t offer customer support on the cheapest plan. However, the higher plans provide email support, allowing you to reach their agents through email from your Jimdo account.
At the same time, you’ll find answers to the most frequently asked questions within the Jimdo Help Center. You can take a look around the articles, tutorials, and guides to help you troubleshoot common problems and learn more about the platform’s features.
Although live chat and phone support are not available, email support is responsive, with a response time of 1 hour on the highest plan.
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Pros
- Free plan to build a 5-page website
- Free domain and contact forms
- AI builder
- Affordable pricing with essential features.
- Free logo generator
Cons
- Limited control over backups.
- Basic SEO tools
- No customer support on a free plan
Expert Advice: If you’re planning on expanding your site significantly, consider the Grow or higher plan for the best combination of storage and advanced features.
4. SITE123: Best for Free Website Building
SITE123 is another popular, inexpensive website builder that allows you to customize your pages easily with a point-and-click feature.
© SITE123
The onboarding process requires you to choose the type of website you want to create but only recommends a basic template to kickstart your site design.
Here are a few reasons why SITE123 is considered one of the best low-cost website builders in 2024.
Pricing
Like Wix, SITE123 also offers a free website building plan. This free plan includes basic functionalities with SITE123 branding, 250 MB of storage, and 250 MB of bandwidth, making it perfect for users who need a simple, personal website with a SITE123 subdomain.
Discover SITE123’s offers
The premium plan starts at less than $6 per month for those looking to upgrade and includes a free domain for one year.
© SITE123
Features
Another reason we recommend SITE123 as one of the best cheap website builders is its easy-to-use website editor. The interface is intuitive, allowing you to customize a simple site quickly.
However, we noticed that the customization options with the editor are very limited. The recommended template often comes with the same design and layout. This is due to the onboarding process not being set up to ask the necessary questions to generate a unique template for your site.
Our research found that the template has many premade sections without the flexibility to change the layout. This limits the ability to create custom designs for your website, as multiple elements are fixed on the pages.
For example, when we tried to create a gym wear store, we received an online store design inspired by photography. This can be confusing for beginners who may struggle to know where to begin tweaking their site.
Despite this flaw, SITE123 has some impressive features, like SEO tools, that allow you to publish a perfectly optimized online store or website. In addition, you can use AI to generate unique text for your site pages and sections based on the short description you provide about your site. You can also add new pages, upload images, and customize your website with new color, font, and structure.
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Customer Support
The SITE123 support center offers a robust knowledge base filled with guides and tutorials. If that doesn’t answer your question, you can rely on their 24/7 live chat and email support for all the website assistance you need.
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Pros
- Multilingual manager tool to translate your website
- Mobile Optimization
- Free plan
- Affordable premium plan
Cons
- Layout restrictions and limited customization
- SITE123 ads on the free plan
- Same website template design
Expert Advice: Do not plan your business website around the SITE123 free plan. Like many things in life, investing in the paid plan is necessary if you want the best features and capabilities.
5. Weebly: Best for Cheap Online Stores
Weebly may not be the cheapest website builder, but it is one of our favorite site creators for making professional websites with an online storefront. It combines customizable web page designs with the eCommerce functionalities of Square to build and grow your ideal website.
The onboarding process allows you to choose between a standalone website and one with an online store. However, it doesn’t provide the option to select from various templates. This limitation can be frustrating for users who want to browse multiple premade designs before starting to edit their site.
© Weebly
Below are other reasons why Weebly by Square is among our list of the best cheap website builders in 2024.
Pricing
Weebly is also one of the cheap website builders that offers a free plan. However, their free plan is recommended for basic use with access to some really interesting eCommerce features. The paid plans start at $10 per month, allowing you to upgrade with a custom domain name.
© Weebly
While the first plans offer a great start, the professional and performance plans provide the most important features. This includes a free domain, remove Square ads, unlimited storage, and password protection.
Nevertheless, they are reasonably priced, so you don’t have to worry about missing out on these features.
Features
A very important reason why we like Weebly is that it offers the freedom to sell anything with Square taking care of the payment. The free website builder allows you to explore powerful eCommerce tools for free. One feature that we find impressive is the quick shop, a faster checkout that allows customers to place an order in a matter of seconds.
Additionally, Weebly offers basic SEO and social settings, allowing you to optimize your site title and description and adjust your site’s search visibility with toggle options.
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One downside of Weebly, despite being one of our cheapest website builders, is its restrictive nature, preventing users from creating custom sections. All parts of the site are pre-made, allowing only for drag-and-drop editing. This can make it harder to use compared to more flexible competitors like Wix or Hostinger Website Builder.
Nevertheless, the affordable website builder offers basic tools you need to create an online store that’s unique to you without any technical expertise.
Customer Support
Weebly offers reliable customer support to get your questions answered with premium live chat and email support. They also offer faster responses via phone support on the higher plans from the most qualified experts on their team to resolve any issue you might have.
You can also access the community forum to chat with other store owners, share tips, solve problems, and learn from what others are doing to build a successful site.
Pros
- Comprehensive e-commerce tools
- Free SSL security
- Chat and email support available on the free plan
- Customized form to capture leads
Cons
- Limited SEO tools
- Phone support is only available on professional plan
- Limited customization options
Expert Advice: If you are looking to create a free online store to test your business idea, Weebly is one of the cheapest site builders you can rely on.
How to choose the best cheap website builder to design your site
Choosing the right website builder is crucial for creating a site that meets your needs and fits your budget. Here are some tips to help you select the best low-cost website builder:
Check Your Budget
Determine how much you’re willing to spend on your website. For instance, Wix offers a free plan with basic features, but upgrading to a paid plan (starting at around $14 per month) unlocks more advanced features and removes ads.
Hostinger website builder has affordable plans starting at less than $3 per month, which includes a free domain for the first year.
Identify the Kind of Website You Want to Build
Think about the primary purpose of your website. Different website builders excel at different types of websites. Some are better for blogs, others for eCommerce stores, and some for general-purpose websites. Knowing the primary function of your site will help you choose a builder that provides the specific features you need.
For example, if you want to start a blog, Wix might be your best bet due to its extensive blogging tools.
Consider the Availability of Templates and Themes
Templates are essential for giving your site a professional look without needing to be designed from scratch. Wix offers over 900 customizable templates, while Hostinger website builder provides beautifully designed templates that are highly customizable.
However, some builders, like SITE123, may have limited options that can restrict the uniqueness of your site design.
Consider Ease of Use and Customization Options
The website builder should be user-friendly, especially if you’re not tech-savvy. Wix and Hostinger website builders offer intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces that make customization easy. Jimdo is also known for its simple, point-and-click interface, making it accessible even for beginners. However, ensure the builder you choose allows enough customization to fit your needs.
Look for Integration Capabilities
Your cheap website builder should integrate seamlessly with other tools and platforms you use, such as Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and email marketing services. Wix has a wide range of integrations available through its App Market, making it easy to add functionality to your site.
Provision to Move Your Site
Consider whether the website builder allows you to move your site if needed. Some platforms offer more flexibility for migrating your site compared to others. Ensure you understand the limitations and possibilities of transferring your website in the future.
Evaluate Support Options
Good customer support is essential, especially if you encounter issues. Look for builders that offer reliable support options, such as 24/7 live chat, email support, and comprehensive help centers.
Conclusion
Building a website can be a daunting task for non-tech-savvy users, making it essential to choose an affordable website builder that is easy to use and provides comprehensive guides on how to build a unique site.
One interesting finding during our research is that many free website builders allow you to get acquainted with their platform without any initial cost. This is a fantastic opportunity to determine if the website builder offers the customization options you need.
While Hostinger is the cheapest website builder, it doesn’t offer a free plan. However, it is reasonably priced and provides the best price-performance ratio among other cheap website builders. Wix, on the other hand, is our favorite and the most trusted website builder. It offers all the tools you need to get your site up and running in one place.
If building a website feels overwhelming, consider hiring a professional and asking them to use any of our recommended cheap website builders to create your site. This ensures you get a professional-looking website without the stress of doing it yourself.
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Frequently Asked Questions
You can also find answers to common questions about cheap website builders here.
Is there actually a free website builder?
Yes, most free website builders allow you to use their platform to create a website. However, to give your website a professional touch with a custom domain name, you might need to purchase a plan.
Can I build my own website?
Yes, with website builders, you can effortlessly create your own website. Try Wix to experience one of the best website building and onboarding processes.
How long does it take to create a website?
It can take less than 1 hour to create a website if you have it planned out. This includes knowing the type of website you want to create and understanding its purpose.
Can I upgrade my plan as my website grows?
Yes, most website builders, including Wix, Hostinger, Jimdo, SITE123, and Weebly, allow you to upgrade your plan at any time to accommodate growing storage and feature needs.
Are there any hidden fees with these website builders?
While most fees are transparent, it’s important to check the renewal rates for the plan you choose, as they can sometimes be higher than the initial promotional rates.