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A website builder is a fantastic on-ramp if you want to spin up a web presence without much effort. Some web hosting services rely on third-party tools, such as Duda or Wix, but an increasing number are stepping up with their own website builders. HostGator, one of our Editors’ Choice-winning web hosting services, is one such company. It offers the easy-to-use Gator Website Builder, a robust tool that features beautiful templates, strong uptime, and the ability to sell products—even digital downloads. The well-rounded Gator has just about everything you need to quickly blog or sell products, so it joins Duda and Wix as our Editors’ Choice picks for website builders.
Gator’s Prices
Gator’s plans are generous. The entry-level Express Start plan starts at $4.99 per month, and includes three email marketing campaigns, a three-product online store, and unlimited storage and monthly data transfers. Next up the ladder is the Express Site plan. It starts at $6.49 per month, and builds upon Express Start by upping the email marketing campaigns to five and the product capacity to 10. It also adds priority support and appointment-booking tools. The high-end Express Store plan costs $12.49 per month, and offers 10 email marketing campaigns, unlimited store products, and zero transaction fees. Gator, like many other website builders, offers discounts for annual commitments. Unlike Weebly and Wix, Gator doesn’t offer a free plan.
Lack of a free option aside, Gator has extremely competitive rates. Wix starts at $14 per month for its Combo plan, which limits monthly data transfers to 2GB and storage to 3GB. The least expensive Wix e-commerce plan costs $23 per month. Duda charges $14 per month (with a one-year commitment) for its Basic plan. Squarespace starts at $12 per month for the entry-level Personal plan, and $26 per month for the base Commerce option.
Getting Started With Gator
For quicker logins, you can link your site to your Facebook or Google account , but you can also create credentials from scratch. Once you’ve decided on a plan, you choose a domain name—it’s included free for the first year with your account if you opted for an annual plan. The domain name costs $22 per year thereafter ($18 per year for the two-year commitment, or $16 per year for a three-year commitment). You can also use a domain name that you already own. Gator doesn’t require a HostGator hosting account; the two services use separate logins.
As with almost all site builders, you start by choosing a template for your site. Gator’s 200-plus templates are attractive and modern, with some featuring full background images. After you select one, the builder interface opens with a dummy site in place. A step-by-step tour walks you through the interface, leaving a good first impression.
Website Design With Gator
Gator is also easy on the eyes. It uses a progressive-reveal strategy, meaning you see more options as you burrow down into the tools. What seems simple at first reveals lots of power and customization as you proceed. The left rail has eight large icons: Elements, Pages, Sections, Design, Blog, Store, Stats, and Manage. When clicked, these open flyout menus with many sub-choices. For example, the Elements entry offers buttons, files, maps, PayPal, navigation, Social, Text, and Videos, each with their own sub-choices.
You can add elements to your pages in Squarespace’s responsive-design, site-builder tradition. As with Squarespace, Gator lets you either drag an element anywhere onto a page or click the plus sign at the bottom to add a new section, with options for images, text, or a combination of elements. There’s a good selection of layout options, too. Guide rules help you line up any item you place onto your page. We like that Gator uses right-click context menus—something that not all site builders can claim. You can also drag buttons, contact forms, social feeds, sound player (using SoundCloud), and a PayPal button onto your page. That last option is better than what some rival website builders offer. For example, GoDaddy Websites + Marketing restricts receiving money of any type to its high-level, e-commerce plan.
Aside from customizing with elements, you can also customize the overall site design. To do this, you can either click an area you want to customize or choose Design from the right-hand panel. A copious selection of background textures is at your disposal, as well as matched, color palettes. If you find that you’ve gone too wild with excess design, you can always revert to the template defaults. More fun options include Parallax backgrounds, which move as the reader scrolls, and animations for text and other objects to fly, bounce, or fade into view.
If you find that you’ve goofed, the Undo lets you turn back time on a mistake. In a nice touch, Gator keeps a history of your site’s state every time you save or publish, so you can go back to a date (picking it on a calendar) and restore your site. You can also add comments to each history point. Unfortunately, that capability costs an extra $39.97 per year.
Working With Images in Gator
The Elements tool offers three, drag-and-drop options: Image, Image Gallery, and Icon. You can upload multiple images at a time, and everything you upload is stored in an online repository for you to reuse wherever else on your site that you choose—something not offered by classic Weebly (though, it’s available in new Weebly accounts powered by Square Online). If you choose Gallery, you can select photos from your linked Facebook or Instagram accounts.
If you don’t have pictures of your own, Gator includes a healthy selection of stock photography—more than 500,000 images—helpfully organized into 18 categories, including Architecture, Cars, Hotels, and Sport. Even more impressive, you can use the images without paying a royalty fee. Several other site builders, including Squarespace and Weebly, charge you for much of their stock photography.
There are dozens of gallery layouts, including grid, horizontal, and vertical choices, with or without titles. When a site visitor clicks your gallery, a slideshow view opens, though it lacks a full-screen view. Unfortunately, Gator has limited photo-editing chops. You can resize images using one of the default aspect ratios, but that’s it.
Managing Pages and Publishing
Adding pages to your website is a simple matter of selecting the Pages menu, hitting the Add New Page button, and choosing from a well-stocked selection of page types. This includes basics, such as Contact and About, and less-common ones, such as Schedule and Restaurant menu. It’s one of the best selections we’ve seen in any site builder. You can save and preview your edits, and they don’t go live until you hit Publish. After you publish a page, a dialog appears that displays your site URL and social sharing buttons.
Several site builders include app stores that feature many third-party service extensions—scheduling tools, forms, and other stuff like that. Wix and Weebly are particularly strong in this. Gator has an App Market, but it only has a handful of apps.
Blogging Options
Like much of the site builder, Gator’s blogging tool is nearly everything we could hope for in such a feature. As with the main site templates, the blog templates are modern and attractive. When creating a post, you can add a header image, tags, text formatting, and edit the post’s URL. You can add inline images or videos, as well as headings and links, and designate a post as Featured or Pinned. Unlike some website builders, Gator lets you easily switch templates, without issue.
Importantly, you can save a post as a draft before publishing it. Our only disappointment with the blogging feature is that you can’t schedule a post to be published at a specific date and time.
Gator’s Mobile Sites
Our test site looked great in smartphone browsers, without our doing anything. Some website builders leave it at that, but the better ones offer customization for mobile consumption. Count Gator in the latter group.
When you enter the mobile editing interface, your site view logically switches to a vertical rectangle, just as though it’s on a phone screen. It lacks the main editor’s many tools, but you can hide any element from the mobile version and change padding, alignment, and the spacing of page elements. You can also customize the background, rearrange sections, and tweak your online store. Unlike Squarespace, Gator’s mobile editor doesn’t let you create a prestitial image that mobile visitors see before entering the site.
E-Commerce Options
You click the Store icon to get started with e-commerce. The simple start page asks you to add your first product. It’s far less intimidating than WordPress.com’s online store. The step-by-step wizard next asks whether you’re selling a product or service. Then you name the product or service, describe it, and add a photo. Bingo! you’re done. A plus sign on the Products page lets you add more products, bypassing the wizard. Gator lets you sell digital downloads, as well as physical products. The website builder even lets you specify expiration criteria based on time or total downloads.
You can add product variants, such as sizes and colors, and specify tax and shipping. After adding products or services, you fill in the basic store details like brick-and-mortar address, accepted currency, and payment processor. For payments, you can use CashOnDelivery, PayPal, or Stripe. The store calculates taxes for you, and integrates with Shippo to handle shipping charges. The store can even track your stock; you put the number of units in the product entry and it decrements as you sell them. You can create store discounts and coupons, and add the social marketing app to spread word of your products or services via Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter.
Traffic Stats, Reporting, and Analytics
The included site stats are impressive. On your account dashboard page, you can see the last 30 days’ worth of unique visitors, total visits, page views, and bounce rate. Open the full traffic page and you can view visitors’ time on site, their geographic information, their languages, and other important information.
You can separate traffic by mobile and desktop, but you must visit your Store’s editing home page to see stats for your online store. Gator tracks visitors, orders, and revenue, but not finer details like abandoned shopping carts.
Helpful Customer Service
We fired up the 24/7 chat support and immediately tossed questions to the customer service representative. The helpful person quickly answered our questions about setting up an online store. You can also contact the customer support team by email or the toll-free phone number (Monday through Friday, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. EST).
Excellent Uptime Results
Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. If your site is down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services. You do not want that.
We used a website-monitoring tool to track our Gator-hosted test site’s uptime over a 14-day period. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings our website and sends us an email if it is unable to contact the site for at least one minute. The testing data reveals that Gator is remarkably stable; in fact, it didn’t go down once in the two-week testing period.
A Site Builder With Teeth!
If you want to build your own feature-rich website in just a few minutes, Gator should be on your radar. The website builder has excellent site-creation tools for desktop and mobile, intuitive e-commerce features, and small business-friendly prices. All this, plus rock-steady uptime, make Gator an Editors’ Choice pick for website builders, joining Duda and Wix.
For more on getting started building your site, read How to Build a Website and 10 Easy But Powerful SEO Tips to Boost Traffic to Your Website.
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