Freelancer reviews: Websitebuilder.com

Low, low price on plans: Regardless of our criticisms, there’s no getting around the fact that Websitebuilder.com’s plans come cheap. Stacked up against more popular options, like Wix and Squarespace, Websitebuilder.com’s come out less expensive than most. If reducing your spending is of utmost importance, you could do worse than taking Websitebuilder for a whirl. 

SEO and Ecommerce features at free tier: Websitebuilder.com offers various SEO and Ecommerce features that would otherwise be locked at the free tier with alternative services. Simple features, like online payments and SEO headers and descriptions. 

Suspicious business practices: While things seem to have improved between now and the user experiences we’ve tracked down online, there’s still a lot of questions regarding the company’s business practices. For a start, there are the various platform clones available that we mentioned in the intro. Next, there’s a lot of horror stories online about the company’s billing and upselling practices. We haven’t run into anything too aggressive so far, so it’s possible Websitebuilder.com (if that is its real name) has improved its practices, but it’s hard to recommend with such a variety of poor customer experiences. 

Poor customer support options: In addition to the negative user experiences found online, Websitebuilder.com’s customer support options aren’t as varied as reliable as other providers. It does have a responsive Twitter account for help requests. Still, there aren’t any video tutorials for the website editor, and incredibly basic customer support options, such as phone support, are locked at the free tier. 

Ecommerce limits: Websitebuilder.com sets limits on the number of products you can host on the platform. You get three products on the free tier, five products on the Premium tier, and ten products on the Business tier. It’s not until you hit the Ecommerce tier that you unlock unlimited products. 

Simple website builder but clunky UI: Starting with the free version, Websitebuilder.com’s editor asks you for a theme of your website (e.g., video games). Unlike other, smarter, builders, all this does is run a search on a stock photo depository so you can choose a suitable header image. Even when Websitebuilder.com eventually generated a layout and color palette based on my goals, it produced some hideous results (overlapping headers, etc.). The editor itself is painfully easy to use, we’ll give it that. But overall, the experience is clunky or responsive as other builders. It’s not that it’s difficult to use; there are just some strange restrictions. For example, adding new pages and blog posts redirects you to another page, which took an absurdly long time to load in our experience, and there was no simple way to preview the post quickly.