Site123

SITE123, founded in 2016, claims to be “by far the easiest free website builder.” The company aims to offer a simple website building solution for any kind of user. Their major asset is combining a user-friendly interface with the typical features of top website builders today: SEO tools, an intuitive web editor, fully responsive and mobile-friendly designs, social media tools and PayPal integration.

SITE123 offers a free plan as well as four premium plans. It’s a great choice for small business owners who want to develop a web presence - read on to find out more about the different options offered by SITE123.

• Fully responsive interface
• Unique and simple premium options
• Lots of layout categories and plugins
• Great for users with little to no coding experience
• Also perfect for entrepreneurs with limited time to work on creating or maintaining a website

• eCommerce integration
• Free hosting and domain
• Integrated SEO tools
• Translation feature allows you to translate up to 150 words into more than 50 different languages
• Templates for websites of all sizes
• You can add unlimited pages to your site

• Customer support is good but could be better
• Design process is intuitive but limited
• No access to your website’s code
• Websites can’t be imported or exported from the system

Overall, SITE123 offers a high quality user experience. It’s got reasonable prices, great features and the interface is one of the most straightforward and intuitive in the website building industry. However, it’s lagging behind some competitors in analytics and quality templates. And it can feel limited in features - not because there are few - but because many more are from third-party sites. This dependence on third-party enhancements makes the experience less integrated.

Still, it’s a great choice for those who seek simplicity, and it even has some impressive eCommerce functions. Anyone will be able to design their dream website without a need for web design or development skills. 

SITE123’s plans are very simple: there are 3 premium plans and a free alternative.

The free plan is a basic option with 500MB storage and 1GB bandwidth, making it best for one-page websites. It includes a “Powered by SITE123” banner ad on your site and your website will be on the SITE123 subdomain (you won’t be able to set up your own domain). This plan might not be ideal if you’re trying to launch a professional website.

SITE123’s premium plans are best suited for small business owners. For $15.80/month users remove the banner ad, get a domain name for a year, translation into one additional language, 50 orders/month, 30GB storage, 15GB bandwidth, a mailing list of 1,000, eCommerce resources, a connect domain and two mailboxes. This is the most popular option. 

SITE123 covers all the most important elements that every premium website builder should have:

• Lots of fonts
• Hundreds of theme templates
• Robust SEO tool that guarantees your website will be easily found on search engines
• Amazing stock image library with hundreds of images
• Personalized email
• eCommerce tools so you can accept payments by credit card
• Responsive websites
• Simple blog integration
• Image and video backgrounds
• Visual editor allows you to preview all changes made to the website

SITE123 goes one step further than most website builders, considering eCommerce makes global business possible, and offers multilingual website capabilities. This means that you won’t need to create different websites for each language, but instead can manage different versions within the same website. The site offers a translation tool that includes automated translation of headers and subheaders.

eCommerce

Geared towards business owners, the Professional plan starts at $21.80/month and is renewable either every three months, six months, annually, biennially or triennially. This eCommerce option is very easy to set up. You can link your Paypal account for easy, secure payment and SITE123 allows you to offer discount codes and manage store inventory, as well as other advanced eCommerce features, three additional languages, a mailing list of 2,500, 500 orders/month, 45GB bandwidth, 90GB storage, five mailboxes and domain connect. It also includes the use of a domain for one year and removes all SITE123 advertisements. 

Templates

SITE123 does not offer a template gallery - instead they have themes or layouts. These are organized according to a basic classification, such as Business, Restaurants & Foods, Online Store, Technology, Blog and Music. Once you make a selection, the content modules and navigation menus will be organized accordingly. Later, you’ll decide whether you prefer a one-page site or a multi-page site. You will only be able to make changes to your template after you are assigned one based on your website’s theme.

After choosing your theme, you can name the site and select language options. There are dozens of languages available, including English, German and French.

SITE123 provides a set of tools that will allow you to change fonts, button styles and activate/deactivate social media integration. Take a good look at the layouts offered beforehand as changing templates on the go is not supported (you’d have to start a new one from scratch).

The downside to this highly-customized system is limited template options for specific industries (for example, there are no legal or construction options). The theme categories are fairly broad, so most users will have to invest more time making layout and design choices themselves rather than selecting a ready-made template that already has everything they’re looking for.  

Customer Service

There are many different options for accessing customer support from SITE123: guides and step-by-step tutorials, email, live chat and several social media channels. It’s reliable, quality support that meets our needs.

Overall

SITE123 is a great solution for small businesses and users that want to create their own simple website or online store without hiring a coding expert or spending a great deal of time in site admin. The eCommerce plans are remarkably professional and flexible, and they’re very reasonably priced - you can’t go wrong using SITE123 to sell products online. For the blogger or user interested in a simple, free site, SITE123 offers sophisticated, customizable image galleries, photo and video backgrounds, and high quality visuals.