A successful online presence starts with choosing the best website builder for small businesses.
Especially since there are innumerable ways and platforms to build your website on. And each of these platforms have something different to offer.
There are different platforms you can use to create your website. For instance: there are CMSs like WordPress, there are website builders like Wix, eCommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, etc. So, once you know exactly what you want, you can choose the platform accordingly.
But with more choices, you might find yourself confused as to which would be the best website builder for small business website. Here are the 8 qualities that you should look for in a website builder.
1) Must Be Affordable
Since we are talking about small businesses, we do need to keep financial constraints in mind. While looking for the website builder for small businesses, you should keep your financial plan in mind.
Based on what you have allotted to spend on your small business website, you can decide the platforms. Platforms like WordPress are free, but you have to look for an efficient host. Whereas there are self-hosted solutions, where you don’t need to pay separately for the hosting but have to pay a monthly, all-inclusive fee for your website.
What you can do is have an estimate of what you are ready to spend on your website building and maintenance, and then choose a website builder for small business that is affordable and fits your other requirements too.
2) Should be easy to use
Even if you are an expert programmer, an easy to use website builder can ease the whole process. Therefore one of the most important things to watch for in a website builder is to look for ease of use.
Today, we have so many options when choosing the website builder for small businesses. Therefore, choose a platform that you find the easiest to use. If you already have the experience to build with one of the tools, then go for it.
To decide the platform, you can sign up for their trials. Most of the website building platforms come with a free trial where you can try their platform for free. On the other hand, cms like WordPress is free, you can set it up at the local host and easily try for yourself.
3) Flexible Enough For Your Business Website
Businesses are dynamic and so your business websites should be ready to accommodate new changes. When choosing a website builder for small businesses, make sure that the platform has all the features to let you create a website according to your requirements.
An ideal platform for creating a small business website should be flexible and allow you to easily manage everything with the options. Therefore you can use simple options and settings to make your website look and work exactly the way you want.
Read: WordPress for Business websites
4) Easy to Maintain
A website needs proper maintenance. There are many maintenance routines that you need to regularly perform to keep your website updated and efficient.
If your small business website builder makes website maintenance difficult than it will need more effort and time to maintain. Therefore, you must choose a website building platform that makes maintenance a breeze.
For example: When you are building with WordPress, the simple maintenance tasks are all automated. You can use a plugin like BlogVault for automatic backups, you can employ a cache service to speed up your website, or an automatic image optimizer to auto-optimize the images.
5) Extendable Features
Since we are talking about small businesses, let us assume that you start small. But businesses can grow and if your business grows, and you wish to do more through your website than your small business website should support it.
As an example, small event organizers own a small business website that advertises their services and represents their business online. But now, over time, the event organizers decide to sell the event tickets through their website. In this case, your website building platform for small businesses should support the additional features required.
6) Monetization options
Whether it is a small business website or a large corporate business website – it will require time, efforts, and finance to maintain and regulate it. Therefore, it is natural for the site owners to think about monetizing the website over time.
So, whatever platform you choose should support the basic monetization features. These include a design that easily allows banner advertisement inclusion, Google AdSense support, and basic eCommerce support for online transactions.
7)Localization support
At some point during the life cycle of your website, you might want to translate your website into your local language. A translated website has many advantages, especially for small businesses.
It helps with the regional SEO benefits, helps people understand your website easily, etc. You can use a service like weglot to translate your website easily, into the language you want.
8) SEO Friendly
You cannot ignore SEO when it comes to small businesses. The whole point of creating an online identity is to get noticed by the prospective customers looking for the services your offer online.
And the SEO advantages begin with choosing a website builder that is SEO friendly. Also, don’t forget about SEO even when designing or planning content for individual pages.
Read: SEO for Small Business websites
Wrapping up
Since we are a company that functions around website building with WordPress, we love it. But besides that, there are so many wonderful reasons for using WordPress for your business website.
WordPress supports all the features mentioned here in this post. They are more than that. WordPress can even by used with a person with no technical knowledge since it lets you build an entire website without touching a line of code.
However, there’s much more to website building. Customizing your website, managing the content, promotions, maintenance, etc. But choosing the website builder for small business is one of the initial steps and can directly impact your whole experience of website building and maintenance.
Further Reading: