Site123 Review – Website Builder For Everyone

4.0

Simplicity

Templates

Features

Pricing

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Site123 Review Conclusion

Site123 is an excellent choice for anyone looking to create a simple site as fast as possible. Site123 lacks a bit in features (especially in free features), but it makes it up in simplicity.

The great thing about Site123 is that it has a free plan, which you can use to get a feel of Site123 yourself and all the features it has to offer.

Site123 is best suited for simple informative or blog type of sites.

Website Builder

Total score

4.0

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In this Site123 review, we will take an in-depth look at how you can use it to create your website in simple steps.

Here’s the deal: creating a website with Site123 is super easy. You can quickly roll out an eye-pleasing website within minutes (yes, literally): no extra fees, no need to interact with the underlying website code.

It gets better.

Site123 supports translating your websites to over 20 languages, you get hosting at no extra charge, and even a free domain name (with paid plans). Sounds impressive, right?

But hold on. I can hear my critical-reader-self right now asking.

Is it worth it?

Are there caveats you need to be wary of?

At the end there as an FAQ section on everything to do with the Site123 website builder

Let’s get this show on the road

Site123 is a cloud-hosted DIY (do-it-yourself) website builder owned by an Israel-based company. Site123 offers an alternative yet straightforward method of creating websites, which would please most of the people out there without a budget to hire a developer.

For starters, you don’t get charged anything, which is very useful if you want just to try out Site123. But if you’re looking to build a complex Site123 website, you will get disappointed.

The best features aren’t free; getting one of Site123’s paid plans unlocks more. Exactly what you require for a fully-fledged site. So why not?

Two scenarios we wouldn’t recommend Site123 are;

First, building websites for large businesses (and companies) or a website with lots of specific requirements requiring lots of advanced customizations.

Second, developers or tech-savvy users are looking for a website builder, which allows them to edit code, make granular customizations, and scale-up large websites.

A good alternative for the above is Wix.

However, if you are looking to create and launch the following types of Site123 websites; you’re good to go with this tool:

• An individual site (freelancer)
• A blog
• An online portfolio site for professionals
• A small to a medium-sized business website
• Your first eCommerce store

To add on, Site123 pricing is fair.

This is the most interesting part of this Site123 review, I will guide you (Step-by-step) on the whole Site123 website creation process.

First, you have to visit Site123’s website as everything gets done via a web browser. All the major browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Firefox are supported.

On the homepage, you are welcomed with a prompt button labeled “Start Here.” Click on it; you get redirected on a page to start creating your Site123 website

What type of Site123 website do you want?

You can choose from the 16 available categories with options such as Business, Online  Store, Blog, Photography, and more. Take a look at the picture below to see all the available options.

The first question is followed up by a request to submit a name for your website. After that, you can get a prompt to finally sign-up.

Fill in your details, i.e., Name, email, and password. Alternatively, you can sign-up with your Facebook or Google account.

I know you’re wondering, aren’t you supposed to choose a Site123 template?

Yes, but the builder automatically chooses one for you, depending on the category you chose. It even fills your Site123 template with photos and dummy content. Lets talk about Site123 templates features.

They are:

• Professionally designed, look modern and visually appealing
• Fully responsive- they are (mobile) optimized and display without hiccups on different screen sizes. At the top of the editing dashboard, there are preview options for Desktop, tablet, and mobile modes to see how your Site123 template adapts on different screen sizes.
• You can choose from over 200 Site123 templates

Site123 isn’t built primarily as a drag and drop builder. It mainly uses blocks in which you edit the content inside. Changes made using sidebar settings can be seen in real-time. Still, you can preview everything on different devices, as I just said above.

To make slight changes to your website; there are 5 buttons on the left-side panel of your dashboard, designed and arranged in a clear and intuitive structure  

Homepage Tab – here you can make changes to:

• Your Site123 Template
• Background images
• Buttons, Forms, Videos, audio and Social Tools e.g. Social Icons, Twitter Timeline, Facebook Like Box.

Pages Tab – Here you can delete or edit (modify layouts) different pages of your Site123 website such as Home, Services, About Us, Contact Us. By removing or adding a page, the changes are automatically made to the menu accordingly alleviating the stress of dealing with page and menu options separately.

You can also use this page to navigate your whole Site123 website (as in webpages) faster and make edits easily.

Design Tab – You can change your Site123 website template’s color scheme and font. When you make a single change, it’s get applied globally meaning you don have to deal with color, style and font for every webpage of your Site123 website.

On the other hand, this adds problems for people looking to fine tune the different pages of their websites as you can’t set custom elements e.g.  font and styles for different pages.

Settings Tab – In this tab you can select an option to edit your:

• Site123 Website Name and Logo
• Site123 Website Type
• Website structure e.g. single page structure
• Language
• Locale and Country (localization) i.e. TimeZone (and format) plus Date Format
• Apps setting
• Add 3rd party Plug-ins and Apps such as Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel and more

Domain Tab – here you can access, redirect and manage all domain features we will discuss later.

On the top right hand corner of Site123 Editor there is a publish button. Click on it to put your site on you internet. I recommend first previewing your Site123 website and checking if everything is okay before clicking that button. Either way, you still get a prompt asking “Are you sure you want to publish?” to confirm your actions.

Everything with Site123 is simplified; starting with the account creation process, it is swift and easier than creating a social media account. Site123 is available in more than 20 languages, increasing its reach and simplifying things for non-English speakers.

The editing dashboard looks modern, intuitively designed and beginner-friendly, which is a big plus in streamlining your editing workflow.

If you are new to website builders, you will appreciate that all the editing tools are placed in easy to access areas and are pretty much straightforward. Site123 goes light on website building jargon.

To start over, you’re automatically helped to select a Site123 template after choosing your site category. If you’re not satisfied with it, you can easily switch it. Preview modes at the top help you perform quick tests on the responsiveness of your Site123 website on various devices.

To edit and create your site, you don’t need to be a programmer, no coding knowledge is required. All you have to do is double click elements, change settings, or edit text and images. Eliminating such complexities makes it a really enjoyable experience, especially for beginners.

But there are a few things that should get ironed out:

• Switching your Site123 template requires you to start over the whole editing process
• You cannot preview Site12 templates when trying to switch to another one
• Unlike other builders, Site123 doesn’t have a mobile app for site management and editing.
• You cant drag and drop elements anywhere or resize them like with Wix.

Learning to gets to grips with Site123 doesn’t have a steep curve; you can become a pro in no time.

To further spruce up and add functionality to your toggle-on website, you’ve got options to add apps, plug-ins, and widgets. You can access the app market under the settings menu.

Some of the plug-ins available are fantastic, am talking about tools such as:

• Google Analytics for visitor tracking and analytics
• Zendesk and Facebook Chat – used for offering customer support on your website.
• Google Webmaster
• Hotjar which is a tool used for optimizing UX (User Experience) and conversions
• Drip – a tool used for multichannel marketing

That’s right; these help with further tailoring, which can help you improve SEO, and market your products better (e.g., using a 3^rd party email marketing tool) if you’re running an eCommerce site. What’s more, they help make your site attractive and engaging, enabling you to edge out competitors in your niche.

Pretty cool, huh?

Here’s a major letdown: to get full access to the Site123’s App market, widgets, and plug-ins, you’ve got to be using one of the highest two paid plans.; some of the apps are free while add an extra cost to your overall Site123 pricing.

Another letdown is that there isn’t a wide variety of 3rd party plug-ins you can choose from compared to other builders like Weebly.

Again, I know I risk seeming repetitive talking about analytics and SEO in this Site123 review, but I cannot stress this enough – both are crucial to your website’s success.

With Site123, you can get your website analytics data by integrating Google Analytics from the App Store under Settings, something which can get done with minimal fuss. Even better, you can add a remarketing tag if you’ve been using Google Analytics before, very valuable for optimizing your marketing campaigns and Ad budget.

Another advantage is being able to implement proper Search Engine Optimization using all the information on your Site123 website’s visitors.

That said, let’s delve deeper into SEO below.

Where would you want your website to appear on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP)? I bet your answer is the first page; this is where SEO comes in.

Can the Site123 website builder help you achieve that? The answer is that it covers most of the fundamentals of SEO; the builder enables you to:

• Edit 3 metadata fields including the meta title – this is the text that appears under you’re a heading Google’s search page
• Customize your URLs,
• Add descriptions and alt text to images

But that’s not all;

The Site123 website builder has automatic site mapping, which helps your site be easily scannable by search engines like Google and Bing. In addition, using social media icons in the footer section of your site’s pages, you can link out to 25 different social platforms to get more traffic and followers to your social media pages.

What if you had done top of the line SEO implementation with your previous site? Site123 has made everything easy, with its 301 redirects feature.

Lastly, you get access to Google Webmaster tools via Site123’s App Store. These tools give you insights on your website, which help you evaluate and identify its strong points, as well as perform maintenance and improvements.

Allow me to nitpick. For advanced users, not everything is catered for; the Site123 builder does not:

• Allow embedding live social feeds.
• Offer support with keywords

For most of the above optimizations, Site123 provides clear descriptions to help you understand. Valuable for those new to SEO.

On top of that, Site123 SEO advisor tool shows you progress of your optimization efforts every time you do an SEO scan.

Site123’s blogging support is decent; here’s the support you get:

• Blog templates
• You can easily share your posts on social media
• You can schedule your blog posts
• Content search feature
• You get free stock images and icons you use in your content
• Adding an RSS feed is supported, it helps people find your blog
• Social bookmarking
• Google Analytics for audience analysis
• Supports creating and managing forums
• Multilanguage translation support ensures your content can be read in multiple languages

Despite all the goodies, if you are looking for a builder that can help you create display categories (sort and control a large amount of blog content), archive, and incorporate a comments section, Site123 falls short. You’re better off checking out our SquareSpace Review.

Online stores have become an excellent way for any small business to increase sales or any individual to venture into eCommerce.

That said, what do you say? Are you ready to start your eCommerce store with Site123?

Here are the eCommerce features, tools, and support you get with the Site123 builder

But I am getting ahead of myself.

For starters, the creation process is the same as any other website with Site123; you select your preferred type of store and template. From there, you can start creating different product pages, add your products, descriptions, and images to make them enticing and SEO optimized.

eCommerce stores can only be built using Advanced and Gold plans.

The Site123 builder supports

• Managing store inventory – auto or manually
• Adding Product categories and displaying related products
• Setting custom pricing depending on colour, size and more
• Multiple currencies (80):
• Payments methods such as PayPal, credit cards, direct transfers, and more…
• Easy implementation of Tax and Shipping
• Featuring special offers for customers, i.e., discount codes (coupons) which can be sent via social media
• Adding 3rd party plug-ins from the Apps to increase your store functionality
• Using CTAs (Call To Actions)

Some caveats you should be aware;

First, there is limited support for marketing tools, even on the App store. All you get with the Site123 builder is a basic email marketing interface. It’s a bummer; you can only build and send simple messages to your subscribers. The email layout cannot be changed.

Second, no automatic invoicing and payment tracking, for such features, you should check dedicated eCommerce builders like Shopify.

Site123 is built to be a one-stop-shop for everything related to building websites; on top of getting free hosting, you can get domain services.

Here’s what’s possible with this builder.

You get access to a domain search tool to check for the availability of your perfect domain. There over 130 extensions available. Subscribing to a premium plan gets you a free domain name tucked in for your initial website hosting year.

For the free Plan, you can only use a generic subdomain but please don’t stick with it. If you’ve bought a domain from another registrar, you can redirect it to your new website, but only after paying for a plan. (Not possible when using Site123 for free).

You should keep away from website builders that don’t make security a priority, Site123 is certainly not among them. Security is not an afterthought with this builder; here’s how your website is secured.

• You get free SSL encryption, which also benefits your how Google treats your website in terms of rankings.
• Site123 hosting uses CDN which improves protection against attacks alongside boosting speeds
• Site123 has Automated Monitoring implemented in their hosting.
• Lastly, you also get a handy autosave feature; it ensures you don’t have to keep manually backing up the site, and you can restore to a previous version if you experience problems.

If you’re short on funds, you can use Site123 without paying a cent, although you might run into limitations in terms of resources and features.

You only get:

• Free hosting
• 500MB storage which is quite limited if you plan to use videos and images
• Support for up to 10 product orders/month.
• 1GB bandwidth which might not be enough to handle high traffic

On top of that, you can purchase some other premium add-ons still on the free Plan, which is great to hear. Despite being free, here is what you won’t like

• Your site is stamped with Site123 branding on the footer section
• There are float Ads
• No email marketing support
• No multiple languages support
• Generic subdomain, you cant connect your domain

Despite everything, having a free option is a plus because it helps you try out the site builder, and if you’re impressed, you can upgrade and pay for one of the following plans.

Basic: $10.80 / month

• 10 GB storage
• 5GB bandwidth
• Email marketing is supported: You can send 100 mailing list messages.
• The Site123 Footer tag remains

Advanced: $16.80 / month

• 30 GB storage
• 15GB bandwidth
• A free domain name
• 2 email accounts with support for 1000 mailing list messages
• No float Ads
• The Site123 floating tag gets removed from your site
• Support for up to 50 product orders/month.
• Your website gets automatically translated to different languages depending on the visitor’s location.1 more language is supported

Professional: $22.80 / month

• 90 GB storage
• 45GB bandwidth
• A free domain name
• 5 email accounts with support for 2500 mailing list messages
• 5 additional languages are supported
• 500 orders available per month.

Gold: $28.80 / month

• 270 GB storage
• 135GB bandwidth
• A free domain name
• 10 email accounts with support for 10000 mailing list messages
• 3 additional languages are supported
• Unlimited orders / month.

You get price discounts depending on the contract length of your Plan. The above prices are for annual subscriptions. There’s no monthly billing option you can pay upfront for 3 months, 1 year, 2 years, or 3 years. A 14-day money-back guarantee covers all plans where you get a full refund if you’re unsatisfied by the service.

One strong point of using Site123 is that you get one of the best customer support services in the website builders space. You can get in touch via Live Chat available 24/7, even for free users. The agents’ response times are decent, in 2 or 3 minutes you get a reply.

What’s more, you don’t have to leave the page your editing, there’s chat bubble available right there. The agents give very helpful answers. Unfortunately, support channels like Phone, and Email aren’t supported.

They also have a Help Center where their Knowledgebase is filled with 18 content categories based on Site123 builder features for those who prefer self-help. To improve their content, Site123 includes short .gifs, which help in a further demonstration of the process you’re struggling with.

To add on, there is a Support Center FAQ page with more information and if you prefer videos tutorials, you’re also covered.

Now, we’ve reached the end of this site123 review. Do we recommend this website builder?

Yes, this is a decent builder that helps with most of the things you need to set up a website; It has all the features of a great builder. Moreover, with its Apps store, you can easily extend its functionality.

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