So, you are in the market for a website builder that suits authors.
Ideal, because in this article we have our compilation list for our top picks, and we compare the features and pricing for you.
If you just want the best choice, we’ve added that right at the top of the article as this was what is most requested by our customers and what we see the best feedback with. So, that’ll be the “can’t go wrong” option.
Otherwise, feel free to explore all the options we’ve reviewed on the market to find something that might fit you a little better.
Enjoy the list!
The Best Website Builders For Authors Specifically
Whether you're an established author or an upcoming one, it's essential to have a website to engage with readers, run a community, and post updates about your novels. A website builder that offers community creation, portfolio-building, and advanced SEO will be the perfect fit for this category. Have a look at the products below to choose the best website builders for authors specifically:
1. Weebly
Weebly is an e-commerce platform that helps entrepreneurs set up professional online stores and have the freedom to increase clientele. It allows you to customize every granular detail and elevate the visual look of your e-commerce store. With Weebly, you get powerful designer tools at your fingertips to design a robust, responsive online store.
Weebly Features
Here are some exclusive features of Weebly:
Smart Marketing: Weebly offers customizable email templates that let you connect with the clientele to save abandoned carts or verify a purchase. Additionally, it optimizes your store for SEO to make you more discoverable on search engines. With Weebly, you can track your store performance and further enhance your sales numbers.
Shipping: Weebly provides a reliable shipping tool so you can easily send your products domestically and internationally. Moreover, you get real-time shipping rates dynamically by carrier, address, weight and quantity. Weebly stores the shipping information for w every order so the system can identify the replacement or return requests from the customers.
Inventory: With Weebly, you get an inbuilt inventory management system that automatically updates the items based on availability. Additionally, you can do bulk imports to save time on entering products into the database. Weebly ensures your inventory system is always up-to-date with the latest orders and returns.
Coupon Builder: Every online store owner will admit that providing coupons on special occasions or personal milestones is a great way to build trust with clients and increase sales. Weebly offers a coupon builder where you can provide discounted deals and make custom gift cards for your prospects and get the sales over the line.
Checkout and Customer Reviews: Weebly broadens your payment acceptance capabilities by offering integration with Square, Stripe, and PayPal. It offers a fully connected shopping cart and an automatic tax calculator. Additionally, you can feature customer reviews to help prospects learn about a product and elevate interest.
Weebly Pricing
Weebly offers 3 Pricing options for its online store-building platform.
The "Pro" plan is priced at $12/month upon annual billing. It offers free SSL security, shopping cart and site search.
The "Business" plan is priced at $25/month upon annual billing. It offers inventory management, an automatic tax calculator, item reviews and a shipping calculator.
The "Business Plus" plan is priced at $38/month upon annual billing. It offers real-time shipping, advanced site stats and abandoned cart emails.
2. Squarespace
Squarespace is a web design and website creation tool that provides businesses with an easy, fast way to build their presence on the internet. Squarespace offers all the tools needed to create a site successfully, whether a blog website or an eCommerce store.
What makes Squarespace worthwhile for most small business websites is that you can start with a fantastic design, easily adjust it for your business, access a robust set of in-house SEO and marketing tools, and have a decent selection of integrations. Its templates are modern and beautifully designed - plus, thanks to its responsive design, websites and online stores built using the platform will look amazing on tablets and mobile devices, too.
Squarespace Features
Here are some exclusive features of Squarespace:
Designer Templates: Squarespace offers a rich library of templates, enabling you to build flexible, relevant, and easy-to-customize pages. You can explore the curated designer color palettes and font packs to see which best suits your style. Squarespace allows you to customize every detail to fit your brand needs. Squarespace templates are known for their visual appeal and professional designs.
Website Analytics: With Squarespace, you gain powerful insights into your site's visitors and how they interact with your content. Squarespace lets you pin down the source of your website traffic and find out how the visitors interact with your content or products. You can check specific referral links to see which press articles or posts drive more traffic and sales.
Advanced SEO tools: Squarespace allows you to leverage SEO tools to optimize your website for visitors. You can modify the SEO page titles and descriptions for search and social purposes without changing the page content. Additionally, all Squarespace online stores are designed to maximize your brand's visibility and help shoppers find your products.
Email Marketing: Squarespace email campaigns provide a unique way to grow and communicate with your audience while staying authentic to your brand and design. To make your branding consistent and recognizable, you can create compelling emails with your existing products, blog posts, and design elements. Moreover, you can create and save segments to build a custom audience and send targeted email campaigns.
Video Maker: Squarespace video studio app helps you make and share engaging videos to tell your story, grow your audience, and drive sales. You can use autofill to pull in your logo, colors, and product images to create polished, on-brand videos. Squarespace helps you harness the power of video content and grow your social channels.
Squarespace Pricing
Squarespace offers 4 Pricing options for its website builder platform.
The "Personal" plan is priced at $23/month and offers SSL security, unlimited bandwidth, upto 30 minutes of video storage, site visibility, and basic website metrics.
The "Business" plan is priced at $33/month and offers premium integrations, CSS and JavaScript customization, advanced website analytics, and fully integrated eCommerce.
The "Basic Commerce" plan is priced at $36/month and offers powerful eCommerce analytics, product reviews, and a point of sale.
The "Advanced Commerce" plan is priced at $65/month and offers abandoned cart recovery, subscription selling, merchandising tools, and advanced shipping.
3. Webflow
Webflow is a complete content management system (CMS) like Drupal, Magento, and WordPress, plus an influential website designer and builder. Webflow attempts to streamline the website creation process by offering design and development simultaneously.
Webflow allows you to export your website as full-fledged code, link it with your CMS, and host it on your server. With Webflow, you can sit back and watch how your site looks when items are being dropped into your visual canvas.
Webflow Features
Here are some exclusive features of Webflow:
Intuitive Designer: Webflow completely controls HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript in an entirely visual canvas and translates your design into clean and semantic code. You can drag in unstyled HTML elements or use prebuilt pieces for complex elements. Additionally, you can view and reorganize your page's element structure in the navigator and ensure accessibility.
Content Management System: With Webflow, you can create customized content structures, add elements, and design virtually. You can design your search experience from scratch and control the content visibility for your visitors. Moreover, Webflow ensures you don't lock yourself into inflexible templates, blog-centric content structures, or complex code languages.
Interactions: Webflow's interaction and animation tools bring all the power of CSS and JavaScript into a visual tool, empowering designers to build complex, rich animations without coding. You can link your animations and motion to scroll progress to achieve effects like parallax, precise reveal animations, or progress bars.
SEO: Webflow helps you optimize your website SEO with fine-tuned controls, high-performance hosting, and flexible content management tools. You can migrate and update your site URLs without fear by creating and publishing 301 redirects. Webflow's globally distributed, AWS-powered hosting stack keeps your site running and drives traffic.
Webflow Editor: With Webflow editor, you can create and edit the content on your page without navigating a messy backend content management system. Webflow makes optimizing page titles, meta descriptions, URLs, and open graph settings easier. Additionally, you can invite collaborators to edit your side and preview the changes before publishing.
Webflow Pricing
Webflow offers 5 Pricing options for its website builder and content management system.
The "Free" plan is priced at $0 and offers a Webflow domain, 1GB bandwidth, 50 CMS items, and 50 Form submissions.
The "Basic" plan is priced at $18/month and offers a custom domain, 500 monthly form submissions, and 50 GB bandwidth.
The "CMS" plan is priced at $29/month and offers 2,000 CMS items, 1,000 monthly form submissions, 200 GB bandwidth, and three content editors.
The "Business" plan is priced at $49/month and offers 10,000 CMS items, 2,500 monthly form submissions, 400GB bandwidth, and ten content editors.
The "Enterprise" plan has an on-demand pricing quote. It offers custom bandwidth, uptime SLAs, and 10,000+ CMS items.
4. Duda
Duda is a drag-and-drop builder that gives you a user-friendly approach to building a website, promising fast designs and efficient templates that will impress your viewers. Duda is an excellent option as it allows you to create your website using responsive design elements and allows you to customize the mobile version of the website separately.
Using the site widgets in Duda, you can build a data-structured, design-first website and add images, text blocks, or addresses using the Content Library functionality. You can also use pre-made, fully customizable Dudas templates.
Duda Features
Here are some exclusive features of Duda:
Website Personalization: Duda offers a rich library of pre-made personalizations and allows you to implement them swiftly. You can combine any mix of triggers and actions to create a website personalization rule that perfectly fits your unique requirements. Additionally, you can use geo-targeting to ensure your site visitors see content relevant to their physical location.
Team Collaboration: With Duda, you can empower your team to leave comments directly on top of a website as it's being built without any back-and-forth over the phone. Its intuitive search bar allows you to find comment threads quickly to catch up on any conversation. Additionally, all website comments are automatically logged in one location, enabling you to track conversations easily.
Client Management: Duda offers a white label editor that lets you add the brand's colors and logo. You can send automatically generated emails to your customers and provide them with site stats, analytics, and instructions. Additionally, Duda boosts your sales with professionally curated marketing materials.
Content Library: With Duda, you can build websites faster than ever by directly pulling clients' content from a website or Facebook page into the content library. You can optimize your workflow by syncing site content with an external data set connected through Duda's API. Duda's content management tools enable you to organize and save clients' images in the content library.
SEO: Duda increases site discoverability with local business schema, which provides search engines with reliable information about a website. It also supports IndexNow, enabling sites to submit updated content directly to search engines. Additionally, Duda automatically generates a site map and informs search engines about pages that need crawling.
Duda Pricing
Duda offers 4 Pricing options for its website builder and content management system.
The "Basic" plan is priced at $19/month and offers website personalization, HTTPS encryption, content library, and multi-language websites.
The "Team" plan is priced at $29/month and offers Amazon Cloud hosting, automatic configuration of DNS records, client billing, and team assets.
The "Agency" plan is priced at $59/month and offers widget builder, website export, site comments, and priority support.
The "White Label" plan is priced at $99/month and offers dynamic pages with internal collections, custom branding, marketing materials, and site analytics.
5Strikingly
Strikingly is a website-building tool that allows users to create engaging websites fast and efficiently, even without web design experience. Strikingly makes getting a site up and running easy and quick, making it an excellent choice for DIYers who want a fast, simple way to create a beautiful site without diving into the coding.
Strikingly offers email marketing options if you would like to send out newsletters, social media integration in case you would like to promote your social media on the site or the website in the social media pages, and custom domains to boost your site's SEO. Strikingly lets you put code in your website's header for analytics tracking.
Strikingly Features
Here are some exclusive features of Strikingly:
Templates: Strikingly gives easy, straightforward user interface instructions when building the website from the templates. Strikingly guides you in choosing a starting point and gives you an extensive list of templates. Once you have decided on what kind of site you want to build, you can select a template from their library.
Mobile Optimization: Strikingly automatically optimizes the element appearance for mobile screens to create an excellent visitor browsing experience. You can switch the element's mobile appearance handling to manual mode and reveal additional mobile-only settings. With Strikingly, you can ensure your website runs smoothly on all devices.
Drag-and-drop Editor: Strikingly offers an intuitive drag-and-drop editor to help you swiftly create a website by arranging elements. Additionally, Strikingly provides a step-by-step guide describing the functionalities of various buttons on its editor. Further, you can migrate your websites to Strikingly and preserve your existing links.
No Branding: Unlike other popular website builders, Strikingly lets you publish websites without their branding. It helps you get a professional outlook for your website and improves traffic. Additionally, you can enhance the security level of your website by restricting access without a password.
Site Analytics: Strikingly provides insight into words that would increase search engine optimization. You can see statistics like pageview, subscribers, and viewer location. With Strikingly, you gain the requisite tools for user marketing efforts. Strikingly helps you turn your website into an online store by offering eCommerce capabilities.
Strikingly Pricing
Strikingly offers 3 Pricing options for its website builder platform.
The "Limited" plan is priced at $12/month and offers 50GB bandwidth, 1GB storage per site, free SSL for a custom domain, and two limited websites.
The "Pro" plan is priced at $20/month and offers 3 Pro sites, a custom domain, unlimited bandwidth, and password protection.
The "VIP" plan is priced at $59/month and offers 5 VIP sites, 2,000 active contacts, a live chat widget, newsletters, and multiple membership tiers.
Why use a Website Builder at all?
A website is your platform for answering any basic questions your prospects might ask about your business and brand. It gives you the space to curate your brand's messaging and ensure customers can find the information they need. A website allows you to share your company's message with potential customers and helps establish trust in your company.
You no longer need to be a web developer with coding skills and lots of time and money to make a simple website that looks professional.
If you know nothing about web development, a website builder is a fantastic tool for getting your site up and running fast. It allows you to create a beautiful, functional website without coding or design knowledge. Website builders are user-friendly frameworks equipped with custom design themes and an array of advanced website-building features that let anyone -- beginners & developers alike -- create a site quickly.
Why should Authors use Website Builders?
Whether you have published several books or are getting ready to release your first, having an effective website is necessary. Creating one and being active on the web could be critical to your book marketing success if you do not have a website. Having a simple landing page for every book you write is okay, but you also need a primary author site.
Your author site is a place for your readers to find all your social media profiles and book links in one place. You may do branding on Facebook and other social media sites, but your website is the only place you have complete editorial control over design and content.
As an author, you have to work hard to develop your audience and market your books online, meaning that you will probably be developing skills in social media, email, and other digital marketing techniques, all of which you can offer as services on your site, too.
Whether you are selling books, offering services through your author's platform, creating content, or some combination of all three, having a powerful, clear site with information available at all times will eventually help you earn more.
If you put in the proper amount of time creating quality content and establishing SEO on your site, you could earn quite an income monetizing your blog and selling products such as merchandise and books.
Best Website Builders for Authors, A Summary
The best site builders for authors should come with a few sections and features designed according to the readers, making content easy to showcase across your website. The right website builder will offer a blog or newsletter that allows you to share your thoughts, integrations with Amazon and Goodreads, and much more.
Weebly allows you to showcase your books on your website in a portfolio format and analyze the website traffic. It is our suggested pick for the best website builder that suits authors. Visit the website to get started.
