How to Choose a Website Builder

Most comparisons open with a feature table. That is the wrong end. Features are the easiest thing to change your mind about, and the cheapest for a vendor to add. The decisions that turn out to be expensive are the ones nobody asks about until a year in.

Here are five questions, in the order they actually matter.

What are you building?

A one-page site for a plumber, an online shop, a photography portfolio and a booking calendar are four different jobs, and the tools that are best at each are rarely the same tool. The category a product belongs to tells you more than any individual feature does, because it tells you what the product was designed around — and everything a product was not designed around is bolted on.

If the answer is "a few pages with a phone number on them", a one-page builder will be faster, cheaper and better than a platform built for a thousand products.

Who controls the address?

This is the question that separates a website from a page on somebody else's website, and almost nothing asks it.

Some products will only ever publish you at theirbrand.com/yourname. That address is not yours. You cannot take it with you, the traffic you build belongs to it, and if the product shuts down or changes its terms, everything you have pointed at it goes with it. Several otherwise good products work this way and say so plainly in their documentation — you have to go and read it, because their marketing pages do not lead with it.

Before anything else, find the vendor's own page about custom domains. If there isn't one, that is your answer.

Is the price you were quoted the price you will pay?

Three things routinely make the advertised number wrong.

Introductory rates. A builder advertising six dollars a month may renew at fourteen. The first year is a discount; the second year is the price. Both numbers are usually published, and only one of them is on the pricing page in large type.

Metering. Some newer tools sell you an allowance — credits, messages, generations — rather than a period of service. When the allowance runs out mid-project you buy more. The monthly figure is a floor, not a total.

Add-ons. A domain that is free for the first year, an email address at a hundred dollars a year, a plugin the feature you need turns out to live in. Price the thing you will actually have in twelve months, not the cheapest row in the table.

What happens when you are stuck?

Every vendor has support. The question is which support is on the plan you are buying. Twenty-four-hour phone support advertised prominently is often attached to a tier costing several thousand a month. A community forum is not a support channel, and a contact form with no published response time is a hope rather than a commitment.

Look at the plan you intend to buy, find the channels listed against that column, and see whether the vendor commits to a response time anywhere in writing.

Can you leave?

Nobody plans for this and it is the constraint people feel most. Ask whether there is an export, and what comes out of it — a folder of files you could hand to a developer, or a backup only that vendor can read. Ask whether your content is structured or trapped in page layouts. Ask whether your domain, at least, is yours to redirect.

A tool you can leave is a tool you can afford to be wrong about. That is worth more than most of the features you are comparing.