SITE123 Review

Summary Review

Remember the time when people had to code entire websites from scratch? Well, that was until website builders enabled the average Joe to build a stylish website without the hefty price tag of a website designer. Yup, website builders like SITE123 are designed for people who have no prior design or development experience.

As their name suggests, creating your website with SITE123 is really as easy as 1-2-3. You’re asked what kind of website you want, your website’s name, your login credentials, and congratulations! You are now a proud owner of a spanking new website! Now, all that’s left is to customize that curated template based on your needs and preferences.

While it’s not exactly drag-and-drop, it’s still very intuitive and easy to use. There’s a menu of page elements that you can choose from, so you can play around with the design within your chosen template. The templates are responsive, well-designed, and come with a nice set of features. Although limited compared to other website builders, it should be enough for your personal website, blog, or a small online shop.

Pros:

+ Super easy to use
+ Mobile and tablet responsive templates
+ Extensive library of product integrations
+ e-Commerce functionality
+ Fantastic customer support with a live chat feature

Cons:

- Limited design and technical features
- Lacks flexibility and creative freedom
- Inability to switch to a different template once your site is live

Who is SITE123 for?

SITE123 is best for individuals looking to launch their personal website or small businesses that only want to sell a few products. However, it may not be the best choice for medium-sized businesses with plans to eventually scale up.

Main Features

SEO

Unfortunately, SITE123 offers just the bare bones in terms of SEO. If you hope to rank in Google’s search engine, you’ll need some basic SEO knowledge. Aside from being able to edit meta titles and descriptions, adding header tags, and adding alt text to images, there’s not much else that you can do.

Payment Processing Integration

SITE123 integrates with the following payment gateways:

Authorize.net, Square, Worldpay, Amazon Pay, Sage Pay, 2checkout, Braintree, Stripe, PayPal, CreditGuard, PeleCard, Tranzilla

e-Commerce

While SITE123 lets you create an online store with a free plan, you won’t be able to accept payments so it kind of defeats the entire purpose, right? After all, who pays cash on delivery in 2024? The good news is that you can access e-commerce functionality by signing up for its premium plan. With it, you’ll be able to unlock the following capabilities:

- Unlimited product display and order fulfillment
- Sell digital products
- Accept online payments
- Issue and manage coupons
- Collect and display product reviews
- Account creation and personal wish lists

Blogging Tools

If blogging is your main thing, SITE123 has multiple templates optimized for blogging. Besides being able to post articles and add media files, you can also schedule posts and moderate comments.

Templates

SITE123 has an impressive library of over 180 templates divided into the following categories: blog, business, photography, music, event, restaurant, creative arts, CV, landing page, and online store. Choosing your desired template is quick and easy as you get to see how each template looks on both computer screens and mobile devices. Now, all 180 templates are, surprisingly, free, but you have to know that what you see is pretty much what you get. Unless you upgrade to a paid plan, you can give up trying to make some changes to fonts, colors, and other design elements.



Mobile Compatibility

What good is a beautiful template if it takes forever to load on your visitor’s handheld devices? After all, a study shows that 40 percent of visitors will abandon your website if the loading process takes more than 3 seconds. Thankfully, all of SITE123’s templates are mobile responsive so there’s no extra work required on your end.

Support and Knowledge Base

We’ve reviewed a lot of website builders including the bigwigs in the industry like Wix and Squarespace so we weren’t really expecting much. Well, guess who got pleasantly surprised? So far, we got quite possibly the best customer experience with SITE123. Not only do they offer live chat, but they do so in no less than 16 languages! If your concern can't wait, you can look for answers in their knowledge base, or shoot them an email.



Pricing & Plans

As of this writing, SITE123 has one paid subscription plan which is available in four payment periods: 3 months, 12 months, 24 months, and 36 months. The plan costs only $5.80 per month and comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee. You’ll get the following under this plan:

- Free Domain for 1 year
- 10GB storage
- 5GB bandwidth
- Remove SITE123 floating tag
- Connect Your Domain
- E-commerce

If you don’t want any commitment, you can get the free plan, but know that you are getting the bare minimum. You’ll get 500MB storage, 1GB bandwidth, and a subdomain. If you want, you can connect your custom domain for as little as $10.80 per month.



The bottom line

If you need a pre-built website that requires little customization then SITE123 is for you. While it lacks Wix’s drag-and-drop editor or Shopify’s robust e-commerce features, it does offer more than enough to get your content out there with minimum fuss. You get mobile-responsive templates, easy to use app market, user-friendly interface, and enough features to power a small online shop. Because SITE123 takes care of everything, don’t expect to do a lot of customization. You also won’t be able to access the source code or integrate an external plugin or template. Once you’ve signed up to the premium plan and built your website, there is no going back, so make sure that you can live with these tradeoffs before doing so.