Not having a website, in today's world of high-tech competition, is analogous to not having a business card a decade or two ago. Often websites are how small businesses attract and inform potential clients, establish authority and legitimacy, and even allow you to invoice and collect payments. It used to be the case that hiring a web developer to build your small business might have cost thousands of dollars… but thankfully, that's no longer the case.

Website builders are online websites and companies which help individuals and small businesses build a website quick and on the cheap. The trick is that website builders provide themes and templates - the bare bone look of a website - and allow business owners to easily upload their own images and text. And many website builders provide gorgeous, well-built themes that it might have cost a business hundreds or thousands to emulate with a website developer. And website builders will usually charge only small fees for their services, often $12 or less per month. Some even allow you to have a small website for free!

But when you're considering a website builder, there are a few important things to look out for:

• Mobile-Ready. You want to ensure that whatever website builder you select provides websites which are responsive and mobile-ready, meaning they resize to mobile viewports when someone is looking at the website on a tablet or smartphone.

• Lots of Options. Perhaps you'll want to gain emails for a newsletter, or incorporate a cart for checking out, or display videos! Always research the potential options that a website builder offers, so that you don't get stuck with a website builder which can't meet your needs as your business and website grow.

• Marketability. Will a website builder allow you to market your own website with your own url, or will you be stuck with a subdomain? Are their websites SEO-friendly?

• Ease of Termination. What happens if you want to close your website? Establish whether it would be easy to terminate your service or move your website, should you ever want to! Some website builders have strict policies.

Bigcommerce

One of the leading providers of shop websites, Bigcommerce allows users to have a 15 day trial to feel out their system before committing. Their social media plugins and email marketing capabilities are top-notch, and help new shops easily gain in popularity. They also offer paid marketing services to business websites, which can allow small businesses to quickly reach many more clients.

Wix

Wix is one of the more secure options, which offers free hosting and mobile-ready websites. Wix also offers free support 'round the clock and many Google-integrated apps and plugins to help boost your website's SEO. They also have one of the largest stables of additional features and functions to add to a website, which can add amazing functionalities to streamline business processes and help your website scale up as your business grows. Since they have a large market share of users, it's easy to find a detailed Wix review based on their services.

Squarespace

Squarespace is known for providing some of the best-looking templates and themes for a website; but the catch is that they only offer a few of them! But this website builder offers many other perks as well, including easily-accessible, high-quality images and in-house analytics about your website's usage and performance. But perhaps best of all? Squarespace gives new users a free domain name for their website.

Website Builder

Website Builder offers free domains to new users and a lot of great perks. The best of those perks is that they have the largest library of themes and templates at roughly 10,000 options. Their websites easily convert to have ecommerce options, and the Website Builder team has worked hard to provide SEO optimizing tools.