Site123 Review

COMPLETE REVIEW

Site123 is a website builder that also comes with a free version, it is extremely user-friendly and time efficient, helping you create a website in just a few minutes. The reason why Site123 is such a great option for beginners and less tech-savvy people is the fact that it eliminates most of the ‘background’ work you normally have to struggle with when building a site. Site123 allows you to focus more on the creative aspect and on adding your content.

Site123 gives you 2 options to choose from: you can either go with their Free version or with the paid Premium one.

The Free version doesn’t cost you any cent and gives you 500MB of storage, 1GB bandwidth and a subdomain.

The Premium package includes a free domain for 1 year, 10GB storage, 5GB bandwidth, e-commerce tools, the ability to remove their Site123 floating tag and more.

Ease of use and how it works

One of the biggest strengths of the Site123 website builder is the fact that it is really straightforward. Even the novices will be able to figure it out in no time.

The Site123 allows you to create a wide range of websites, according to your needs. Before you get started, you have to choose the type of website you want to create. You have 16 options to choose from: business, restaurants and food, transportation services, online store, blog, events, music, sports, tourism, creative arts and more. There’s pretty much no field left uncovered so you’ll most likely find something that meets your needs.

Once you’re settled with a type of website, you have to provide a name, e-mail and password and you can choose to sign up with your Facebook or Google account. The final step is to start your website.

Site123 walks you through all the steps and everything is really simple and easy to understand.

The downside to this is the fact that you don’t get as much freedom as with other site builders, because the focus with Site123 is on ease of use, rather than diversity.

Depending on the type of website you want to create, you have up to 10 themes you can choose from. You DON’T have a drag and drop editor, which might be a deal breaker for some. While the templates are not very inspired or customizable, you can still choose between 13 layouts, change color schemes, mess around with fonts and menu buttons and enable/disable the social media buttons.

You should also know that you can’t really change templates ‘on the go’ with Site123, so in case you are not happy with one once your site goes live, you have to go back and create another website, using another theme.

All the editing is done using the buttons on the left bar.

One useful thing about the Site123 is its multilingual support: this website builder supports 15 languages.

Site123 is mobile responsive. Before you actually publish your site, you can preview it in mobile, tablet and desktop modes.

And while other builders limit the number of webpages, with Site123 you get unlimited pages, the only limit you have is on storage, depending on the plan you choose.

Features, plugins, integration

When it comes to features, the Site123 will pretty much include all the basic features, but don’t expect complexity. You will have ecommerce tools and Site123 now comes with PayPal, Stripe and 2Checkout when it comes to payment methods. You can also go with the offline bank transfer method. You can create product categories, add unlimited products, you can create coupons, offer discounts, but you won’t get any payment tracking and automatic invoicing and if you need more complex ecommerce tools, you should go with something like Shopify, BigCommerce and the like.

Site123 lets you include Google Maps, a photo gallery, a music player and for the paid customers, there are third-party plugins for analytics, email marketing, live chat and google webmaster tools.

You can link out to more than 20 social  media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Flickr, Spotify, Tumblr, Yelp and more.

In terms of SEO tools, you get customizable URLs, you can edit the meta title and description, add alt text to images and a few other things.

When it comes to security, Site123 offers free SSL encryption and the HTTPs helps ensuring your customers that protection and confidentiality are not an issue with your website.

All in all, Site123 is a great website builder for small businesses and people who don’t want to go into coding and just want to create a site as hassle-free and quickly as possible. The free plan offered by Site123 can be used indefinitely, not just as a trial, as with many other providers. You only have to upgrade to their paid plan if and when you want to.