WordPress is a popular, flexible content management system that powers millions of websites, and Bluehost makes it the backbone of its website builder. If you need extra help building a site, the Bluehost Website Builder gives you the tools to make dependable, attractive pages with e-commerce options. Editors’ Choice winners Duda and Wix hold up better as standalone site builders, but Bluehost Website Builder is an accessible alternative if you’re willing to embrace its WordPress focus.
Bluehost’s Prices, Plans, and Options
Although it lacks a free plan, Bluehost Website Builder is reasonably priced. You just need to suss out exactly what you pay under each WordPress hosting plan. You can subscribe for a year or up to three years, which determines the introductory price and the renewal price. Bluehost offers several website builder tiers, including Basic ($11.99 per month), Choice Plus ($21.99 per month), or Online Store ($26.99 per month).
The Basic plan includes unlimited monthly data transfers, the option to build one website, and 10GB of SSD storage. The Choice Plus plan opens the door to additional premium templates, the option to build three websites, domain privacy, 40GB of SSD storage, and a free CDN and Secure Socket Layer (SSL). The Online Store tier adds more business features, such as the ability to offer discount codes, site memberships, and online booking. The e-commerce functionality, payment, and storefront tools are the main draw, and WooCommerce is one of the best WordPress plug-ins out there.
All tiers provide shared hosting, more than 300 templates, access to an image library, blog post management, and email marketing tools. With the included hosting, you receive one month of free Microsoft 365 Email Essentials for your domain. If you want more high-powered hosting, consider Bluehost’s VPS or dedicated hosting plans.
Bluehost Site Tools and E-Commerce Options
Bluehost gives you two options for creating a WordPress-powered website: the traditional WordPress interface or the Bluehost Website Builder. When using the website builder, you enjoy a more streamlined way to create professional-looking sites. Like Web.com, Bluehost Website Builder prompts you to type keywords into a generator that creates a starting point. For our test, we created a podcast-focused website that features a big pair of headphones on the home page.
Bluehost Website Builder features just one WordPress theme, but the sheer variety of drag-and-drop templates and layouts lets you endlessly customize that theme. Although you can’t change your theme selection (a common website builder limitation), you can alter numerous visual components within a selected template, such as fonts and background colors. In addition, you can swap between desktop and mobile previews to see how your site looks on different displays.
(Credit: Bluehost)This stylistic freedom doesn’t apply to image editing. You can import your own photos, including a logo, and browse Bluehost’s stock photo library. However, you can’t really edit those photos, besides resizing them or adding a link and alt text metadata information. Wix gives you more robust photo editing options.
When it comes to designing your website, Bluehost doesn’t skimp on tools. Under Sections, you can browse many different elements to add to your site. Each element presents you with a few examples to choose from before dragging it onto your page. The standard options include text forms, video embeds, and image galleries. More bespoke elements include a countdown timer, map, and carveout for custom HTML/CSS.
Here you access e-commerce features, such as product listings, reviews, promotions, and pricelists. With WooCommerce, you can sell tens of thousands of different products, physical or digital, as well as subscription memberships.
(Credit: Bluehost)Bluehost’s website builder is simple to use, but placing all of these elements under the same Sections banner makes it take longer to find what you’re looking for. Once an element was on the page, I spent a few more seconds than I wanted adjusting values to get what I desired. Finding your workflow won’t take long, though, as this is still very much an accessible website builder.
Besides Sections, you can access other important editing menus. View all of your site’s pages. Alter global appearance settings and enable transition animations. Enter business and shipping information, as well as social media account credentials if you want your site to sync with Facebook or Twitter. Track your site’s traffic progress via Google Analytics.
Like fellow website builders from GoDaddy and Hostinger, Bluehost has also adopted AI tools to make building sites even easier and faster. If you opt for the new WonderSuite experience when starting a site, you simply answer questions and let the builder generate text and image suggestions (or provide SEO and commerce help). WonderSuite breaks everything up into simple blocks to customize and rearrange in its WonderTheme template.
The website builder also includes WordPress-specific features that make your site shine. For example, you can create a WordPress.com blog that lives on your site or swap back and forth between the simplified website builder and fully featured WordPress admin interface at any time. In that way, Bluehost serves as useful training wheels as you teach yourself to ride the WordPress bike. To learn even more, check out how to get started with WordPress.
Excellent Uptime and Customer Support
A pretty website won’t do you much good if no one can reach it. That’s why we also test how well traditional web hosting services and website builders stay online. Every 15 minutes, our website monitoring tool pings our website and sends an alert if it is unable to contact a site for at least one minute. Bluehost has historically been very stable, and that’s still the case. During a 14-day period, we didn’t see a single outage. Otherwise, expect excellent and dependable uptime.
(Credit: Bluehost)With Bluehost Website Builder, you can leverage Bluehost’s proven customer support team. Through its Blue Sky service, Bluehost provides 24/7 telephone support, online web chat, a ticket-based system, and a helpful knowledge base. As with uptime, Bluehost’s quick and reliable customer support continues to impress us in testing. If you aren’t satisfied, you’ll receive a full refund upon canceling within 30 days. For more details, check out our full Bluehost web hosting review.
Note: We had trouble accessing the streamlined site builder during our most recent test. We had to rely on the traditional WordPress CMS. This is a known issue for users across the board, caused by a recent update, but customer support assured us that a fix is in the works, and is manually fixing accounts in the meantime.
No Need to Feel Blue
Bluehost Website Builder’s WordPress focus isn’t a limitation. In fact, WordPress powers so many websites that choosing a website builder built for the CMS gives you more flexibility than you’d initially expect. For existing Bluehost users, it only makes sense to stay within the ecosystem, and Bluehost’s website builder won’t let you down. That said, if you’re starting fresh with website builders and want one that doesn’t feel quite as supplemental, our Editors’ Choice winners are Wix for its free option and Duda for integrating SaaS platforms.
For more on website building, check out our stories on how to create a website and 10 SEO tips to boost your traffic.
https://me.pcmag.com/en/old-website-builders/20095/bluehost-website-builder
