Best website builder for small business: price the plan you need

We build and run websites for a monthly fee, so we are not neutral on this question. That is also why this page can say something the others cannot: for plenty of small businesses, a website builder is the right answer, and it costs a small fraction of what we charge. There are no affiliate links on this page. Every builder is linked to its own pricing page.

Every guide we could read on this query on 8 November 2026 had money riding on the answer: two sell their own builder and rank it first, one was sponsored by the builder it put first, and the rest earn referral fees. Most test by building an online store, which is not what a plumber or an accountant needs. So we priced the plan a service business would actually buy on each builder, from US copies of each pricing page, and checked the three things that bite later: branding, payments and leaving.

Which website builder is best for a small business?

It depends on what the site has to do. Pick by situation, not by a ranked list.

Wix and Squarespace sit at the top for a reason: they are easy to use and the templates look professional with little effort. The difference between them matters less than whether you will write the words, which we come back to below.

How much does each website builder cost?

The median is $15 a month billed yearly across seven builders, the same as when we priced them for the cost of building a website on 3 November. The table below adds the plan you need for payments or bookings, which is where most service businesses end up.

Read from copies of each provider’s US pricing page in the Internet Archive, captured 27 October to 8 November 2026, because the live pages showed us regional prices. Hostinger had no archived copy and was read live on 8 November, during a Black Friday offer. Before tax. Shopify Basic is $29 yearly or $39 monthly and Square Plus $49 a month per location; both are commerce products and left out of the median. This site is hosted by Hostinger, which we pay for like anyone else.

Three things the advertised prices do not show:

• The free domain lasts one year, and only on yearly billing, on every builder that includes one. After that it renews at the registrar price, about $20 a year for a .com. What a domain name costs has the detail.
• Squarespace’s US price went up. Basic is now $19 billed yearly. Several guides still print $16, and some name a Personal plan that no longer appears on its pricing page.
• The cheapest plan is often not the one you need. If customers book a slot or pay a deposit on your site, budget for the second price column, not the first.

Is a free website builder good enough for a business?

Not for a business you want customers to trust. Every free plan we read either keeps the builder’s name in your web address or shows its ads, and most do both.

A free plan is a fine way to try the editor for an afternoon. For the site itself, the cheapest paid plan with your own domain costs $4 to $19 a month, and your domain is the one part of the site you should own outright from day one.

Wix or Squarespace?

The two most searched builders, and close enough on price that the choice comes down to how you work.

Prices from archived US pricing pages, 4 and 8 November 2026. Export rules from Wix’s help page and Squarespace’s.

If you want freedom to place things exactly, Wix. If you want the site to look composed without design decisions, Squarespace. If you think you may want to move the site one day, neither is ideal, and Squarespace is the less locked of the two.

Can you move a builder site later?

Mostly not as a working site. This is the question none of the ranking guides tests, and it matters most in year three, when you want a redesign or a different provider.

Your domain and your words always come with you, which is why both should be in your name and saved somewhere you control. The full version, platform by platform, is in who owns a Wix, Squarespace or Webflow site.

What do local businesses actually build on?

Not mostly builders. We checked the homepages of 111 ordinary local businesses across eight trades, from the public page source, on 8 November 2026.

Our study of electricians, plumbers, HVAC, roofers, landscapers, pest control, dentists and accountants in US metros, the same sample as our small business website statistics. 11 more homepages returned a bot check and are excluded, most of them accountants on one platform, so accountants are under-represented. Fingerprints read public HTML only. A small sample, not a survey.

Only 12 of 111 run on a builder the owner could have set up alone. Of the 54 WordPress sites, 23 use the Elementor page builder, a designer’s tool more often than an owner’s, and 23 of all 111 credit an outside designer or agency in the footer. Another 16 sit on an agency or industry platform, where a vendor builds and holds the site. Broader counts point the same way: W3Techs puts WordPress on 39.4% of all websites, Wix on 4.2% and Squarespace on 2.4%, on its page dated 8 November 2026, though that covers the whole web, not local businesses.

So the question these guides answer is “which builder”, and the decision most owners in our sample actually made was “do it myself, or pay someone”. Both are fair choices. They just need different information.

When is a website builder the wrong choice?

A builder is the better choice when you need five or so pages, most work comes from referrals or your Google Business Profile, you can write the words yourself and you have a weekend free. In that case it costs a small fraction of a done-for-you service, and you should use one.

It is the wrong choice when nobody will write or update the words, when the site has to bring in enquiries from search rather than sit there as a business card, or when you have already started one that never got finished. Then you are not buying software, you are buying the work, and you should compare the people who do it. Our pricing is published, and so is a page on who we turn down.

What should a small business site have, whatever you build it on?

Common questions