If you're looking to get online fast, welcome to our choice of the best website builder options of 2020.

Website builders have been around for many years, but a new generation now make excellent use of new technologies like responsive and mobile platforms to offer an even better service. The best website builder software allows businesses and individuals to build anything from a single-page site to a professional online store, without the need for any HTML or design experience whatsoever. 

Whether you're a sole trader or a multinational corporation, just about every business needs an online presence – in other words, a website. A growing number are adding bells and whistles like an email list or form facility, domain name registration and much more.

While most cost money, there are also some free website builders available, though they tend to have more limited functionality than ones developed for business use.

Additionally, there are website builders that cater specifically for musicians, photographers, and online art portfolios.

But here, we'll give you a rundown of the best website builder choices currently available.

• Also check out our complete list of best web hosting services.

More experienced users can customize and fine-tune the design to suit their own needs, or perhaps install a more traditional web design package that allows them to build the perfect site from scratch.

There are free options, but these often have major restrictions, including limits on the size of the site and the lack of any ability to use your own domain. Fortunately, the commercial options are very reasonably priced, from around £5/$5 to £10/$10 a month, with hosting included.

To help you decide which option is best for your needs, we’ve picked out the cream of the crop: these are the five top best website builder services in the world right now. 

A popular web hosting choice, Hostgator also has some great website builder capabilities. The Starter plan starts at $3.84 (£3.25) per month for a two-year plan (With our "TECHRADAR" code, you'll pay $3.46 per month). This will get you unmetered storage and bandwidth, unlimited pages, 1-year free domain and hosting, free SSL certificate, $200 ad vouchers and a few other things. The top tier plan will also grant you eCommerce functionality.

You’ll have the simple and powerful drag and drop builder at your disposal so you can quickly and easily build your website and you can choose around 30 fully customizable mobile-friendly themes to help you with the website building. Hostgator also gives you analytical tools so you can always check how well your website is performing. Additionally, you’ll have access to live feeds from Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

• Read our review of Hostgator

All the features work very well and the website builder itself is very simple to operate so even the most non-tech savvy users will have no problem with it. Unfortunately, if you want to create a blog, the features there are lacking when compared to the competition. There is no option to schedule posts and the only comments you can post are the Facebook comments. Still, if you want a simple blog it will be good enough, although more demanding users probably won’t be satisfied.

The support is great and it’s available 24/7 with telephone, live chat, or email. Although, to get the best support you’ll need to purchase something other than the Starter plan. All in all, Hostgator’s website builder is an excellent choice for anyone who wants to start making a website and they are quite capable hosting provider too.

Wix is one of the most popular online website creators, offering a range of plans and products. The free version has Wix branding, limited storage space (500MB) and bandwidth, but move up to the most popular plan (unlimited) and there’s no Wix ads. You get unlimited bandwidth (hence its name) and 10GB storage, along with a free domain, Google Ad vouchers and much more. The e-commerce plans start with the "Business Basic" plan with a price of $17 (£13.30) per month.

• Read our review of Wix

An excellent collection of 500 plus templates gets the design process off to a quick start. The drag-and-drop editor gives you all kinds of tools and features to explore – an image editor, video backgrounds, animations, social buttons, an integrated site blog – and just about everything can be tweaked, tuned and restyled. Furthermore, as of recently, Wix introduced Wix Turbo, which increases the speed and performance of websites substantially.

All the core editing functions are really smartly designed, and operate more like a native app than your average website builder. Wix does have some weaknesses, with tech support seeming a little sluggish and limited in some respects. But there’s no denying that the superb editor and range of top-notch templates make it easy for web building novices to create something impressive.

Another capable provider, Squarespace’s website builder offers a plethora of features with some gorgeous looking templates. The service is a bit pricey with the cheapest Personal plan is priced at $12 (£10) a month, paid annually. To be fair, you do get a lot of features like SSL security, unlimited bandwidth and storage, SEO features, intelligent image optimization, image and video galleries, performance boosting CDN support, professional web store, a powerful blogging platform, and several others.

• Read our review of Squarespace

One of the first things to catch your eye are the templates. They are beautifully designed and easily accessible, as you can switch them at will if you decide later that you don’t like a particular template. The website editor itself is very minimalistic and kinda bland looking, but don’t let that fool you, as there are a bunch of options and features available here. This is because they are only shown when you put your mouse cursor over its individual elements. This will take some time to get used to, but once you do, you’ll appreciate all the features you get.

If you encounter any issues Squarespace offers good support and their support team is quite knowledgeable. Apart from their support pages that have FAQs, guides, video tutorials and other support like articles, there is a live chat available on workdays from 4 am to 8 pm EST, and email support is available 24/7.

Weebly is another big name in the website building world which offers a powerful editor and capable set of features. There’s a free plan, which like Wix limits space to 500MB and imposes ads on your site.

However, if you move up to the Professional plan – at $12 (£9.5)  a month – the ads and storage limit are dropped, plus you get a free domain, and even support for a web store containing up to 25 products. The supercharged Business plan lets you create sites with unlimited web store products and high-end store features like product reviews and discount coupons, retailing at $25 (£19) a month.

• Read our review of Weebly

The service offers hundreds of professionally-designed web templates, covering just about any site type. The drag-and-drop editor is neatly designed, although you don’t get full control over where you can position elements on the page, and the interface can seem a little cluttered. A further niggle is that there is no global Undo feature.

Like Wix, we found tech support was a little wobbly in terms of sluggish responses, but Weebly offers a host of powerful features, some very stylish templates, and easy access to free images for your site is another definite boon.

There’s a lot to like here in terms of a powerful drag-and-drop editor bristling with professional features and highly customizable templates, but at the outset, let’s make it clear that this isn’t the cheapest service around.

There’s no free plan (or indeed trial – although there is a 30-day money-back guarantee), and the most basic plan is priced at $5 a month (£5 for UK) (first month is free). That gives you unlimited pages and web space, a simple integrated blog, limited SEO settings, plus website backup and restore, so it’s a touch pricey for what you get.

• Read our review of 1&1 MyWebsite

That said, 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite offers a wide range of responsive templates, and an editor which provides loads of potential adjustments and tweaks, all with plenty of visual feedback and context-sensitive menus to help streamline the whole process. What’s clever here is that the top-level stuff is easy to use and understand for beginners, yet expert users can dive more deeply into the menus to really play around and customize elements. You also get your own personal consultant free of charge.

Other highly useful features include the ability to point to your old website in order to import media content from there straight into your new site. This could be a huge timesaver for some. There also an e-commerce plan starting at $20 per month.

Also consider

As we’ve seen, many a website builder pitch themselves towards novices and making life easy for the less site-savvy out there, but what about experts who want powerful low-level control? Those are the users Voog has in mind.

So you don’t get many templates here, for example, and there’s the bare minimum of media support – but what you do get is a compact drag-and-drop editor which does its best to stay out of your way. There are weaknesses here, and the interface is somewhat clunky in respects – and it’s another which lacks a global Undo function – but it has some real power you can drill down into.

• Read our review of Voog

For example, clicking a text box gives you the option to use bullet-point lists, insert tables or videos, or even edit the HTML source to customize effects. Voog also lets multiple users easily collaborate on a site project, and if you’re after nifty, unusual features like these, you won’t see them elsewhere.

The entry-level Standard plan is priced at $8.80 (£7.10) per month (billed annually) and gives you 5GB storage, and all the core features you’ll need, including SSL security (although it’s limited to 30 pages). If you know what you’re doing in terms of website design, and want some true power and customization capabilities, there is a 30-day trial you can check out (no credit card details needed).

Jimdo is a somewhat quirky website builder targeted largely at novice users, but it’s well worth your attention for a number of reasons, not the least of which is a free plan which boasts more than the average offering.

Yes, there are the usual limitations including adverts, a 500MB storage limit, no custom domain, and very limited SEO. But there are a few features you won't get in other free plans, like a password protected area, for example.

• Read our review of Jimdo

The site editor itself is simple and consistent, even if it’s somewhat unconventional in terms of its design. Also, the editor doesn’t have as many functions and features as some rivals. For example, there aren’t that many templates, and the widgets on offer aren’t as plentiful as you might find elsewhere – plus there’s no global Undo (although Jimdo isn’t alone in this respect).

Another neat touch is a good web knowledgebase which means help is generally close at hand when it comes to troubleshooting. Overall, this is a compelling product, that is well worth giving a whirl.

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A content delivery network (CDN) works to accelerate almost any website by caching its files in servers around the world. Whether your visitors come from Europe, North America, Asia or anywhere else, content is automatically served from the nearest location for the fastest possible speeds.

If you're new to the technology then it might seem intimidating, and there's no doubt that prices can be high, but don't let that put you off. A CDN is not just for massive corporations. You can set up the simplest services in less than five minutes, and if you choose your plan wisely, it might not cost you anything at all.

Whatever your website, from a simple blog to a sprawling site for a big business, we've picked out some of the best services around to help point you in the right direction. If you find anything that looks interesting, give it a try – you can explore many of these CDNs for free, without handing over payment details or signing up for any contract.

• We’ve also rounded up the best VPN services of 2020

Cloudflare is a hugely popular American content delivery service that combines novice-friendly ease of use with expert-level features and functionality.

Setup is simple, with no need to edit your code. Just update your DNS nameservers to use Cloudflare and the service kicks in automatically, caching content and serving it to visitors from their nearest location.

But there's much, much more. Web filtering can block bots, limit content spam, keep you safe from hackers or detect and mitigate DDoS attacks. Smart image optimizations can reduce image file sizes by up to 35%, further improving speeds. There's wide support for standards like IPv6, HTTP/2 and SPDY, clever page rules to help you manipulate traffic, and a REST API allows developers to take full control of what the service is doing. Also, Flan Scan, a lightweight network vulnerability scanner is thrown in the mix too.

• Read our review of Cloudflare

Cloudflare's free plan allows you to see what the service can do, without making any commitments. It's very usable, with unlimited bandwidth and no annoying restrictions to try and force you to upgrade.

Upgrading to the Pro plan costs a reasonable $20 (£16) a month, and adds the image optimization rules, extra configurability and improved support.

Whatever you choose, Cloudflare delivers great performance. As we write, the benchmarking site CDNPerf ranks Cloudflare at eight place for worldwide HTTP request response times out of a field of 20 top CDNs.

• You can sign up for Cloudflare here

Fastly provides CDN tricks for some really big organizations, including the likes of Spotify and Reddit, and the firm lives up to its name, delivering impressively fast performance levels. Going by the rough guideline of CDNPerf’s rankings, it’s the second fastest CDN for the UK, and worldwide speeds are mostly good, too.

Perhaps Fastly’s strongest point, however, is just how configurable the service is. For example, there’s diverse support for different types of video caching, and tons of low-level controls for those who want to get stuck into the likes of manipulating HTTP headers to customize how content is served.

• Read our review of Fastly

Of course, some know-how is required to set up everything, and novices to the CDN world will doubtless be confused by all the options on offer. But for those who need this level of flexibility and configurability, it’s priceless to have.

Speaking of the price, Fastly operates a pay-as-you-go model with a minimum charge of $50 (£37) per month. In addition, you can test up to $50 of traffic for free.

• You can sign up for Fastly here

KeyCDN is an easy-to-use budget CDN that might be a good pick for first-time users.

Getting started couldn't be much simpler. Sign up with your email address and you get an immediate 25GB to play with, no payment details required. A well-designed web dashboard enables creating your first zone with the minimum of clicks, and there are guides to help you integrate the service with WordPress and other apps. 

Worth mentioning is that as of late November 2018, KeyCDN fully supports IPv6.

More experienced users will appreciate options like Origin Shield – this allows you to specify a KeyCDN server to be the source for updates rather than the origin, reducing your server load. You're able to manipulate headers, cache or strip cookies, or set up a custom robots.txt. Once the service is running, a capable set of reporting tools enable watching CDN performance in near real-time. Also, all customers have access to Image Processing feature, which is great for image optimization.

• Read our review of KeyCDN

KeyCDN's standout feature has to be its low prices. Bandwidth charges start at $0.04 (£0.032) per GB, less than half the price you'll pay with some of the high-end competition. The minimum usage is a tiny $4 (£3.2) per month and the minimum payment is $49 (£38). The company doesn't even try to cash in on the extras, for example offering shared SSL and custom Let's encrypt SSL certificates for free.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these low prices don't get you leading-edge performance, but there's still plenty of power here and you do get a lot for your money.

• You can sign up for KeyCDN here

MetaCDN is an Australian company which combines the CDNs of Amazon Cloudfront, Fastly and Verizon's EdgeCast into a single speedy service.

Why? It's all about performance. When a visitor accesses your site, MetaCDN has three networks and more than 120 locations to choose from – way more than anyone else. In other words, there’s a much greater chance any visitor will have a server near them.

This matters because every CDN delivers its best performance in different areas. EdgeCast scores highly in North America, for instance, but Fastly is quicker in the UK. MetaCDN automatically chooses the best network for every visitor's location, giving you the best of all worlds.

• Read our review of MetaCDN

This approach does have a catch. When you sign up with a single CDN, you can get access to all its individual settings and options, but combining three means you only get settings which apply to all of them (for obvious reasons). Which essentially means MetaCDN has barely any configuration options at all. (Check the Support site to get a rough feel for how the system works.)

Still, MetaCDN is nicely user-friendly and it could be a good pick if speed is your top priority. Pricing is complicated (although not bad for access to enterprise-level CDNs) and there are three plans, Basic, Lite and Pro. The most popular one, Lite, is $50 on a monthly basis (you can also choose a yearly rate, for a $39 a month).

• You can sign up for MetaCDN here

This CDN provider focuses mainly on the West, with 14 points of presence (PoPs) in North America, and nine in Europe. There are only five PoPs in Asia, and two in Australia and South America (Brazil).

StackPath is user-friendly, complete with a straightforward web console to manage your settings, and if you do get stuck, there’s extremely efficient technical support available via either live chat or phone.

Performance seems good in the US and UK, and indeed Europe, but further afield you may see things tail off a bit, which is hardly a surprise given StackPath’s aforementioned focus on Western nations.

• Read our review of StackPath

Another strength here comes on the security front, with this CDN giving users free shared SSL (or the option to use your own SSL certificate, if you prefer). There’s also anti-DDoS technology, a capable Web Application Firewall, and EdgeRules, a powerful tool that lets you customize the behavior of StackPath's CDN at different phases of the CDN request.

All in all, this is a tempting offering with a baseline plan that charges $20 (£15.5) for up to 1TB of bandwidth per month. The first month is also free.

• You can sign up for StackPath here

One of the oldest and most popular providers, Akamai offers a great CDN service and according to the company they serve up to 30% of all internet traffic. Being one of the oldest providers their server coverage is impressive with around 275,000 servers in over 135 countries. Akamai also provides great 24/7 customer support which is to be expected from someone this long in the business.

Setting up might be a bit problematic for newbies though. This doesn’t mean newbies can't do it or that they would have much trouble, it’s just that the whole service is more leaned toward advanced users, generally speaking.

Akamai has a good number of features and the performance is quite impressive, among the best in fact. For instance, the benchmarking site CDNPerf ranks Akamai among top five worldwide.

Pricing is a bit tricky, as there is no definitive information to be found on their website. This just means you’ll have to contact them directly to get the exact quota. Thankfully, they are easy to contact and you can do it by live chat, email or phone.

• You can sign up for Akamai here

Amazon CloudFront is the CDN facet of AWS (Amazon Web Services), so it’s certainly part of a heavyweight operation. And indeed CloudFront offers a raft of advanced features as you might expect, and you can customize all manner of things such as enabling automatic GZip compression for better speeds.

Another strength here is the in-depth analytics on tap, showing you details of your visitors’ device type, OS and so forth. There’s also the handy ability to set up alerts, meaning you can be warned when data transfer usage goes above a certain level.

• Read our review of Amazon CloudFront

The downside to all the options on offer is that relative novices to the CDN world may find CloudFront’s control panel a little intimidating, at least initially.

The other slight sticking points are that calculating pricing can be a rather tricky matter, and if you aren’t an experienced user familiar with CDN basics, tech support isn’t free – if you need help, you’ll have to fork out for it. Prices vary depending on region, but the good news is there’s a free tier (which gives you 50GB of data per month for one year).

Performance levels are fairly average, too, but there’s no denying the power and configurability that Amazon offers to the slightly more tech-savvy user.

• You can sign up for Amazon CloudFront here

As you’re doubtless aware, Microsoft Azure is a big old stack of integrated cloud tools for building and managing applications and services, with a wide range of coverage including a CDN offering, which is what we’re focusing on here, naturally. Note that this doesn’t use Microsoft’s own edge servers, but rather three plans that use other CDN networks: Standard Akamai, Standard Verizon, and Premium Verizon.

We fully discuss these various plans in our review of Microsoft’s CDN service, linked below, but suffice it to say that in terms of pricing – which can be somewhat confusing to work out – this isn’t the cheapest offering around. Still, those who want integration with other Microsoft technologies and services may well find the price worth paying.

• Read our review of Microsoft Azure CDN

You get a web dashboard that is absolutely crammed with features, although as ever, this means it’s not particularly easy to use for beginners (and the setup process is pretty involved, too). Performance levels are impressive, and at the time of writing, according to CDNPerf, Azure CDN is the third fastest content delivery network in the US and fourth worldwide.

This has to be a tempting prospect if you’re using other Azure services, or if you’re a developer who will appreciate the likes of .NET or PowerShell management features. You can create a free account and get started with 12 months of free services.

• You can sign up for Microsoft Azure CDN here

CDN77 is a big-name player in the content delivery game, with some heavyweight clients signed up including the European Space Agency. It has an expansive CDN network with over 30 data centers across the globe, with many of those in Europe and the US, but there are also locations in South America, Asia and one in Australia.

The web console interface is very streamlined and keeps any jargon to a minimum, making it suitably user-friendly for novices to the CDN world. The flipside of this is that there aren’t a huge amount of options, although you can do some tweaking of various settings.

• Read our review of CDN77

In terms of performance, CDN77 is solid enough, and it ranks as a lower-to-mid pack player that’s unlikely to disappoint, but certainly isn’t the fastest CDN network we found when reviewing these various services.

You get a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate, and CDN77 is pretty good value for money overall in terms of its per-GB pricing, although it’s not the cheapest outfit we’ve highlighted here. Pricing starts at $0.049 per GB of data for US and European locations, with Asia and Latin America being more expensive. If you want to test the waters, there’s a 14-day risk-free trial, and you don’t need to supply any payment details for this.

• You can sign up for CDN77 here

If you need a powerful CDN, look no further than Leaseweb, an enterprise-level operation which is still suitable for regular business users – just about, although we should say upfront that it isn’t cheap, as you might imagine.

Pricing starts at $113 (£88, €99) per month for an entry-level plan with a 2TB data allowance, the good news being that even with this ‘basic’ subscription, you get all the same security and CDN features as the heavyweight enterprise plans. That being said, you might need to contact them for exact price due to recent website changes they made.

That includes a smartly designed console for overseeing your CDN needs, complete with an extensive raft of potential settings and tweaks, featuring many options you don’t get with your average service (like the ability to set the cache-control header, or determine how long to cache 404 responses).

• Read our review of Leaseweb

There’s also an in-depth statistics section which displays graphs and charts showing many interesting stats, such as visitor and traffic breakdowns, cache performance and the top file types which are seeing action.

The one somewhat bleak spot is Leaseweb’s performance, which seems somewhat off the pace going by CDNPerf’s findings, although it’s difficult to gauge exactly what results you’ll get in practice. Users who want a powerful range of features in their CDN could give the 30-day trial a go to find out.

• You can sign up for Leaseweb here

• Also check out our roundup of the best web hosting services