Web.com has a range of features and functionality to make it a complete website and ecommerce hosting platform—its easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder has major appeal for beginners who want to build professional-looking websites and ecommerce stores in mere minutes. It also offers dedicated tools focusing on SEO and marketing so you can reach a wider audience.

Web.com logo on a white background. Clicking the image will take you to Web.com's website.

How Web.com Stacks Up to Other Web Hosts

When searching for the best web hosting and website builders for beginners, it was clear that Web.com is the answer. For those looking to create and publish their first site, Web.com makes it easy to sign up and start building today. Plus, its DIY website builder has everything you need to get started.

Web.com earned it’s spot as our third overall pick for best web hosting providers this year. Our other favorites include:

Where Web.com Stands Out

Web.com offers a wide range of website creation tools built for beginners. Where other hosts assume you have some knowledge of what you’re doing and require some technical skills, Web.com guides you through the entire process of building your first website.

Despite its simplicity, it doesn’t skimp out on functionality—from AI-powered features, a built-in image library, and an intuitive DIY drag-and-drop website builder to ecommerce functionality and SEO tools, it comes with everything you need to create and market your website in one easy-to-use package.

A One-Stop Website Solution

You’ll find its platform to be a true one-stop-shop for getting a professional website up and running quickly and easily. For busy small business owners and entrepreneurs lacking technical skills, Web.com simplifies every step from selecting a domain to launching a customized site.

A key advantage is not only the integrated website builder but also the hundreds of professional templates that can be customized to fit a range of industries. With drag-and-drop simplicity, anyone can create an attractive, mobile-friendly site in minutes without coding—themes, layouts, images, and content can all be tailored as needed.

But Web.com goes beyond website building to provide the essential services and tools for a complete online presence. Your selected domain name, email accounts, hosting, and security are all set up and managed seamlessly through its platform. Ecommerce functionality is also turnkey with built-in support for secure payments, coupons, site-wide sales, and more. You can manage and sell through your website, Facebook, Instagram and other channels from one dashboard.

Should you need assistance with content creation, Web.com’s AI Writer helps craft well-written text for pages and posts in just seconds. Since you’re always trying to broaden your reach, you’ll appreciate that you can easily integrate your social media, blog, images and videos for a polished look.

To top it all off, resources like SEO optimization, local listings management, digital marketing, and analytics, Web.com empowers small businesses and entrepreneurs to attract and engage customers from day one.

The breadth of included capabilities eliminates the need for multiple platforms and services.

A laptop displaying a furniture website being built using Web.com's drag and drop builder. Laptop is on a blue and cream background below text that says "Build a beautiful website. Save up to 70% on our website building tools!"

DIY Website Builder

Right from the template selection, you can choose from over 150 responsive designs tailored to different industries and styles. You’ll appreciate having so many options to match your brand aesthetics and needs. Then customize the layout, images, colors, fonts and other elements to your liking. Moving sections around is as easy as clicking and dragging.

The process enables quickly iterating to achieve the optimal structure.

Access to Web.com’s library of over two million stock photos and videos further simplifies enhancing your sites visually, and finding the perfect media to convey your brand and messaging is effortless—even embed content from YouTube, Vimeo, and social platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The focus is on building truly multimedia, dynamic websites, and it takes just minutes with the Web.com experience.

Under the hood, Web.com leverages AI to facilitate the DIY process. For instance, the AI Writer helps generate quality text content for pages and posts in seconds. This aids crafting compelling copy without heavy lifting. And let’s be honest, AI is pretty neat.

Furthermore, backend automation handles technical aspects like responsiveness, speed optimization, and search engine visibility, so you can focus purely on design and user experience.

Selection of six of Web.com's templates, including those titled Academic Tutoring, Accounting, Agriculture, Animal Groomers, App Landing Page, and Architect.

A Focus on SEO

To help your website rank higher and drive traffic, SEO is built in. Right within the website builder, you can easily customize on-page elements vital for search indexing like meta descriptions, titles, headings, image alt text, and more. The ability to directly control SEO factors while designing pages simplifies getting things right the first time.

The SEO wizard feature provides actionable guidance and step-by-step instruction to edit pages and fixing issues. For example, it may recommend improving page speed or adding keywords to a product description. The tool explains precisely how to make each improvement.

With just a few clicks, you can run in-depth SEO reports covering crucial indicators like rankings, traffic, mobile optimization, page speed, and more. Web.com compiles the analytics and highlights opportunities to further improve your website and reach a wider audience.

For more advanced needs, add-on features like the SEO Audit tool provide comprehensive diagnostics for on and off-page factors. You can validate performance regularly against SEO best practices with minimal effort to have your page ranking higher. Whether launching a new website or refreshing an existing one, its SEO tools and guidance help you continually improve your website’s discoverability and drive qualified traffic.

Shows two of Web.com's SEO tools, Mobile Friendliness Checker and Backlink Checker. Under Mobile Friendliness Checker, it says "Your website may look great on a desktop, but what about a smartphone or tablet? We check your site's design for mobile friendliness to make sure it's accessible on all screens and provides a positive mobile experience." Under Backlink Checker, it says "A backlink is created when a website links to another website. Websites with more relevant backlinks tend to be more visible in search results. Our SEO analysis will provide a high-level overview of your website's backlinks."

Ecommerce Tools

Web.com is not just for your run-of-the-mill website. It also caters to those who want to start selling online. The integrated tools cover everything from store setup to order management.

Web.com makes it straightforward to quickly transform product pages into shoppable storefronts. Pre-made templates, banners, images, and blocks make visually appealing designs effortless, so you can start selling faster.

You’ll love elements like its countdown timers that create a sense of urgency for a limited-time deal, or even stir anticipation while counting down your newest release date.

And use its lead forms to further engage customers and start collecting more emails.

You won’t have to worry about payment gateways, shipping carriers, or taxes as they are simplified in a secure checkout. Customers can conveniently pay through credit cards, PayPal, and other methods in just clicks.

Real-time shipping rates also instill confidence during purchase.

Web.com empowers driving sales through promotions with built-in capabilities for discounts, site-wide sales, and coupons—easily boost conversions and encourage repeat business. With social integrations, selling on social media is also turnkey. Product catalogs sync across your website, Facebook, Instagram, and other channels. You can fulfill orders wherever customers prefer to shop.

To make sure you are on track, reporting and analytics provide a bird’s-eye view into inventory, purchases, margins, and other ecommerce metrics through one unified dashboard, so you can identify successes and opportunities in your store’s performance.

For SMBs seeking complete, integrated ecommerce solutions, Web.com provides the ingredients for retail success.

Selection of desktop and mobile ecommerce templates from Web.com

Marketing Tools

Web.com’s marketing tools simplify collecting leads, running campaigns to engage your audience, and promoting your brand. From online booking to email marketing, the capabilities remove the complexity of online outreach.

For appointment-based service businesses, you’ll find the booking and scheduling feature makes it simple for current and prospective customers to book timeslots on your calendar. Customers can view your availability and pay deposits upfront, making it a hands-off process.

And email marketing helps regularly nurture contacts with targeted messaging.

Web.com provides professional business email addresses matching your domain for building credibility and to help with deliverability as you scale.

Web.com’s AI comes in handy here as well: intelligent copywriting assistance composes compelling email and landing page content quickly. You just simply provide a few prompts and details to generate well-written drafts.

In-depth campaign analytics provide insight into email open rates, social engagement, leads, and more to continuously refine your outreach, and you only focus time on what works and what needs adjustment. From social to email and beyond, it gives you the tools to efficiently get your brand and offerings in front of the right audiences to drive business growth.

From Web.com's website. Image shows an overview of the Appointment Booking feature that you can embed directly on your website. Image says "Appointment booking right on your website. Unlimited appointment scheduling. Collect payments online. Personalized confirmations & reminders. Only $10/mo."

Expert Services

Starting your first website can be daunting. We know. We’ve been there. If you’re struggling to build or choose a design for your new site, you’re not alone. The good news is you can hire the Web.com team if you get stuck or want someone to build the whole thing for you.

For more tailored guidance on an already existing site, Web.com’s professional services assess your current website and needs to provide strategic recommendations. Its experts dive into optimizing design, content, SEO, and conversions based on your goals.

You can tap into its expertise on navigating challenges like improving site speed, driving more leads through landing pages, and setting up effective analytics.

A major advantage is the experts’ deep knowledge of getting the most out of Web.com’s platform. They understand how to efficiently implement enhancements using the proprietary tools—custom solutions enhance the website without complex integrations.

Web.com also provides coaches to advise on mastering areas like email marketing, social media, blogging, SEO, and paid ads. The real-world guidance will help you improve results across marketing channels. Of course, these expert services will come at a cost, starting at $149, so you’ll need to see if that is worth it for what you need.

Where Web.com Could Improve

Because Web.com‘s built for beginners, advanced users will likely feel constricted with design choices, customization, and scalability. However, it’s the lack of these things that make it perfectly suited for anyone who’s never built a website before.

Aside from that, there are a few other areas we feel Web.com can improve as well.

Pricing Confusion

Some Web.com add-ons you might have to pay extra for, but that saves you money at the start since you won’t need to spend your budget on features that you won’t use until later.

For instance, domain expiration protection costs $9.99, which is something most hosting companies provide for free. However, you can purchase it later if you decide to keep your website around. With this extra protection, Web.com will automatically enroll your domain to prevent unintended expirations.

You might find some webhosts that will transfer your website for free, but Web.com charges $9.99. Although it isn’t free, it is a cheap one-time fee and you can trust that your website data is in good hands if you already have a site elsehwere.

Web.com includes one month free for an SSL certificate, which isn’t a long time, but your site will be safe and secure while you decide if you want to continue to use your website.

The free professional email is similarly short-lived at just three months, but this is plenty of time to decide if you need a professional email or maybe you would like to find a designated email software and then you won’t be wasting money for a professional email that you aren’t using.

Costs can grow quickly when adding must-have elements piecemeal, but the same pricing structure can save you hundreds of dollars in fees in the long run by not having tools sit unused.

Web.com offers no free version and no free trial period, but they have low-costing one month plans that ultimately provide you a very affordable one-month trial.

Lack of Customizability and Scalability

Customization and ease of use are usually inversely related. Most things that are easy to use aren’t flexible, whereas things that are flexible aren’t as beginner-friendly. Web.com definitely leans towards the former.

The standardized templates and widgets make initial setup simple, but lack some flexibility.

When using pre-designed templates some tailoring options will be limited. However, there is no need to substantially modifying the design from the beautiful styles that Web.com has available.

With a drag-and-drop builder, customization capabilities tend to be quite restrictive, which you’ll find is perfect for beginners. Having too many options for customizability would overwhelm you when just getting started. Although having unlimited options to customize each aspect of your website sounds fun in theory, ultimately, it will take away valuable time and energy.

The available blocks, layouts, fonts, and color schemes help you get a basic site live quickly.

While you can upload custom media, you won’t be able to adjust the look and feel beyond presets and that will save you time and stress in the long run.

For scalability, Web.com is definitely designed for beginner sites with less traffic, but it does offer a few different plans to help you scale when needed. As your audience grows, storage, and bandwidth caps necessitate upgrading plans. Once you reach the top, you’ll need to move your site elsewhere. However, that’s usually not too hard and most hosting companies will migrate you for free.

Customer Service Issues

Although some reviewers had issues with the customer service, you’ll find that the Web.com team is easy to contact and happy to help. Attempting to get questions answered via live chat might take some time, but with patience, you’ll get the answer you are looking for.

Common support complaints ranged from long hold times to uninformed agents providing incorrect answers, but these were in the minority. Most customers were happy with Web.com’s support network.

The customer support isn’t the best in the business, but the good news is that its help center is so incredibly easy to use and packed full of tutorials as you go, so you likely won’t need to reach out to support anyway.

While starting small, Web.com will provide you the support you need to get started. Its documentation and helpful guides will answer the most complex questions. For users dependent on assistance to run online businesses, the current support will get you where you need to go, but it might take some time.

Web.com Pricing and Plans

At less than $3 per month, Web.com’s hosting and website builder are comparable to other hosting services. While its pricing may feel a bit confusing with so many different plans and options, you’ll be able to get everything you need at a beginner-friendly price point with the option to add on more features as your needs change.

Web.com offers standalone hosting options allowing you to host on their servers or with WordPress:

  • The Basic plan starts at $2.75 per month ($9.99 on renewal) and includes hosting for one website with 10GB storage, support for up to 15,000 visitors monthly, 25 FTP accounts, a free domain registration for the first year, unlimited bandwidth, and a business email address.
  • Upgrading to the Plus plan at $3.95 per month initially ($13.99 on renewal) allows hosting up to five websites with 20GB storage, support for up to 50,000 monthly visitors, 50 FTP accounts, an SSL certificate, unlimited bandwidth, a free domain name the first year, and a business email.
  • The Premium tier is $5.95 per month the first year ($16.99 on renewal) and expands capacity to 10 websites with 40GB storage, support for up to 200,000 monthly visitors, unlimited FTP accounts, an SSL certificate, a free domain registration the first term, unlimited bandwidth, and a business email address.
  • Alternatively, their WordPress hosting provides the same plans and features at the same price points, with the main difference being you don’t get access to Web.com’s website builder. This caters to those managing their WordPress sites independently.
  • All plans include significant first-year discounts up to 70% off. Domain renewals are around $22 per year for a .com address after the introductory free registration expires.
Pricing for Web.com's hosting packages. All text in the image is discussed in detail before the image.

Web.com’s website and ecommerce plans include:

  • The $4.95 per month Website plan covers website and blog basics. It includes: website builder, domain, privacy, business email, hosting, SSL and one hour of expert design support. After the first year the renewal price is $15.99 per month.
  • Upgrading to the $7.95 per month Website Plus Marketing plan adds appointment scheduling, social and email marketing, and AI writing. It renews at $21.99 per month after the first year term.
  • The Online Store plan at $13.95 per month enables building a full ecommerce website with secure integrated checkout and multi-channel selling on social platforms. It renews at $29.99 per month after one year.
  • The top-tier Online Marketplace plan at $19.95 per month provides further automation for workflow, inventory and order processing across sales channels. It renews at $44.99 per month after the initial term.
Pricing for Web.com's website builder and ecommerce packages. All text in the image is discussed in detail before the image.

Beyond the core plans, Web.com offers a range of add-ons and extra services to further optimize and protect your online presence:

  • The SEO Tool starts at $29.99 per month for diagnosing and improving search engine optimization.
  • Business directory listings are $15 per month to get placed on over 24 directories. The Business Directory plus Reviews at $20 per month adds reputation monitoring and management.
  • Domain expiration protection is a one-time $9.99 fee to prevent accidental domain expirations by auto-renewing.
  • Domain privacy protection costs $15 per year to keep your personal domain registration info private.
  • Premium DNS service starts at $4.42 per month to speed up DNS propagation and improve uptime.
  • Domain transfers are $9.99 each for moving your domain names to Web.com.
  • For professional email, Google Workspace integrates at $3 per month (Business Starter) up to $9 per month (Business Plus)
  • SiteLock security plans range from $6.99 per month (Essentials) to $24.99 per month (Prevent Plus) for protection against malware and other threats.
  • CodeGuard backups start at $3.99 per month. The Cyber Security solution provides annual site cleanup and protection for $49.90 per year.

For those wanting done-for-you website design, Web.com offers a $149 Web Design special. This includes a custom logo, SEO-optimized site, and unique branding delivered by their experts. It’s ideal for beginners wanting a professionally built website. They also provide custom pricing on specialty services like SEO strategy, PPC ads, local listings management and more based on your needs. Their experts can optimize and enhance sites on an ongoing basis.

Web.com offers extensive add-ons to enhance security, performance, email, SEO, and more. However, costs can add up quickly. You’ll need to evaluate your needs to determine which services warrant the extra investment for your business. Try Web.com today.