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Bluehost Website Builder Review – PCMag

WordPress made even easier
Bluehost’s already excellent web hosting service sweetens the deal with an accessible, WordPress-focused website builder.
WordPress is a popular, flexible content management system that powers millions of websites, and Bluehost makes it the backbone of its website builder. If you need extra help building a website, the Bluehost Website Builder gives you the tools to make dependable, attractive pages, with e-commerce options. Editors’ Choice picks Gator and Wix hold up better as standalone paid and free website builders, respectively, but Bluehost Website Builder is an accessible, alternative option if you’re willing to embrace Bluehost’s welcoming WordPress focus.
Although it lacks a free plan, unlike Wix, Bluehost Website Builder is reasonably priced. You just need to suss out exactly what you pay under each WordPress hosting plan. You can either subscribe for a month or a year, which determines the introductory price and the renewal price. 
The Basic plan starts at $9.95 for your first month of service, but the price renews at $19.99 per month once the introductory period ends. Similarly, Basic’s annual plan starts at $72, but the price jumps to $132 per year. The Pro plan starts at $14.95 for the first month, but its cost rises to $24.99 per month. Its annual plan costs $168 for your first year of service, but the price increases to $180 per year after that.
The Basic shared hosting package includes unlimited monthly data transfers, 50GB of storage, and five email addresses. The Pro plan builds on Basic by including unlimited GB storage per file (with a 300,000 file soft limit) and unlimited email. With the Pro plan, you gain access to WooCommerce online payment and storefront tools, extra premium templates, and domain privacy. The e-commerce functionality is the main draw, and WooCommerce is one of the best WordPress plug-ins out there.
The Basic and Pro tiers provide unlimited websites, more than 300 templates, access to an image library, blog post management, email marketing, and a free Secure Socket Layer (SSL). A free SSL is a nice added security benefit, which you’ll also find with Gator (HostGator’s website builder). With the included hosting you receive one month of free Microsoft 365 Email Essentials for your domain. If you want more high-powered hosting, consider Bluehost’s VPS or dedicated hosting plans.
Bluehost gives you two options for creating a WordPress-powered website: the traditional WordPress interface or the Bluehost Website Builder. When using the website builder, you enjoy a more streamlined way to create professional-looking sites. Like Web.com, Bluehost Website Builder lets you simply type keywords into a generator to let the builder create a starting point. For our test, we created a podcast website that features a big pair of headphones on the home page. 
Bluehost Website Builder features just one WordPress theme, but the sheer variety of drag-and-drop templates and layouts let you endlessly customize that theme. Although you can’t change your theme once you’ve picked it (a common website builder limitation), you can alter numerous visual components within a selected template, such as fonts and background colors. In addition, you can swap between desktop and mobile previews to see how your site looks on different displays.
Unfortunately, this stylistic freedom doesn’t apply to image editing. You can import your own photos, including a logo, and browse Bluehost’s stock photo library. However, you can’t really edit those photos, besides resizing them or adding a link and alt text metadata information. Gator also has virtually nonexistent photo editing tools, but Wix gives you more robust options.
When it comes to designing your website, though, Bluehost doesn’t skimp on tools. Under Sections, you can browse many different elements to add to your site. Each element presents you with a few examples to choose from before dragging it onto your page. Standard options include text forms, video embeds, and image galleries. More bespoke elements include a countdown timer, map, and carveout for custom HTML/CSS. 
Here you also access e-commerce features, such as product listings, reviews, promotions, and pricelists. With WooCommerce, you can sell tens of thousands of different products, physical or digital, as well as subscription memberships.  
Bluehost’s website builder isn’t confusing to use, but dumping all of these elements under the same Sections banner makes it take longer to find what you’re looking for. Once an element was on the page, I spent a few more seconds than I wanted adjusting values to get what I desired. Finding your workflow won’t take long, though, as this is still very much an accessible website builder. 
Besides Sections, you can access other important editing menus, too. View all of your site’s pages. Alter global appearance settings and enable transition animations. Enter business and shipping information, as well as social media account credentials if you want your site to sync with Facebook or Twitter. Track your site’s traffic progress through Google Analytics.
Since you must use WordPress with Bluehost, the website builder includes WordPress-specific features that make your site shine. Start writing a WordPress.com blog that lives on your site. Swap back and forth between the simplified website builder and fully featured WordPress admin interface at any time. In that way, Bluehost website builder serves as useful training wheels as you teach yourself to ride the WordPress bike. To learn even more, check out How to Get Started With WordPress.  
A pretty website won’t do you much good if no one can reach it. That’s why we also test how well traditional web hosting services and website builders stay online. Every 15 minutes, our website monitoring tool pings our website and sends an alert if it is unable to contact a site for at least one minute. Bluehost has historically been very stable, and that’s still the case. During a 14-day period, we didn’t see a single outage. Otherwise, expect excellent and dependable uptime.
With Bluehost Website Builder, you can leverage Bluehost’s proven customer support team. Through its Blue Sky service, Bluehost provides 24/7 telephone support, online web chat, a ticket-based system, and a knowledgebase for Bluehost and WordPress in general. As with uptime, Bluehost’s quick and reliable customer support continues to impress us in testing. If you aren’t satisfied, receive a full refund if you cancel within 30 days. For more details, check out our full Bluehost web hosting review.
Bluehost Website Builder’s WordPress focus isn’t a limitation. In fact, WordPress powers so many websites that choosing a website builder built for the CMS gives you more flexibility than you’d initially expect. For existing Bluehost owners, it only makes sense to stay within the ecosystem, and Bluehost’s website builder won’t let you down. That said, if you’re starting fresh with website builders, and want one that doesn’t feel quite as supplemental, we still recommend Wix and Gator, our free and paid Editors’ Choice picks, respectively.   
For more on website building, check out 10 Easy But Powerful SEO Tips to Boost Traffic to Your Website and How to Create a Website.
Bluehost’s already excellent web hosting service sweetens the deal with an accessible, WordPress-focused website builder.
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Jordan Minor is an Analyst on PCMag’s Apps and Gaming team, and he really just wants to use his fancy Northwestern University journalism degree to write about video games. Beyond gaming, Jordan covers coding software, dating apps, meal kits, video streaming services, website builders, and other software-related beats. He also hosts The Pop-Off, PCMag’s video game show.
Jordan was previously the senior editor for Geek.com, and a PCMag intern before that. He has also written for Kotaku, The A.V. Club, and Paste Magazine, and is currently working on a book about the history of video games. He is the reason everything you think you know about Street Sharks is a lie.
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