Web.com Review: The Truth About the Web.com Website Builder in 2023
Web.com is a company that offers a variety of online business tools and services. In this Web.com review, I will take an in-depth look at Web.com site builder.
For this I examine:
When you’re done reading, you’ll know if Web.com is the right choice for your business or if you should look elsewhere.
Web.com Review: Is This Website Builder Any Good?
Something that immediately struck me while working on this Web.com review is that you can buy this Web.com DIY site builder on a monthly basis, giving you time to review before committing to a long-term plan.
Once you have registered and paid, you will be taken to the site builder administration panel where you can view all the websites you have created. There are also links to analytics, the template library, and your own media library. You can create as many websites as you want, but you must purchase a domain for each website you want to make public.
By clicking “create site‘ in the top right corner takes you to a page where you can either have Web.com create a simple layout for you or go to the template library and choose one for yourself. Unfortunately, there was no way to create a website without a template.
I looked at the guided process first. Web.com asks a few basic questions about the nature of your business, then takes you to a page of suggested templates. These appear to be just the templates that Web.com provides for the category of business you have selected.
The templates are great, but this honestly feels like more work than just pressing.choose Template‘ and browse the template library for yourself.
In any case, once you have selected a template, you will be taken to the website editor.
The site editor
When I opened up the site editor for this Web.com review, I noticed some excellent features:
- Documentation. The Getting Started tutorial walks you through all the basic functions of the site builder, making it the perfect choice for someone who has never created a site before.
- view test. You can see how your website will look on desktop, tablet or mobile. This is an easy way to ensure your website is mobile-friendly.
- Easy access to help. There are two small buttons in the lower left corner. One will redirect you to the Web.com knowledge base. The other opens a chat window where you can reach customer service.
Next, I started working on the side.
Moving, adding and editing content
Web.com’s website builder is a block editor, which means that individual pieces of content are organized into blocks that can be moved around the page using drag-and-drop functionality.
To add a block, Click on the blue “+‘ at the top of the sidebar. This opens the block library to the “features” section. Here you will find everything you need to create a basic web page, including headers, text, images, forms and tables.
To create an advanced website, click “blocks” option at the top of the sidebar. This will take you to a larger menu of blocks, including options for banners, calls-to-action, testimonials, and more. This gives you even more options, but it’s still pretty limited compared to what you’ll find in the WordPress block editor or even other website builders.
How to customize a block, click it. If it’s a block of text, you can start typing right away. If it’s a non-text block, editing options appear at the top.
move blocksmove your mouse over the top of the block and click on the wide part of the blue line that appears, then drag it to a new area of the page.
create pages
The next thing I looked at for this Web.com review was the “pages” option in the Web.com site builder. This opened a new sidebar menu with a list of pages. You can also add three types of pages here: blank pages (see image below), duplicates of existing pages, and pages that use a different template than your main page template.
Overall, these are all the features you would expect from a tool of this nature when it comes to page building.
Theme customization
Next, I clicked “subjects.” This opened a new sidebar with site-wide customization options for things like fonts and headers.
All the basic settings are in place, so you should be able to customize the website’s design to match your branding.
settings
Finally I opened thesettings” menu in the sidebar. This gave me the opportunity to use features such as image optimization and creating a “Back to topbutton that appears when users scroll down your page, as well as the ability to connect your site to other tools such as Google Analytics.
This section also gives you the option to enable the blog, but this option was in beta and the technology seemed very limited at the time of writing this Web.com review. (If you want to create a blog, I recommend using a WordPress-based website builder instead.)
Web.com Website Builder Pricing
There are three monthly plans for that Web.com site builderand All site builder plans include unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth.
Let’s take a look at what else these plans have to offer:
- Starter. Available for $0 the first month and $10/month thereafter. At the end of your renewal period, you can also choose an annual plan for $100/year. This plan comes with all the features, templates, and stock images that come with the website builder.
- Marketing. Available for $2.95 the first month and $15/month thereafter. You can also renew annually after the first month for $150/year. This plan includes the website builder itself, as well as automatic submission to search engines and creating a business profile that gets listed in dozens of directories (the site doesn’t specify which directories).
- Ecommerce. Available for $3.95 the first month and $20/month thereafter. At the end of the first month, you can also renew an annual plan for $200/year. This plan includes everything from the Marketing plan + the ability to sell up to 500 products on your website, track and manage orders, and connect your website to Facebook Marketplace.
This pricing is on the cheaper end of what website builders cost, even if you stick to the monthly plan. We’ll show you how Web.com compares to the competition later in this review.
Web.com pros and cons
👍 Benefits
- Access to a variety of one-page and multi-page website templates
- Block editor for maximum customization
- Affordable prices
👎 Cons
- No way to create a website without using a template, limiting your ability to create something truly unique
- No SEO tools in the simplest plan
How Web.com compares to other website builders
The next step in my Web.com review was to compare the tool to some other popular website builders. Specifically, I’ll take a look at how well Web.com compares to Squarespace and the Bluehost website builder.
place
Squarespace is a very popular website builder, currently hosting more than 3.7 million websites [1]. The company offers a variety of plans, with the basic plan looking pretty similar to Web.com’s:
- Free domain
- Unlimited bandwidth and disk space
- SSL certification
- Access to the full site builder
- Access to over a hundred different templates, each created for a specific type of website
The most important thing that stands out here are the templates. Squarespace has fewer templates than Web.com, but Squarespace templates generally look more professional.
Squarespace users on the Personal plan can also access the platform’s basic SEO tools, which is notable since Web.com only offers SEO tools to users who opt for the Marketing plan.
I also preferred the Squarespace Editor’s wider view, as it gave me a better sense of how the site would look when I published it. Functionally, however, the Squarespace Editor is a bit more limited as it edits the page in sections rather than blocks.
pricing
Squarespace pricing starts at $16/month for the personal plan, which is more expensive than Web.com’s starter plan. However, the inclusion of SEO tools makes the Squarespace plan more comparable to the Web.com marketing plan, which is slightly more expensive at $150/year.
| Surname | Web.com | place |
|---|---|---|
| domain | Yes | Yes |
| storage | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| bandwidth | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Kind of editor | block | section |
| template quality | Middle | Excellent |
| marketing tools | analytics | Analytics, SEO tools |
| Cost (Basic plan) | $0 for the first month, $10/month OR $100/year thereafter | $16/month |
Bluehost website builder
Blauwirt is one of the oldest and most popular web hosting companies out there, and the company now offers a website builder to all customers. Each hosting plan also comes with all the basics needed to run a successful website:
- Free domain for the first year
- SSL certification
- CDN included
- 50GB storage
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Custom WordPress Templates
- Access to the WordPress-based site builder
The actual Bluehost site builder uses WordPress software as its foundation to give users access to more robust blogging tools than other site builders. You can also install WordPress plugins that give you access to thousands of free tools to enhance your website’s functionality, create courses, run membership programs, and more.
So what makes this site builder different from the regular WordPress block editor? Well, the Bluehost website builder divides a page into sections instead of blocks. You choose a pre-made layout for each section and then click on its content to add content. This makes the builder easier to use, but more difficult to fully customize and not quite as versatile when working on individual pages as the Web.com builder.
pricing
The Bluehost website editor can be accessed by purchasing any Bluehost plan. The cheapest of these is the Starter Shared Hosting package, which can be purchased for as little as $2.75/month when you include three years of hosting with your first purchase. However, after those three years, the site renews for $9.99/month, so you’ll be spending about the same amount of money over the long run as you would on a Squarespace or Web.com site.
| Surname | Web.com | Bluehost site builder |
|---|---|---|
| domain | Yes | Free for the first year |
| bandwidth | Unlimited | unmeasured |
| storage | Unlimited | 50GB |
| Kind of editor | block | section |
| template quality | Middle | High |
| marketing tools | analytics | All built-in WordPress tools + ability to add marketing plugins |
| Cost (Basic Plan) | $0 for the first month, $10/month OR $100/year thereafter | $2.75/month when purchased for 3 years; increases to $9.99/month upon renewal |
Web.com Review Conclusion: Is Web.com the Right Tool for You?
the Web.com DIY site builder is a good tool for creating a simple website with some exciting features like the ability to switch between desktop, mobile and tablet views. I also appreciate that blocks were used instead of sections as this gives the user more control over where content appears on their page.
This makes Web.com Site Builder ideal in a few situations:
- You want to create a one-page portfolio or business portal
- You are building a website for your ecommerce business and don’t want to use plugins
- You create a company website that uses the blog for company updates only
However, the tests I ran for this Web.com review made it clear that the platform has its limitations, particularly when it comes to blog setup. If your main priority is building a great blog, I recommend using something like the Bluehost site builder instead, or creating a self-hosted WordPress site instead.
