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The Best Website Builders

By Melanie Pinola

Melanie Pinola is a writer focused on home-office gear. To find the best paper shredder, she has shredded enough junk mail to fill several bathtubs.

A website isn’t just a way to showcase your business, highlight your work, or write about your interests. It can be the biggest part of your online identity—a way to tell your story and establish a brand (and perhaps make some money). After researching 21 of the top website-building services, building 20 websites with 10 of the most promising ones, and changing hundreds of little things on each page, we think Wix is the best way to create a professional-looking website. Wix offers more templates than any other online site builder we tested and has the most powerful setup wizard, which makes it dead simple for just about anyone to create a site and tweak it to their liking. For those who have design experience or want fine design control over every element on a web page, Wix’s editor provides that, as well as an abundance of plugins to help you enhance and grow your website.

Everything we recommend

The best website builder

Wix is the most versatile tool for creating a website. With its two design modes, it can auto-build a site customized to your needs or give you full, pixel-level control. It’s both easy to use and full of features.

Buying Options

Square Online

A simple option for restaurant and retail store owners.

Square Online is the best choice if you want to create an online store or restaurant website, because that’s its entire purpose. It provides free hosting and is easier to use than the alternatives, but its design options are very limited.

WordPress.com

The best for blogging and for digging into html.

No other site builder we tested offers as many controls or as much flexibility for blogging as WordPress.com. You can also create other kinds of websites with it, though it’s tougher to customize than Wix if you don’t have coding experience.

Google Sites

The best free website builder for basic sites.

If you just want to build a simple website and don’t care about in-depth design customization, Google Sites is exceptionally easy to use and totally free. It’s ad-free, too.

How we picked

A website builder should be easy and intuitive to use. It shouldn’t require any knowledge of HTML, CSS, or other programming.

We looked for a variety of attractive, modern site templates that you can customize for different types of websites.

The best website builders offer tools for understanding your site’s traffic, SEO, and accessibility for people with disabilities.

Connections to popular apps such as Google Ads and QuickBooks help you enhance and get more out of your site.

Wix is simple enough that just about anyone can use it to create a website in minutes, but it’s also flexible and powerful enough for you to fine-tune every aspect of each page if you want to. If you’re new to web design or don’t want to spend a lot of time designing a website, Wix’s auto-site builder (called ADI, for artificial design intelligence) can do the job for you. Just answer a few questions about your style preferences and the kind of site you want, and you’ll quickly have a web page to start from. But Wix is also one of the most powerful, feature-heavy site builders we tested: When you want to take the reins from the AI, Wix’s main editor is packed with controls that can tweak every aspect of your site. Beyond the basics of site editing, Wix offers plugins for all sorts of uses, from online stores to restaurant sites to blogs to appointment-booking sites. And its SEO (search engine optimization), social media, and email marketing tools can help owners grow an online presence. A free, ad-driven version is available, but most people will want to upgrade to a paid plan to have a more professional-looking custom domain name and to remove the banner ad at the top of each page.

• Ad-supported version: free
• Starting monthly price (lowest plan): $19
• Starting monthly e-commerce price: $30

Square Online doesn’t offer as many design customization options as Wix or our other website builder picks, but this service offers the easiest way to build an online store or a restaurant website because it takes just a few clicks to add a featured-items section, a menu, a contact form, customer testimonials, an events calendar, and other crucial business-oriented features. If you use Square’s POS (point of sale) hardware to collect payments in person, using Square Online for a new site may be a no-brainer since doing so ensures that all your payment and inventory information stays in one place. It’s also free, with a discreet “powered by Square” footer—but upgrading to a paid plan allows you to use your own domain name and access site-traffic reports. Square Online doesn’t offer as many design customization options as the other website builders we tested, but its simplicity is a feature in itself.

• Starting monthly price (lowest plan): $16
• Starting monthly e-commerce price: $16

WordPress.com is the easiest way to get started publishing content online because it was originally designed for bloggers and other content creators who want to easily post new information for their readers. These days, it’s also a powerful platform for creating just about any kind of website, though the process is less automated and the templates are less slick than what you get from Wix. The free plan provides all the basics required to manage a website, but you need to upgrade to a paid plan to remove the WordPress.com ads, use your own domain name, and install plugins to enhance your site for marketing, social media, e-commerce, or other purposes.

• Starting monthly price (lowest plan): $7
• Starting monthly e-commerce price: $33 to $59

Google Sites comes free with every Google account, and it’s as easy to use as Google Slides, which makes it ideal if you just want to get a basic site up quickly and aren’t too fussed about the way it looks. As you might expect, Google Sites has built-in integration with all things Google: Maps, YouTube, Docs, Calendar, and more. It provides only 13 basic templates and a handful of preset site color and font themes, but you can still create a modern-looking website with it. The templates come with prebuilt modules and pages that are appropriate for the site type you select, including a menu for a restaurant site, for example, or a gallery for a photography portfolio. We think it’s best for setting up a simple informational website, such as a portfolio page or a site for a club or other group.

• Ad-free version: free

The research

Why you should trust us, who this is for, how we tested, our pick: wix, flaws but not dealbreakers, the simplest option for retailers and restaurants: square online, the best for bloggers or for people who know html: wordpress.com, a simple, completely free site builder: google sites, other good website builders, the competition.

I’ve written a number of Wirecutter guides to software, including tax software and team messaging apps . Before joining Wirecutter, I wrote about software and technology for sites such as Lifehacker, ITWorld, PCWorld, and Zapier; Weebly.com , a former Wirecutter website-builder pick, was one of my freelance writing clients, too. And before my writing career, I spent more than a dozen years as a graphic designer and web designer for a small marketing agency. I learned to code in HTML, PHP, and JavaScript way back before website builders existed, and I helped clients set up their websites and online stores. (We had to transfer files using an FTP server! By plugging in the computer to a phone line with a 56k dialup modem connection!)

While researching this guide, I interviewed several design experts, software engineers, and website accessibility experts via email. This group included Dianne Cyr , a professor who teaches website design at Simon Fraser University; David Kadavy , author of Design for Hackers ; Meenakshi Das , a software engineer at Microsoft and an accessibility advocate; and representatives from accessibility organizations CaptionCall and Sorenson Communications , Accessibility Partners , and Peaces Of Me Foundation .

A website builder is an all-in-one service that can help you get a professional-looking site up and running quickly and easily—no coding or design experience required. Unlike web design software you install on your computer, such as Dreamweaver , a website builder runs in your browser and guides you through everything from registering a domain name (if you don’t already have one) to designing your site to adding important features or web pages, such as a contact form or an online shopping cart. It even hosts your site for you.

Most site builders offer dozens—if not hundreds—of site design templates you can select to customize, as well as an intuitive interface (usually drag-and-drop) for rearranging text boxes, images, and other elements on a web page. If you’ve ever worked on a PowerPoint or Google Slides presentation that involved text blocks, images, and other objects on a single page, you’ve got a leg up on learning how to use a website builder.

At about $20 a month for access to the service (or about $30 a month for an e-commerce site)—including site hosting and tools to market your website and optimize it for search engines—a website builder is a relatively small expense for a business that’s making a profit. But before diving in, consider how much time and effort you want to spend creating and maintaining your own site. You can set up a basic website in an afternoon, but the more features you want and the more customized you want the design to be, the more time it will take to perfect and to keep up-to-date. (We spent at least a day with each of our picks just getting to know the design options, the editing interface, the administrator controls, and the add-in options.)

Just as some people are better off paying a professional to do their taxes , paying a web designer to set up and update your site may be the better option for you. This might be the case if the following apply:

• You’re averse to making many small decisions. You can simply select a template, edit the text and images on the page, and call it a day. But to make your site stand out from that of everyone else who uses the same template, you’ll probably want to customize the colors, fonts, features, and more to reflect your brand. Most websites have a whole lot of elements to customize, and not everyone has the patience, interest, or eye for the task.
• You already have a website that you’d like to move to a website builder. Getting the exact same look and feel is difficult with most website builders because they don’t let you import HTML, CSS, and other code. ( WordPress.com is an exception, as it lets you export all your content in the event you want to run a self-hosted WordPress site.) At the same time, you may find that one of our picks can create a site that looks and functions better than what you currently have, and websites built with a good site-building app can be much easier to update and improve.
• You’re not sure what you want your site to look like in general or what features you need. A good website designer can help you sort out the right design and elements for your site based on the information you share about your business, your goals for the site, and your audience or customers. A pro can also help you avoid making poor design decisions. Templates provide a structure for getting started, but they don’t prevent anyone from making a mistake like forgetting to add alt text to an image or choosing low-contrast text such as light-gray text on a dark-gray background, both of which are examples of issues that make your site less accessible to visitors.

Prices for professional web design vary depending on how complex your site is (and what each designer charges), but a quick scan of designer marketplace 99designs offers some insight: At this writing, for a custom website built from scratch, designers quote a wide range, from $600 to more than $3,000. For help with designing and customizing a site created with a website builder such as Wix or Shopify , prices start at $550. If you’re unsure about designing your own website but are drawn to these website builders because they make it easy to update a site once it’s created, hiring someone to help you with the initial design might be the best option for you.

For our 2021 update to this guide, we researched 21 of the most prominent website building services, considering their pricing, features, and design templates. We decided to not test services that didn’t offer a free trial, lacked basic features like site stats, or were meant for creating one-page landing pages for marketing purposes.

Based on our interviews with web design experts, as well as Wirecutter staffers’ experience creating their own websites, we landed on the following criteria for a good build-it-yourself platform:

• A user-friendly interface: A website builder should require no coding knowledge whatsoever to put a site together, and it should allow other people to easily update the site even if they didn’t design it originally.
• A free trial of some kind: Websites, and especially online stores, are complex endeavors, so a service should give you time to kick the tires before you spend any money. Finding out that a platform lacks a key feature shouldn’t happen after you’ve paid and gone through all the effort of setting up the site.
• Pricing in line with most of the competition: A website builder shouldn’t cost significantly more than the industry average, which is roughly $20 to $30 per month. We gave extra points to services that offered a free plan, even if they had ads.
• Site templates that suit a wide range of industries and types of companies: We especially favored those that don’t require you to source a wealth of high-quality images just to get a page up and running. Where possible, a site builder should offer built-in stock-art options for people who don’t have a library of photos or illustrations.
• Basic analytics and SEO: Traffic reports and search engine optimization tools help you understand how your site is doing with traffic and make it more discoverable. We also considered the guidance that website builders offered to help build a search engine-friendly site.
• Website accessibility features: We looked for built-in tools or advice to help make a website accessible for all visitors, including those who are blind or have low vision. According to the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) , this includes things like code or markup that defines the structure of content on the page, as well as the way in which text, images, and sounds are presented.
• Timely, friendly, effective customer support: Live chat and phone calls during business hours are best, but fast email response is okay.
• Integration with other apps: Connecting your site to Google Ads, QuickBooks, ShipStation, and other apps can help you run your business more efficiently.

For any business-related website, reliability (it doesn’t go down, or uptime is as close to 100% as possible) is crucial. We couldn’t test this aspect directly, and most website providers don’t offer reliability guarantees, but our picks are services that are large enough that outages are uncommon—or at least only as common as most large-scale server outages that affect the internet from time to time.

Based on the above criteria, we decided to test 10 website builders: GoDaddy Website Builder , Google Sites , Shopify , Square Online , Squarespace , Ucraft , Webflow , Weebly , Wix , and WordPress.com .

It’s hard to tell whether a website builder will do everything you need until you try it. Features such as whether it autosaves your changes—something you might assume it would do—aren’t listed in most apps’ marketing materials.

So I built websites using each of our 10 finalists. To start, I used each one to create a basic homepage and a contact page. In doing so, I noted the answers to the following questions:

• What design templates can I choose from? What about the breadth and quality of the selection?
• How easy is it to change the site’s overall appearance and how much design control does the site builder offer? (For example, can I specify a specific HEX color code ? Are there helpful photo-editing tools?)
• How intuitive is the user interface for both designing the site and customizing its settings, such as changing the site title or publishing/unpublishing the website?
• What add-ons are available for different types of sites, such as an e-commerce website, a restaurant, a photo portfolio, or a blog?

I also checked out each app’s customer support and its security and privacy policies. Most of the apps have built-in help tools, and sometimes the services also offer detailed help forums or FAQ sections, but every app we tested had one or two quirks that left us wanting to ask “How do you…” questions, so a quick support response was crucial.

After that preliminary testing, I took a deeper dive by building a more advanced type of website. I created a restaurant site (“Wirecooker”) with a contact form, a menu, and embedded JavaScript code from a free restaurant-booking service, TableAgent . (Please don’t visit us in our Long Island City, New York, office expecting wine and cheese.) I also added a blog to this site, an online store to sell fake scones, and several modules and plugins, including an embedded Google Map. I also looked at the designed sites’ accessibility using Chrome’s built-in DevTools and the WAVE Evaluation Tool Chrome plugin . Finally, I asked my 15-year-old daughter—who created a website in Google Sites once for homework but otherwise has no web design experience—to test our contenders. I watched as she tried to create the same website about dragons and other mythological creatures with varying degrees of success and satisfaction.

For the 2018 version of this guide, a dozen Wirecutter staffers also built their own websites using some of our current picks.

Wix makes it easier to build an informative, attractive, and useful website than any of its rivals. In our testing, Wix’s site generator—which asks you a few questions regarding what kind of site you want to create, what features you want to add, and what style you prefer—offered the fastest way to set up a site tailored to personal or professional needs and individual style preferences. For those who prefer to be more hands-on, Wix’s site-editing interface also offers the most control (aside from WordPress, which allows you to edit HTML directly) over the look of every element on a page. It provides the most built-in plugins to enhance a website, too, including search engine optimization (SEO), marketing, and accessibility tools.

Wix comes in two versions: an ADI (for artificial design intelligence) wizard and a more comprehensive editor. The ADI is the easiest way to get started: Answer the questions mentioned above, and Wix whips up a website with sample text, photos, and pages relevant to your industry. It’s surprisingly smart. For example, when I specified that my website was a wine store (“Wirecorker”), the ADI offered wine-colored themes and pages relevant to the shop, such as a store-policies page. Other services, if they ask you any questions about your business at all, ask only for the category of your business (as WordPress.com and Squarespace do) or if you have a Facebook page (as Jimdo does). Wix’s ADI works even better if your address is in Google Maps, if your social media pages contain your logo, or if you have an existing site, because it can pull in the graphics for you.

Wirecutter’s Jenni Gritters has built sites using Squarespace, Wix, and WordPress; after our testing, she said she recommended Wix for anyone looking to get a small-business site off the ground. “It’s the easiest to use of the three, with pre-built templates that look original and literally no space to mess things up,” Jenni wrote in her testing notes. “If people want a pretty website with little to no effort, Wix is a great place to land.”

If you want more control over every aspect of the page—everything from the exact size (in pixels) of a menu to the precise location of a photo (in X and Y coordinates)—you can switch from the ADI to the main editor. It allows you to drag and drop anything on the page, while also providing sticky guidelines for lining things up. You also get pixel-level control over text sizes, unlike in competing site builders, which limit you to a few (often maddeningly small) sizes. Wix is the best option if you have previous design experience or want to fiddle with the site elements to make each page look just so .

In contrast to the 30 or so templates the ADI offers, the full site editor offers more than 500 templates. Most of them don’t require you to supply high-resolution images to make them work, and you can search Shutterstock, Unsplash, or Wix’s own photo gallery for images to add visual flair to your site. The templates are organized into specific business or use categories. For example, Wix’s “Fashion & Clothing” section has “Accessories Store” and “T-Shirt Store” subsections, and the “Photography” section has “Commercial & Editorial,” “Events & Portraits,” and “Travel & Documentary” subsections. These specialized options are more useful than some other services’ overly broad categories, and their straightforward naming makes it easier for you to find a look that suits your needs than Squarespace’s templates, which have vague names like “Paloma” and “Pulaski.”

Having this freedom to add, remove, move, resize, and customize each element of the page could lead to overenthusiastic mistakes. Wix offers simple undo and redo buttons, and it saves a new version of your page every time you make a change. This is definitely not the case with perhaps the most heavily advertised site builder, Squarespace , where tapping Control+Z or Command+Z to undo sometimes works but sometimes doesn’t, and cleaning up mistakes can lead you to wipe out other page elements accidentally or leave you wandering through the settings menus. Squarespace also doesn’t autosave changes, which is one of the main reasons we decided not to make it a top pick.

In our tests, Wix’s interface made it abundantly clear how to change, remove, or move elements (text blocks, photos, dividers, and more) on the page. Getting the functional parts of your site working—contact forms, menus, interactive maps, social integration, or even online ordering—is easy with Wix, especially considering that most relevant templates have those sections set up. When we did contact customer support over chat, the agents were helpful even when we had a free plan.

Despite being easy to use, Wix also offers many robust tools to enhance your site:

• a vast array of “apps” or plugins to do things like manage product inventory or advertise on Google and Facebook
• SEO tools to guide you in picking the strongest keywords, updating a site’s meta (search-friendly) description, being mobile-friendly, and more
• marketing and sales tools such as free email campaigns, a chatbox, and the ability to collect recurring payments from customers
• an accessibility wizard that scans your site for issues and assigns automatic alt text to images based on their filenames

Wix offers a free plan for those who don’t need or want to use their own domain name; the site is published with a mywebsite .wixsite.com URL. With a free account, Wix places an ad for its services at the top of each website page. We prefer the less prominent branding of other website builders’ free offerings: WordPress.com and Square Online place their ads less distractingly in the footer of the website, while Google Sites doesn’t display ads at all. We think it’s worth upgrading to a Wix paid plan to remove the ad, use your own domain name, and get more storage space and bandwidth. (The free plan comes with up to 500 MB of bandwidth and up to 500 MB of storage space.)

Most small businesses aren’t likely to bump up against the 2 GB bandwidth or 3 GB storage limits of the Combo plan ($19 per month or $14 per month if paid annually, at this writing). However, if you know you’ll need a lot of storage—for example, for posting high-resolution photos or videos—you might want to look at Wix’s pricing for its higher-level plans. All the other website builders we tested, except for Google Sites, don’t have bandwidth or storage limitations (and Google Sites’s limits, such as its cap of 1,000 pages per website, are generous ).

An inherent flaw of Wix’s more detailed design options is that if you change a lot of the elements of a template, you can end up making bad style choices with the type, images, layout, sizing, organization, or any other element of web design. In other words, total freedom of expression is also total freedom to make an ugly site.

Wix won’t interfere if you really want to use Comic Sans and a low-res image of a greasy sandwich to poorly advertise your diner. None of the other site-building apps did much advising, either, but their editing tools didn’t offer as many opportunities to make a disastrous design blunder. Also, because Wix is so robust, its administrative section has a ton of menus, which can be overwhelming. All the menus are clearly labeled and organized, though.

Once you pick a template on Wix, you can’t switch to another template—you have to rebuild the site from scratch if you want a totally new look. Template switching doesn’t work wonderfully on other website builders, as it usually produces a number of errors and odd leftovers, but swapping between templates is at least possible and works fairly well with WordPress.com.

If you switch from using the ADI to the full editor, changes you make in the editor might not stick if you switch back to the ADI, but Wix warns you of this possibility before you do so.

Wix’s Combo package contains most of what we think small businesses need, but it imposes monthly limits on file storage (3 GB) and bandwidth (2 GB). Although the limits are generous enough that they shouldn’t affect most small businesses, some of Wix’s competitors, including Square Online and Squarespace, offer unlimited storage and bandwidth at or below Wix’s price.

Panelists in our 2018 testing complained of difficulty in removing page features (sidebar text boxes, large images, contact forms) from certain templates without messing up the page’s general layout. Unless you use a single-page layout (or a “strip,” in Wix terms), template elements are not modular, and wiping out an entire container means having to smoosh together the elements around it to make up for the empty space. That’s true for most website builders, though, in our experience.

Wix doesn’t allow for editing a website’s style sheet (CSS files) and doesn’t provide deeper access to the HTML behind the page or FTP access to the files. There is a Dev Mode, however, called Velo, which lets you paste code into the site, add JavaScript, or connect your site to external APIs .

Not to be confused with Squarespace, Square Online is a website builder provided by Square, the payment-processing platform you may have used at your favorite coffee shop. It doesn’t offer the breadth of stylish template options that Wix and other site builders do. Instead, Square Online presents you with a standard layout to which you can add modular elements, such as text boxes, a photo gallery, a map, or featured items. Where it really excels is in the simplicity of setting up an e-commerce or restaurant website—all the common features for those kinds of sites are highlighted in the main editing menu. Although you don’t have as much design control with Square Online as you do with Wix, we found Square’s website builder simple to use, especially for managing inventory and showcasing featured products. Best of all, it’s free if you don’t need a custom domain name; you pay only the standard credit card processing fees for transactions.

You won’t find much variety from one site made with Square Online to another because the main layout is standardized. The color, font, and layout options for sections or items on a page—such as a block of text with a photo—are also quite limited. For some people, however, this simplicity (fewer editing tools and plugin apps to bother with) is a plus.

Adding pages, customizing background colors, and inserting components is straightforward, though different from other sites’ drag-and-drop approach. When you click on any section of a page, the customization options all appear in a panel on the left—rather than directly next to or above the item. To move a section up or down on the page, duplicate it, or move it to another page, you have to click a menu in the left panel. Having that one-stop editing location adds to the simplicity of customizing a site in Square Online, and we liked the clean, uncluttered user interface.

As expected for a site builder owned by a credit card processing and POS (point of sale) provider, Square Online does an excellent job of helping you list items to sell. Wix has its own powerful e-commerce tool, but to add products there, you have to leave the main site editor. With Square Online, you can add or edit items without leaving the page where you list them. The editor also intelligently adds fields to each product depending on the category you select. For example, for “food and beverage items,” the form offers fields to enter a nutritional value or to label the product as vegan or gluten-free.

Similarly, for restaurants—which Square Online is also designed for—you can add or edit menu items directly in the editor, unlike in Wix, where you do that in a separate section of the site builder. There’s an option to upload a PDF menu, too.

On the back end, Square Online provides all the tools a retailer might need to run their business, from inventory management to checking abandoned carts to orders reporting. If you use Square for in-person sales, you’ll find that the website reports integrated into Square are quite handy. On the downside, the site offers only a few SEO and social media settings, such as making the site visible to search engines or not, and we couldn’t find any built-in accessibility tools.

One problem we kept running into is that sometimes Square Online would redirect us to a page hosted at Weebly.com —a help page or a settings page or, sometimes, an “Oops!” error page. Weebly (a former pick in this guide) was recently acquired by Square, and the integration of the two platforms seems to have some kinks that need working out. During our tests, customer support was helpful but difficult to reach due to strange redirects to Weebly.

Another issue we found is that the small text size and low-contrast design of Square Online—light to medium gray text on a white background—makes it harder for people with low vision to use. This is a design trend we’ve been seeing everywhere that we hope will go away soon.

You can use Square Online to run a blog, but its features are barebones. You can use it to create a static non-store site, too, but because the design options are limited, we think most people are better off going with one of our other picks for those purposes.

Square Online is completely free if you just want to create your site and have it hosted at Square with a Square subdomain, as in mywebsite. square.site. The free version adds a discreet “powered by Square” footer that’s less in-your-face than Wix’s branding, which appears at the top of its free sites. To remove the branding and get access to site-traffic, sales, and marketing reports, you can pay for a plan; subscriptions start at $16 a month ($12 a month if billed annually). Square Online also provides an option to create single-item “buy buttons” that you can add to an existing website to sell products, but this feature doesn’t let visitors add several different products to a cart before paying—something Shopify Lite allows with its own buy-button feature.

WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS (content management system), supporting over 40% of all websites . That’s because it’s especially powerful and versatile, particularly for websites that are heavy with text and photos or videos. Whereas other website builders provide optional blog sections, WordPress is designed for blogging: It comes with tools to manage comments, contributors, publication times and date formats, an RSS feed, and more. More than 50,000 WordPress plugins are available to enhance your site. And unlike any of the other website builders we tested, WordPress allows you to directly edit the code behind your web pages, as well as to export or import your site content if you decide to change website hosts.

If you want to host your own site, you can get the free software from WordPress.org or through most website hosting providers; if you prefer an all-in-one option, WordPress.com provides hosted sites (free and paid) that you make in the same software. There are pros and cons to both options: If you don’t mind maintaining your own site and finding a hosting provider, installing WordPress yourself gives you access to all of the available WordPress plugins for free—and it’s likely to cost less than WordPress.com’s Business plan. However, WordPress.com requires a lot less work to get a site up and running, and a 2021 test conducted by Review Signal found that WordPress.com had the fastest page-load time of any hosting service for WordPress.

In any case, the WordPress software works similarly whether you host your own site or let WordPress.com handle it, and you can import and export your data if you need to change hosting services. For our testing, we used the WordPress.com-hosted website builder.

WordPress.com offers about two dozen free website templates (or “themes”), some modern and stylish, others a bit dated. You can buy individual premium templates with more complex layouts, or you can upgrade to a Premium or Business plan to access premium templates as part of your subscription cost. (If you host your own WordPress install, you can find approximately a gazillion free and paid templates across the internet.) Unlike in most other site builders, you can change the template for your site at any time, without having to start over from scratch.

Once you select a template, you can customize it to a great degree. You can choose a preset color palette, specify your own colors, or select colors from the handy suggestions that WordPress.com offers based on the photos on your page. You can also specify font pairings for headers and body text. We found Wix’s site editor, with its drag-and-drop controls, to be just a bit more intuitive and powerful, but a site hosted on WordPress.com is highly customizable, too.

Editing items on a page is straightforward: Click a “block” (or navigate to it with the Tab key), and a pop-up menu allows you to move it up or down, duplicate it, or change the alignment on the page. If you know HTML, you can edit the code instead of using the visual editor. None of our other picks give direct access to editing the HTML behind the page. At one point during our testing, we ran into a puzzling issue while trying to edit the HTML of a block: For some reason, WordPress.com flagged as a problem parts of the code that the site builder itself had auto-generated . Fortunately, it offered the option to resolve the problem automatically.

You can use WordPress to create a basic website with static pages, as many people do, but the app shines most when it comes to blogging and other content creation. (Wirecutter itself is built on WordPress.) Wix and other site builders offer blogging capabilities, but WordPress (including WordPress.com) was specifically designed for blogging and provides all the tools a blogger needs and then some. You can schedule pages and blog posts to go live at a specific time, insert widgets like a tag cloud or latest comments on a post, insert videos or photo galleries, display an excerpt of a post , show related posts , manage comments, and a whole lot more. The administration interface for managing plugins, media, users, and settings is easy to use, too.

One of the most compelling reasons to use WordPress (whether on WordPress.com or your own hosted version) is access to more than 50,000 plugins to customize and grow your website. WordPress.com includes a free suite of plugins called JetPack to monitor page-load time, adjust security settings, automate backups, scan for malware and other security threats, clear spam from comments and forms automatically, and improve SEO. To install other plugins while using WordPress.com, you need to upgrade to a Business or eCommerce plan; self-hosted WordPress sites don’t have that limitation.

We appreciated WordPress.com’s strong accessibility features, including warnings when the app notices an issue with your design (such as low-contrast text) and a view that shows an outline-like list of all the blocks on the page so that you can jump to a block using a keyboard. Some templates are also labeled as “accessibility ready.”

WordPress.com provides 24/7 support via live chat for paid accounts with a Business or eCommerce subscription; support for the free plan and the cheapest paid plan (Premium) comes via the public community forum. (In contrast, for free plans, Wix offers 24/7 support by phone or email and 24/7 live chat depending on your location.) With WordPress.com, the good news is that because WordPress is so popular, there’s a good chance that if you have a problem, someone else has encountered it, too, and there’s a discussion about it on the forum.

The free version of WordPress.com gives you 3 GB of storage, adds branding in your website’s footer, and requires you to use a subdomain, as in mywebsite .wordpress.com. This is better than Wix’s free plan, which gives you only 500 MB of storage, also requires you to use a subdomain, and has a more in-your-face ad at the top of the page. Upgrading to a paid WordPress.com plan, which starts at $7 a month ($4 a month billed annually), adds email support, additional storage space, the ability to accept payments, and the ability to create premium content available only to paying subscribers. This is a better starting price than Wix’s $19 a month, but WordPress.com’s Business and eCommerce plans are higher than Wix’s comparable plans .

One concerning side note: Both WordPress’s domain-search tool and its image search often provided distinctly gendered results. When searching for a domain, I entered “Melanie,” and the top suggestion was “Hotmelanie.com.” I got different, more business-oriented suggestions when I typed in “Mel.” The same happened with “Roberta” and “Rob.” And during testing, my daughter used the image-search tool to look up photos of unicorns and mermaids; the results, full of dubious pictures of sexy women, disappointed both of us, although the photos were provided by Pexels , not WordPress.com itself. We didn’t have this issue with any of the other site builders' domain-name recommendations or image-search tools.

If you just need to build a basic site and don’t care too much about customization or aesthetics, Google Sites will help you get the job done easily, for free. Anyone who uses Gmail or any of Google’s other services already has access to Google Sites , and building a website will be instantly familiar to anyone who has used Google Slides . It’s so easy to use that the service is being taught to elementary school students. Although Google Sites offers fewer templates, design options, and features than our other picks, it has all the necessities for building a basic website. And there’s no denying its attractive $0 price and lack of “powered by” branding, which other site builders plaster all over their free sites.

Google Sites offers only about a dozen templates, most of which are pretty basic looking. But while few in number, the templates cover a wide range of website needs, including events, projects, restaurants, service businesses, and hobbies. Once you select a template, Google Sites creates relevant pages and features for you. For example, if you select the restaurant template, the site builder adds a press-quotes or customer-reviews section on the home page, a menu page, an about page for your chef’s bio, and a contact page. As in most other website builders, once you choose a template, you can’t switch to a different one. You can, however, quickly style the website through a choice of a handful of preset themes.

Editing web pages is as easy as selecting an item on the page and using the pop-up menu to format or customize it. The drag-and-drop interface allows you to move elements or resize them, although you don’t get as much control as you do with Wix. As you might expect, you can embed items from other Google apps, such as Google Calendar, Google Forms, and Google Maps.

That’s about it. Unlike our other picks, Google Sites offers no live customer support, no built-in site metrics (although you can connect your site to, you guessed it, Google Analytics), and no blogging or e-commerce tools. However, if you use another app—such as OpenTable for restaurant bookings—you can add JavaScript code to embed that app’s widgets on your site.

Google Sites has some size limits , but we doubt that most people would brush up against them, and your website storage doesn’t count against your Google Drive space. If you have over 10,000 images on your site, more than 1,000 pages, or more than 6 million characters on a page, you’re in trouble (for more reasons than the fact that Google Sites won’t support your site). A Google representative told us that customizable themes (for example, color palettes and line-spacing controls) are in the works—and that’s something we’re looking forward to, as it will allow you to make your site fit your brand better and look less generic.

Did we mention that Google Sites is free? You can host your site with a Google subdomain or bring your own custom domain name.

The $9-per-month Shopify Lite plan is a good option if you have just a few products to sell and already have a website built on a platform that doesn’t have its own e-commerce tools. It allows you to sell items through an embeddable buy button that works in Wix and most other website building services, on Facebook, or through a hardware POS device. The plan should cover a business that’s mostly focused on brick-and-mortar sales but sells online occasionally. However, we think it’s simpler to use one of our top picks’ own e-commerce tools; that way, you’ll have everything in one place rather than having to copy product codes from one app to the next. If you want to scale up, Shopify’s other plans offer comprehensive hosting and site-editing tools, as well as an unlimited number of items and infinite image storage, shipping discounts, scaling transaction fees, and the like. Although Shopify is at least on a par with other site builders—if not even better—when it comes to tasks like setting product details and managing orders and inventory, we found its site editor less intuitive and more difficult to use.

You might consider Squarespace instead of Wix if you want a less complicated site-editing interface or if you like one of its templates better. Squarespace offers lots of plugins and an excellent suite of reporting and other tools, similar to Wix, and its 70 or so website templates are slick and elegant. We appreciated Squarespace’s intuitive interface (its dashboard is a bit less cluttered than Wix’s) and found it easy to add pages, blocks of text, photos, and other elements. Aside from some wonkiness we experienced in testing (sometimes the site wouldn’t load) and the way the site builder leans toward creating low-contrast elements, our main complaint with the service is that Squarespace has no autosave function. This made us nervous during testing because it’s all too easy to close a tab by mistake or for a laptop battery to run out of juice mid-edit.

Services we tested

GoDaddy’s Website Builder offers many features for free, including email and social media marketing, 24/7 support, PayPal payment acceptance, appointment scheduling, and a content-creation tool. It also has a pleasant interface. However, we had a hard time finding a way to set sitewide style preferences, such as font size and background color, and it was slower than our picks in adding stuff like products or photos.

Ucraft offers a free plan, but it’s very limited: You can’t embed HTML or JavaScript code, use Google fonts, or easily customize graphics blocks. We found it tricky to add or edit elements on a page because many settings were buried in menus. And when we tried to contact support via chat, the service was offline on a Thursday at 7 p.m. Eastern.

Webflow is perhaps the most powerful website builder we tested. But it’s too advanced and tedious to use for non-developers due to its overwhelming number of menu items (similar to what you find in Adobe Dreamweaver or Illustrator). If you’re not creating websites for a living, you’re better off going with Wix or WordPress to get a fine level of design control without feeling out of your depth. (And if you are interested in creating websites for a living, learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript or PHP would likely be better for your career.)

Strikingly and Jimdo are both one-page site builders for businesses that want to tell customers about themselves and maybe link somewhere else. We liked their ease of use but preferred our picks’ greater flexibility.

Simvoly offers no built-in photo editing or cropping features—or, at least, our tester couldn’t find them. It also lacks an undo function, and our tester described the page and menu setup as “mind-boggling.”

Services we considered but did not test

Zyro offers inexpensive plans starting at $5 a month at this writing, but the basic plan comes with restrictively small allowances for storage space (1 GB) and bandwidth (3 GB). A Website Planet review of the service noted an issue with their test site looking different on desktop and mobile—the fix, to edit the mobile view separately, didn’t sound appealing to us.

Having happily used HostGator’s website-hosting service in the past, we were interested in its website builder . But there’s no free trial, and we prefer a service that you can try before paying rather than investing time and having to ask for a refund within the 45-day guarantee period.

Like Wix, Pagecloud automatically generates layouts based on your needs, but it also lets you manually adjust the layout on a pixel-exact level. However, it’s more expensive than Wix and has fewer features overall.

Although Webnode is relatively inexpensive, its own website looks generic and simple. That, plus a few complaints about customer service on Trustpilot , gave us pause.

Yola has unimpressive reviews from other publications, and Yola branding appears even on sites made on one of its paid tiers.

BigCommerce and Duda were more expensive than our picks but didn’t add any extra features.

SiteBuilder , uKit , and Site123 don’t allow you to preview their templates or view example client sites. You have to create an account to see them.

Cargo (aka Cargo Collective) seems dedicated to sites for publications, with a tight focus on artistic and abstract expression.

Meet your guide

Melanie Pinola

Melanie Pinola covers home office, remote work, and productivity as a senior staff writer at Wirecutter. She has contributed to print and online publications such as The New York Times, Consumer Reports, Lifehacker, and PCWorld, specializing in tech, work, and lifestyle/family topics. She’s thrilled when those topics intersect—and when she gets to write about them in her PJs.

Further reading

The Best Business Card Printing Services

by Erin Roberts

We tested nine business card printing services and found that Moo delivers high-quality cards and is easy to use.

The Best Electronic Cutting Machines From Cricut and Silhouette

by Jackie Reeve and Arriana Vasquez

If you’re a crafter who needs to cut materials like cardstock or vinyl, we think the Cricut Explore 3 is the best electronic cutting machine.

The Best Password Managers

by Andrew Cunningham, Thorin Klosowski, and Max Eddy

Everyone should use a password manager, and after researching dozens and testing six, we recommend 1Password because it’s secure and easy to use.

The Best Online Fax Services

by Melanie Pinola

If you need to send occasional faxes for free, no service does it better than Dropbox Fax . Need to fax sensitive info? Give mFax a try.

15 small business website examples for inspiration in 2024

The right website can help a small business thrive. Here are 15 of the best small business website examples on the web.

Small businesses are incredibly diverse — and this diversity reveals itself in their websites. These small business website examples will help you kick-start the design process.

Many small business owners start by publicizing their products and services through small social media campaigns or through a link in their Instagram bio . But when it comes to setting up a website, they often call in extra help to make it happen.

For most web designers, working with small business owners is incredibly rewarding. It can be a chance to exercise creative freedom, help a brand grow, and even develop new style guides and design systems . It’s also an opportunity to develop the business’s brand from the ground up and create a user experience completely tailored to the needs of the business and its clientele.

While some clients will know exactly what they want, others may not be very familiar with web design and may need you to explain the limitations you’re working with or raise possibilities they haven’t thought of. Aim to tailor your process, as well as your site design, to each client’s needs. You can use this list of 15 small business websites to spark inspiration or to show clients what’s possible for their site.

Why is website design for small business important?

A dedicated website gives small businesses an online home and serves as an important hub for marketing efforts. The benefits of a website include:

• Communicating better with existing and potential customers. A website allows businesses to gather important information in one place — it becomes a single point of contact where people can find out about the business’s location, opening hours, products or services, and contact options.
• Increasing reach and brand awareness. Offline and social media marketing campaigns only reach people who get the flyers in the mail or use the platforms the small business advertises on. A website opens the business to anyone in the area, or even the world, searching for that product or service. A website can also build brand recognition and awareness through content designed for search engine optimization (SEO). Most prospective customers don’t buy anything until they’ve already had several interactions with a brand, so creating content that appears high in people’s search results will push them one step closer to buying.
• Building credibility. Investing in a professional website builds credibility and fosters trust with potential customers. Sixty-two percent of people see the lack of an online presence as a warning sign and deliberately steer clear of businesses if they can’t find information about them online.
• Increasing independence. Advertising solely on social media platforms means that these platforms are essentially in control of the types of content a business can publish and the number of people who encounter it. Having a website creates an independent platform where small businesses can engage visitors in a way that’s tailored to the business’s needs rather than the needs of another platform.
• Selling products and services directly to online consumers. A simple ecommerce site allows a business to sell and ship nationally and internationally. Services like consulting, graphic design, teaching, and digital marketing are an excellent fit for online sales.
• Offering online booking and ordering capabilities. A website with an online booking system encourages more bookings by streamlining reservations, reducing reliance on calls or emails.

15 small business web design examples

Small business web design is rewarding and a lot of fun. You’ll build the website — and sometimes even the brand — from the ground up. Here are some of beautiful small business websites we’ve found online. We hope they’ll inspire your creativity to make a website for a small business.

1. The People vs. Coffee

The People vs. Coffee is a mobile pop-up cafe in Adelaide, Australia. Designer Shaun Lonergan ’s hero image of three to-go coffee cups and baked goods on a counter shows the cafe from the perspective of a customer waiting to order, immediately making visitors feel welcome. Small animations and interactions throughout this one-page site make for a fun user experience and reinforce the cafe’s casual vibe.

To keep the cafe’s social media and contact details at visitors’ fingertips as they scroll through the site, Shaun uses a sticky sidebar showing a black-and-white icon set that matches the site’s color scheme.

Shaun has made this page available to clone for free in Webflow, so you can use it as a starting point for any one-page small business site.

2. Surftwins Essaouira

Essaouira-based Moroccan Surftwins Mouhssin and Yassin offer surf lessons and holidays to international visitors. Designed by Marta Kawecka , their website shows how thoughtful attention to visuals can take a site to the next level. Marta highlights the beautiful location with a sun-kissed blue, gold, and white color palette that matches Essaouira’s water, sand, and whitecaps. Marta also chooses a background pattern based on traditional Moroccan tiles to further evoke the business’s stunning locale.

Marta’s attention to visuals also shows in rough hand-drawn icons and illustrations, plus a short video that shows clips of Essaouira’s vibrant Medina and the twins smiling as they run classes on the beach.

3. Bones Co.

Husband-and-wife design team Bones Co. have plenty of personality, and they’re not afraid to show it on their website. A play on the pair’s spooky business name runs throughout the site, including an illustration of them pretending to be ghosts and a tombstone-shaped favicon .

One of the best ways of marketing a service is by highlighting the people that make the business tick. That means about us pages are key. But Bones Co. takes theirs to the next level by talking about their clients and themselves. They say they want to learn about their clients’ stories, purpose, and beliefs, adding: “Together, we’ll find ways to create engagement and earn trust while always sticking to your truth.”

4. RISE Athlete

The RISE Athlete website — a fitness site designed by Catch Digital Inc. — packs a lot of information onto the landing page: a navigation bar with nine items, a background image of a personal trainer working with a client, all-caps hero text that reads “Your new home for functional fitness,” an intro to the business, and two CTA buttons. But clever use of negative space and typological choices favoring readability balances the page instead of cluttering it.

Paired CTA buttons throughout the website target visitors at different sales funnel stages: The white ones are for people with intent to purchase, while the dark ones are for those still in the discovery and evaluation stages.

5. Standard Bots

The Standard Bots website is a fantastic example of what professional photography can do for a small business page. This robotics startup’s site features stunning photos of the business’s core product, a robotic arm, against a collection of beautifully arranged black, white, and gray backgrounds. The dark orange CTAs match the thin copper-colored bands on the robot, which means the CTAs harmonize with the images while drawing attention through their contrast with the grayscale color scheme.

This site includes a table comparing the Standard Bots product to its closest competitors. This kind of table is an excellent idea for pricier products, especially new ones competing with more well-known alternatives.

6. Nomadic Road

The Standard Bots site explored above uses high-quality photos to sell their product, and you can do the same to market a service. In this minimalist website for overland motoring adventure business Nomadic Road , designer Guillaume Brunon combines long shots of the offroad vehicles taken from the air and close-up pictures of desert tire changes and sand traps. This juxtaposition of majestic big-picture photos and breathtaking experiences perfectly aligns with the company’s ethos of crafting memorable narratives for their clients to share in the future.

7. Bring on Monday

New Zealand accounting firm Bring on Monday differentiates itself from other accounting firms by focusing on the human side of accounting. Bring on Monday’s casual, friendly branding shows up in different ways throughout this Made Studio site, resulting in a unique and internally coherent user experience.

Down-to-earth copy — like the “Say hey” microcopy on the contact form link — combines with bright colors, natural photos, and offbeat animations in this site to demonstrate what separates Bring on Monday from slick corporate accounting firms: their understanding of client relationships as friendships.

Learn how to design, build, and publish a unique and professional website for your business in no time.

8. Serenity in Leadership

‍ Small businesses that want to appear at the top of Google search results need a search engine optimization ( SEO ) strategy. One part of a strong SEO strategy is using keywords to show search engines what the site is about, and maintaining a regularly updated blog helps you do just that. Leadership consulting firm Serenity in Leadership ’s page, designed by Jez Dant , includes a frequently updated blog informing potential clients about their offerings while improving the company’s search rankings.

9. Hair by Taylor Ross

On hairstylist Taylor Ross ’s small business site, designer Raymmar Tirado uses a reveal-on-hover effect to showcase Taylor’s services in a compact space: Hovering over each description (or tapping, for mobile visitors) reveals a picture of the service and its price. This is an excellent space-saving idea for small businesses that offer a lot of services. As an extra benefit, it also makes the site more user-friendly, as visitors don’t have to click between different webpages as they browse their styling options.

10. Terlingua Real Estate

Design and marketing firm Teel Group welcomes visitors to West Texas and Terlingua Real Estate with a loading animation of a Lone Star and then a full-page background video showing an aerial view of rural West Texas. This opening evokes the vast feeling of the local landscape — which is especially effective for a real estate firm specializing in selling rural lots. The choice to leave a lot of negative space around the text and CTAs “above the fold” (visible to viewers without scrolling down the page) further reinforces the theme of wide-open spaces.

11. Good Garms

Sustainable clothing online store Good Garms offers a range of browsing options on its user-friendly ecommerce website . Potential customers can search by category, brand, material, gender, or sustainability type (fair-trade, organic, or recycled), giving them granular control over their shopping experience. The product pages include comprehensive information about each clothing item, including the fabric type, place of production, and reviews from other customers.

Designer Bryn Taylor gives site visitors a peek behind the scenes by including a style guide page complete with colors, button styles, and header tags — a great resource if you’re interested in creating a small business website that looks like this one.

12. Bar Forty-Five

Most small businesses have a lot of personality. Color choices and layout can communicate broad aspects of a business’s personality and style, but typography can communicate nuances in personality, industry, and style in a split second. While legibility should always be the priority in body text, feel free to experiment in headings with distinctive display fonts. For example, consider using an all-caps , handwriting , or graffiti font to represent an important theme, evoke a key era, or express the brand identity.

The typography speaks volumes on designer Janis Oppliger ’s site for Bar Forty-Five , a restaurant and bar in Solothurn, Switzerland. Janis uses a contrasting font pair to give the site a classy retro look while prioritizing readability by combining Abril Fatface , a distinctive font inspired by 19th-century Europe, with the highly legible sans-serif Montserrat .

13. South Coast Canteen

Fergus Brown ’s website for the South Coast Canteen is another example of creative typographic design . Fergus combines a ridged black background texture with the Pantograph font to create a digital version of an old-fashioned menu board. This adds a fun, nostalgic element to the site that builds an emotional connection with visitors.

14. Chicago CryoSpa

Prism Design Studio ’s website for the Chicago CryoSpa combines a sharp high-tech look with ingenious and creative design choices. The site’s custom preloader mimics plummeting temperatures, counting down to -240 degrees Fahrenheit as the site loads. The homepage showcases the experience customers are curious about with a background image of a smiling person inside the cryogenic therapy chamber. Then a video layered over the top of the background image simulates the liquid nitrogen used in the spa’s therapy services.

This site’s homepage is a great example of conversion-centered design principles. The two CTAs are large and shown in contrasting colors, attracting attention. The billowing steam enters at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen and moves toward the headline and CTA buttons, drawing visitors’ eyes in this direction.

15. Custom Jewelry Design

The white, black, and gold color scheme of Sasha B ’s Custom Jewelry Design site shows off this small business’s distinctive offerings to perfection. Sasha allows site visitors to scrutinize the tiny details on key pieces of work through animations that show the piece revolving slowly against a black background. Prospective customers can scroll down to a photo gallery that shows a close-up of each available piece that’s linked to a product description page where they can find out more details and add the product to their shopping carts.

Help small businesses hit the big time with a Webflow website

Small business websites capture the unique personality of their business while usually following a fairly standard structure: landing page, about us page, product or service details, and contact details. When the website’s complete, the business owner can use it as a digital hub to market the small business .

Webflow can streamline the whole process and help you create a beautiful website without coding. And if you’re pressed for time or want to work with a pre-built site structure, browse our small business website templates to find designs that you can adapt to fit the project’s needs.

To find out more about how to use typography, color, and layout to communicate the business’s offerings, head over to Webflow University to explore our learning games, tutorials, and dedicated courses.

Build completely custom, production-ready websites — or ultra-high-fidelity prototypes — without writing a line of code. Only with Webflow.

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• Best Website Builders for Small Businesses of 2024

Website builders provide responsive templates and drag-and-drop editors to simplify site creation. Selecting the right provider and services enables small businesses to get online quickly to generate leads, sell products, and reach customers.

Popular Website Builders

Wix »

Squarespace »

GoDaddy »

Why Trust U.S. News

At U.S. News & World Report, we take an unbiased approach to our ratings. We adhere to strict editorial guidelines, maintain a separate business team, and provide transparency on our methodology.

Website Builders Evaluated

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Best Website Builders

Table of Contents

• Best Website Builders for Small Businesses
• Compare the Best Website Builders for Small Businesses
• Rating Details

If you want to create an appealing website quickly and within your budget, a website builder can help. Our Best Website Builders for Small Businesses rating can help you decide which one to use. We researched providers and compared more than 20 features to identify the top four site builders. Compare pricing, tools, customer service, and more to find the best solution for your company.

Our Best Website Builders for Small Businesses of 2024 Rating

• WordPress.com

Compare the Best Website Builders for Small Businesses of 2024

Best website builders for small businesses in detail.

We evaluated web hosting services, site-editing tools, and professional reviews for our rating of the Best Website Builders for Small Businesses. Our assessment looked at plan pricing, range of subscriptions, and features for various industries. Also, we considered cart, checkout, analytics, and inventory management tools for e-commerce. Explore the top website builders to create a professional and functional business site.

Wix Is Recommended For:

Businesses of all sizes and budgets looking for site building packages

Customers that need 24/7 support via chatbot and callback

Those in search of a range of management, marketing, and e-commerce tools

Wix Isn’t Recommended For:

Businesses looking for a low-priced plan that supports e-commerce

Companies that want to integrate their point-of-sale (POS) system with their site

Those who don't want to purchase a custom email address separately

SEE FULL REVIEW »

GoDaddy Is Recommended For:

Small businesses looking for an affordable option for their online store

Services that need low-cost appointment scheduling and reminders

Retailers that want to combine point-of-sale (POS) hardware with their online sales operations

GoDaddy Isn’t Recommended For:

Midsize companies requiring a full-featured development platform for their site

Those wanting access to an app marketplace of free and fee-based third-party add-ons and integrations

Companies requiring currency conversion for processing international sales

Duda »

Duda Is Recommended For:

Web designers and agencies who build websites for others

Those who are okay with using non-industry-specific templates

Duda Isn’t Recommended For:

Those who want a wide range of template choices

Customers who don’t want to buy e-commerce features as add-ons

WordPress.com »

WordPress.com Is Recommended For:

Those in search of a budget-friendly website builder

Anyone who wants to build a website without knowing code

Users who want access to a wide range of free and premium themes

WordPress.com Isn’t Recommended For:

Those seeking a low-cost e-commerce solution

Those needing immediate access to customer support

Users wanting high-quality security features without upgrades

What Should a Small Business Website Include?

Most website builder templates provide a few page layouts pertinent to your industry or chosen goal. As such, these make a good starting point for deciding which pages to include on your small business website. However, a restaurant may want to add an online menu, whereas an accountant will highlight their services. See the checklists below for essential, industry-specific, and optional web pages.

Small Business Website Pages

Here are the essential web pages every small business website needs:

• Homepage: This is the first thing visitors see upon arrival. It should briefly describe your business, services or products, and how you help customers.
• About: You can highlight your company’s history and team members, or share your business vision and values.
• Services or products: Summarize what your business offers and detail or link to additional pages with more information.
• Contact: Encourage visitors to get in touch or stop by your physical store. Consider adding a dynamic map to guide customers to your location.

Industry-Specific Website Pages

Depending on the industry, your small business website may benefit from:

• Online menu and integrated ordering tools (for restaurants)
• E-commerce store with clickable products and images
• Customer account page for managing retail or subscription orders
• Shipping and return information (for online stores)
• Appointment request form or booking page with a calendar
• Gallery or portfolio pages (for creatives)
• Event pages for ticketing
• Case studies page for professional services

Nice to Have but Not Required

Consider these extras:

• An FAQ page can assist with SEO and reduce emails with repeat questions.
• A testimonial or review section shows your company’s expertise via social proof.
• With a blog, your company can share news and educational content.

How To Choose the Best Small Business Website Builder for You

When you first compare small business website builders, it’s essential to understand your site’s goal and which features can help you accomplish it. Many companies want to sell products or services online or build their brand’s presence. Integrated payment processing and e-commerce features help with the former, while a custom domain name and native email marketing tools support the latter.

Also, work out your minimum and maximum monthly budget. Some website builders lock core functions behind more expensive plans, making them out-of-reach for companies that need a free or cheap service. Remember to consider the payment processing costs, as fees can take up to 10% of each transaction. Write down your must-have features so that when you compare providers, you can eliminate any subscriptions that lack the necessary tools.

Consider the following questions before assessing your options:

• Do you want an all-in-one platform with a builder, domain, and web hosting? Or would you prefer to buy a domain separately ?
• How will you accept payments, and for what kind of products or services?
• Do you need an online store? If so, how many products will it have?
• Are built-in social media and email marketing tools important?
• Does your company require industry-specific features, like booking, ticketing, or reservation tools?

Does My Business Need a Web Designer?

Entrepreneurs can DIY their websites with user-friendly site builders and editing tools. But what if you don’t have the time or inclination to make a website? Alternatively, suppose you have a sizable startup budget and want to see your ideal design come to life. In these cases, a web designer could be the better solution. Although it costs more and takes longer, you can request customizations without completing the work yourself.

However, a website builder is the way to go if you needed your site online yesterday and want to accept payments within the next day or two. Website builders include pre-made templates, so you can add your main pages without formatting each one individually.

Artificial intelligence (AI) text generators and image libraries also enable quick website generation. And if you select a site builder like GoDaddy, payment processing is built in. Learn what’s involved in our How to Build a Website guide.

Web designers take longer because they must consult with you, develop one or more site mockups, and then collaborate with you to ensure each element meets your expectations before building begins. WordPress.com and GoDaddy offer in-house expert design services, whereas Wix and Duda provide access to third-party professionals.

How Much Does a Website Builder for a Small Business Cost?

Most website builders have the same templates, regardless of the subscription. But features and functionality differ between personal, business, and e-commerce packages. Website builder plans range from free to $70 monthly. Free versions lack a custom domain, which many small businesses prefer for improving brand awareness and customer experience.

GoDaddy offers the cheapest business subscription: Commerce. The regular price is $24.99 monthly for 5,000 products, social selling, and promotional tools. Conversely, the WordPress.com Business plan costs $40, and e-commerce solutions are only available with plug-ins. However, less expensive options are available if your small business doesn’t need a full-fledged online store with payment processing.

For instance, GoDaddy’s Basic package costs $11.99 monthly, whereas entry-tier plans from Duda are $19, and Wix starts at $16. That said, it’s vital to compare tools closely. Although GoDaddy’s most affordable subscription doesn’t have an online store, you can still process payments through a virtual terminal or payment links, a less common feature among other website builders.

In addition to monthly fees, payment transactions may incur processing fees. These vary by website builder and range from zero to 10%. Duda doesn’t collect payment fees, but you must find and integrate your site with a third-party payment processor. WordPress.com has fee-free transactions for Commerce users ($70 monthly), and Business users pay 2% per payment, which is less than Wix ($2.9% plus $0.30) and GoDaddy (2.3% plus $0.30).

Small businesses intending to sell digital or physical products online should consider an e-commerce website builder plan. These packages have built-in features for online stores, like payment processing, item catalogs, and shipping integrations. While some platforms let you add payment processing through third-party integrations, others require switching to an e-commerce plan

If you believe you may sell products in the future, look for a website builder with a scalable plan selection. That way, you can upgrade your package and build a store quickly when it’s time to open your online shop.

Since consumers will judge your creative business on the visual appearance of your site, find a website builder with templates and tools that fit your brand the best. For instance, WordPress.com supports paid subscribers and tipping on all plans (including the free version). In contrast, Duda provides agency packages, perfect for companies looking to add web design or hosting services.

Creative businesses may prefer website builder plans with the following features:

• Slideshow, stacked, carousel, or grid gallery options
• Appointment scheduling and payment tools
• One-time and recurring subscriptions or memberships
• Free and paid digital product downloads
• Password-protected gated content for members
• Built-in collaboration tools for clients and teams
• Clickable elements for donating or tipping artists
• Video editing and storage features
• Social media integrations
• Digital marketing automation for email and social media
• Client management tools and user permission levels

Although you can install a third-party website builder plug-in, in many cases, it’s easier and possibly more secure to use your web host’s website builder. A web hosting company creates and maintains its website builder, ensuring that it receives the latest security patches and meets new standards for web accessibility. If you have a problem, you can access support through your provider’s customer service channels and knowledge bases.

In contrast, when you use a third-party plug-in, you must rely on another vendor for vulnerability patching, product updates, and support. If you run into a problem while creating your site, it can be challenging to find a solution, which is why we suggest using your web host’s website builder.

Unless you have a developer on your team or the budget for a professional web designer, a website builder is typically the better solution for a small business. Website builders don’t require coding skills or technical knowledge. Instead, they provide drag-and-drop tools, allowing you to easily switch page elements or add new ones. Customizable pre-made templates and layouts eliminate the need to start from scratch whenever you add a page.

In addition, many website builders are all-in-one systems, meaning you can use one vendor for your domain name, hosting, site-building tools, and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate. However, hand-coding a website allows for even more customization and integrations. It takes longer than making a site with a website builder, but you can turn a blank site into a custom creation with the right skills.

• Best Website Builders of 2024
• Best Free Website Builders of 2024
• How To Make a Website
• Wix vs. Squarespace
• What Is Web Hosting?

Website Builder Services

• Squarespace

Other Ratings from 360 Reviews

Best Domain Registrars of 2024

Lauren Swift

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Best Web Hosting Services of 2024

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Our 360 Methodology for Evaluating Website Builders

1. we researched the companies and products people care most about., 2. we created objective 360 overall ratings based on an analysis of third-party reviews..

• Professional Ratings and Reviews . Many independent website builder evaluating sources have published their assessments of website builders and their products online. We consider several of these third-party reviews to be reputable and well-researched. However, professional reviewers often make recommendations that contradict one another. Rather than relying on a single source, U.S. News believes consumers benefit most when these opinions and recommendations are considered and analyzed collectively with an objective, consensus-based methodology.
• Consumer Ratings and Reviews . U.S. News also reviewed published consumer ratings and reviews of website builders. Sources with a sufficient number of quality consumer ratings and reviews were included in our scoring model.
• Calculating the Z-Score: The Z-Score represents a data point's relation to the mean measurement of the data set. The Z-Score is negative when the data point is below the mean and positive when it's above the mean; a Z-Score of 0 means it's equal to the mean. To determine the Z-Score for each third-party rating of a company, we calculated the mean of the ratings across all companies evaluated by that third-party source. We then subtracted the mean from the company’s rating and divided it by the standard deviation to produce the Z-Score.
• Calculating the T-Score: We used a T-Score calculation to convert the Z-Score to a 0 to 100 scale by multiplying the Z-Score by 10. To ensure that the mean was equal across all data points, we added our desired scoring mean (between 0 and 10) to the T-Score to create an adjusted T-Score.
• Calculating the common-scale rating: We divided the adjusted T-Score, which is on a 100-point scale, by 20 to convert the third-party rating to a common 0 to 5 point system.

U.S. News 360 Reviews takes an unbiased approach to our recommendations. When you use our links to buy products, we may earn a commission but that in no way affects our editorial independence.

How to Start a Web Design Business: Expert Tips from People Who Did It Themselves

Updated: January 09, 2024

Published: January 02, 2024

Have you heard the expression, "If it were easy, everyone would do it?" That saying certainly applies to starting your own business. However, with the right preparation, you'll discover that learning how to start a web design business isn't as hard as you might think.

I talked to two web design business owners who filled me in on everything you need to know about how to start a web design business. I'll walk you through the steps you'll take, plus some pro tips to help you make your launch a success. 

How to Start a Web Design Business: 15 Steps

• Figure out your working arrangements.
• Identify your website design business niche — if you have one.  
• Pick a name.
• Create a mission statement.
• Determine what you want to offer.
• Establish a business plan.
• Seek legal advice.
• Check off administrative tasks.
• Identify pricing.
• Make your branding.
• Create templates and establish workflows.
• Design your website.
• Start building your social presence.
• Train yourself on anything you're not sure about.
• Network in person and online.

Whether you are figuring out how to start a web design business from home or eventually want to open up your own brick-and-mortar location, there are a lot of items to check off before you're ready to take on clients. Here are 15 steps you can follow when learning how to start a web design business. 

1. Figure out your working arrangements. 

Your first step is to figure out your working arrangements. Will you work from home or rent out an office space? Will you interact with clients virtually or offer a brick-and-mortar location where you can meet? And if you're working from home, do you have a professional, private space where you can conduct business? 

It's possible to learn how to start a web design business from home, but by addressing these questions upfront, you'll know how to better set your business up for success. 

Mindy League, UX Director at Elevated Third,  owned a web design agency that one of her clients went on to acquire. She knows her stuff — League has worked in digital marketing with B2B giants, including HP, IBM, Thermofisher, and more. When recounting her experience as a web design business owner, League mentions that she feels it's easier to start a business now in a world where working from home is normalized. 

She recounts, in a pre-pandemic world, needing to have a brick-and-mortar storefront where she could work with her team or meet clients. "Now, we have this really more acceptable work from home," she says. "I think it would be easier to start a business now than it was then. Because [then] it was expected that you had a brick and mortar, which was a high cost, a high expense. It was almost validating that you're in business." 

Once you've figured out your physical working arrangements, consider your hardware and software arrangements too. When learning how to start a web design business from home, keep in mind that you'll need all the bells and whistles you would in an office, such as a comfortable seat, functioning computer, and monitor, if you like using one. 

You may need to purchase a new laptop or monitor for your web design business work. Or, maybe you'll need to sign up for Adobe Creative Suite subscriptions. If you're not launching your business ASAP, you don't need to sign up for the software right away to avoid paying for it when it's not in use. However, you should have your physical hardware ready to go. 

Pro Tip:  I know that bills can quickly add up when you're first starting a business. If you're buying a computer, I recommend considering a lightly used one as they're reasonably priced. Or, purchase a gently used desk from a local thrift store to cut costs. What matters most is that your equipment is reliable. 

2. Identify your website design business niche — if you have one. 

Niche or no niche, that's the question. There are pros and cons to both — if you choose a niche, you can become the best in that industry and establish a reputation. Alternatively, if you don't choose a niche, you can garner a large pool of clients across industries. 

One way isn't better than the other; they're just different. 

Macey Miller , the owner of  Be Bold Design Studio , has created websites for "all kinds of businesses," though much of the sites she's made have been for woman-owned companies. Miller initially became interested in website design because she wanted a creative outlet when working in marketing at a hospitality technology company. You should trust her advice because, since starting her business in 2018, she's created more than 120 websites. What started out as a side gig became so successful that Miller was able to quit her full-time salaried role in six months.

"I have a lot of friends who own businesses, and they need websites," she shares. "And so I started my business out of really an outlet for creativity, but then also as friends and family needed websites and logos and designs. I was always like, yeah,  I can hop in. I'll do that.  It was a nice break after all the analytical meetings and just all the things that came with …marketing." 

Pro Tip:  If you're stuck, let your portfolio and professional experience inform your decision about whether you'll pursue a niche subcategory of website design or offer more holistic services. If you only have experience creating websites for consumer packaged goods products (CPG), stick with the CPG industry. Or, if you've created websites for educational institutions, food and beverage, entrepreneurs, and more, you may consider sticking with a no-niche agency. 

3. Pick a name. 

I know —  picking a business name  is tricky! It should be descriptive but not too long. Reflective of your mission, yet clever. Unique but simple. That's a lot to keep in mind. (Psst: If you need help selecting your business name, check out these  300+ examples of business names  we love for inspiration.) 

In some cases, you may want to use your own name as the title of your business. If you believe yourself to be the face of your brand, then maybe, using your name is a good idea. Of course, there's also the  search engine optimization  (SEO) value if you have an uncommon name. 

I advise you to test out your business names in front of family, colleagues, or friends. You can run a poll on LinkedIn to ask others in the industry which they prefer. Picking a moniker is a serious commitment, so be sure you're willing to stick with it for a while. 

Pro Tip:  I suggest doing some research before you commit to your name. When you Google it, if a lot of other agencies pop up, you might want to pick an alternative. If there are already a ton of other businesses with the name, you'll have a hard time securing social media handles, too.

4. Create a mission statement.

Before you begin ideating your company mission statement, I suggest you check out some examples from businesses you admire. ( May I humbly suggest HubSpot ?) 

I also love  Be Bold Design Studio's mission statement . It's straightforward, focused on impact, and I love how Miller clearly displays it on the footer of the studio's homepage. 

Your mission statement doesn't have to be too long or intricate. The best mission statements are straightforward and succinct, and they showcase your company's values. 

Pro Tip:  You can include your mission statement on your homepage, footer, or on its own page, depending on how much emphasis you'd like to place on it. 

5. Determine what you want to offer.

You have your name, mission statement, and niche all picked out. Your next step is determining what you want your business to offer. Ultimately, you can make your business as all-encompassing (or niche) as you want. Do you want to offer complete website design services that include add-ons such as branding and logo design or photography? Or do you want to work mainly on website rebuilds? What about maintenance — do you want to offer it or leave clients to their own devices? 

It is  your  business — so you can decide what you want to offer based on both your skills and experience. However, keep in mind that if you don't have a well-rounded menu of offerings, clients may take their business elsewhere, where they can get their website created, logos created, and branding established all in one place. 

Pro Tip:  If you're building your business with a co-founder, League suggests that you consider picking someone with expertise in the opposite of what you do. "When you're getting started, you don't necessarily think of looking for someone who does the opposite of what you're doing," she says. However, by thinking about this in advance, you can reduce the likelihood that you'll need to outsource help. (Psst: That doesn't only apply to business offerings. For instance, if you have the creative portion under control, consider working with someone more analytical who can tackle the finances.) 

6. Establish a business plan. 

In my opinion, writing up a business plan is arguably the most daunting part of learning how to start a web design business. The good news? You don't have to do it yourself — this robust guide to creating a business plan will offer you a life raft.

Your business plan should provide a clear summarization of your organizational strategy for success. You can use your business plan to acquire funding from investors or help forecast your business demands. Most importantly, when starting out a business, your business plan should highlight your goals and the way you plan to achieve them. This is also where you'll tie in your mission statement and business purpose. 

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of writing your business plan, use one of our free templates to set you on the right track. For example, I love this one page business plan template.

It's concise, asks the right questions, and makes it easy for you to keep all your crucial information in one handy location. You can download it here . 

Pro Tip:  Taking a look at other business's plans can help you figure out how to build out your own. Here are  24 sample business plans  to get your creative juices flowing. 

7. Seek legal advice. 

Congratulations; you're about halfway through the process of learning how to create your web design business from home. Give yourself a pat on the back — and take a deep breath because it can be overwhelming. 

Before you go any further in your business ownership journey, it's time to seek legal advice. Your best option is to find a lawyer who has experience working with small businesses and helping ensure they're compliant with all the laws in your jurisdiction. You may need a license to operate your business, depending on what it is and where you live. Or, you might need help deciding whether you want to be a sole proprietor, open an LLC, or start a corporation.

While no one likes shelling out cash for legal fees, the repercussions of not doing so and accidentally violating a law can be massive. Your lawyer can also help you draft the contracts that you'll share with clients when entering into an agreement with them. Getting liability insurance for your business is also a good idea, and your lawyer can advise more on the steps you should take to do so. 

Pro Tip:  Lawyer fees can be expensive — especially when you're just starting out. If the cost of working with a lawyer is prohibitive, I recommend you try to find one willing to do the work pro bono. I'll admit, it can be tricky to find a lawyer that'll do the work for free. But ask around — you may have a connection willing to help out. 

8. Check off administrative tasks. 

I told you learning how to start a web design business isn't always glamorous, didn't I? I promise it will be well worth it. Your next step is to complete various administrative tasks you need to check off your list before your business can open its doors. 

For example, now that you're starting your own business, you'll need to think about how you're going to get health insurance. Maybe you can still be on your parent's insurance, or you have a partner who can take you under their wing. However, if this isn't the case, you need to think through the ways you'll be able to get healthcare.

I know this doesn't seem directly related to starting your own web design business, but it's an important administrative task you need to check off. When you're just starting out, you'll only need to think about getting healthcare for yourself. But if your business grows and you hire teammates, you'll have to think about their insurance, too. 

The next thing you'll want to think about is your retirement plan. You can consider opening a Roth IRA or a Health Savings Account. (Of course, if you want more guidance about what's best for your financial future, I suggest you speak with a financial advisor who better understands your particular situation.) 

Lastly, think through your holiday and vacation policy. You're your own boss now, which means you'll have to be accountable for getting stuff done. Creating a clear vacation and holiday plan is an excellent way to keep you on the right track. Miller believes that holding herself accountable for getting work delivered in a reasonable amount of time is partially why her business has flourished. "I think it is very important to… be true to your word," she says. 

Miller continues, "If you say you're going to deliver something on Tuesday, you need to deliver something on Tuesday. A lot of times with a website design business, you know, it's creatives, and it's hard to pin us down within the website design business. You can be a creative, but you also have to be very, very careful with that more creative energy and focus on making sure that your clients are being served well and efficiently and on time." 

Pro Tip:  If you're struggling with administrative tasks, I highly recommend talking to other small business owners you know who have taken their business full-time to learn more about how they handled administrative tasks when starting out. 

9. Identify pricing.

Now that you know what you have to offer, it's time to decide how much you're going to charge for it. 

Your first step when identifying pricing is to take a look at your competitors' pricing. How much is your competition charging for a website, logo design, branding, and bespoke photography? What about a site refresh? Find out, and make notes of what your top 5-10 competitors are charging. This will inform your rates. I suggest creating a spreadsheet that clearly identifies competitor pricing.

You'll also have to decide if you want to charge a flat rate for a project or hourly. If you go the project route, consider how many hours it will likely take to complete the project and break that down into hourly wages. Remember: You deserve to pay yourself a livable salary. 

Now that you've done your research, consider your business's overhead. Do you have to pay for your space? Have you thought about how taxes factor in? How about the software you'll need to run your business? Did you include your insurance fees when factoring in how much it costs to run your business?

From there, you can subtract your overhead per project from the rate you're thinking of charging. This leaves you with your profit. 

Pro Tip:  Adding testimonials to your website can help you feel more confident about your rates. These testimonials demonstrate the value of your work, and you can easily point to them when conferring with potential clients about budget. For some inspiration, check out HubSpot's Customer Reviews page . 

10. Make your branding. 

We're finally at a fun part of the web design business creation process. You'll have to make your branding before you begin to share the news of your business online. You're a creative, so you likely already know exactly what to do, but here are a few branding tips in case you need them:

Consistency is key — choose a color palette, style of photography, and a few fonts. Then, stick with them. This will give your business a professional flair. 

Create a logo that's not too detailed. If it is, the details will get lost when you shrink it down. 

Try to avoid already popular color pairings because they'll subliminally remind your visitors of other, more famous brands. For instance, red and yellow may not be the best bet for your company because these colors together conjure up images of Ronald McDonald. 

Pro Tip:  Need a dose of inspiration for your business's color palette?  These color pairings  are sure to wow.  

11. Create templates and establish workflows.

Yes, you have your branding, pricing, and business plan — but you are not open for business yet. First, it's essential to create templates and establish workflows. That way, when you do get your client (and trust me, it will happen), you already have a handle on how to get them onboarded.

Using a project management tool can help you create workflows that hold you accountable and ensure you deliver results on time. I love Asana, Trello, and Notion, so experiment to find one that works best for you and is within your budget.

This is also the time for you to make sure those contracts you worked with your lawyer to create are ready to go. Plus, create a checklist for client onboarding, the steps you'll follow to launch a client website, and make any necessary supporting documentation or templates. You should also have your invoice template in place. If you do all of this, professional is the name of your game. 

Last but certainly not least, determine how you're going to track your time. It's not enough to set an iPhone timer — you need to keep track of your time and how you spend it. There are plenty of time-tracking apps available, some of which even integrate directly with your project management tools. 

Pro Tip:  By having your onboarding checklist ready to go, you'll be ready the moment your first client comes knocking. Plus, you'll score major points with your client for preparedness and professionalism. 

12. Design your website.

You already know how to do this, so I'll leave this one to you. And if you want some sources of inspiration, you know where to find them — here, where I identified the  25 best creative agency websites . 

Just to recap, here are some key things to keep in mind when designing your website. 

Were created with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. 

Include mindful CTAs, or calls to action . (Psst: You shouldn't only have one place for visitors to go to reach out to you — that CTA should be sprinkled throughout your site so visitors can contact you the moment they feel inclined to.) 

Feature cohesive branding . 

Have testimonials and examples of past work. 

Have a sense of personality so visitors know who you are and why they should trust you with their website. 

Hire a proofreader or ask a family, friend, or mentor to look over your site. Ask them to read through it for clarity and accuracy. 

Consider having a blog on your website and writing posts that target keywords. 

Your goal on your business website is to reduce friction in any way that you can. 

Pro Tip:  About  42.5 million Americans have disabilities . Don't ignore  website accessibility best practices when building your website . 

13. Start building your social presence. 

You're almost at launch day, congrats. It's time to start building your social presence. Whether you contribute to collaborative articles on LinkedIn to showcase your web design expertise, create your own X/Twitter posts with a link to your portfolio site, or begin filming trendy TikToks about web design misconceptions, the internet — erm, I mean the world — is your oyster. 

When deciding which social media platforms you want to hone in on, consider this:

Where is my audience?

What platform can I go viral on? (TikTok is great for this because, regardless of whether you have five followers or five million, you can go viral.) 

What platform feels intuitive for me to use? 

How can I best tell my brand story?

Pro Tip:  Ideally, you'll be able to create content for multiple social media platforms. However, focusing on one or two will help reduce stress. Dial in on wherever you're seeing the largest return on investment for your time. 

14. Train yourself on anything you're not sure about. 

Maybe you're a natural-born designer, but sales calls don't come easy for you. Or maybe you've always loved rebuilding websites, but you struggle with offering bespoke logo design services. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses — but your weaknesses don't have to stay weaknesses. You can decide to seek out training to teach yourself more about anything you're unsure about. 

"I think it's easy for people to say like, well, I'm not good at admin, or I'm not good at sales calls, and that's just an excuse," says Miller. "Why don't you go in and learn how to do a sales call? Like I've done two to three sales trainings, which has been very helpful because sales is a part of owning your own business. And if you're not comfortable with selling in a way that is natural and authentic but also just natural and authentic to you, then you won't be able to last." 

Pro Tip:  HubSpot Academy  has plenty of free courses that can help teach you more about different facets of marketing, sales, and beyond. You can even earn free certifications, which look great when you're trying to build authoritativeness. I've done several courses, and I found them to be both educational and engaging.  

15. Network in person and online.

You did it! You've successfully created your own web design business. I hope you're proud of yourself because I'm proud of you.

Now, it's time to share the incredible news with your family, friends, colleagues, and mentors. Remember to bring business cards with you when you meet with people, and bring along extras so your friends can pass them along to their friends. You never know who may be your first client. 

Online, you can spread the word on your personal and professional social media accounts. You can also reach out to any business owners you know and let them know you're open for business if they wish to enlist your help.

Pro Tip:  Keep your mind open when it comes to finding clients. You never know how your clients will make their way to you — just trust that they will. Be sure to spread the word so everyone you know can have their feelers out in case anyone they know needs a designer. 

What are 5 tips for people starting a web design business?

These five tips from Miller and League — who have actually gone through the process of building a web design business themselves — can help set you up for success. 

Remember that potential clients are everywhere. 

League recounts that when she owned her agency, she was living in Austin, Texas, where she had a large network. "There were a lot of folks that I knew," she says. "And so I would just make new clients at the retail stores, or wherever I was, I would just meet people. Or they knew someone, and then we referred." A valuable lesson to keep business cards with you at all times indeed.

Give back to your clients.

League also suggests the idea of using "swag" to gain momentum for your business. "We gave a lot to our customers," she says. "We had parties and gave them swag. So when we had profit, we really gave them things that we thought they would enjoy. We [were] really appreciative of them. We were constantly giving them mugs, and we made up cute campaigns around it, like a social media campaign. [With the cups, we asked clients to] send us your 'mug shot.'"

Keep in mind that things ebb and flow. 

The reality of owning your own business is that things will ebb and flow; there will be busy seasons and slower ones. However, to keep your business afloat during tougher times, Miller suggests you get creative. "There are a lot of different ways to make money as a website designer," she shares. "One tip is being open to potentially white labeling. There are a lot of agencies that white-label their services and that need freelance graphic designers to kind of come in and help with the workload. 

When you start your own business, a lot of times you think, oh, it's just going to be me, all by myself. I'm going to be getting all these clients, but in those slow seasons, it's nice to lend your services to an agency or even take on some retainer clients and do maintenance work or graphic design work." 

Customer service speaks for itself. 

Another key learning from Miller? That customer service really can set you apart from your competition. "I found that the reality of building a healthy business and a client base requires serving your clients, marketing, networking, and a strong online presence, but really more focusing on serving your clients," she says.

"A lot of people focus more on the design and the creative part, but I truly believe that customer service is almost as equally important as the beauty of creative design. It takes time to build a client base and to establish a reputation." 

Expect to wear a lot of hats. 

Depending on the client, you may have to wear more hats than just the assigned "web designer." For instance, League mentions that entrepreneurs are sometimes more anxious regarding where their money is going than large corporations, as it's their hard-earned cash they're spending. 

"They would get really nervous before the launch because it was the unveiling of their idea," she explains. "And so that, that was something I didn't realize, [that] I had to be so much of a psychologist, making that transition from the bigger agency, you know, to the smaller agency. There was a lot more psychology. Granted, when you work with an agency or with any client, you have to worry, think of, and be empathetic towards them." 

Bring Your Web Design Dream Business to Life 

You officially know how to start a web design business, and it's up to you to decide if you're ready to take that next step toward becoming your own boss. When building your company, keep your why in mind, and commit to customer service. If you do these two things, you can't go wrong. 

Don't forget to share this post!

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How To Start A Web Design Business?

• Matan Naveh
• on Business
• Updated on: 06.07.21

Starting a web design business is an ideal opportunity. The industry is growing at a rapid rate and now’s the time to invest in creating a successful brand. However, it is a competitive industry so it’s important to carefully lay the foundation for your business so you can avoid those “Wait, what???” scenarios that too many first-time business owners face.

So, in the following guide, we’re going to look at everything you need to do to become a successful web designer and business owner. You’ll learn:

• How to choose your design niche
• How to set your rates
• How to attract new clients

But first, let’s look at your current situation and make sure you’re in the best position to start a business.

How to Start a Successful Web Design Business​

• 1. Pick a Web Design Niche​

2. Decide Which Design Services You’ll Offer

3. set your company goals, 4. set your rates, 5. choose a name for your design business, 6. set up the legal stuff, 7. create your digital branding, 8. build your design business website, 9. get your business software in place, 10. start building your online profile, 11. find new web design clients, 12. make time for education, 1. pick a web design niche.

Unless you have a ton of experience in a specific industry or building websites for certain kinds of folks, this might seem like an impossible task. Plus, why bother committing yourself to only one niche if you could design websites for everyone ? 

There’s actually a lot of value in choosing a niche as a web designer or web developer. 

For starters, it’s so much easier to sell yourself to potential clients when you can say: 

“I create beautiful online stores and shopper-friendly experiences for companies across the UK.”

“I’m a web designer .”

Having a well-defined niche also helps you more quickly identify leads that are a good fit for your business. You might not think that’s a big deal now, but opening yourself up to any and every job will only lead you down a time-consuming rabbit hole looking for new clients. 

Instead, take some time right now to choose a niche for your business. It’s okay if it evolves over time. But, for right now, you need to lay down a clear path for yourself and the niche is the first step in doing that. 

How to Choose the Perfect Web Design Niche

Ideally, you’ll operate within this niche for a long time to come, so it should be something that you’re passionate about and have the ability to succeed in . If either is lacking, it’ll be hard to stay committed to the work.

First things first, look at your past experiences. Were there any industries you enjoyed working in or you found particularly rewarding? This goes for your experiences as a web designer as well as in other roles. 

Then, think about what it is you excel at and where your strongest skills lie. Are you more of a designer or a coder, or something in between the two? Do you have a specialty, for instance UX design or frontend development? You should also settle on one CMS , too. (If you’re here, that’s most likely means it’s WordPress.)

You might also want to narrow down your niche by location . That doesn’t necessarily mean opening an agency and buying office space downtown, but it does mean that you’ll focus on serving the local business community from wherever you operate. 

Once you’ve settled on a niche, do some research to make sure: 

• There are opportunities within this target niche. 
• They can afford to pay for the kinds of websites you build. 

When you’re happy with what you’ve come up with, move onto the next step.

Look around at the existing web design solutions being offered to your target niche. What do they consist of? 

Are they solely offering to build a website for a flat fee or are there other services baked in? How about web design-adjacent offerings, like website maintenance, managed hosting or consulting? 

These days, it’s a good idea to consider ways to bring extra value to your client relationships. And the reason why is simple: 

Website builder technologies like Wix and Weebly have made it easy for consumers to: 

• Build their own websites. 
• Pay a small monthly fee for them. 
• Get their businesses online in a matter of days instead of weeks or months. 
• Not have to worry about buying web hosting, themes and plugins or maintenance services. 

In the minds of business owners, this is a huge win. All those annoying things they don’t want to worry about or pay for seem to be taken care of for them. 

Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t inherently make any of this easy for business owners. Which is why when you’re setting up your business, you need to figure out a way to make both your web design services and the WordPress CMS the most attractive option. It also doesn’t hurt that it’ll put more money in your pocket at the end of the day. 

So, what can you reasonably offer to clients that they’d find valuable? 

Finn & Gray , for example, offers a multi-pronged approach:

This agency provides clients with the following services: 

• Logo and brand design
• Photography and videography

For businesses that are just getting off the ground, this would be immensely helpful as they could use the same agency to take care of everything for them. 

Then you have a company like Four Trees Media that offers digital, print and social media services: 

For companies that intend on doing more than just sitting behind a website — like networking, advertising, growing an online community, etc. — offering a well-rounded service like this would make your business an attractive option.

Or you could start simple. This is how Proxy handles it: 

There’s one package for branded web design and it includes the essentials a business would need to get a WordPress website off the ground: 

• Development
• Search engine optimization
• Managed hosting

This kind of solution is great for those business owners who don’t want to worry about the technical side of a website and would prefer to offload it to someone else.

But you need to consider what your niche and audience will find the most valuable. You should also only offer services you know you can deliver on. 

That said, don’t feel like because you don’t know the first thing about something like WordPress security that you can’t add monthly maintenance services to your plans. There are plenty of tools and third-party companies who can handle that work for you while you still make a profit on it. 

Before you start building everything out, I want you to take a moment to look ahead to the future. Without a roadmap for your business, it’ll be hard to steer yourself in the right direction. 

Answer these questions to put yourself on the right track: 

What is your company’s mission?

Sum up what you do, who you serve and why you do it in one or two lines. Then, come back to it whenever you need a reminder of why you started this business in the first place.

How do you want clients to look at you?

As a freelance designer? An agency they contracted for help? A business and marketing partner? A digital specialist? Give yourself a name, one that strongly resonates with the role you play in your clients’ lives.

When do you want to sign your first client by? 

Be realistic. If you have an existing list of clients to pull from or ask for referrals from, landing your first client in a week or two is a reasonable expectation. But if you’re starting from scratch, give yourself at least a month or so to work out the kinks in your pitch and presentation and not feel incredibly pressured to close any client that passes your way. 

How many clients do you want to work with each month?

Notice how I said “want” instead of “can”. There’s a difference between maxing yourself and your resources out to the point of burnout… and taking on a reasonable amount of clients so you can always give your best. Be kind to yourself and your clients. Set a limit on how many clients you can reasonably serve each month.  

Where do you want to be 1 year from now? How about 5? 

This could pertain to how much money your business is generating or how many clients you’re capable of taking on. It could also pertain to what kinds of services you offer. Perhaps your goal is to move from solopreneurship to running a full-blown agency by Year 5. Or maybe you want to sell your agency by then. 

Give each of these questions some serious thought and record your vision for the business. This’ll help keep you motivated even on your hardest days.

This isn’t always the easiest thing to think about, especially if it’s early in your career as a web designer or developer and you’re feeling a touch of impostor syndrome. 

But here’s the thing: 

If you don’t charge a competitive rate on Day 1 and are willing to let prospects low-ball you or, worse, ask that you work for free, it’s going to be a long while before you can start demanding the kinds of rates you deserve. 

So, here’s what I’d recommend you do to come up with pricing for your business:

• Find out what the competition is charging for the same services. 

(e.g. $7,500 for an optimized website)

• Use the average competitor’s rate (or your own, if you have one) to figure out your monthly revenue based on the number of clients you expect to have. 

(e.g. $7,500 x 2 = $15,000/month)

• Personal branding, web hosting and other things needed to maintain your site
• Marketing and advertising costs
• Software fees
• WordPress themes and plugins
• Office rent (even if you work from home) plus utilities
• Insurance fees
• Tax payments (you should put aside estimated taxes every month so you’re not scrambling at the end of the year to pay them)
• Employee-related costs

(e.g. $2,500/month)

• Subtract your estimated monthly expenses from monthly revenue. 

(e.g. $15,000 – $2,500 = $12,500)

If you want your business to be successful and you want to feel good about the work you do, you have to make a profit. It’s okay if you don’t have an exact number just yet. 

That said, don’t just look at your profit margin and call it a day. You should also consider the value aspect of what you do. 

For example, if you work with software companies that sell licenses to enterprises at $1,000 a pop, a well-built website could realistically make them tens of thousands of dollars in their first month alone. A website that costs $7,500 would be a steal for them and I’m not sure you’d want to send that kind of message. 

So, again, this is why we’re going through this one step at a time. Look again at your niche and figure out what kind of value they’ll get from the website you build for them. While it’s important that you cover all your expenses, it’s just as important that you price your services based on their value to clients as well. 

A common question I see in my freelance and entrepreneur Facebook groups is this: 

“Should I name my business after myself?”

Let’s say you start as a solo web designer, so you figure using your own name to brand everything is fine. This is what clients as well as the WordPress community have come to know you by. 

But what if you decide you want to add a team to the mix? Your name could become problematic. For starters, clients might still ask for you or fill up your inbox with requests when it’s no longer even you designing websites.

For some web designers and web developers, the ultimate goal is to pull back from the design or coding end of the business and to run the show. So, you’d want your business to have a name that’s different from your own. 

You also have to think about how your business name sounds to your target audience. For instance: 

• Is it easy enough to remember? 
• Is it too difficult to pronounce? 
• Does it sound too much like another company? 
• Does it sound like you work in another industry or with another niche?
• Will prospects be turned off because it’s location-specific even though your services aren’t?

Start spitballing ideas and run them by people you know. Friends. Family. Former colleagues. Get a gauge for how they feel about it. 

And when you’re happy with what you’ve come up with, buy your domain name as soon as you can!

This is a tricky one to cover because it all really depends on what kind of company you decide to create and where you are doing business from. In the United States, for instance, we have to deal with things like: 

• Paying for business licenses and associated fees.
• Registering with and filing local and state taxes.
• Securing various business insurances.
• Developing an iron-clad business contract .

And if you decide to create a WordPress agency on Day 1, you also have to concern yourself with employee- or contractor-related matters, like salaries, taxes, benefits setup, etc. 

So, here’s what I’m going to tell you for this one: 

Do your research.

Go to your local government’s website and make sure you’re in full legal compliance when setting up your business. Then take a look at the things you need to do to protect your business. Hiring an attorney probably isn’t necessary, but buying something like liability insurance might be in order depending on the kinds of clients you work with and how much your services cost.

As a web designer, I’m sure you’re familiar with what this involves. Even if you don’t do brand design , you know to ask for these elements before a project starts. You also know how much easier it makes your life as well as marketers’ lives when clear and consistent branding is used from the get-go. 

So, make sure you spend time building out this visual identity for your business before you start worrying about it for other people. 

At the very least, you’ll want to create: 

• A logo (with variations for purpose, background and channel)
• Font pairings
• A color palette
• Image style
• Voice/personality

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to put everything into your very own style guide either. 

This way, you’ll have a resource you can turn to if and when you decide to revamp your branding or your website. It would also be useful if you have freelancers or employees working for you. Something like updating your website or content can and should easily be outsourced to others when you’re focused on building a successful brand and business. 

One of the nice things about being a web designer or developer is that you don’t have to worry about this part of the startup process. That’s why I’m not going to tell you how to build your business website with WordPress. 

What I want to do, instead, is to give you some quick pointers on things you should do to make your life easier:

Make your own website one your clients would pay for 

Your portfolio is going to do a lot of the heavy-lifting in terms of demonstrating your prowess as a web designer or developer. However, your website itself is something you can use to impress potential clients. 

By building a site they’d be willing to buy (at the highest price point you’re asking for), it’ll be so much easier to gain their trust. “See what I did here? We can do the same for you!”

Make sure it’s free of errors

You can’t give clients any reason to call into doubt your abilities as a designer. The second you do, they’re going to question every decision you’ve made and it’s going to make your life a living hell when it comes time to ask for their feedback. 

By ensuring your website is free of errors, you can ensure that their first impression is solid. 

Include testimonials

As soon as you start wrapping up jobs with satisfied clients, remember to ask them for a testimonial. It might feel awkward at first, but think about how hard it is for you to trust a service provider you don’t know when you have little proof that they’re qualified to do what they claim. 

With testimonials clearly displayed on your website, you can clear up doubts they have about taking that next step and filling out your form or giving you a call. 

Optimize it for search

From this day on, you’re no longer just a web designer or web developer . You’re a business owner. And business owners have other responsibilities than building websites.

One of the most time-consuming responsibilities (if you let it be) is the hunt for new clients. However, if you set your website up to rank for the right search terms (e.g. “WordPress designers near me”, “UX designers ecommerce”, “digital agencies Austin”), it can do some of that work for you. 

Don’t worry. You don’t have to be an SEO pro to do this. Start with one of these SEO plugins to get the ball rolling.

Automate prospecting

Once your website starts appearing in organic searches and you have prospects interested in working with you, don’t just send them to an open-ended contact form . Your website can automate the prospecting process, too. 

What I’d recommend is creating a form similar to the one ecommerce design agency SAU/CAL uses: 

It has a small footprint, asking for basic contact details. However, it also allows prospects to fill in extra details about their store, what they need, timeline and so on. Not only does this help the agency vet leads and make sure they’re actually a good fit, but it helps make the discovery call go much more smoothly. 

You could also take this a step further and embed an online scheduler like Calendly into your site and ask prospects to schedule a time to chat so you don’t have to do the back-and-forth dance over email with them. 

Up to this point, you probably haven’t spent much money on your business. That’s going to change in this stage. While you can certainly get a number of business tools for free to start, you’ll eventually have to spend money on them. It’s the only way to ensure your company maximizes its productivity and profitability every second of the day.

Here are the ones you should have in place by the time of launch: 

Project Management Software

Even if you work on your own, there are just too many moving pieces as well as projects and clients to keep track of. Project management software helps keep teams big and small organized and projects delivered on time. 

It’s also a dedicated space for you to develop and document your processes — both for your projects as well as internally. 

You can use this tool to develop a series of templates as well. So, any time you identify something you do over and over again (like a specific email you send to clients or a new project folder you set up at the start of every job), simply templatize it and save it here.

Plus, by saving your processes and templates to the cloud with one of these platforms, you can empower your team (if you have one) to update and improve them as they see fit.

Recommendations: 

• Asana (best for solo)
• Trello (best for small teams)
• Monday (best for agencies)

Contract/Proposal Software

Have you ever heard of scope creep ? How about late payments? Or, even scarier, clients that ghost you? It can be nerve-wracking entering into any new relationship, but when money, reputation and your sanity are on the line, you can’t afford to enter one too casually. 

That’s why you put a website proposal and web design contract in place to ensure that all parties are officially in agreement on the scope of work and the terms of the relationship. It’s the best way to assure your clients that you’re legit and it’s the safest way for you to do business. 

Accounting Software

You’re going to need help managing your money and an accountant might be a little too pricey at the start. That’s fine because there are plenty of accounting tools that help with things like invoicing, payment processing, as well as general bookkeeping. 

Time-tracking Tool

Really, you should be billing clients a flat hourly-rate for the work you do, be it a one-time payment for a website or a monthly fee for an ongoing service. It’s still a good idea to track your time. 

If you work on your own, time tracking allows you to see how long it takes to complete individual tasks and entire projects. This data will help improve your scheduling and may also give you a valid reason to increase your rates. 

If you work with a team, you should enable time tracking to get insights into how long it’s taking everyone to complete different tasks and phases of your projects. You don’t want your team to feel like they’re being monitored or rushed through their work. You just want to make sure they have enough time to get done what’s needed, which allows you to more accurately forecast projects and create realistic timelines for clients. 

Design and Development Software

This seems like a no-brainer, but I’d recommend you explore design and development tools that enable you to collaborate with others. By simplifying collaboration and handoff, you can get jobs done more quickly, produce better results and have a happier team. 

Many of these tools have collaboration features built in, so check on your existing ones before exploring alternatives. 

Human Resources Software (Optional)

If you decide you want to expand your web design business beyond yourself, you’re going to need tools to manage your team. This will ensure you have all information on employees and contractors safely stored as well as things like taxes and benefits automatically handled for you.

Which software you use depends on whether you hire contractors and/or employees. It also depends on how big your company is at the moment. A good one to start with, though, is Gusto .  Finally, it’s important to pay attention to the type of laptop you’re using. Make sure you have the right kind of  PC or Mac that’s most conducive for web design projects .

I originally set out to show you how to start a web design business. All of the steps before this will allow you to do that. However, before you go looking for new clients, build out your online profile a little bit. 

Remember: It’s not just your website that clients may go looking for or encounter online. 

So, while the website needs to be the central informational hub they eventually arrive at, you’ll want to have a presence on other channels as well. 

Here’s an example from Google and Zen Den Web Design of how you eventually want this to look: 

You can see that this design agency has done the following: 

• Provided Google with business details through a Google My Business account.
• Created a Facebook business page. 
• Claimed its listing on Yelp. 

Keep in mind that everyone’s online presence is going to look a little different. You need to build one out for yourself that makes the most sense. For example, do you need: 

• A Google My Business or Yelp account to reach local business owners? 
• A Facebook business page? 
• A Facebook group to grow your community?
• A LinkedIn page for recruitment? 
• A Quora account to answer questions and help potential clients find you there? 

Just keep in mind that for every profile you set up, it needs to be regularly managed and closely monitored. If you don’t have the capacity for that, then just focus on your website and one or two social media channels for now. 

Technically, everything you’ve done here will help you get web design clients . But like I mentioned before about SEO, you don’t always want to be on the hunt. It’s a time-consuming and exhausting process that’s going to take you away from paid work and building relationships with existing clients. 

That said, your SEO work is going to take some time to kick in. In the meantime, here are some ways to get in front of high-quality prospects: 

Ask existing or former clients for referrals. If they were great clients, there’s a good chance they’ll know other awesome business owners that need your help.

Connect with your “tribe” on social media . There are tons of groups on Facebook and LinkedIn where you can connect with other small business or agency owners who need clients or are maxed out and want to refer qualified prospects your way.

For instance, this is a post recently shared in the Web Designer Boss-Ladies group on Facebook : 

Reach out to your personal network. You never know, a relative, friend or former colleague might know of an opportunity that would be perfect for you.

Publish new content to your website. Content marketing isn’t just useful for raising your profile in search or on social media. It can help potential clients find knowledgeable and talented designers or developers who understand their pains and know the exact solutions needed to ease them. 

You can also use this space to communicate your mission and values, just as Wholegrain Digital does:

Offer a lead magnet. If you don’t have time to do a lot of blogging (or the funds to outsource it), put together a free and valuable resource to give away on your website, like a template, checklist, or ebook. Just remember to set up a sales funnel so you can automate pushing those leads through to conversion.

Scour job boards for good opportunities. Try to stay away from freelance marketplaces that require you to pay a fee for every job you secure. Instead, use resources like Indeed and LinkedIn Pro Finder to find reputable and high-quality clients .

Cold reach isn’t always a bad idea , especially if you’ve taken the time to research the company and website. Just make sure you actually qualify them as a lead, have a valid reason for reaching out to them (i.e., their website sucks), and have a plan for how you can fix it. 

One of the problems you may run into when your business starts to pick up speed is stagnation of your design skills. It’s not as though you’ll forget how to build websites, especially if you’re working five days a week. 

However, web design changes pretty quickly. One minute, every website is using lead generation pop-ups to greet visitors… and the next, they’re using AI chatbots to generate leads and get the conversation started. 

So, among everything else you must do as a business owner and web designer to succeed, you’ll want to make room for ongoing education.

The easiest and most pain-free way to do this is to subscribe to a few of your favorite web design or development blogs . This way, you’ll always have the latest news, trends and changes waiting for you in your inbox. 

Another thing you can do is carve out time for more formal education . And, no, I’m not talking about going back to school. There are so many other ways to accomplish this these days:

• Take free classes with a platform like Khan Academy .
• Play around with new coding or design techniques in online playgrounds like CodePen .
• Attend real-world training, collaboration, or networking events through WordCamp or Meetup .

If you want to ensure that your business does better with each passing year, keep educating yourself (and your team) so you’re always poised to deliver the most value.

The Challenges of Starting Your Own Web Design Business

To be fair, there are a ton of benefits associated with running your own small business or agency. You get:

• To set your own prices.
• Total control over your career and the direction of your business.
• Flexibility in terms of where, when, and how you work.
• Greater fulfillment working with clients you like, respect and can make a difference in the lives of.

But there are challenges, too. 

For one, you’re the boss now, which means you’re responsible for making sure that everything runs as it needs to. 

This goes beyond just successfully launching client websites. You have to make sure you’re making more money in your business than you’re spending on the business. You have to become really good at managing client relationships (and perhaps employee relationships, too). You also have to balance web design work with sales and marketing tasks. 

Being the owner of a small web design shop is a lot of work. It costs money, too (as you’ll soon see).

Then there’s the fact that how you enter this opportunity can make or break the business. 

For instance, let’s say you currently work full-time at a design agency, but your contract has a strict non-compete. When you leave, you might have to start your business with a new set of clients in a completely different niche. It’s going to take a lot of work to build your portfolio and reputation back up again if you have no previous work or contacts to leverage. 

It’s not impossible, but it does make it harder. 

Or let’s say that you’ve recently graduated from university. You have a pile of loans and expensive monthly bills that need to be paid now that you’re out in the real world. You’re having a hard time spending anything more than the bare minimum your business needs to get off the ground. 

Without a healthy safety net of cash behind you as well as the time and funds to put into building your business today, it’s going to be difficult to ever get to a point where you generate a steady and predictable income from it.

Whatever your situation, just keep in mind that you won’t be able to launch this business tomorrow nor will it become an overnight success. It takes time, money and effort to get a business off the ground and, if you’re not in the right space to do that, you may want to postpone this until you’re ready.

Wrap-Up (Plus, a Bonus Tip!)

You wanted to learn how to start a web design business — and the 12 steps above will certainly set you down the right path. However, I want you to keep one very important thing in mind here as we wrap up: 

If you do not take care of yourself, you won’t be able to take care of your clients. 

In other words, if you’re hustling like crazy to launch this business and take on as many clients as possible, there’s a good chance you’re going to burn yourself out. And when you’re exhausted and can’t see straight and your body is killing you from sitting around for 10+ hours every day, your head isn’t going to be in the right place for this. You’ll rush through your work, get agitated with clients who mean well and the quality of output will decline. 

This can happen in the very early days of a business as well as in the years ahead. 

So, starting as early as possible, set up the following burnout-proof practices to ensure that you and your business always perform at their level best: 

• Set a schedule and stick to it. 
• Create boundaries within your workspace as well as with clients. 
• Take weekends off and spend time with people you care about.
• Schedule vacation time at least once a year and build that time off into your pricing structure so you don’t see it as a “loss” you have to make up for. 
• Connect with and support other creative business owners who’re in the same boat. 

If you have a team working for you, foster a working environment that encourages these same best practices. No one is going to be of any use to your clients if you’re all struggling to get through the day. And you don’t want to let all the hard work you’ve invested in this business go to waste because of that.

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View, manage, and install add-ins for Excel, PowerPoint, and Word

When you install and use an add-in, it adds custom commands and extends the features of your Microsoft 365 programs to help increase your productivity.

Note:  This article only applies to add-ins in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. For guidance on how to view, install, and manage add-ins in Outlook, see  Use add-ins in Outlook .

View installed add-ins

You can directly install add-ins from this page or select  More Add-ins  to explore.

In the Office Add-ins dialog, select the  My Add-ins  tab.

Select an add-in you want to view the details for and right-click to select  Add-in details  option.

Install an add-in

Tip:  If you selected  Home  >  Add-ins , directly install popular add-ins from the menu that appears, or select  More Add-ins to view more options. 

Select  Add  from the add-in you want to install.

Manage installed add-ins

To manage and view information about your installed add-ins, perform the following:

Select  File > Get Add-ins .   Alternatively, select  Home  >  Add-ins > More add-ins .

In the Office Add-ins dialog, select the  My Add-ins tab.

Select  Manage My Add-ins . This opens the Office Store page in your preferred browser with a list of your installed add-ins.

Remove an add-in

To remove an add-in you installed, follow these steps.

Select  File  > Get Add-ins . Alternatively, select  Home > Add-ins .

In the Office Add-ins dialog, select  My Add-ins  tab.

Select an add-in you want to remove and right click to select  Remove  option.

Note:  Add-ins that appear in the  Admin Managed  section of the Office Add-ins dialog can only be removed by your organization's administrator.

Cancel an add-in subscription

To discontinue your subscription to an add-in, do the following:

Open the Microsoft 365 application and select the Home  tab.

Select  Add-ins from the ribbon,   then select  More Add-ins .

Select the My Add-ins tab   to view your existing add-ins.

Select  Manage My Add-ins .

Under the Payment and Billing section, choose Cancel Subscription .

Select  OK ,   then Continue .

Once you've cancelled your subscription, you should see a message that says "You have cancelled your app subscription" in the comments field of your add-in list.

Manage an add-in's access to your devices

Note:  The information in this section only applies to Excel on the web, Outlook on the web, PowerPoint on the web, and Word on the web running in Chromium-based browsers, such as Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome.

When an installed add-in requires access to your devices, such as your camera or microphone, you will be shown a dialog with the option to allow, allow once, or deny permission.

If you select  Allow , the add-in will have access to the requested devices. The permission you grant persists until you uninstall the add-in or until you clear the cache of the browser where the add-in is running.

If you select  Allow Once , the add-in will have access to the requested devices until it's relaunched in the browser.

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Apple Vision Pro brings a new era of spatial computing to business

Customized Workspaces for Productivity

• Webex by Cisco brings an immersive and intuitive meeting experience that fills the space and utilizes Personas and Spatial Audio for a more natural video conferencing experience.
• Zoom provides an experience built for Apple Vision Pro with exceptional audio and video quality, giving users the ability to easily collaborate and schedule meetings.
• Box makes it easy for users to collaborate and securely manage files and content, including 3D objects, allowing them to intuitively bring this content into the world around them.

Design and Collaboration

• Lowe’s Style Studio leverages the unique capabilities of spatial computing to help customers visualize and design their dream kitchen, making home improvement easier than ever.
• JigSpace brings intuitive, hands-on inspection and effortless collaboration to help users communicate complex ideas, products, and processes with spatial context.
• EnBW (Energie Baden-Württemberg AG) enables visualization of renewable energy infrastructure projects, allowing collaborators to see and assess designs of vehicle charging stations, wind turbines, and solar farms.

Training and Simulation

• Taqtile Manifest makes digital work instructions actionable with a simple glance or hand gesture.
• PTC’s Onshape Vision app  transforms the way product designers and engineers view, interact with, and collaborate on complex 3D models.

Guided Work

• TeamViewer Spatial Support enables remote experts and service technicians on the ground to troubleshoot repair and maintenance processes with unparalleled fidelity, enabling faster response and reduced downtime.
• BILT supports 3D interactive instructions with voice, text, and animated guidance for thousands of products to enable a wide range of workflows.

Text of this article

April 9, 2024

Incredible new enterprise experiences leverage spatial computing to customize workspaces, collaborate on 3D designs, deliver specialized employee training, and guide remote fieldwork in entirely new ways

For decades, Apple has worked to provide innovative products and services for businesses. Today, Apple products are used by all of the Fortune 500 companies in every industry around the world — iPhone and iPad are indispensable for businesses of all sizes, and Mac is preferred by employees when given the choice at work. Apple’s unique combination of hardware, software, services, and built-in support for IT makes it incredibly easy to manage and secure devices at scale. With the introduction of Apple Vision Pro , spatial computing enables enterprises to build experiences that previously were not possible.

“There’s tremendous opportunity for businesses to reimagine what’s possible using Apple Vision Pro at work,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations and Enterprise Marketing. “We’re thrilled to see the innovative ways organizations are already using Apple Vision Pro, from planning fire response operations to iterating on the most intricate details of an engine design — and this is just the beginning. Combined with enterprise-grade capabilities like mobile device management built into visionOS, we believe spatial computing has the potential to revolutionize industries around the world.”

With visionOS built on the foundation of decades of engineering innovation in macOS, iOS, and iPadOS, enterprise developers can create powerful spatial experiences controlled by the most natural and intuitive inputs possible — a user’s eyes, hands, and voice. The breakthrough design of Apple Vision Pro features an ultra-high-resolution display system and custom Apple silicon in a unique dual-chip design to deliver experiences in real time. Vision Pro uses a wide range of advanced machine learning and AI models to enable foundational capabilities such as hand tracking, room mapping, Personas, and more. All of this is accelerated by the Neural Engine in the M2 chip, which ensures spatial computing is the most powerful way for a business to leverage AI.

Developers have been building apps for Apple Vision Pro across numerous enterprise categories, from business productivity and product design, to immersive training and guided work.

Spatial computing blends digital content with the physical world, providing an infinite canvas that enables businesses to reinvent workspaces and enhance everyday productivity. With visionOS, apps are freed from the boundaries of a display, so they can appear side by side at any scale. With support for Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad, users can set up the perfect workspace and bring the powerful capabilities of their Mac into Apple Vision Pro wirelessly, creating an enormous, private, and portable 4K display with incredibly crisp text. The most-loved productivity apps for business are now available on Vision Pro.

SAP Analytics Cloud helps streamline the process of gathering, integrating, analyzing, and presenting data-driven insights to enhance business decision-making. On Apple Vision Pro, the app enables employees and executives to immediately access their data dashboard and arrange their most critical business workflows, apps, and cards beautifully in their space. They can also drill down into the data with contextual 3D maps and graphics to gain new insights. With the latest SDK release for developers , the SAP Business Technology Platform fully supports Apple Vision Pro. Customers and partners can now deploy their SAP apps to Vision Pro, alongside iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.

“Apple Vision Pro is a revolutionary device, and we are thrilled to leverage the capabilities of spatial computing with SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Mobile Start,” said Philipp Herzig, chief AI officer, SAP SE. “Going forward, we see the power of visionOS combined with generative AI being a force multiplier for enterprises. SAP Analytics Cloud running on Apple Vision Pro will help our customers discover all-new insights from complex data with powerful and intuitive processes that supercharge their business planning. And with SAP Mobile Start, we provide access to all of SAP’s business applications and workflows in unimaginable ways.”

Microsoft 365 productivity apps and AI companion Copilot built for Apple Vision Pro can help users get more done in powerful new ways. Focus mode in Word allows users to write without distraction; graph, manipulate, and visualize data in sharp, crisp detail in Excel; and immerse themselves in a slideshow with PowerPoint. Switching between meetings, chats, and shared content is easy in Teams — along with accessing the assistance of Copilot — with life-size windows that can be arranged in the user’s space.

“Spatial computing has enabled us to rethink how professionals can be productive and work intelligently with the power of AI,” said Nicole Herskowitz, vice president, Microsoft 365 and Teams. “With Microsoft 365 and Teams on Apple Vision Pro, your office moves with you, allowing users to view apps side by side on an infinite canvas with spatial computing for incredible multitasking and collaboration.”

Additional apps in business productivity include:

The display system on Apple Vision Pro packs 23 million pixels across two displays — or more than 4K resolution for each eye — which makes videos, images, and documents crystal clear from any angle. With crisp visualization of 3D content, spatial computing opens up opportunities for product design, retail planning, and construction modeling, and enables new experiences for customers to engage with products and services.

The Porsche Race Engineer app provides an entirely new way for the Porsche team to collaborate. Race engineers are constantly making real-time decisions about everything from the performance of the car to the driver’s vitals. Apple Vision Pro helps engineers visualize car data in real time, bringing critical metrics like speed and braking alongside track conditions and car positioning, combined with live video from the car’s dashboard. In February, Porsche broke the U.S. record for electric vehicles at Laguna Seca with the new Porsche Taycan Turbo GT, while the engineers tracked along using Vision Pro. This can also expand track experiences for fans around the world.

“At Porsche, we’ve always been driven by dreams, and Apple Vision Pro has enabled us to reimagine track experiences,” said Oliver Blume, Porsche’s CEO. “The new Porsche Taycan Turbo GT is the ultimate all-electric performance car, and, fittingly, we were thrilled to bring the best of German engineering and Apple’s inspiring product innovation together with the Race Engineer app. This is the perfect example of our team delivering on our goal to bring the best user experience to our employees and customers.”

Design and manufacturing processes are complex and involve large amounts of data from various sources. NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud APIs let developers stream massive 3D engineering and simulation data sets from the cloud to Apple Vision Pro. The high-resolution displays and powerful sensors built into Vision Pro enable developers and designers to create detailed, immersive renderings and visuals that can be viewed and manipulated in real time.

“The world’s industries are racing to build digital twins of products, facilities, and processes to better test and optimize designs well before constructing them in the physical world,” said Rev Lebaredian, NVIDIA’s vice president of Omniverse and Simulation Technology. “Enterprises can now combine the power and capabilities of Apple Vision Pro and the physically accurate renderings of OpenUSD content with NVIDIA accelerated computing to power the next generation of immersive digital experiences.”

Additional apps in design and collaboration include:

From preparing technicians to install equipment, to teaching complex tasks requiring hundreds of hours of hands-on work, making training procedures more interactive and impactful is critical to employee success. When it comes to aircraft maintenance, taking a plane offline for training can be costly and cause delays throughout the system. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines will dramatically improve technical maintenance and airline operations with spatial computing on Apple Vision Pro. The Engine Shop app enables technicians to train on the latest engine models in full fidelity in their own space. With this app, a technician can instantly see the entire task they need to perform step by step, with detailed repair instructions overlayed on a 3D model of the exact engine. This reduces errors and increases employee job satisfaction while saving valuable time and ultimately speeding up plane turnaround times.

“We see Apple Vision Pro as a tremendous value-add that will improve our fleet availability and operations,” said Bob Tulleken, KLM’s vice president of Operations Decision Support. “Training our employees with spatial computing will lead to fewer costly errors because the most current information they need to do their job is there in front of them as they perform the task. This means we not only get vastly more efficient in our work, but also provide a better work environment for our employees to succeed.”

Additional apps in training and simulation include:

Guided work requires the context of a person’s surroundings, such as a utility service technician who needs access to work orders or schematics.  Resolve  has reimagined how building engineers can plan for and access information they need to make decisions about systems behind walls, including HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and fire sprinkler lines. Rather than use static paper plans, users can review high-detail plans and 3D models on Apple Vision Pro, enabling architects, builders, and maintenance workers to see, fix, and comment, enhancing the entire life cycle of a construction project.

In emergency response scenarios, incident management software combines real-time and historical information with geospatial data to help first responders manage their people and fleet resources. The FireOps app, developed by About Objects and DigitalCM, marks a turning point in emergency response management. FireOps leverages the infinite canvas with visionOS to provide a unified operational view of incident action plans, dramatically streamlining over a dozen procedures. This enhances coordination and decision-making among all participants, and ensures that first responders are more connected, informed, and prepared than ever before.

Additional apps in guided work include:

Apple offers developers a variety of resources, including powerful APIs, rich documentation, global developer labs, Develop in Swift tutorials , and the visionOS simulator to help companies bring game-changing Apple Vision Pro experiences to life. To further support developers, today Apple is announcing the Enterprise Spatial Design Lab, providing hands-on support from Apple to help enterprises bring apps from concept to reality. The immersive sessions will be available beginning this summer at developer.apple.com . In addition, Deloitte announced today it is expanding its Apple practice to include a new Academy for Apple Vision Pro . The practice includes more than 100 practitioners trained to deliver visionOS solutions to clients, with a series of one-week, instructor-led courses to help engineers, product managers, and business leaders prepare for the new era of spatial computing.

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This Ramadan, queer and transgender Muslims made their own community

• During Ramadan, Muslims gather to break fast and honor community practices.
• This year, queer and trans Muslims created their own celebrations to rethink tradition and feel connected.
• This article is part of " Community in Focus ," a series highlighting Asian and Pacific Islander events.

On a chilly evening in late March, New York City's LGBT Community Center was filled with the warmth of belonging. A crowd of more than 100 Muslims — dressed in traditional dresses and robes in vibrant teal, rich brown, and bright red — set the room abuzz with chatter as they waited for the official call to Maghrib prayer, the set time for breaking fast during Ramadan .

Juicy dates, a symbol of abundance, were scattered on each table, as they would be at any Islamic iftar, a gathering where Muslims observing Ramadan eat and break a period of fasting. Among the dates were brochures reading "There is no one way of being Muslim," along with affirmations to help guests embrace the intersection of queerness and Islamic faith.

Many guests at The Center said these welcoming messages could be rare. "I've never been anywhere like this," Armana Khan said.

From March 11 to April 9, the Islamic holy month of Ramadan , Muslims worldwide gathered for acts of togetherness. They held iftars in crowded makeshift tents at local recreational centers, stood shoulder to shoulder in mosques, and prayed late into the night to deepen their Islamic practice.

But for queer and transgender Muslims, this practice of ummah, or the connectedness Muslims feel while exercising their faith together, has often made them feel excluded from traditional Ramadan celebrations.

For Khan, a 30-year-old transgender Pakistani Muslim living in Queens, New York, childhood trips to the mosque were tinged with discomfort and dysphoria because of gender-based separations.

"It was always really uncomfortable being on the men's side, and all I wanted to do was go to the women's side and be with my sisters and friends," Khan said. "Especially during Ramadan when we went more frequently, it became a place where I felt isolated."

Though Khan maintains a spiritual relationship with Islam in her everyday life, she can't remember the last time she participated with other Muslims in public. While attending The Center's queer iftar, Khan said she finally felt welcomed, not ashamed, in both her Muslim and her transgender identities.

The iftar — which included prayers led by a queer Muslim community member named Shiffa, and joyful drag-queen performances — was just one of many ways queer and transgender Muslims fostered community this Ramadan.

Reimagining togetherness and faith during Ramadan

Many queer and transgender Muslims said they'd felt isolated from traditions that emphasize togetherness, like praying at community mosques, fasting for Ramadan, or performing the Muslim pilgrimage called Hajj.

While over 30 majority-Muslim countries criminalize queerness in some capacity, many Islamic scholars disagree about whether Islam " accepts " queer and transgender people. Each scholar, institution, and government leads with their own interpretation of and perspective on Islam.

Sophia Uppal, a 28-year-old who's nonbinary, described their relationship with Islam as complicated. Some of Uppal's favorite childhood memories include waking up early to their mom preparing sehri, or the meal Muslims eat before sunrise to prepare for the day's fast.

But they said they'd also felt disconnected from Islam for so long because of the expectation to adhere to a heterosexual and cisgender lifestyle. "My mom would dress me up in hijab and clothes that did not feel aligned with me at all," Uppal said. "Now it's sometimes a deep trigger when I see gendered Islam forced upon me."

Both Uppal and Khan look back on their Islamic upbringings and recall feeling pressured to conform to generations of tradition and subjectively interpreted religious texts. At first, these teachings — like the interpretation that if a person was queer or transgender they couldn't be a Muslim — made Uppal and Khan feel excluded from their communities. But infusing queer and transgender experiences into Islamic tradition has helped Uppal and Khan create new relationships with their Muslim identities .

At the iftar, Khan reflected on how she reconciled her queer and Muslim identities during Hajj, one of Islam's five pillars.

"When I went on the Muslim pilgrimage of Hajj, I continued to have very LGBT thoughts in my mind," Khan said. "I wondered, 'If God really hated me, why would he keep these thoughts in my mind and at his holiest place, nonetheless?' I realized then it was because God allowed me to be in his house the way that I am. Otherwise, he wouldn't have invited me to Mecca or even to Islam."

For Dena Igusti, a 27-year-old Indonesian Muslim, gathering with fellow queer people every day during Ramadan allowed them to reconnect with the community aspect of Islam they enjoyed when growing up.

"This is my first Ramadan where I've had every iftar exclusively with other queer Muslims, and it reminds me of the small community gatherings I had growing up," Igusti said. "We don't gather in an optic way but in a real deep sense of care for each other. It has really solidified my relationship with Islam and continued to show me the beauty of my faith."

Fostering a more inclusive Muslim community around the world

While there are very few examples of queer Muslim religious leaders, Imam Daayiee Abdullah, 70, the executive director of the Mecca Institute, and his ethos — "We don't tell anyone they are a Muslim; they tell us" — have been a guiding force for queer Muslims worldwide who are seeking to build community.

The Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity began hosting inclusive virtual and in-person events for all kinds of Muslims in response to the widespread exclusion of queer Muslims from Islamic-identified spaces.

"MASGD spaces are not spaces where we're going to ask you to tell us your whole backstory about your devoutness to Islam or how you came into the faith," said Mx Yaffa, an indigenous Palestinian who's the executive director of MASGD. "We're not going to ask you the flip side either: about how queer you are or what part of the spectrum you fall upon."

MASGD aims to foster inclusive spaces, especially during Ramadan. This year, the organization launched a calendar to catalog the many queer-Muslim-focused Ramadan events hosted around the world, like queer Taraweeh and Jummah prayers, iftar events, and Chaand Raat celebrations. Hosting organizations included Queer Crescent, Queer Shia Collective, Masjid al-Rabia, the Halal and Queer Collective, and others.

At its inception in 2013, MASGD was one of the few organizations in the world that emphasized ummah for queer and transgender Muslims, but now it's one of dozens.

Queer-centered Ramadan celebrations highlight the beauty of layered identities

At The Center's iftar, when Shiffa delivered the adhan, or call to prayer, the crowd went silent.

After attendees broke their fast , they joined together in song and dance and enjoyed drag performances by queer and transgender Muslims from a variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

"To be in an Islamic space where I didn't have to question if I was Muslim enough or if people supported my trans identity was radically transformative," Khan said.

Being surrounded by fellow queer Muslims this Ramadan, Igusti said it was evident that their queerness is naturally complementary to their Islamic practice. Igusti added that each side of their identity continued to reveal different but inseparable parts of the other.

Yaffa similarly said these inclusive community events served as reminders of how each side of their identity strengthened the other.

"To me, Islam has never been this contradictory thing to everything else that I am. My identities amplify and elevate each other," Yaffa said. "I'm a better queer and trans person because I'm Muslim, and I'm a better Muslim because I'm a queer and trans person."

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