Website Builders

Website builders have converged on a common set of capabilities, which means the choice now turns on questions that are easy to overlook during a trial and expensive to discover later: what the output actually is, how fast it loads, and what leaving looks like.

Start with output. Some builders produce static files you could host anywhere. Some produce a site that only runs on their platform. Some sit in between, generating a site you can export in a degraded form. This determines whether you are choosing a tool or choosing a landlord, and it is rarely on the comparison page. If the site is going to matter to your business in three years, ask the export question first.

Performance varies far more than the marketing implies. Builders that assemble pages from generic components frequently ship substantial JavaScript to render what could have been static HTML, and it shows on a phone on a mediocre connection. Build a representative page in each candidate, then measure it on a throttled mobile connection. The differences are often several seconds, which is more consequential than any template.

Content structure is what determines whether the site is maintainable. A builder where each page is an independent canvas is fast to start and painful at forty pages, because a change to the header is forty edits. Builders with reusable components and a content model — where a blog post is a structured record rendered by a template — cost more to set up and stay manageable indefinitely.

The technical basics are worth checking explicitly, because the good ones handle them invisibly and the weak ones do not: clean URLs, editable titles and descriptions per page, correct redirects when a page moves, a valid sitemap, and image handling that serves modern formats at appropriate sizes. Any builder failing several of these is creating work for you later.

Custom domains, certificates and email deserve one look before you commit. These are commodities and should be included; anything charging separately for a certificate is charging for something that costs nothing.

For a product launch, a fast single page that says clearly what the thing is will outperform an elaborate site. See [landing pages](/categories/landing-pages).