IONOS MyWebsite is a powerful and affordable website builder for small businesses. It offers 2 versions of its site editor to cater for both beginners and advanced designers. Features like email and traffic analytics are standard, while an online store option offers inventory management and social media cross-selling. Overall, IONOS MyWebsite is a great option if you are a small business owner looking to grow your online presence.
PROS
- Very easy to use
- Excellent support
- Competitive price:
CONS
- The editor is a bit limited.
- Can’t add custom code
How IONOS by 1&1 Works
IONOS is a web host and domain registrar founded in 1988. The company offers everything from shared hosting to cloud computing. Its MyWebsite website builder includes shared hosting by IONOS with unlimited storage and bandwidth.
IONOS MyWebsite builder is built for small businesses. It offers website editors for both first-time and experienced designers, and sells tools that can help your business grow. It’s ideally suited for small businesses that want to build a large-scale online store, but don’t want to spend a fortune on a more advanced e-commerce-specific platform like Wix or Shopify.
Using IONOS
We found the overall experience Builder of using IONOS MyWebsite to be quite smooth. You can sign up, choose a template, and start designing, all in a few minutes.
The complexity of the editor will depend on whether you sign up for the beginner-friendly MyWebsite Now or the more advanced MyWebsite Creator editor. In any case, it’s easy to customize your template styles, drag and drop content elements, and preview your site.
Hosting
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All IONOS MyWebsite plans include IONOS shared hosting with unlimited storage and bandwidth. You also receive a free SSL certificate, a free domain name for one year, and 1 free email address on your domain.
Privacy Tools
IONOS helps you communicate to your visitors that you take privacy seriously. You can easily add a banner to your site explaining your cookie policy. Plus, any forms you add to your site are GDPR compliant by default.
How to Create a Website with IONOS
The process of building a website with IONOS MyWebsite starts with choosing a template. There are only 18 templates available, far fewer than comparable website builders. The designs are decent, although they can feel a little bland. You can change templates at any time, but if you do, you will have to restart the design process.
After choosing a template, you can customize it and add content elements to your site. How much control you have over this process depends on whether you choose MyWebsite Now or MyWebsite Creator.
With MyWebsite Now, you just have a little more flexibility to customize your website. You are limited to showing or hiding content elements within the blocks already present in your chosen template. You may not drag and drop new content elements onto your site or edit your site code.
With MyWebsite Creator, you can drag and drop content elements such as text boxes, images, buttons, shapes, and more. You can customize the layout of these elements and add effects such as a video background. MyWebsite Creator also allows you to edit your website’s CSS code so that users with coding experience can make more in-depth changes to the basic design.
Whichever editor you use, we found MyWebsite to be pretty straightforward. You can preview how your site will look on desktop, tablet and mobile devices, and it only takes one click to activate your site.
Overall, we were quite satisfied with the website development process for IONOS MyWebsite. We think most users will like the flexibility of MyWebsite Creator, although MyWebsite Now may be useful for first-time designers who want to get a website up and running as quickly as possible.
Adding Multimedia to Your IONOS Website
IONOS MyWebsite supports photos, videos, audio files and PDF files. You can upload files by simply clicking on an existing media content item. Files are stored in a content library, so it’s easy to reuse them on your site.
One thing we particularly liked about IONOS is that the platform automatically resizes images to optimize them for faster page loads. You also get access to thousands of free stock images to use on your website. Overall, the platform’s media management is pretty solid.
Marketing Functionality with IONOS Websites
IONOS offers several features for marketing your online business. First, all sites include a built-in email marketing tool that you can use to send newsletters to your contacts. It’s not the most customizable newsletter writer we’ve seen, but it’s pretty handy if you don’t want to pay for a third-party email marketing service.
MyWebsite Creator users also have an online meeting scheduling application. Although this application does not integrate with MyWebsite’s online store system, it can be of great help to small businesses that offer personalized services.
IONOS has good support for blogs, although you need to use MyWebsite Creator to create a blog. You can schedule posts ahead of time, create accounts for multiple bloggers, and aggregate your posts into an RSS feed. You can also easily promote your new posts on social media or in an email newsletter.
Finally, users of IONOS’ top-tier Pro plan can personalize the visitor experience based on how they got to your site, whether they’re visiting for the first time, and more. For example, you can place a coupon code on your home page that is visible to first-time visitors, but not to anyone else.
SEO Functionality & Add-Ons with IONOS Websites
IONOS MyWebsite offers strong SEO capabilities. To get started, you can add a meta title and description to every page on your site. You can also add alt text to images and videos to help search engines better catalog your site. In addition, MyWebsite optimizes your content, including images, so that your website loads as quickly as possible.
To analyze your visitor traffic, IONOS offers a built-in analytics tool. You can also integrate Google Analytics.
ECommerce
Using IONOS, users can get their e-commerce site online quickly without investing a lot of time getting involved in the small technical details of setting up their online storefronts. Users can choose between three subscription levels for eCommerce builders to suit their needs.
All eCommerce templates include drag and drop sections such as
- Fraud checker. Any major e-commerce site can be subject to fraudulent purchasing activity. IONOS has a fraud detection engine that helps store owners identify fraudulent transactions. Users can receive warnings if transactions trigger certain conditions, such as from certain IP addresses known to be botnets or representing malicious activity.
- Sales tax calculator. Tax rate changes are determined automatically. Additionally, users can set up their businesses as sales tax leads and mark specific customers as tax exempt.
- Multilingual shop. Users can submit different versions of their online stores in different languages.
- Instagram/Amazon/Ebay. Thanks to the app’s integrated solution, subscribers can sell through Amazon, eBay, and even Instagram purchases.
Payment Processing
Stores built with Builder can accept payments processed through PayPal as well as all major credit cards. Additional payment gateways can be configured depending on the store location. Some users may prefer to set up options like Stripe and Bitcoin.
Scalability
IONOS Ecommerce sites are also scalable, with features that allow users to expand their store as their business grows. This includes extensive inventory management (subscribers can add up to 10,000 products and electronics to their stores), customer wish lists and B2B support. Stores built with the IONOS website builder are based on expertly designed templates that are beginner-friendly and easy to use. Automatic tagging of sale items and drag-and-drop sections ensures that users can sell their inventory online without technical skills.
IONOS offers 24/7 customer support via phone, email, and live chat. You can also request a free personal advisor so you have a single point of contact for all questions about your website.
For DIY troubleshooting, IONOS offers a detailed online knowledge base with tutorials for both MyWebsite Now and MyWebsite Creator. The tutorials don’t have many screenshots or videos, but they are still quite complete.
IONOS by 1&1 Pricing
IONOS offers 3 plans: Starter, Plus and Pro. The Starter plan includes access to MyWebsite Now, while the Plus and Pro plans use the more advanced MyWebsite Creator software. You can add eCommerce functionality to any of the 3 plans for an additional fee.
All plans are billed annually and you can get a greatly reduced price for the first year. There is no free trial, but you can request a refund if you cancel within the first 30 days of your subscription.
IONOS vs GoDaddy
IONOS and GoDaddy are very similar when it comes to creating a small business website. GoDaddy offers slightly better tools for email marketing and online appointment booking, but we prefer IONOS’s e-commerce functionality. We think IONOS comes out on top if you are thinking about launching an online store.
IONOS vs Bluehost
IONOS offers a much smoother design process than Bluehost and more robust eCommerce features. That said, Bluehost is built on WordPress, so it’s worth looking into if you want to launch a blog rather than an online store.
IONOS vs Wix
Wix is more customizable than IONOS and offers paid apps to expand your eCommerce potential. However, it is also much more expensive than IONOS. Therefore, we believe that Wix is best suited for online businesses looking to increase their marketing and sales efforts, while IONOS is best for businesses just starting to sell online.
Bottom Line
IONOS MyWebsite is a powerful yet affordable website builder that offers many of the tools small businesses need. With this site builder, you can create a highly personalized website, market to customers with an email on your domain, and sell products online for local delivery or pickup. There are many things I like about IONOS MyWebsite, and we found some drawbacks for companies starting out in online sales.
That said, IONOS MyWebsite is not suitable for everyone. The platform doesn’t offer blogging functionality with its most basic plan and isn’t as scalable as an e-commerce-focused website builder like Wix. Overall, we think IONOS is best suited for businesses that want to expand their online presence and don’t want to spend a fortune to launch an online store.