Are you looking for a website builder that’s suitable for a personal site? Maybe you won’t ever find the perfect one, but at least you can look into some of the best personal website builders that bring the most value for this purpose.
By value, we mean that they are affordable, easy to use, good-looking, and offer most of the essential features that you would normally need so you don’t have to look for solutions externally.
Based on a few criteria that we will briefly describe below, we curated and narrowed down this list to five website builders. We did it to help you choose the optimal one without too many second thoughts.
Skip straight to the list of the top website builders:
What to look for in the best personal website builders
Before revealing the list of the best personal website builders, let’s quickly go through some factors you should look into before making the purchase:
🎨 Templates. One of the most important things for a personal website is to look awesome, right? Make sure the website builder offers many beautiful and modern design options, for different purposes and niches.
🔨 Integrations & add-ons. A good website builder should come with in-house apps and provide third-party integrations (or at least it should give you the possibility to integrate them yourself). Check its list of integrations to see what you get.
🖼️ Visual editor. No one wants to waste time with builders whose interface is ugly, non-intuitive, and difficult to grasp. Look for a website builder that provides a modern visual editor that you enjoy using.
🏠 Included hosting. If you want to launch a personal website, a builder that comes with hosting included is what you need. When they provide the hosting, all you have to care about is designing your site and publishing content.
Here’s a quick overview of how the best personal website builders compare:
| Templates | Drag-and-drop editor | Hosting | Integrations & add-ons | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wix | 800+ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | $0 $5.50/month $10/month |
| Squarespace | 140+ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | $16/month |
| WordPress.com | 160+ (free & premium) | ✅ | ✅ | Limited | $0 $4/month $8/month |
| Bluehost Website Builder | 300+ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | $2.95/month |
| Zyro | 140+ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | $2.99/month |
These are just a few of the features that a personal website builder should have in store for you. We’ll be bringing more of them into discussion while reviewing the five brands that we picked for this post.
Best personal website builders in 2022
These are our top picks that we think will deliver the best value for your personal needs:
Wix
Wix is a popular and multipurpose website builder that comes with a generous palette of features and necessary functionality. Not only that it can be used by any novice, but it’s also an all-in-one solution to launch a personal website quickly and without effort.
⚙️ Best features
- 800+ templates for all purposes
- Integration with 250+ apps
- Blog module
- Free logo maker
- Advanced AI that creates the base website for you according to your preferences
- Drag-and-drop editor
- Wix app market (extension add-ons)
- Free hosting
Wix’s interface is very intuitive and easy to use. Just create an account and follow the steps. You can choose to either create the site yourself or let the WIX AI create it for you based on a few questions. Everything about Wix is visual because the entire customization – be it design or functionality – is done via the Wix editor.
💵 Wix pricing
Wix is a free website builder if you don’t mind displaying Wix ads on your pages and not having a custom domain. If you want to remove these limitations, you need to upgrade to the Combo plan for $10/month.
If you want to get started, you can follow our Wix tutorial.
Squarespace
Squarespace is pretty much similar to Wix. It offers a huge number of templates, all looking modern and beautiful. You can customize your site very easily through a drag-and-drop editor and integrate it with various tools for further optimization.
⚙️ Best features
Squarespace is similar to Wix when it comes to setup and customization. The difference is that Wix is more intuitive in the sense that all its settings/features are better organized and designed, which makes the interface easier to work with.
💵 Squarespace pricing
Squarespace is the most expensive of these best personal website builders. Its Personal plan costs $16 per month and offers all the main features that such a website requires. Squarespace’s Personal plan is the richest in features compared to the other products on the list.
If you want to get started, you can follow our Squarespace tutorial.
WordPress.com
Even though you might think that WordPress is a blogging platform, you can actually build many kinds of websites with it. The fact that it powers 42.9% of all the websites in the world says it all [1].
And when it comes to making a WordPress website, WordPress.com is one of the easiest ways to get started.
There’s one downside to it, though: you can’t install plugins* (aka extensions) if you do not upgrade to the Business plan.
*In a nutshell, WordPress plugins let you add new features to your site.
⚙️ Best features
- Free hosting
- Free and premium themes
- Plugins for extra functionality (unfortunately, available only in the Business plan)
- Limited integrations with third-party services (you need to upgrade for the full package)
- Website analytics
- Drag-and-drop block editor
- Blogging features
- WordPress.com Reader (a newsfeed where your followers can see what you publish and where you can interact with other people that use WordPress)
If most of the website builders on this list let you manage your website right from the editor, WordPress relies on the dashboard when it comes to customization. You have everything you need in the menu to the left (aka functionality that you can add to your website).
To customize the design, though, you do benefit from a visual block editor (go to Pages and click on the page you want to edit). Still, it’s safe to say that WordPress is the least intuitive website builder in this post.
💵 WordPress.com pricing
You can build a website with WordPress.com for free but you can’t customize much in this plan. If you upgrade to the cheapest plan for a personal website – $4/month – you will still not be able to expand your site’s functionality by installing plugins and add-ons. You can just design the site, post content, and add some of the basic integrations that come with this pricing plan.
To access the full functionality of the WordPress software, you’ll need the $25 per month Business plan.
Bluehost Website Builder
An alternative to building a personal website with WordPress is using the Bluehost Website Builder. This tool creates a website for you on top of WordPress, while still working as a standalone website builder. The cool thing about Bluehost is that you have more customization options and freedom in designing and expanding your site in the cheapest plans. That’s because it uses the open source version of WordPress instead of WordPress.com as the core platform.
⚙️ Best features
- Built on the open-source WordPress software (which means that you have the freedom to add extra functionality)
- Drag-and-drop editor
- Hosting included
- 300+ design templates
- Blogging tools and themes
- Access to both Bluehost editor and the regular WordPress dashboard
- Possibility to install plugins and third-party integrations
With Bluehost Website Builder, you kill two birds with one stone. You get access to the Bluehost editor (which is a cool and friendly visual editor), but you are also able to control your site’s functionality via the classic WordPress dashboard and use the WordPress block editor.
The huge advantage of this website builder is that you receive all the essential WordPress features that you won’t get with WordPress.com at this low price.
💵 Bluehost Website Builder pricing
You can subscribe to Bluehost Website Builder for only $2.95 per month – the plan built for personal websites.
If you want to get started, you can follow our Bluehost Website Builder tutorial.
Zyro
Zyro is a website builder tailored for two purposes: personal websites and small business websites. While it looks cool and modern, it’s not as advanced when it comes to customization flexibility as the other builders on this list. It provides only a few basic elements that you can use to design your site.
⚙️ Best features
Zyro comes with an interface that’s easy to manage. The editor is straightforward and visual – similar to Squarespace, but with fewer customization options and integrations. Zyro also has a dashboard where you can find all the tools that you can add to your website for extra functionality.
💵 Zyro pricing
Creating a personal website with Zyro will cost you only $2.99 per month if you sign up for a two-year subscription (or $3.29/ month for a one-year deal).
Which is the best personal website builder?
That’s a wrap. Your final choice will heavily rely on what are your plans with your personal website.
To sum it up:
- 🏆 Our overall choice is Wix because it’s the easiest to manage and offers the best palette of features for an affordable price. You can follow our Wix tutorial to get started. Shoutout to Bluehost here, because it offers awesome features for a low price (it’s not as intuitive and friendly as Wix, though, but it’s good enough).
- 💰 If money is an important factor for you, go with the cheapest options out there – Zyro and Bluehost – that offer good value for this price.
- 🕊 If you want a personal website that gives you freedom in customization and functionality – and also has a cool visual editor – go with paid Wix or Squarespace.
- 💪 Bluehost will offer you a full-fledged WordPress experience at a lower price if you consider WordPress to be the optimal platform for your site to run on. WordPress.com itself gets too expensive if you add these extra features.
- 🤷♂️ The free versions of Wix and WordPress.com will do, too, if you don’t mind the ads and the domain name limitation.
Think about which scenario applies to you and see what website builder seems to be the best deal for your personal needs.
To see even more options, you can read our full roundup of the best website builders for all use cases.
Which one of these personal website builders do you consider to be the best and why? Let us know in the comments section below.