The 5 Best Website Builders In Australia For 2026 [Tested]

Ah, websites. The bane of every Australian business owner’s life. You need one to start a business in 2026 – but you don’t have $30,000 to fork out for a professional website designer. Website builders like Wix and Squarespace seem like a cost-effective alternative – but which is the best?

As an entrepreneur who has personally built – or overseen the building of – more than 100 websites over the past 15 years, I know a thing or two about web design.

But before I explain how to choose the best website builder for your business, let me reveal a few uncomfortable truths that these companies don’t want you to know.

1. Squarespace

Best website builder if you sell services or digital products.

Above: Squarespace asks you a series of questions to help you get the design right.

Squarespace is a beautiful website builder. Its user interface is a masterclass in UX/UI design, and the websites you can create with it are breathtakingly gorgeous.

I can see it appealing to clothing brands, architects, wellness studios, high-end consultants, resume writers, psychologists and any business that sells “expensive bottles” – i.e., lotions, vitamins, supplements and soaps.

Pros.

First, I love the themes that you get with Squarespace. You get a lot of them, and almost all are beautiful.

Bold typography, contemporary aesthetic, lots of white space and beautiful photography are the cornerstones of each Squarespace template.

This is rare. Most website builders on the market will make your website look like it belongs to an accounting firm. In 1994.

Rather than forcing you to choose an off-the-shelf template, it will ask you a series of questions about your business – and use the data to create a bespoke template you can edit.

I asked it to create a new website for our executive search practice, Arielle Partners – and the result is below.

Squarespace did 90% of the design work you see in the image, while I wrote the copy.

Above: Squarespace is a cure for ugly websites. I spent about 30 minutes creating this home page – most of it on writing the copy.

I love the fact that Squarespace lets you grab images directly from Unsplash (for free) and edit them on the fly using the built-in image editor.

No need to download the image, open it in Photoshop, edit, save, and upload. A huge time saver.

(Related: 11 Best Web Hosting Providers In Australia).

But as I mentioned earlier, Squarespace isn’t just a website builder. It also offers a reasonably sophisticated suite of tools that can help you manage your business.

This is the #1 reason you’d choose an all-in-one website builder like Squarespace (or Wix, below) over WordPress.

Here are Squarespace’s most valuable business tools, together with their standalone alternatives – and pricing:

This will appeal to you if you just started your business – and haven’t built out a meaningful tech stack.

Instead of spending the next month choosing and integrating each of these products, you can just sign up for a single Squarespace account – and start selling.

Speaking of selling, Squarespace offers native Squarespace Payments (powered by Stripe).

You can generate invoices, payment links and even create payment plans for your customers.

Cons.

The more I played around with Squarespace, the more it dawned upon me that website builders don’t fully remove the need for a designer.

Squarespace will build you an attractive, 80%-ready website at the push of a button.

Without an eye for design, you’re likely to overcomplicate, overdesign or overlook the mistakes that Squarespace made. Yes, it does make mistakes.

For example, the design I showed you earlier looks too crowded because of tight margins.

Above: Adding more white space to these two areas will help the page breathe better.

It would look substantially better with more white space below page breaks and above subheadings.

This might seem like an inconsequential detail.

But it’s exactly the kind of detail that adds up to create an impression the user never notices consciously – but feels on an experiential level.

Don’t get me wrong – if you’re just starting your business, you don’t need to hire a professional designer to help you build your first website on Squarespace.

But I recommend you do it once you have steady revenue – to ensure that you’re not overlooking issues that are invisible to you, but obvious to your website visitors.

By the way, you’ll also need to pressure-test Squarespace’s design strategy. It created a gorgeous-looking brochure website out of the box for me, but this website stopped well short of being a business tool.

My second gripe is aimed at the strength of Squarespace’s business tools.

For example, Squarespace will easily handle your inventory if you have a straightforward product line.

But it doesn’t offer multi-location fulfilment, so if you start shipping from two different stores or warehouses, you’ll have trouble monitoring stock levels at each.

Above: Squarespace’s back end looks like the pinnacle of clean, logical design – until you see Wix (see below).

Also, it offers a basic CRM with analytics (yay), but no attribution reporting (nay).

It might tell you that 100% of your sales came from social media, but ignore the fact that 50% of those originated through SEO. And you will conclude – mistakenly – that you should allocate more marketing spend on social media.

The CRM doesn’t offer any sales pipeline management, either – and only basic automations (e.g, cart abandonment emails).

If your business has a salesperson who nurtures leads through a set of stages, this isn’t the right tool for you.

Oh, and watch out for these two fees – they can get steep:

Finally, Squarespace provides a free logo maker, which is good without being excellent.

Although it’s easy to use, its logos follow the familiar (and somewhat overdone) hipster design language.

If you don’t want your brand to look like every Australian coffee shop, barber, T-shirt manufacturer and eco-friendly soap brand, stay away.

Overall.

How Does Squarespace Stack Up?	Score
Front-end aesthetics (can it build a beautiful website?)	10/10
Ease of use (how steep is the learning curve?)	10/10
Technical features (CSS, API, apps?)	8/10
Business tools (scheduler, logo maker, CRM?)	7/10
Value for money	7/10
OVERALL	8.4/10

Squarespace is the best website builder in Australia for business owners who want a gorgeous front end and a reasonably strong business back end.

Do you sell less than $1m of online products and memberships per year? This is the right website builder for you.

Compared with Wix, it creates prettier websites. But Wix has a more logical, easy-to-use back end – and a far stronger suite of business tools that make it more suitable for selling physical products.

That said, Squarespace shines as a blogging platform, a personal branding platform and an uncomplicated e-commerce platform.

If you have zero design experience, it gives you a huge head start with great templates and pre-made sections.

Pricing.

2. Wix

Best control centre for your entire business.

Above: The website Wix produced for me. The sections are excellent, but the aesthetic is a bit stiff and corporate-looking, don’t you think?

Wix is the online Swiss Army knife for small business owners who sell physical products, but turn over less than $1m per year.

Like Squarespace, it lets you build, host and maintain an excellent website. But unlike Squarespace, it gives you access to a native (and surprisingly powerful) CRM, plus a few other goodies. But we’ll get to that.

Pros.

In January 2026, Wix launched an AI assistant called Aria that you talk to in plain English.

It’s unbelievably good at giving you a headstart with your website.

It asked me a few questions and spat out a website that I was 70% happy with. Within two minutes. (I’m not exaggerating).

The beautifully intuitive and pleasant-to-use UI removed all frustration and clunkiness that usually occurs during the finessing stage of a website build.

Above: Wix’s chatbot asks what you need – and proceeds to build it for you.

It also nailed the sections – and their order.

While Squarespace built a site that looks like a leaflet, Wix build focused on commercially relevant stuff – testimonials, case studies and a strong benefits section.

But the website it spat out wasn’t as pretty as I had hoped (see “Cons” below).

In Wix’ defence – and I say this realising the irony – you don’t buy Wix because you love its website builder.

You buy it because you want Wix to become the control centre for your business.

Because it has a built-in CRM with Kanban-style pipeline management and decent automation, it can:

Without ever leaving Wix.

That’s a lot of value for a small business. Especially from a platform that makes most of its features available for $42/month.

Squarespace can’t do any of this. If you need to nurture leads, you’ll be buying Pipedrive ($34/month) and stitching it with either Zapier ($27/month).

You haven’t magically discovered a hack that will remove the need for you to one day pay $2,000/month for a “grown-up” CRM.

If your business grows, complexity will increase – and you’ll need a CRM that can cope with it.

I also like that Wix lets you send 200 email marketing emails per month for free – unlike Squarespace, which demands a recurring fee out of the gate.

This won’t matter for a business with 20,000 newsletter subscribers. But if your business has 70 customers, and you want to email them a couple of times per month, this is perfect.

Above: Wix’s layout is clean and logical, but it looks more complex than Squarespace’s.

Wix’s back end is a work of art. Even though it has more features than Squarespace, it’s also easier to figure out – and to live with on a daily basis.

The categories are more logical and clear, while the UI is better at nudging you in the right direction.

This is a meaningful advantage over Squarespace if you’re an Australian business selling internationally – because your customers will be able to transact in their currency.

And speaking of payment, the processor has a wrinkle that I’ll discuss shortly, but the fees are comparable with Squarespace’s.

In fact, they’ll be almost identical, because you’ll integrate with the same processor – Stripe.

Cons.

The website Wix produced for me wasn’t as beautiful as the one Squarespace created.

While Squarespace’s aesthetic looked polished and premium, Wix’s was more angular. Stiff. Corporate-looking.

Lack of native payment infrastructure is also disappointing. In the US, Wix offers built-in Wix Payments. But in Australia, you need to integrate Wix with an external processor like Stripe or PayPal.

It’s not a deal-breaker, but it does chip away at the “everything under one roof” value proposition.

The silver lining? If you ever want to migrate away from Wix, you get to keep your transaction data.

Above: Wix’s Design Agent produced this “LinkedIn ad graphic” out of the box. Oh man – there’s a lot of room for improvement.

Midway through 2026, Wix embedded a suite of agents inside the app, which includes a Design Agent, a Marketing Agent and a Front Desk Agent.

I played around with some, and am reluctant to recommend them as selling points.

I’d also caution against blindly embracing Wix as your perfect all-in-one CRM/ERP/website builder software package.

Wix is fantastic if you’re a solo founder, or perhaps have a team of three – you, a salesperson and a product lead.

Add a second salesperson, and Wix will cope – because it will let you assign different deals to different people.

But as soon as you want to limit deal-access rules, territories, quotas and team hierarchies, you enter a territory where dedicated CRMs such as HubSpot give you considerably more freedom.

Your marketing person wants more sophisticated attribution – to better manage their advertising budget.

And you’ll hit Wix’s biggest weakness on the day you decide you’ve outgrown it:

Suddenly a simple website update becomes a 3-6 month business transformation project. One that involves rebuilding your processes and retraining your staff.

Overall.

How Does Wix Stack Up?	Score
Front-end aesthetics (can it build a beautiful website?)	7/10
Ease of use (how steep is the learning curve?)	7/10
Technical features (CSS, API, apps?)	9/10
Business tools (scheduler, logo maker, CRM?)	10/10
Value for money	8/10
OVERALL	8.2/10

Wix is not a simple website builder.

It’s a powerful all-in-one digital toolbox that wants to take care of your CRM, website, web hosting, client booking and payment processing needs.

Most importantly, it can scale with your business – to a point.

Yet, this is Wix’s greatest strength, and the reason it’s one of the best website builders in Australia.

Design-wise, Wix’s websites have room for improvement.

But its advantage is that it delays the moment your business needs to fork out $30,000-$50,000/year on a “grown-up” software stack. It lets you build a site, start taking payments and follow up with leads – without making you stitch together 7 different SaaS products.

For a young business, that’s enormously valuable.

Pricing.

3. WordPress + WPEngine

Best website builder for world-class entrepreneurs.

If you have dreams of building a world-class business, you need to build your website on WordPress.

And if you run WordPress, I recommend WPEngine as your web host – because it’s built specifically for it.

Yes, you can get cheaper web hosting for as little as $5/month somewhere like CrazyDomains, but this brings disadvantages that I’ll discuss shortly.

Let me explain.

If you baulk at the idea of spending a few days learning the ropes of WordPress, you’re in for a real shock when the real challenges of entrepreneurship begin.

That said, people who criticise WordPress did have a valid point a few years ago. It was clunky and required a decent amount of coding knowledge.

It makes it easy for anyone to create rich, flexible content layouts with its block-based UI.

To prove my point, I’m about to get meta on you. Below is exactly what I’m looking at while writing this review for you, in WordPress.

Above: There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s a blocks-based user interface that you control through familiar buttons and menus.

Pros.

WordPress scales better than any other website builder. This is the #1 reason it powers over 43% of the Internet as of 2026.

In a study that analysed the top 1 million websites in the world, WordPress was used almost 60X more often than Squarespace:

Source: W3Techs.com

Scalability is the reason for its popularity.

In other words, you must ensure that your web platform grows in sync with your business, and never runs into a dead end.

Replacing platforms is expensive and time-consuming because it involves rebuilding your internal processes and retraining your staff.

These events also come at the worst possible time, when your business is experiencing rapid growth, and the last thing you need on your plate is an IT distraction.

If you own a serious business that requires a lot of custom functionality (e.g., a forex trading platform or a trading app), WordPress is the website builder for you.

Even though it includes built-in templates out of the box, I recommend downloading one from ThemeForest by Envato Market.

Above: For between $30 and $90, you can download a WordPress template on Envato that no website builder will ever match.

You also get best-in-class SEO tools, marketing tools, and ecommerce tools.

WPEngine is just that. An engine that will power your WordPress website, day and night, keep it running fast, secure and backed up.

Cons.

I must invoke the Apple vs Android analogy again.

WordPress, the Android of the site builder world, gives you ultimate flexibility, but this comes at a cost.

When you go with an all-in-one vendor like Squarespace, you get everything from one vendor. The builder, the hosting, the templates and the widgets are in one spot.

And the support team is actually trained on the product, so they have the power to fix the issue at the core, rather than sending you on “their plugin broke our theme” types of wild goose chases.

That said, in 90% of cases, I solve the problem by submitting a support ticket to a relevant provider, going to bed, and seeing it resolved the next day.

My last gripe with WordPress relates specifically to WPEngine.

It gets very expensive, very fast.

The entry-level $83/month package puts your website on a shared server. Not the best hosting choice for mission-critical websites.

A dedicated server starts at $560 /month (but ~$1,000 is more likely if you get any decent traffic).

Why the obscene prices?

And AWS is expensive to begin with.

This doesn’t mean WPEngine is a bad choice. It’s one of the best WordPress hosting platforms if you have a mission-critical website that experiences traffic surges (e.g., massive e-commerce sales or blog traffic spikes).

And because WPEngine handles all server maintenance, you never have to worry about PITA OS upgrades, MySQL compatibility, load sharing, etc, etc.

Overall.

How Does WordPress/WPEngine Stack Up?	Score
Front-end aesthetics (can it build a beautiful website?)	10/10
Ease of use (how steep is the learning curve?)	7/10
Technical features (CSS, API, apps?)	10/10
Business tools (scheduler, logo maker, CRM?)	10/10
Value for money	8/10
OVERALL	9/10

WordPress powered by WPEngine is best for ambitious, gritty entrepreneurs with big visions.

If this is you, don’t mess around with Squarespace or online shop builders like BigCommerce or Shopify.

Those are just training wheels that you’ll end up jettisoning in 12 months’ time as your business grows, anyway.

4. Webflow.

Best for agencies and experienced designers who don’t code.

One of the coolest things about Webflow is that it allows you to design your website from scratch, and be constrained only by your imagination – without forcing you to learn to code.

You can change padding, border radius, margins, and line height to your heart’s content.

But more importantly, you can enter a professional workflow, reusing styles, elements and styles globally via dynamic content, as well as controlling micro-details of your website, such as wrappers and hero content.

Pros.

One of the coolest things about Webflow is that it allows you to design your website from scratch, and be constrained only by your imagination – without forcing you to learn to code.

But more importantly, you can enter a professional workflow, reusing styles, elements and styles globally via dynamic content, as well as controlling micro-details of your website, such as wrappers and hero content.

Webflow won’t force you to add any plugins or extensions in a refreshing move. Everything is available from the interface.

This makes the interface quite complex, but as an antidote, Webflow offers a comprehensive University that includes videos, courses, articles and a private forum.

Cons.

Webflow’s interface is pretty dense. It’s definitely something that will take you a few weeks to master.

Above: Webflow’s interface is a beast. Think Photoshop or Final Cut Pro, but in a browser.

It’s not the type of environment that is immediately intuitive nor a huge pleasure to use.

I’m also not a big fan of Webflow’s templates. You get a selection of free ones, but almost all of them are very ordinary.

Given that Webflow’s target clients are professional designers and agencies, I suspect these templates rarely get used, and most websites are built from scratch.

Overall.

How Does Webflow Stack Up?	Score
Front-end aesthetics (can it build a beautiful website?)	8/10
Ease of use (how steep is the learning curve?)	6/10
Technical features (CSS, API, apps?)	10/10
Business tools (scheduler, logo maker, CRM?)	8/10
Value for money	8/10
OVERALL	8/10

If you’re a design professional who wants to be unconstrained by the limitations of typical site builders, but you don’t code and don’t want to mess around with separate domains and web hosting, Webflow is a powerful option.

Webflow will also fit an amateur who wants an extra layer of control to do some tinkering on the back end.

It does have a learning curve, so it’s not for people who want a website fast. If you’re a doctor, a lawyer or a small business owner who needs a one-page website fast, Webflow is not for you.

Pricing.

5. Duda.

Best for emerging designers.

Aimed at professional designers who have been in the web-building game for about 5 years, Duda provides a robust set of client management tools, great templates and a sophisticated e-commerce capability.

It can be used by small business owners and people who want a simple portfolio site, but if you fall into that camp, you’re much better served by the simplicity of Squarespace.

Instead of competing directly with WordPress, Squarespace and Wix, Duda describes itself as a B2B website builder and focuses on the needs of web-building agencies and freelancers.

Pros

Duda’s Quick-to-access global design functionality allows you to set a consistent style across all of your website’s elements and pages.

The design of the sections is very good. You can preview them directly in the builder, and this saves you a copious amount of time in saving and refreshing.

Adding content is a matter of dropping widgets onto Duda’s page.

The builder offers hundreds of widgets, allowing you to choose design elements and functionality for your site.

Above: Duda’s UI is logical and clear. The product page, for example, offers subtle hints that help you complete the setup and links to additional features that you should consider activating.

As a business tool, Duda allows you to white-label its platform by adding logos to its every touchpoint and setting your own prices for web hosting, site management and design services.

For example, if a client stops paying for their website, you can set up an automation that takes their website offline and sends them email reminders until they pay again.

No more lengthy emails that start with “In regards to that blue button on the about page, about halfway down…”.

Your client can provide notes about the offending button directly in the interface.

Above: Duda allows you to swap templates on the fly from within the builder.

You get advanced responsiveness controls. While Dudo will do its best to convert your design into a mobile-friendly layout, it doesn’t always get it right.

For those situations, it allows you to manually specify page breakpoints to ensure your design vision is consistent across all devices.

Support is available via live chat from inside the builder.

Oh, did I mention that a free logo maker is also included as a widget, and it’s surprisingly good?

Cons

Duda’s interface is a bit on the convoluted side.

It won’t pose a huge challenge to someone who has previously built websites, but a novice should expect to spend time familiarising themselves with the features.

For example, I couldn’t figure out how to change the background of a header from a gradient to a solid colour.

Overall.

How Does Duda Stack Up?	Score
Front-end aesthetics (can it build a beautiful website?)	7.5/10
Ease of use (how steep is the learning curve?)	7.5/10
Technical features (CSS, API, apps?)	8/10
Business tools (scheduler, logo maker, CRM?)	7/10
Value for money	7/10
OVERALL	7.4/10

For a relatively unknown website builder, Duda is very good.

It’s best suited to a digital native with moderate design skills or a freelance web designer who builds good, inexpensive websites for clients.

It has some quirks, but they’re not of the deal-breaker variety.

Expect to spend some time poking around its features, and maybe even have to submit a support ticket or two before you finish your website.

Pricing.

The Worst Website Builder In Australia: Weebly (Square)

Terrible all around.

When you sign up, you get a decision tree – a business website or a personal website.

The latter option is very simple and has decent templates. They’re not remarkable, just OK. Very 2014.

One of the key features of Weebly is its eCommerce platform, which makes it easy to set up an online store. It’s powered by Square, the company that acquired them a few years ago.

When you sign up, you must choose whether to build e-commerce or a personal website.

Pros.

I like that the Weebly e-commerce option only allows you to work on the level of sections. It doesn’t let you move things around at the element level, which is good.

You end up with a somewhat stiff-looking website, but you cannot break anything.

You can integrate Google Analytics, add custom header scripts and checkout tracking scripts, create 301 redirects and edit page URLs, titles and descriptions, alt text for images.

Checkout is done, predictably, by Square, and you get charged 2.2% on top of every transaction for the honour.

Above: Square, Afterpay and PayPal are integrated into the platform; you just need to provide logins to activate them.

You can create automated shipping calculations based on the address you’ll be shipping from.

You get the ability to insert pre-built sections into your pages, and these cover a good amount of use cases:

I like the ability to toggle between a desktop and mobile version of your website.

The always-on-tap tutorials live in the bottom right corner and are very helpful at putting instructions at your fingertips in visual form, instead of you having to flick across to page in the knowledgebase.

Cons.

If you choose the option to build an e-commerce store, you don’t get access to templates.

This is dumb. You’re left to your own design skills. If I’m going to sit here and design, I’d rather use a platform that gives me more flexibility.

You don’t get the ability to create a blog and publish posts, either.

Decent site traffic analytics is available for paid plans. It’s a bit redundant because it doesn’t offer goals and insights into costs per conversion, so you’ll need to use GA anyway.

The templates are pretty crap, and their selection is limited, so you’ll be tempted to customise them. Once you do, using the somewhat clunky UI, you’re bound to create a fruit salad.

Above: Weebly’s UI is tolerable but doesn’t keep up with what you get with the best website builders like Squarespace and Webflow.

When using the Weebly builder’s personal side, you cannot grab images directly from free libraries like Unsplash.

The UI isn’t intuitive, either. I found myself getting stuck on the personal website side, and dealing with popups.

Finally, you cannot preview your website until you’ve paid for the plan. I think I know why.

Overall.

Weebly is in an awkward place. Its pure e-commerce mode is not as scalable or flexible as Shopify.

Its pure CMS/personal website mode is very similar but not as pretty as Squarespace.

The frictionless integration with 99Designs is cool, but again, if you’re in a position where you want to spend $500+ to set up your website, you’re probably in a position to consider more advanced platforms.

While decent, these cars struggle with sales because they’re stuck in no man’s land.

Not as reliable as Toyotas, not as refined as BMWs and not as cheap as Hyundais, they lack a distinct identity.

Apps are available from within the platform, some are free, but many of them seem to be rated quite low. For example, here’s a screenshot of a form that costs $8/month but gets 3/5 stars. Are you inspired to build your brand on this?

There’s something “stuck in 2015”, dreary and “the rats have abandoned ship” about every aspect of Weebly.

5 Other Website Builders To Avoid.

These four products are far from being the best website builders in Australia.

They’re decent products, but you’re much better off choosing one of the options above, depending on your need.

1. BlueHost+Wordpress

As I mentioned elsewhere, the only reason Bluehost gets recommended is because of its generous referral commissions.

Any reviewer who is half-honest will not recommend it, especially in the Australian market, as the platform doesn’t offer .com.au domain names.

2. WordPress.com

This option is the worst of all worlds. You get to deal with the relative complexity of WordPress, but you don’t get the benefits of freedom that a self-hosted WordPress website offers.

3. BigCommerce

Also standing at an awkward cross-road, BigCommerce is complicated, powerful, bloated, and not very user-friendly.

It does everything BigCommerce does and more, but is further ahead on the user experience front. It also has a much larger pool of available integrations.

4. GoDaddy.com

You can use GoDaddy’s website builder in 30 minutes. I’m not kidding. It is by far the simplest website builder to use.

If you’re just after a billboard on the internet, a one-page website or your own review of the best website builders in Australia, then this website builder is for you.

5. Hostinger Website Builder.

Touting its “AI website building tools”, Hostinger’s website builder comes with Hostinger web hosting.

Yes, it’s a lure. And you’re the fish.

It has decent website builder functionality with a nice range of templates, but is aimed squarely at beginners. There’s nothing it can do that Squarespace or Wix can’t, but the latter can do a lot more.

Why I’ve Never Liked Website Builders.

Confession time. I’ve been building websites for over 15 years. During this time, I’ve personally built or overseen the development of over 100 websites.

Don’t get me wrong.

I’ve tried to like them. I’ve tested them. I’ve even tried to build my own websites, client and business websites using them. Yet, I’ve never become a fan.

Two reasons:

Hence, I’ve always stuck with WordPress. I’ve always viewed it as the best website builder for me, and for 95% of Australians.

It takes more time to master in the short term, but in my view, playing the long game is the key to success in business and life.

They’ve improved their drag-and-drop editors, rolled out advanced SEO features, and added gorgeous templates.

Because my job requires me to be on the cutting edge, I started road-testing the most popular website builders on the Australian market in 2026.

My dilemma was:

The Uncomfortable Truth About Website Builder Reviews.

I love writing about stuff that I know something about. This is easy for me because I have a lot of experience with web development.

That said, website builder reviewers are corrupt because of incentives to provide favourable reviews.

They’re one of the best web hosting services, but certainly not the best. Yet, few reviewers can resist the juicy $65 commission.

My Testing Methodology For Best Website Builders In 2026.

I signed up for a paid plan with each site builder and used it to build a full new website.

Every site that I built included:

As a digital native with a tonne of web development experience, I did not read guides or watch tutorials prior to building each site. But, when I did get stuck, I’d check the knowledge base.

What I Looked For In Website Builders (And How They Compared).

For a website builder to score highly in my review, it needed to show competence across 5 primary dimensions. Here’s how the top 5 stacked up side-by-side.

	Squarespace	Wix	WordPress	Webflow	Duda
Front end aesthetics	10	10	10	8	7.5
Ease of use	10	9	7	6	7.5
Technical features	9	9	10	10	8
Business tools	9	10	10	8	7
Value for money	10	9	8	8	7
OVERALL	9.4	9	9	8	7.4

And here’s what each criterion means (is “criterion” a word?):

1. Front End Aesthetics.

How pretty are the templates? How many templates are available – and how many are good-looking? How good are the colour palettes?

Beyond that:

If the website builder doesn’t pass the scrutiny of these questions, I don’t even bother assessing it further. Australian users expect good-looking websites in 2026. Ugly, crappy stuff won’t cut it.

2. Ease Of Use.

How steep is the learning curve? How complicated is the back end? How intuitive is the interface?

If I do need support, how good is it? Is it limited to text-based tutorials, or does it also include video walk-throughs? Is there an option to speak with a real human?

3. Technical Features.

How good is the advanced SEO functionality (e.g. sitemaps, robot blocking)?

Beyond that – can I add custom CSS (globally and at the level of individual elements)? How easy is it to expand functionality using integrations, plugins and extensions?

4. Business Tools.

Business tools are expensive. Especially when you buy them separately.

A typical annual bill for digital tools in a business that turns over between $100K – $2M per year might look something like this:

Some website builders include a lot of these tools for free, which makes them incredible value for money.

5. Value For Money.

Value is relative and is much more important than absolute cost. Most people build a website to start a small business or augment their brand.

Another consideration is that of upfront vs ongoing costs. How much do you pay now and once, and how much do you pay monthly?

Website builders trick you into believing that prices are lower than they are by showing them in a weekly context.

The secondary features are:

Any website builder not scoring at least 7.5 out of 10 on any of those metrics will die a very slow, painful death.

How A Person With No Design Skills Can Build A Beautiful Website.

There is a trick to making your website look great.

Statistically speaking, you probably don’t have design chops.

Even if you did, you’d still need to build at least 5-10 websites, and suffer the agony of them looking like ugly abominations to figure out what works in web design and what doesn’t.

Limit yourself to moving large sections only. Do not move individual elements within those sections, and don’t change font sizes or image sizes.

Frequently Asked Questions About Australian Website Builders.

Here’s what people usually ask me about this topic.

What’s the best template and hosting option for WordPress?

WordPress is a platform that you download for free. You install it on your web host and customise it to your exact needs using themes and plugins.

This means you’ll need:

If you’re in Australia, I recommend Namecheap for the former and WPEngine for the latter. The best WordPress templates (by far) are on Envato.

Is WordPress a website builder?

Let me clear up some confusion first. When people mention WordPress, they refer to one of two entities – WordPress.com or WordPress.org.

They’re wildly different from each other.

WordPress.org is an open-source platform you can download for free and install on your web host. Think of it like this:

Which website builders include SEO?

If you’re looking to build a website that will rank highly in search engine results, you need to choose a website builder that includes search engine optimization (SEO) features.

Some include basic features that will help your site rank higher, while others go the extra mile with comprehensive tools and resources.

To help you make the best decision for your website, we’ve tested them all and concluded that Squarespace is the best option for SEO.

What is a mobile-responsive site?

Responsiveness is the site’s ability to automatically adjust its layout so that it appears user-friendly on small screens of mobile devices.

If you think your website’s mobile version isn’t important, think again. We’re already in a mobile-first world, and this trend will only accelerate.

– Steven