5 Best Website Builders For Service Industries

Website builders have a reputation for being well-suited to personal projects and homespun blogs, but little else. Perhaps it’s a hangover from the simpler era of GeoCities and Tripod. The thing is, though, website builders have advanced by leaps and bounds since the days of dial-up internet and Netscape Navigator.

Maintaining a positive relationship with your customers is crucial in achieving success, particularly as those customers have more ways than ever to publicly register their feelings about you! Happily, companies involved in the service industries can increasingly find website builders with features specifically tailored to helping businesses reach their clients (and vice versa).

If your company can serve people effectively without breaking the bank, you shouldn’t feel guilty for not shelling out the big bucks for professional designers. Let’s look at some products which will allow you to build an appealing, cost-effective web presence and keep your clientele coming back for more.

1. Wix

Boasting 90 million users in over 190 countries, Wix seems to become more prominent by the day. With ads airing during the Super Bowl and on the sides of buses, no other modern website builder is as visible in the public eye.

Wix offers the following six plans:

Free

• Full Usage of Wix’s Design and Editing Platform
• 500 MB Storage
• 1 GB Bandwidth
• Free Hosting
• Free Wix Domain
• Wix Branded Ads & URL

Connect Domain Plan

• $4.08/month (annual plan)
• $6.90/month (monthly plan)
• 500 MB Storage
• 1 GB Bandwidth
• Custom Domain (instead of “wixusername.wix.com/sitename”)
• Free Hosting
• Google Analytics
• Premium Support

Combo Plan

• $9.75/month (annual plan)
• $13.90/month (monthly plan)
• All of the Above PLUS:
• Free Domain for One Year
• 3 GB Storage
• 2 GB Bandwidth
• Customized Favicon
• Removes Wix Ads
• No Mobile Ads

Unlimited Plan

• $12.92/month (annual plan)
• $15.95/month (monthly plan)
• All of the Above PLUS:
• 10 GB Storage
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Site Booster App (annual plan only)
• Form Builder App (annual plan only)
• $125 Local Listings Voucher (annual plan only)
• $100 Bing Ads Voucher (annual plan only)
• $75 Google AdWords Voucher (annual plan only)

eCommerce Plan

• $16.58/month (annual plan)
• $19.90/month (monthly plan)
• All of the Above PLUS:
• 20 GB Storage
• 10 GB Bandwidth
• Online Store

VIP Plan

• $24.92/month (annual plan)
• $29.90/month (monthly plan)
• All of the Above PLUS:
• 20 GB Storage
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Exclusive VIP Support Line – Priority Callback
• Instant Response
• Professional Site Review

With the biggest template selection in the industry, extensive tutorial and help features, and a vast array of third-party apps available via the Wix App Market, Wix is a fine choice for any business looking to interface with the public without a huge investment. The App Market (it’s the largest such repository for third-party apps in the website builder industry) is especially helpful in making Wix adaptable to your particular field.

Of particular interest to the service industry – specifically the food sector – is Wix’s online ordering system.

Your customers will be able to place orders right on your website, for either pickup or delivery. Wix takes no commission from sales. And for those of you who deliver products or services of the non-edible variety, Wix’s online ordering system can be easily tweaked to reflect your particular business (though the mobile-friendly version of your site’s URL will start with restaurants.wix.com).

If you’re in the business of delivering goods, you won’t find an easier website builder to facilitate sales than Wix.

2. DudaOne

I’ve been a DudaOne fan ever since I first used their builder. They may not have the elevated public profile of Wix, but the editor is powerful and intuitive, and Duda offer a great package of features that any business can make productive use of. And unlike Wix, DudaOne sites are all fully mobile responsive – an increasingly important trait in a mobile-dominant world.

Duda gives you three plans to choose from:

Free

• Natively Responsive Website
• Unlimited Access to inSite
• Limited Analytics and Tracking
• Web Hosting on Amazon Cloud
• Community Support
• Branded Duda Domain
• Duda Ads
• 10 Product Store
• PayPal, Stripe & Global Gateway Payment Providers
• Two Product Categories
• Order and Customer Management Tools

Business +

• $14.25/month (annual plan)
• $19.00/month (monthly plan)
• All of the Above PLUS:
• Full Analytics and Tracking
• Email Support
• Custom Domain (no branding)
• Secure Connection (HTTPS)
• No Ads
• Site Backup
• Chrome Push Notification
• Developer Mode
• Multi-Language Website

Business + eCommerce

• $22.50/month for 100 Product Store (annual plan)
• $29.99/month for 100 Product Store (monthly plan)
• $36.75/month for 2500 Product Store (annual plan)
• $46.00/month for 2500 Product Store (monthly plan)
• All of the Above PLUS:
• 30+ Payment Providers
• Unlimited Product Categories
• Product Reviews Integrated with Facebook

DudaOne’s feature set – eCommerce, blogging, a form builder, a WordPress feed – is strong and intuitive to implement for even the most tech-averse among you. What really makes DudaOne stand out in terms of its utility for the service industry, however, is inSite.

With DudaOne’s inSite feature, you can customize what your site visitors see based on the time of day, whether or not they’ve visited your site before, and other variables. As a tool, it provides a degree of flexibility and customization in your customer interactions that most other website builders simply don’t allow.

You could have a newsletter signup form pop up for first-time visitors only. You could display a “click-to-call” button during business hours and a contact form during non-business hours. The possibilities are endless.

Through inSite, you can ensure people see the information that’s most pertinent to them at whatever time they see it. Remarkably, this tool is available even with a free DudaOne subscription.

3. Squarespace

As Squarespace (see our review) doesn’t have a free subscription, it doesn’t boast the same eye-popping user numbers as Wix. Nonetheless, it has grown in prominence in recent years (the Super Bowl ads with Key and Peele being a big indicator) and is widely considered to be the classiest, most sophisticated website builder out there, while remaining true to the drag-and-drop DIY ethos of modern website building. For those in the service industry, you’d be remiss not to consider Squarespace for your company website.

Squarespace keeps it simple with its available plans, offering two of them:

Personal

• $12/month (billed annually)
• $16/month (if paid month to month)
• 3% Transaction Fee
• 20 Pages/Galleries/Blogs
• Up to 2 Contributors
• Fully Integrated eCommerce
• Sell Unlimited Products
• Accept Donations
• Powerful Website Metrics

Business

• $18/month (billed annually)
• $26/month (if paid month to month)
• All of the Above PLUS:
• 2% Transaction Fee
• Unlimited Pages/Galleries/Blogs
• Unlimited Contributors
• Professional Email from Google
• $100 Google Adwords Credit

Squarespace’s 41 responsive templates are broadly acknowledged to be the class of the industry. You won’t find templates this elegant and professional anywhere else in the website builder world.

Unlike Wix, Squarespace doesn’t have a collection of third-party features on offer, instead opting to do everything in-house. This approach means that every feature is guaranteed to work seamlessly within your site. You’ll never have to worry about a third-party developer dropping their support of an app you’re using.

Squarespace’s features are second-to-none, but their eCommerce tool deserves particular attention. Squarespace allows you to sell physical and digital goods while letting users track and manage their inventories, track payment activities, sort sold items into different categories, and create coupons and promo codes. Business subscribers are given additional USPS shipping options. The only limiting factor here is that Squarespace eCommerce is integrated with Stripe and only Stripe – you won’t get any further options for payment processing.

Squarespace’s eCommerce, while great for a standalone online business, makes for a great sales complement to brick-and-mortar stores as well. Read my Squarespace review to get the full story.

4. Weebly

With over 40 million websites created, Weebly is the second most popular website builder in existence, trailing only Wix. With full mobile responsiveness, incredibly easy website building (it’s one of the easiest of them all, which is really saying something) and rich feature haul, Weebly is well-suited to give service industry businesses a solid web presence.

Weebly’s subscription plans are thus:

Free

• Drag & Drop Builder
• Weebly Ads/Weebly Branded URL
• 500 MB Storage

Starter

• $8/month
• Custom Domain, Free for One Year
• Unlimited Storage
• Connect Your Domain
• Expanded Stats
• Customizable Footer
• Remove Weebly Branding
• Search Engine Indexing
• $100 Google Advertising Credit
• Up to 10 Products in Online Store
• 3% Weebly Transaction Fee
• Integrated Shopping Cart – Links to “checkout.weebly.com”

Pro

• $12/month
• All of the Above PLUS:
• Phone Support
• HD Video & Audio Players
• Password Protected Pages
• Site Search
• Membership Sites – Up To 100 Members
• Up to 25 Products in Online Store

Business

• $25/month
• All of the Above PLUS:
• Unlimited Membership with Membership Sites
• Member Registration
• SSL Security
• Unlimited Products in Online Store
• No Weebly Transaction Fee
• Integrated Shopping Cart on Your Domain
• Digital Goods
• Inventory Management
• Shipping & Tax Calculator
• Coupon Codes

Performance

• $49/month
• All of the Above PLUS:
• Real Time Shipping Rates
• Abandoned Cart Emails
• Gift Cards
• 5 Email Campaigns/month to 500 Contacts Per Email

One thing you’ll get with Weebly is top-notch customer service. Many website builders give you either phone support or live chat. Weebly does both. Their customer service has acquired a reputation, and it’s a good one.

Weebly’s website builder is richly featured and robust enough to handle the needs of your customers. Their eCommerce feature is top-notch, and offers the choice of Stripe, Square, PayPal, and Authorize.net as payment processors. And like Wix, Weebly gives you access to a large number of third-party apps (via the Weebly App Center) to fill any feature gaps left by their in-house widgets.

Unlike many competitors, Weebly offers a full-fledged mobile editor, so you can edit your website on the go. You can’t always be chained to your laptops, and Weebly offers a degree of freedom in website management that most competitors just don’t provide.

Weebly provides an intuitive, responsive way to connect your business with your customers. Want a more detailed look at Weebly? Read my review to quench your curiosity.

5. Jimdo

It may not be the biggest name in the industry, but Jimdo has established a formidable customer base with its highly capable website builder. Over 12 million websites have been created using Jimdo’s well-designed editor, easily-managed storefronts, and wide variety of features.

Here’s what Jimdo has to offer:

JimdoFree

• 500MB Site Storage
• Jimdo.com Subdomain
• Basic SEO for Whole Site
• 1 Password Protected Page
• Footer Jimdo Advertisement
• Up to 5 Products in Online Store
• No Transaction Fees
• Payment Accepted via PayPal (incl. credit cards)
• Offer Free Shipping for Large Orders

JimdoPro 

• $7.50/month (billed annually)
• All of the Above PLUS:
• 5GB Site Storage
• 1 Free Custom Domain
• Connect External Domains
• 1 Custom Email with 3 Forwarding Aliases
• Semi-Premium Support (Response Within 24 Hours)
• Basic SEO for Individual Pages
• 5 Password Protected Pages
• Ad-Free
• Custom Footer
• Up to 15 Products in Online Store
• Site Statistics
• Additional Payment Methods

JimdoBusiness 

• $20/month (billed annually)
• Unlimited Site Storage
• 2 Custom Domains
• 20 Custom Emails with Unlimited Forwarding Aliases
• Premium Support (Response Within 2 Regular Business Hours)
• Advanced SEO
• Unlimited Password Protected Pages
• Ad-Free
• Unlimited Products in Online Store with Discount Codes and Shipping Options
• No Jimdo Transaction Fee
• Site Statistics
• Mobile Express Page
• Unlimited Images
• Up to 100 MB File Downloads for Patrons

Like Weebly, Jimdo features a full mobile editor – a definite plus in today’s uber-hectic business world. Unlike Weebly, however, Jimdo’s sites are not mobile responsive – instead, a separate mobile site is automatically created when you save your desktop website. I expect Jimdo to someday move to full mobile responsiveness, in keeping with industry trends.

Jimdo provides a solid set of features to its users. Blogging, eCommerce, HD video streaming, and more. The only downside with the eCommerce is that you can’t sell digital goods.

If you’re looking for more that what Jimdo provides in-house, they’ve compiled a list of 3rd party widgets compatible with Jimdo that can be added via embed code.

Click here to read my full Jimdo review.

Conclusion

For those in the service industry, the need for a friendly, approachable and flexible web presence is manifest. You’re in the business of pleasing people, and a rigid online billboard does not inspire confidence. Luckily, modern website builders like the ones I’ve profiled above allow you to make those all-important connections with your clientele that will give people another reason to come back.

Now, keep grinding away to make us happy! Chop chop!