Web.com Website Builder Review
Web.com is an online company that provides a website builder, along with website hosting, domain name registration, and various digital marketing services. It offers turn-key solutions to small-sized businesses and entrepreneurs.
For those with zero coding experience, Web.com is easy to use and could be a good solution. However, customization is limited. If you’re new to website building, Web.com could be a good start for your first website or online store.
So if you’re a small business owner, of one or more companies, and want an all-in-one online store solution this could be one of the best options for you.
What Web.com excels at is providing a ridiculously easy-to-use website builder and low plan pricing — its drag-and-drop editor is super intuitive. But if you want customization, you’ll find it lacking because Web.com wants to sell you extra services.
Also, while the pre-designed templates are clean and simple, they’re not the most impressive designs. It offers things like SEO tools, but limits your access to your site’s code, so for any complex design options you’ll have to pay someone else to do it for you.
The Good
- Affordable: Very low introductory price which includes hosting!
- Free LLC formation: One of the most unique features of this website builder is that it offers free formation of a limited liability company (LLC). Very uncommon but useful for businesses like construction or real estate.
- Ease of use: Intuitive interface is their most outstanding feature. The drag-and-drop editor makes modifying one of its 150+ templates simple.
- Professional design services: If you’re just not interested in building it yourself, Web.com gives you the option of hiring one of their professionals to design a site just the way you want it.
- Online store: It’s easy to upgrade to an affordable e-commerce plan and all stores include inventory management.
- Mobile responsive themes: All of Web.com templates are mobile-responsive. Your website will automatically resize and looks great on phones, tablets, or desktop computers.
- Great customer service support
Not So Good
- Limited customization: Easy to build a website, and modify it, but customization is very limited.
- Upsells: The reason for limited customization is their push for upselling services like detailed SEO, visual designs, and marketing.
- Limited image editing: Large image library but customizing image sizes and shapes is limited
- No free option available
Web.com is a web hosting company that has fallen short of the competition. Web.com does shine as a website building, with hosting service. With good shared hosting plans, strong phone support, numerous themes, and excellent uptimes as a package Web.com shines.
Prices, Plans, and Options
Many website builders offer free options, but many others do not. Web.com doesn’t have a free option, so you must pay for the service no matter which tier you pick. However, entry-level prices are reasonable – especially when considering all that is included. Your first month’s fee is heavily discounted, going as low as $4.95 per month. Once that ends, the normal rates are in line with what we’ve seen elsewhere.
The $16-per-month Website plan gives you the website builder, plus more than 150 templates and thousands of stock images. For $21 per month, the Website + Marketing plan submits your site to business directories and search engines, such as Bing, Google, and Yahoo. To access more online storefront options, you must subscribe to the $30-per-month Online Store plan. For $45 per month, Online Marketplaces makes several features available that would be all you need for a small e-commerce business.
Those are the standard plans, but Web.com offers many add-ons features.
To safeguard your site, Web.com offers spam protection via CatchGuard, as well as email virus protection and removal. You can get a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate starting at $28 per year, which should be considered an essential purchase if you plan to sell products. Most of their competitors offer a free SSL certificate because it’s not really an option you can do without – even if it’s not a e-commerce site. For $50 per year, the Cyber Security Solution package includes more benefits, such as 24/7 assistance, device and identity monitoring, and a mobile VPN client.
Features and Options
During the setup process, you enter basic information, such as whether your site is personal or for a specialized business, and let Web.com generate the site from there. Or you can choose from dozens of stylish templates as your starting point. The templates include sites for car dealerships, coffee shops, jewelry makers, and repair services.
In your dashboard, you can access and edit all the sites you’ve created, along with any uploaded files associated with those sites. The analytics section displays useful stats, such as page views, unique visitors, popular pages, and what devices visitors use to access your site. Web.com integrates with Google Analytics to deliver deep audience insights.
Website builder
You get two options when you first start using Web.com: answer a few questions to have the company create the site for you, or choose a template you like and design it yourself. Creating a website with Web.com’s site builder was easy. I just clicked a few buttons and replaced images and text with my content.
All of Web.com’s nearly 200 templates are mobile-responsive, so your site should look great on any device.
Unfortunately, if you choose a template and are unhappy with the design halfway through, you’ll have to start over with a new template and add your content again. Other site builders, like Wix and Squarespace, offer easier template switching so you don’t lose your content.
Stock photo library
Many site builders offer free stock photo and video libraries and Web.com does as well. You could find the images using Unsplash’s website, but Web.com saves you a step by building it into the site editor. You’ll get access to more than 1 million free stock photos.
Logo builder
Web.com has a logo builder feature that is free, that is great for folks starting a business or website from scratch. Getting a logo design made can be a costly and tedious process that many new business owners would rather avoid. So, for them this is a big plus.
When you type in your business or brand name, the logo maker uses artificial intelligence to generate shapes, icons, and colors that would make the most sense for your industry. Once you get a first draft you can edit and change the design to suit your tastes. It does very well for most small business owners, and for me it seemed like a very attractive feature. But if you’re interested in a marquee design you’ll have to hire a professional designer.
SEO and Marketing Tools
For the beginner these tools can be a big help. It’s a great feature. I know most folks think they understand this but usually don’t know how to execute.
Once your site is live, Web.com walks you through SEO. To start, you fill out your business profile with keywords relating to your business or industry and names of competitors, and the Simple SEO tool will give you recommendations on how you can improve. With that you get a start, and it will be a big help in improving content. However advanced SEO features are not available on the lower tier subscriptions.
Most of the Web.com plans include the same marketing tools. Marketing via Web.com limits you to local directory listings and search engine site submissions. There is a phone number subscribers can call to get online marketing help from Web.com, due to limited marketing options and Web.com wants to sell you professional services. There’s no email marketing included, so you must send emails to customers manually or use a separate service. This is where most web building services fall short, since building a customer “Newsletter” list is an important component of many small businesses. You can capture a small number of customer emails, but to build and send email to a large customer database you’ll have to hire web.com services or use an outside service.
Shared Hosting
When you purchase a Web.com site builder plan, you also receive a free domain and hosting. However, Web.com still sells three shared hosting: Basic Hosting, Plus Hosting, and Premium Hosting. Each includes a website builder, unlimited monthly data transfers, access to open-source applications, site backup, and a one-year domain registration.
For example, Essential Hosting (starting at $9.99 per month) includes 10GB of web storage, 25 FTP accounts, and support for one website. Plus (starting at $13.99 per month) ups the specs to 20GB of web storage, 50 FTP accounts, and support for five websites. Premium Hosting (starting at $16.99 per month) stands at the top of the hill with 40GB of web storage, unlimited FTP accounts, and support for ten websites. As with the site builder plans, these prices are a bit higher than before.
Excellent Uptime and Customer Support
Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. While your site is down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services—and they might not come back. Web.com’s customer service is very reliable and rated very high among customers.
Recommendation
Web.com is a good starting point for those new to website building, and from our experience it seems to be one of the easiest to get started with and at a reasonable cost. Competitors such as Squarespace and Wix and also very good, but may be more complex to get started and have a higher cost for their starter packages (with the exception of their simple free options). After testing this we would definitely recommend to those not wanting to have a severely technical customized site and low maintenance. Overall a great turn-key solution for small businesses. I especially recommend it highly to construction related small businesses.
