5 Professional Website Builders to Use Instead of WordPress
When it comes to professional website building, using WordPress is undoubtedly a reasonable solution. The platform comes with a powerful feature set, abundance of design customization tools, themes, plugins and extensions. It can boast a trusted user community, the members of which are always ready to provide any kind of web design assistance to newbies. These are the major features that make WordPress the most professional CMS available in the contemporary web design industry.
The fact that WordPress deserves the attention of web design pros makes us suggest that the service is not quite easy to use for newbies. Actually, this is not a mere suggestion – WordPress really implies coding skills, time and effort to be used to the advantage. When time is a priority, website builders are always at your service. These systems are intuitive and understandable to all users, regardless of their programming knowledge. It’s much easier to explore and master them as compared to WordPress. It is you, who is in charge of the web development process and it is you, who watches and controls the result. This is exactly what most users value about website builders above all. To simplify the choice of the most trustworthy services, let’s review the most popular systems now.
SITE123
The website builder has gained the loyalty of many web design fans due to the simple interface, easy control of the web development process, abundance of features and diversity of projects they can develop with the system. Professionals often consider SITE123 a universal website builder. Whatever project type you intend to create for your business or personal needs, SITE123 will cope with the task on the top notch level.
Designs
The website builder offers high quality templates, which are responsive and free in nature. Websites built with the system can be viewed on any screens and devices. All the themes fall into categories to simplify user search and save web development time. SITE123 provides deep control over the web design process. This is convenient for all users with no exceptions at all. Just select the required modules and plugins, arrange them on your website pages and keep working on your website design by using customization tools to create the desired effect.
Features
SITE123 is rich in features, which can enhance your website performance. Its design editing tools can surpass your expectations, providing the required features to boost the way your website looks. Thus, you can add, edit and manage website pages here, select and connect widgets and social media tools, set up SEO parameters, change website style, fonts, background etc. The website builder also stands out from the crowd due to its advanced multilingual tool. It allows creating different language versions of your web project. This eventually helps reach your goals with maximum efficacy and time economy.
Cost
SITE123 is a cost-effective website builder, its feature set ideally comes up to the cost of the plans the system offers. What’s important, the cost of the pricing plans differs depending upon the location a user lives in. The features the plans include remain the same. As of today, SITE123 is ready to offer the following pricing options:
- Free
- Basic ($9.80)
- Advanced ($15.80)
- Professional ($21.80)
The prices are quite affordable and the options of the plans come up to various web design needs – both commercial and non-commercial.
Summary
SITE123 is a free website builder, the use of which can help you design appealing and functional projects. These include landing pages, business websites, portfolios, eCommerce sites. The service comes with multiple tools, features, various ready-made styles, templates and layouts. They do not only differentiate it from other professional website builders, but also let you design an impressive website without hiring the professionals. As a result, you get fully responsive, feature-rich, SEO optimized websites.
Ucraft
Ucraft is a cloud website builder, which offers distinct and clear drag-and-drop editor. The system has won popularity due to its advanced design customization settings, niche templates and features that make it a decent choice for all user categories. You can use Ucraft to launch landing pages, online stores, business websites and other projects. No coding skills are required to get a full-featured website in less than a few hours with Ucraft.
Designs
Ucraft designs feature high quality. The system currently offers around 70 templates, each of which can be customized as you need. You can either choose a pre-designed theme and replace the available content with your own info or get a blank theme and design a website from scratch. All Ucraft templates are responsive and divided into thematic sections. They come with full-screen formats, flat designs and industry-specific ready-made content you will certainly value to the advantage. Code injection option allows web design pros to make advanced edits to give their websites excellent performance and required look.
Features
Ucraft is initially known for its advanced design customization settings. Designer Tools the system comes with allow changing the website typography (styles of headings, titles, fonts, spacing etc.), editing website layout and using the form builder. It is also possible to use the Landing Page Creator to design a website of this type in a quick, easy and convenient way. If you are right about to develop a business website, you will certainly appreciate an opportunity to design your own business logo, which will effectively boost the credibility rate of your company. Finally, Ucraft is one of those platforms, which offers a superior White Label Tool. This feature enables website owners, who intend to start their own website builder businesses, reach the goal with maximum efficacy and minimum time or effort investment.
Cost
Ucraft has a free plan for users, who just wish to test the system to find out the differences it has with other systems. This plan doesn’t work well for building large websites. If you have such a goal, though, it makes sense to get a paid subscription, the cost of which currently constitutes $8/mo. This price may be reduced by 20%, if you decide to make a one-time annual payment.
Summary
Ucraft is a credible and full-featured drag-and-drop website builder. It allows building different types of websites, starting with simple landing pages and up to complex web stores. Due to the White Label Solution, Ucraft users can start their own web-based businesses without running a risk to face a failure. Websites built with Ucraft are responsive, SEO-friendly and well-designed. The multilingual tool, availability of landing page and business logo creation and other advanced options make the system a worthy web building solution for proficient web designers and beginners.
IM Creator
When it comes to the combination of functionality, ease of use and creative freedom, IM Creator is one of the top services to work with. The website builder is free, full-featured and user-friendly. You don’t have to be a coding expert to build decent websites with the system. Just follow step-by-step guidelines it offers and watch the result, which will certainly impress you. With IM Creator, you can build effective business websites, portfolios, landing pages either for commercial or non-commercial use.
Designs
IM Creator designs are versatile and impressive. You can browse a rich gallery of ready-made templates to select the themes, which will be a perfect match to your web design needs. Having chosen the required template, you can start customizing it by using the tools available in the dashboard. This is also quick and simple. IM Creator designs are responsive right from the start. You may be 100% sure that your visitors won’t face problems accessing your website on the go, regardless the devices they will use for this purpose.
Features
Launching a website with IM Creator is much easier than with WordPress. This is because you don’t have to master any coding basics, buy and install extra plugins or look for insecure third-party extensions. The web design process is based on the Polydoms technology. It implies proper choice and arrangement of content blocks that are called “Stripes”. These blocks form your website layout and you can further fill them with your own content. What’s interesting, IM Creator comes with impressive eCommerce and blogging engines, which allow connecting a blog or an online store to your websites. Another feature that makes the website builder a nice WordPress alternative is its White Label. The feature is handy to everyone, who will have the desire to get a quality and profitable web-based business, utilizing advanced design customization tools and other features of the system.
Cost
One of the highlights of IM Creator is that the system is completely free for non-profit organizations, people of creative professions and students. IM Creator offers integrated hosting and doesn’t require any must-have paid features. As to the paid plans, goal-driven business owners can upgrade to the Premium Plan ($8/mo) or give preference to the White Label Plan, the cost of which currently constitutes $350/year. Both options works great for entreneneurs, hosting companies and resellers. The difference is about the cost and the feature set included.
Summary
IM Creator is a free cloud website builder, which will impress everyone by its simplicity and affordability that merge well with functionality. The service is much simpler and more understandable than WordPress and it certainly offers more powerful features. It doesn’t imply any additional financial investments, offering free and paid options for users with diverse web design objectives, skills and budgets.
Mobirise
Mobirise differs from WordPress in a variety of ways, but the fact that the system is not web-based is certainly one of its highlights. Mobirise is the downloadable software and, thus, it requires preliminary installation. The service allows creating landing pages, business websites, portfolios and other sites with it. It is flexible and super simpler for beginners, who can cope with their web building tasks in no time.
Designs
You won’t find standard customizable templates in Mobirise. The system allows building websites out of content blocks. Each of these blocks is fully responsive and comes with pre-designed content. Your task is to select the required blocks (the choice is pretty extensive and currently encompasses over 800 blocks that are regularly updated), arrange them on a web page and customize them as you need. Mobirise also has a paid website building solution, offering premium themes that also require customization.
Features
Mobirise comes with an intuitive and convenient website editor, easy interface and abundance of customization tools. These options make the website builder advanced and functional. What’s more, Mobirise allows launching websites that are optimized for mobile viewing. The service has an advanced AMP Website Builder you can use to create AMP web pages that load fast on mobile devices and are indexed well by Google. It is also possible to host your readymade website with Github Pages absolutely for free.
Cost
Mobirise is a free web building service. It allows launching websites and selecting hosting at no cost at all. However, users have a chance to opt for premium templates and extensions, which can be a nice boost for your website. The cost of extensions ranges between $19 and $39 depending upon the quality, feature set, customization options and other related parameters. If you wish to save time and effort buying ready-made premium themes and add-ons, you can make a one-time payment to get the entire premium kit. This is how you can save up to 77% of expenses you would encounter, when purchasing them individually.
Summary
Mobirise is a free website building software you can use to launch different types of websites. The system requires installation, but this doesn’t affect its complexity level and functionality. To build a website with Mobirise, you can choose one of its multiple content blocks. They are regularly updated. As a result, their number keeps growing. Mobirise offers free and paid templates, extensions and hosting options. It’s up to you to make the choice based on current web design preferences.
uKit
uKit deserves the leading positions in the rating of modern website builders. This is because the service is stunningly simple and effective. It’s easy to build business websites with it as the entire feature set of the paltorm is geared towards this purpose. uKit has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, which makes it convenient to control each step of your website design. Both newbies and web design experts can use the website builder to launch websites with proper performance.
Designs
uKit templates are interesting, thematic and simple. It is easy to customize them as the process is convenient and understandable for users with versatile programming skills. Whatever uKit template you will go for, it will be responsive and will quickly adapt to desktop and mobile devices. Subdivision of templates into niche categories makes their choice simple and time-saving. If you don’t wish to use any of the ready-made themes, you can design your own website from scratch by selecting and customizing a black canvas.
Features
uKit business orientation explains the diversity of its feature set. Apart from templates, the service allows integrating multiple widgets and plugins. For example, by integrating an Ecwid plugin or connecting an eCommerce widget, you can get a fully-featured online store almost in no time. The website builder makes it possible to connect a SSL Certificate to your ready-made website to boost its privacy protection and preserve confidentiality data. Integration of external services ( like LiveChat, AMO CRM, MailChimp etc.) also contributes to your website functionality and makes the system a nice substitute to WordPress.
Cost
The cost of using uKit will surprise everyone as this is one of the system’s highlights. The thing is that the website builder is much more affordable than many other platforms and provides an array of payment options. Currently, uKit plans include:
- Premium ($4)
- Premium+ ($8)
- eCommerce ($9.6)
- Pro ($12)
The prices are more than affordable, but mind that there is no free plan in uKit. If you are not sure about the feature set implied by the plan you are interested in, take your time to use the 14-day trial version of the service. It comes with no limitations and allows exploring and checking the entire feature set of the website builder.
Summary
uKit is a cloud-based website builder, which focuses on launching small business websites. The system is easy-to-use for beginners, but it also offers a rich set of features for professional website developers. The service has a collection of responsive templates, which fall into thematic categories and flexible design customization tools to let you launch decent websites.
Bottom Line
WordPress is currently one of the most popular CMS in the world. The system is convenient and functional, but it is somewhat complicated not only for newbies, but for proficient web developers as well. This is the reason of why web designers give preference to website builders. These platforms are simple and affordable. They come with pre-designed themes, which are optimized for mobile viewing. If you are currently willing to migrate from WordPress, it makes sense to choose between SITE123, Ucraft, Mobirise, IM Creator and uKit. Their features and design options make them worthy substitutes to the well-known WordPress CMS.
