HOSTGATOR WEBSITE BUILDER SPECS
| Free Version Offered | No |
| Web Store | Yes |
| Blogging Tool | Yes |
HostGator's Prices
HostGator'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 that the Express Site plan. It starts at $6.49 per month and builds upon Express Start by upping the e-mail marketing campaigns to 5 and therefore the production 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 0 transaction fees. HostGator, like many other website builders, offers discounts for annual commitments. Unlike Weebly and Wix, HostGator doesn't offer a free plan.
Lack of a free option aside, HostGator 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 smallest amount 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 bottom Commerce option.
Getting Started With HostGator
For quicker logins, you'll link your site to your Facebook or Google account, but you'll also create credentials from scratch. Once you've selected an idea, you select a website name—it's included free for the primary year together with your account if you opted for an annual plan. The name costs $22 per annum thereafter ($18 per annum for the two-year commitment, or $16 per annum for a three-year commitment). you'll also use a website name that you simply already own. HostGator doesn't require a HostGator hosting account; the 2 services use separate logins.
As with most site builders, you begin by choosing a template for your site. HostGator's 200-plus templates are attractive and modern, with some featuring full background images. After you decide on one, the builder interface opens with a dummy site in situ. A step-by-step tour walks you thru the interface, leaving an honest first impression.
Website Design With HostGator
HostGator is additionally 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 initially reveals many 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 instance, the weather entry offers buttons, files, maps, PayPal, navigation, Social, Text, and Videos, each with its own sub-choices.
You can add elements to your pages in Squarespace's responsive-design, site-builder tradition. like Squarespace, HostGator allows you to either drag a component anywhere onto a page or click the sign at rock bottom to feature a replacement section, with options for images, text, or a mixture of elements. there is a good choice of layout options, too. Guide rules assist you to line up any item you place onto your page. We like that HostGator uses right-click context menus—something that not all site builders can claim. you'll also drag buttons, contact forms, social feeds, the sound player (using SoundCloud), and a PayPal button onto your page. That last option is best than what some rival website builders offer. for instance, GoDaddy Websites + Marketing restricts receiving money of any type to its high-level, e-commerce plan.
Aside from customizing with elements, you'll also customize the general site design. to try to do this, you'll either click a neighborhood you would like to customize or choose Design from the right-hand panel. A copious selection of background textures is at your disposal, also as matched, color palettes. If you discover that you've got gone too wild with excess design, you'll always revert to the template defaults. More fun options include Parallax backgrounds, which move because the reader scrolls, and animations for text and other objects to fly, bounce, or fade into view.
If you discover that you've got goofed, the Undo allows you to turn back time on an error. during a nice touch, HostGator keeps a history of your site's state whenever you save or publish, so you'll return to date (picking it on a calendar) and restore your site. you'll also add comments to every history point. Unfortunately, that capability costs an additional $39.97 per annum.
Working With Images in HostGator
The Elements tool offers three, drag-and-drop options: Image, Image Gallery, and Icon. you'll upload multiple images at a time, and everything you upload is stored in a web repository for you to reuse wherever else on your site that you simply choose—something not offered by classic Weebly (though, it's available in new Weebly accounts powered by Square Online). If you select Gallery, you'll select photos from your linked Facebook or Instagram accounts.
If you do not have pictures of your own, HostGator 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'll use the pictures 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, HostGator has limited photo-editing chops. you'll resize images using one among the default aspect ratios, but that's it.
Managing Pages and Publishing
Adding pages to your website may be a simple matter of choosing the Pages menu, hitting the Add New Page button, and selecting from a well-stocked selection of page types. This includes basics, like Contact and About, and less-common ones, like Schedule and Restaurant menu. It's one of the simplest selections we have seen in any site builder. you'll save and preview your edits, and that 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 during this. HostGator has an App Market, but it only features a few apps.
Blogging Options
Like much of the location builder, HostGator's blogging tool is almost everything we could hope for in such a feature. like most site templates, the blog templates are modern and attractive. When creating a post, you'll add a header image, tags, text formatting, and edit the post's URL. you'll add inline images or videos, also as headings and links, and designate a post as Featured or Pinned. Unlike some website builders, HostGator allows you to easily switch templates, without issue.
Importantly, you'll save a post as a draft before publishing it. Our only disappointment with the blogging feature is that you simply can't schedule a post to be published at a selected date and time.
HostGator's Mobile Sites
Our test site looked great in smartphone browsers, without our doing anything. Some website builders leave it at that, but the higher ones offer customization for mobile consumption. Count HostGator within the latter group.
When you enter the mobile editing interface, your site view logically switches to a vertical rectangle, even as though it's on a phone screen. It lacks the most editor's many tools, but you'll hide any element from the mobile version and alter padding, alignment, and therefore the spacing of page elements. you'll also customize the background, rearrange sections, and tweak your online store. Unlike Squarespace, HostGator's mobile editor doesn't allow you to create a prestitial image that mobile visitors see before entering the location.
E-Commerce Options
You click the shop icon to urge started with e-commerce. the straightforward start page asks you to feature your first product. it is 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 merchandise or service, describe it, and add a photograph. Bingo! you're done. A sign on the Products page allows you to add more products, bypassing the wizard. HostGator allows you to sell digital downloads, also as physical products. the website builder even allows you to specify expiration criteria supported time or total downloads.
👉 Also, you can read: HostGator Website Builder review
You can add product variants, like sizes and colors, and specify tax and shipping. After adding products or services, you fill within the basic store details like brick-and-mortar address, accepted currency, and payment processor. For payments, you'll use cash on delivery, PayPal, or Stripe. the shop calculates taxes for you and integrates with Shippo to handle shipping charges. the shop can even track your stock; you set the number of units within the product entry and it decrements as you sell them. you'll create store discounts and coupons, and add the social marketing app to spread the 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'll see the last 30 days' worth of unique visitors, total visits, page views, and bounce rate. Open the complete traffic page and you'll view visitors' time on site, their geographic information, their languages, and other important information.
You can separate traffic by mobile and desktop, but you want to visit your Store's editing home page to ascertain stats for your online store. HostGator 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 inquiries to the customer service representative. The helpful person quickly answered our questions on fixing a web store. you'll also contact the customer support team by email or the toll-free telephone number (Monday through Friday, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. EST).
Excellent Uptime Results
Website uptime is one of the foremost important aspects of a hosting service. If your site is down, clients or customers are going to be unable to seek out you or access your products or services. you are doing not want that.
We used an internet site monitoring tool to trace our HostGator-hosted test site's uptime over a 14-day period. Every quarter-hour, the tool pings our website and sends us an email if it's unable to contact the location for a minimum of one minute. The testing data reveals that HostGator is remarkably stable; actually, it didn't go down once within the two-week testing period.
A Site Builder With Teeth!
If you would like to create your own feature-rich website in only a couple of minutes, HostGator should get on your radar. the website builder has excellent site-creation tools for desktop and mobile, intuitive e-commerce features, and little business-friendly prices. All this, plus rock-steady uptime, make HostGator an Editors' Choice pick for website builders, joining Duda and Wix.
For more on getting started building your site, read the way to Build an internet site and 10 Easy But Powerful SEO Tips to spice up Traffic to Your Website.
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