The Best Website Builder for SEO in 2024

I chose Wix as one of the leading website builders for SEO because of its comprehensive suite of built-in tools that are easy for anyone to use, including a personalized SEO Checklist, customizable meta tags, and SEO-friendly URLs.

It automatically generates XML sitemaps, ensures mobile optimization, and supports structured data markup. Users can implement 301 redirects, integrate with Google Analytics and Google Search Console, and leverage social media integration for enhanced visibility.

Additionally, Wix offers tools for site speed optimization, customizable robots.txt files, and an SSL certificate for secure browsing. It features a built-in blogging platform and SEO patterns to automate meta-tag creation across multiple pages. With a wide variety of templates and built-in SEO features, Wix also provides a free domain for one year, lead capture forms, a Site Booster app, and a Visitor Analytics app on premium plans.

Wix’s fast and reliable multi-cloud hosting infrastructure ensures your website loads quickly and remains available. An added benefit of choosing Wix is the free SSL certificate included with every plan.

Wix offers four pricing plans to choose from, all of which offer great value for money. Choosing a plan really comes down to which one suits your needs best, as I outline below:

• Lite: Wix’s Lite plan is just that—a basic plan that comes with 2 GB of storage space, a light marketing suite, and a free domain for a year, but it only allows two collaborators.
• Core: A step up from the Lite plan, Core moves up to a basic marketing suite and site analytics, as well as basic ecommerce capabilities. You’ll also get 50 GB of storage and can add up to five collaborators.
• Business: The Business plan allows you to add up to 10 collaborators and includes 100 GB of storage space. You’ll also get access to Wix’s standard marketing and analytics suite.
• Business Elite: Wix’s Business Elite plan comes with advanced site analytics, ecommerce, marketing, and developer features. You’ll also get unlimited storage.

All of Wix’s pricing plans function as monthly subscriptions, meaning you don’t have to commit to an annual fee.

Wix is excellent for website beginners with startups and small businesses due to its ease of use and affordability. It’s a great choice for blogs, ecommerce stores, and websites that promote events and services.

Shopify offers a great website builder with SEO tools and features that make it an excellent choice for online stores. Users can customize meta tags, including title tags and meta descriptions, for each product and page to improve their ranking with search engines.

The platform supports clean and SEO-friendly URLs, enhancing the structure and readability of links. Shopify also automatically generates XML sitemaps and integrates seamlessly with Google Analytics to track and monitor SEO performance.

Additionally, it offers features like 301 redirects for managing URL changes without losing SEO value and built-in blogging capabilities to support content marketing. Mobile optimization is also a key focus, ensuring that sites are responsive and perform well on all devices.

What makes Shopify stand out from similar ecommerce website builders is that it lets you connect your business with up to 10 inventory locations and offers incredible shipping discounts to help entice more customers.

It also boasts a simple drag-and-drop interface with over 70 professional, fully customizable store templates. It offers dozens of apps to enhance your business, promotional tools for omnichannel marketing, and a Shopify POS terminal to support in-person selling.

Shopify is generally considered good value for money across its pricing plans due to its robust ecommerce capabilities, reliable hosting, and extensive app integrations.

While its plans can be pricier than some competitors, the comprehensive tools and support provided make it a strong investment for serious online retailers. Here’s how the plans are laid out:

• Basic: Shopify’s Basic plan is enough to get started and comes with credit card rates that start at 2.9% + 30¢ USD for online transactions. You also get up to a 77% shipping discount, 10 inventory locations, 24/7 chat support, localized global selling with three markets, and Shopify’s POS Lite as standard.
• Shopify: The Shopify plan comes with the above but adds up to 88% shipping discount and insurance, five additional staff accounts, and rates that drop to 2.7%.
• Advanced: With Advanced, rates drop to 2.5%, plus you add custom reports and analytics, five additional staff accounts, and 10x the checkout capacity.
• Plus: With Plus, you get all the above plus 200 inventory locations, priority 24/7 phone support, localized global selling with 50 markets, unlimited staff accounts, fully customizable checkout at 40x capacity, 200 POS Pro locations with Shopify Payments, and the ability to sell wholesale and B2B.

Whether you’re just starting out in ecommerce or have been doing it for years, I would recommend Shopify. It’s a great platform for entrepreneurs and businesses of all sizes who want to build a robust ecommerce presence.

If you’re looking for powerful sales tools, seamless payment processing, and extensive app integrations, you’ll probably find it beneficial, especially if you prioritize ease of use and comprehensive support while scaling your online store.

As I mentioned, Squarespace is an excellent website builder for artists and creatives focused on SERP (search engine results pages) due to its visually appealing, customizable templates designed to showcase portfolios.

Squarespace excels in providing robust search engine optimization features that empower users to optimize their websites effectively. I especially love its beautiful SEO-friendly templates, perfect for anyone who wants to showcase their art or creative pursuits. These templates ensure websites are mobile-responsive and well-structured, enhancing user experience and results with search engines.

Customizable meta tags for titles and descriptions allow you to tailor content for maximum SEO impact. Additionally, Squarespace integrates built-in tools for managing structured data, such as Schema.org markup, which helps improve search engines indexing and click-through rates.

These features collectively make Squarespace a compelling choice for individuals and businesses seeking to build and optimize websites with SEO as a foundation.

One of Squarespace’s biggest advantages over other website builders on my list is that it comes with a built-in AI copywriter. Squarespace AI can quickly create engaging, high-converting, SEO-friendly website copy for you, helping you attract new visitors and convert them into paying customers.

In addition to this and its built-in SEO features, Squarespace offers professional templates for online stores, websites, and portfolios to help you get started. You’ll also have access to a logo maker, email marketing tools, a course builder, an invoice generator, and other essentials to help you start selling immediately.

You even have the option to hire an expert Squarespace designer and outsource the website-building work to them so you can focus on growing and expanding your business.

There are four Squarespace plans you can choose from — Personal, Business, Commerce Basic, and Commerce Advanced. Overall, its slightly more expensive than other website builder competitors. Still, it does include features like invoicing, advanced analytics, and online selling, so it’s worth it for businesses that want to sell products and services online.

Its Commerce plans are great since they remove transaction fees on physical products and include advanced shipping and discount functionalities. That said, I’d recommend opting for an annual subscription, as monthly prices for the site builder are about 45% more expensive. Take a look:

Squarespace also offers a 14-day free trial, letting you test out the site builder before you commit to a monthly or annual subscription.

As mentioned, Squarespace focuses on creating visually stunning websites, making it perfect for creatives. I feel it’s particularly suitable for artists, photographers, and other creative professionals who want a user-friendly platform to showcase their work that also makes SEO easy.

GoDaddy is the best SEO website for beginners, offering a range of easy-to-use SEO tools and features. Its SEO Wizard guides users step-by-step through optimizing meta descriptions, keywords, and content, making SEO accessible even for novices.

GoDaddy’s Website Builder includes mobile-friendly templates with clean HTML markup, ensuring sites are optimized for both desktop and mobile search results. Additionally, GoDaddy provides analytics tools to track performance, keyword suggestions for better targeting, and integrated social media tools for broader online presence and engagement.

It also offers built-in promotional tools for email and social media marketing, along with reliable hosting options, making it a comprehensive all-in-one solution.

GoDaddy offers three pricing tiers: Basic, Premium, and Commerce. The plans offer good overall value, especially for beginners. The affordable entry-level plans include essential features like mobile-friendly templates and SEO tools.

However, compared to some competitors, GoDaddy’s plans may be slightly pricier for advanced features and higher-tier options. While it offers robust basic tools, users looking for extensive ecommerce capabilities or more advanced customization might find better value in other platforms like Shopify or Wix.

• Basic: The Basic plan is a great starting point and offers good value, with the ability to connect a custom domain. It also has built-in SEO and content and design tools, a unified inbox and website chat, secure SSL, and 100 email marketing sends per month.
• Premium: Premium offers the same but allows you to book recurring appointments and take online payments and deposits. It also includes email marketing tools, lets you create and launch social ads, and sends 25k marketing emails monthly.
• Commerce: In addition to all the features of the Premium plan, the Commerce plan adds the ability to sell unlimited products via leading marketplaces like eBay. You’ll also get automated inventory sync across channels, automated sales tax calculators, and 100,000 email marketing sends per month.

GoDaddy is ideal for first-time site builders who want to establish an online presence and get their websites noticed by search engines. Its ease of use lets even newbies quickly build an online store, track inventory, handle shipping and sales tax, and accept online payments.

Weebly stands out as a top free SEO website by offering essential features without any cost, perfect for new companies with no budget. Its free plan includes customizing meta descriptions, which is crucial for optimizing individual pages for specific keywords.

The platform also provides clean HTML markup and responsive design to ensure fast loading times and good performance across devices, enhancing search engine rankings.

You can also publish SEO-friendly content through Weebly’s integrated blogging capabilities to attract organic website traffic. The free plan’s built-in analytics tools allow you to monitor site performance and track visitor behavior to refine your SEO strategies.

That said, the free plan does come with some limitations, such as a Weebly-branded domain and fewer ecommerce features compared to premium plans. For more advanced ecommerce functionalities, like product reviews and cart abandonment emails, you would need to upgrade to a paid plan. But overall, it’s a great option for a first website for anyone who wants to build a website with integrated SEO tools.

There are four pricing plans to choose from — Free, Personal, Professional, and Performance. As I mentioned above, Weebly’s free plan offers solid value as a free SEO website builder, providing essential features.

But while it is a strong option for basic needs, the free plan includes Weebly-branded domains and has limited ecommerce functionalities. If you want more advanced features, such as product reviews and enhanced ecommerce tools, you’ll need to upgrade to a premium plan. Here’s the info:

• Free: Weebly’s free plan includes free SSL security and the ability to embed third-party code. It also has a fairly decent amount of ecommerce features compared to competitors that will let you get a shop up and running for free.
• Personal: The personal plan allows you to connect a custom domain, add Digital Goods to your store, and create shipping labels.
  Professional: This plan includes phone support, advanced site stats, a free domain, the ability to remove Square ads, and password protection.
• Performance: As well as all the above, you’ll add the ability to accept payments through PayPal with the Performance plan. You’ll also be able to collect reviews, get abandoned cart emails and advanced e-commerce insights, and get access to Priority Support.

Weebly is excellent for people who either just got into ecommerce and want to take a stab at building their own store for free or retailers who want to expand their business and start selling products online as well.

HubSpot stands out as one of the best SEO website builders primarily due to its advanced SEO-driven marketing and sales integration tools. Its platform integrates seamlessly with HubSpot’s CRM and marketing automation, letting you efficiently track and nurture leads directly from your own website, all in one place. This cohesiveness boosts not only your marketing efforts and sales processes but also optimizes your website’s performance.

Additionally, HubSpot offers comprehensive on-page SEO recommendations to improve meta tags, headers, and content structure for better search engine visibility. The platform includes content strategy tools for keyword research, content creation, and optimization and provides performance analytics to track keyword rankings, organic traffic, and user engagement.

While you can set up URL redirects, auto-generate sitemaps, and configure site language settings, more advanced features are available through HubSpot’s CMS and marketing platform, with additional add-ons available as needed.

As mentioned, the HubSpot site builder is free. This means it has no paid plans, but you can “upgrade” by purchasing one of the tools in HubSpot’s arsenal if you want to generate leads, create marketing campaigns, build a multi-language website, or start selling online.

While this pricing structure seems great since you only pay for the tools you need, it can get quite expensive if you subscribe to several different products. Here’s a quick rundown of the different tools you can add to your HubSpot account and their monthly prices:

HubSpot is best for people who aren’t looking for just a website builder but also want marketing, sales, and customer service tools to grow their business and maximize revenue. That said, the website builder is free, and you don’t have to purchase any other products, so if you need a simple site, HubSpot might just do the trick.

Hostinger’s SEO-friendly templates are crafted with clean, efficient code to enhance site performance and search engine indexing. You can easily customize meta tags such as titles and descriptions to optimize content for relevant keywords.

I also love Hostinger’s robust analytics tools, which provide insights into website performance metrics and SEO effectiveness. These tools enable users to track keyword rankings, monitor traffic trends, and make data-driven optimizations. Collectively, these tools empower users to build and maintain SEO-optimized websites that effectively attract and engage their target audience.

That said, Hostinger is a website builder best for beginners on a budget who just want basic SEO tools. As you scale or if you have deep technical SEO knowledge, you might find its features insufficient. For example, its basic reporting and analytics may not provide the granular insights needed for thorough SEO performance tracking. Additionally, it offers limited support for schema markup and fewer integrations with third-party technical SEO tools. But it’s more than enough for new websites.

With Hostinger’s AI-driven website builder, you answer three simple questions, and it will generate an entire website for you, complete with images and text. Thanks to its intuitive editor with drag-and-drop tools, you can then effortlessly edit the AI-generated layout to fine-tune every aspect of the site.

It can also help you build an ecommerce store, write product descriptions for every item on offer, and sell up to 500 unique products to customers worldwide.

Hostinger offers a free domain for a year, a free business email inbox, over 150 mobile-optimized website templates, and marketing integrations. You can offer over 20 payment options to your customers and track website data (visitors, session time, heatmap, etc.). It features Google Analytics integration and Facebook Pixel for tracking performance and sales.

There are three Hostinger pricing plans to choose from: Premium, Business, and Cloud Startup. The provider currently offers steep discounts of up to 75% on their annual plans for the first year, with prices increasing slightly upon renewal. The pricing below reflects this first-year discount.

• Premium: The Premium plan comes with 100 GB SSD storage, weekly backups, unlimited free SSL, unlimited bandwidth, free email, and free domain, but lacks ecommerce features and the AI tools mentioned above.
• Business: The Business plan adds WooCommerce integration (basic) so you can have a store, plus access to AI website-building tools and enhanced DDoS protection.
• Cloud Startup: In addition to the features of the Business plan, the Cloud plan includes a dedicated IP address, more WooCommerce features, and priority support, among other highlights.

Hostinger is one of the best website builders if you want an easy, budget-friendly setup that offers sufficient built-in SEO tools to get you search engine results. It comes with features like meta tag customization, mobile display, and fast loading speeds without needing advanced features or extensive customization.

WordPress is renowned for its robust SEO capabilities, primarily driven by the Yoast SEO plugin and its Google Search Console integration. These tools offer comprehensive tools for on-page optimization. This plugin facilitates easy management of meta tags, readability analysis, and integration of focus keywords throughout content, ensuring pages are optimized for search engines.

WordPress also excels in its advanced SEO tools like customizable permalinks and canonical URLs, which help maintain a clean and authoritative site structure. Additionally, its wide selection of SEO-optimized themes ensures websites are not only visually appealing but also mobile-responsive, catering to user experience—an increasingly critical factor in SEO ranking.

Another reason why businesses opt for WordPress is its ease of use. This site builder was designed to make it easy for anyone to build their dream website, regardless of their experience. It also offers a staging server, so you can change different elements of your site in a safe environment and see the results without actually impacting the live website.

Other key features of WordPress include inventory management, product upsells, DDoS protection, a web application firewall (WAF), and an in-depth site analytics dashboard.

WordPress has different products depending on your needs. WordPress.org is free to use, but you’ll need to pay for web hosting, domain registration, and any premium themes or plugins you choose to use. Costs for self-hosting can vary depending on the hosting provider and the features you require.

WordPress.com plans include hosting as part of their package. When you subscribe to a WordPress.com plan, your website is hosted on WordPress.com’s servers, so you don’t need to worry about managing hosting yourself. The prices below reflect WordPress.com’s many options:

You can get started for as little as $4/month on an annual Starter plan and upscale as you grow and expand your business if the need for advanced functionalities arises.

That said, if you want to create a blog with hundreds of pages or an ecommerce store, you’d have to opt for either the Creator or the Entrepreneur package, which are a bit more expensive but still offer great value for money.

There’s also a free plan that serves as an unlimited free trial and lets you try out WordPress without committing to a monthly or annual subscription. Granted, you’ll have limited access to the website builder’s features and functionalities, but it’s still a good way to test WordPress in practice and see if it’s the right choice for you.

WordPress is best for content agencies, bloggers, entrepreneurs, affiliate marketers, and other businesses that create a lot of informational content. While it can be used to build sites that aim to promote services as well, there are better options that are less overwhelming for beginners and offer higher value for money, such as Wix and Squarespace.