HostGator is a fantastic web builder at a competitive price. This website builder offers a flexible drag-and-drop page editor and over 200 templates. If you want to get your website up and running even faster, you can use their AI-enabled website designer. Additionally, email marketing and e-commerce tools are standard with all HostGator websites. Overall, this website builder is a great option for first-time designers and growing online businesses.
PROS
- Very easy to use
- Excellent support
- Competitively priced
CONS
- The editor is a bit limited
- Unable to add custom code
Overview
HostGator is a web hosting company founded in 2002 and based in Houston, Texas. The company has won numerous awards for its web hosting. In 2019, the company launched a website builder to help individuals and small businesses create their own sites.
The HostGator website builder is impressively flexible and easy to use. It’s also one of the most affordable options for small businesses, especially considering the range of marketing and sales tools included. While other website builders may be better for online stores looking to grow, HostGator’s platform is ideal for new online businesses or established businesses looking to get online.
How HostGator Works
We were very impressed with how easy the HostGator website builder is to use. The back-end control panel is carefully designed and makes it easy to transition between designing your site, managing your online store, and launching marketing campaigns. The drag-and-drop site editor is also easy to use and we loved that there’s an AI design option that can help you get online right away.
HostGator Features and Tools
Unlimited Web Hosting
All HostGator website building plans include free hosting with unlimited storage and bandwidth. HostGator is an award-winning web hosting provider, so this service is very high quality. All sites also come with an SSL certificate and a free custom domain for 1 year.
Logo Builder
If your company doesn’t have a logo yet, you can use HostGator’s logo maker to create one. Simply enter your business name and choose from a number of initial designs. You can then customize your logo’s shape, colors, fonts, and more.
How to Create a Website with HostGator
HostGator offers 2 paths to create a website. You can follow a more traditional design process or use an AI design tool to create a custom site for you.
With the AI designer, all you have to do is enter a few details about the site you’re trying to create. Based on that, the designer will suggest some options to get you started and then take you to your new site.
If you choose this route, your options for customizing your site are moderately limited. You can add page sections, including text and images, but you don’t have the option to drag and drop individual elements onto your pages. However, we are quite satisfied with the selection of page sections and believe that this editor will be sufficient for most basic websites.
If you want more control over the design of your site, you can choose the more traditional design process. HostGator offers over 220 templates, all mobile-friendly, to choose from.
The drag and drop page editor allows you to add individual content elements to your site, giving you great freedom when presenting your content. We especially liked that elements are automatically aligned using a series of semi-transparent grid lines. This speeds up the design process and ensures your site design looks professional.
The only problem we found with the HostGator editor is that you cannot change the templates. With so many customization options, we don’t think this is a big deal. But it can be frustrating if you get into the design process and decide you don’t like your template, as you’ll have to restart. It’s also worth noting that you can’t migrate your site to another platform, although that’s often the case among website builders.
Adding Multimedia to Your HostGator Website
HostGator allows you to add images, videos, audio, text files, and even Flash layouts to your website. All your files are stored in a media library, which you can organize into searchable folders.
You can upload multiple files from your computer simultaneously, which we liked, but the library doesn’t let you import images from social networks or cloud storage. HostGator also offers thousands of free stock images from Unsplash.
Overall, we found the process of adding multimedia to be simple and seamless. Integration with cloud storage and social media platforms would also be nice, but not essential.
Marketing Functionality with HostGator Websites
All HostGator websites include a very capable email marketing package. Every time a visitor fills out a form on your website, their information is automatically entered into the contact database. You can segment your contacts or download a database if you want to use a third-party email.
HostGator’s email marketing tool lets you launch campaigns around product announcements, sales, events, and more. You will customize your email. emails using the same section-based page editor you use when building your website with AI Designer, so it’s pretty easy to create professional-looking email campaigns. Just note that the number of email campaigns you can send per month is limited to 3 with the basic subscription and 10 with HostGator’s highest tier plan.
To analyze your marketing performance, HostGator lets you track how many people open your campaigns. However, you may not retarget customers based on this data or create personalized coupon codes.
SEO Functionality and Add-Ons with HostGator Websites
One point that HostGator misses the mark is SEO. You can edit the meta title and description for each of your pages, and it’s easy to create a blog for any HostGator site. However, the platform doesn’t let you add alt text to images, and it doesn’t have any tools to analyze your site’s SEO and suggest improvements.
That said, we were pleased with HostGator’s analytics capabilities. You can enable Google Analytics on any website. Or you can use the platform’s built-in traffic analytics tool, but you’ll need to update your plan to see details like where your visitors are coming from and what pages they’re viewing.
Ecommerce
All HostGator sites support e-commerce, and the platform works well for small or relatively new online businesses. You can sell digital downloads, accept online reservations, and easily post coupons and sales. Additionally, HostGator provides tools for inventory, shipping, and tax management.
However, HostGator lacks some of the more advanced features that growing stores will likely need. For example, you can see abandoned carts, but you can’t create automated emails. You also cannot sell gift cards online or enable in-store pickup as a delivery option.
HostGator Customer Support
HostGator offers 24/7 customer support via phone, email, and live chat. The platform also has a detailed online knowledge base with hundreds of articles. It covers not only how to design your website, but also how to use an email marketing package and online store tools.
HostGator Pricing
Pricing & Special Offers
HostGator offers 3 plans: Starter, Site and Store. All plans include hosting, email marketing, analytics and e-commerce. However, they differ in how many campaigns you can send, what data you can analyze, and how many products you can sell.
HostGator offers introductory pricing for up to 2 years for new customers. After that, you can get a 25% discount for signing up for another 2-year plan.
HostGator vs WordPress.com
WordPress.com is one of the best website builders for bloggers because it allows you to sell ads on your blog posts. However, the WordPress.com site builder is not as easy to use and does not offer as much flexibility as the HostGator builder. For everyone who is not a blogger, we recommend HostGator.
HostGator vs GoDaddy
HostGator and GoDaddy website builders are very comparable in price and features. We think the HostGator website builder offers a little more design flexibility and we like that it has more than twice as many templates available.
HostGator vs HostPapa
HostPapa‘s website builder is relatively basic and is best suited for small websites, such as one-page portfolio sites. The HostGator site builder offers much more in terms of design options and marketing tools, and we would recommend it over HostPapa for most website builders.
Bottom Line
HostGator’s website builder is easy to use, flexible, and very capable. We love that you can choose between a traditional drag-and-drop editor or a simplified AI design process depending on how much time you want to spend creating your site. We were also impressed with the overall ease of customizing a site and the simplicity of the HostGator control panel.
What really makes HostGator stand out is its support for email marketing and e-commerce on all plans. It is one of the most affordable website builders to create a fully functional online store. While HostGator has some shortcomings that can hold back a rapidly growing business, it is ideal for people and businesses connecting to the Internet for the first time.