How to choose a website builder — the questions that decide the outcome

Before comparing prices, compare shape. This guide asks the six questions that separate the products, and every answer is checkable on a pricing page without logging in.

1 · Which lane does it offer?

Ask how the site gets made: from a prompt (AI generates it), from a structured quiz, from a template, or through a designer. Every builder markets as if it were curate; almost none are. The lane decides how much work remains after the first response.

2 · Which editing model?

The axis nobody markets honestly:

Section and block models carry the same promise a managed service makes — the structure is the designer's job, not yours. A canvas model gives you the most freedom and the most liability, and the difference between the two is not visible in a screenshot.

3 · What runs your site?

Own-platform (you never leave the renderer), WordPress (you get an admin to maintain), a layer over someone else's CMS, or hosting with a builder attached (an ordinary catalogue item). The substrate decides who performs maintenance and how work travels if you later change host. It also decides how much of the site is yours: a document you can read is a document you can take.

4 · What does year two cost?

The category's central pattern is the renewal step: a cheap first term bought as a long prepay, then a step up. Of the 51 vendors profiled, 19 renew at exactly the rate they sold at — 1.0x, none of them discounted — and the 10 that print a step run from 1.51x to 33x. Ask, on the pricing page, before you commit:

• What is the regular rate? Is it printed, or only inferable?
• How long is the term behind the headline rate?
• Is a "monthly" rate actually a prepay spread? (One vendor's "$2.99/mo" is a

48-month total divided by 48.)

And a price you cannot quote is a gap, not a bargain. Of the 51 vendors profiled, 4 publish no price at all, and another 18 print a first-year rate and stop there. What should a website cost is the ledger behind those numbers.

5 · What does the free tier include, and can it be reached today?

Free tiers are three different products: a free-forever site on the vendor's own subdomain (their domain, not yours), a free first year that converts to a paid plan on renewal, and a free year you have to be invited into. Compare what the free plan's own surface states rather than what a comparison table infers from it.

Two of the failures we found are worth the ten seconds they take to check. One free tier publishes every page with a noindex directive, so the site is free of the one thing a business buys a website for. Another free tier produces a preview, not a site: the draft is there, and publishing it is what the paid plan buys. A free tier that cannot be reached today is not a free tier; it is a discount on the first invoice.

6 · What happens to your site if you leave?

The question almost no pricing page answers, and the one that decides the cost of the second year. Three things to establish, in this order: whether the platform publishes its export terms at all, whether the export is complete (every page, with its copy and images — not a home page and a contact form), and whether it runs somewhere that knows nothing about you (no database, no runtime, no callback into the platform that produced it). What happens to my website if I cancel my builder subscription sets out the three models builders use and which one is which, and how to export your website is ours — it says exactly what we ship and what we do not.

How to run the comparison

One row per builder, six columns, in the order above: lane, editing model, substrate, the regular rate, what the free tier really gives, and the export terms. The first four take a minute each on a pricing page. The fifth is a page you have to find. The sixth is the one most pricing pages never answer, which is why it belongs in your notes and not in the vendor's.

Every vendor claim above is sourced in the internal research corpus with an as-of date. Our answering posture on the same six questions is stated on the platform's own pages, not typed into a comparison table.