In this fast-tempo world, creating a long-lasting website is a very hard process. New and new solutions born almost every day which completely reform website designs.
However, the statement that claims: the more you spend on your website, the longer-lasting it will be, is false. This factor is not influential in this equation. The factor that matters is in which part you want to save money, and which tools help you on that.
For example, if your website’s main functionalities are full of errors and non-cost-effective decisions, your website is destined to die. However, if you find a tool that replaces 5 programmers’ work, and creates a website that is similar to what they could do, is a success, and a good way to save money.
In this article, we will introduce you to the website builders, and 5 of the best in the current market!
Table of Contents
Why do real estate websites need a website builder?
We already wrote some words about cost-effectiveness. Well, you may not be the best programmer in the world, but that’s not a problem at all. You can still make fabulous websites without hiring professional web developers for a high price. In terms of the real estate market, it is an important aspect.
Although, according to Statista the real estate market is anticipated to grow at an annual rate of 3.41% between 2024 to 2028, it is expensive to create a website. Why? Because you need to create so many functions, just like: property listings, detailed property pages, interactive maps, contents, or security features. Yes, these are all effective features on a real estate website! On top of that, based on your actual served market, you need to do so many other things.
However, cost-effectiveness is just one reason for using website builders.
What are the other advantages of website builders?
These website builder tools that we will demonstrate today are no-code website builders. It means, you don’t have to know a single code, and you can still create the website, usually with a drag-and-drop technique.
One of the advantages of using website builders is the ensured protection. In the real estate industry, ensuring security is one of the most crucial aspects. Here, the website needs to store and handle personal information about the clients, and potentially contracts between the vendors, and the buyers. If the visitors believe your site can’t protect their data, they will use another website.
However, website builders offer you an SSL certification, they use well-tested codes, and have authentication mechanisms. In addition to that, you can communicate with the website builders’ representatives if you have any questions or problems!
Even if we only highlighted these three advantages, there are still some more:
- Building a website with a no-code website-builder is faster than doing it just on your own
- Websites created with website builders are automatically optimized for mobile phones, unlike the others
- With many website builders, you have the option to scale your website if it grows bigger, which is harder in any other cases
Statistics of website builders
Now that you have gained information about the advantages of website builders, you need to meet with its occurrence, and acceptance in real life.
According to some statistics, there were 18 million websites made by website builders alone in 2023. Although it’s roughly 1.8 percent of all of the websites that currently exist, its effect is incredible.
If we examine the one hundred thousand biggest websites in terms of traffic in the world, approximately 32% were created with a website builder. So even if only a few businesses try website builders, statistically they reach better results.
Now that we finally acknowledge the power of website builders, let’s see which are the best options in a certain industry: what would we recommend to the real estate business? Which are the best real estate website builders?
5 best real estate website builders
In this chapter, we will introduce 5 of the best real estate website builders!
Wix
Wix, one of the most popular website builder tools, launched in 2006. Their continuous improvement, and targeting more and more segments led the company towards success. Nowadays, they have a 9.5 percent market share, and real estate websites are one of their main priorities.
Price
Wix has 4 different packages. Unfortunately, none of them are free. Even though you can enjoy their features for free in a one-month period, you need to pay after that to continue your journey.
Their plans are the following:
- Light plan – $17 for a month
- Core plan – $29 for a month
- Business plan – $36 for a month
- Business Elite plan – $159 for a month
Who should use it?
Wix has several apps specifically created for real estate websites. That means if you have crystal clear imaginations about your website capabilities, Wix is for you. A Virtual tool app, a ROI calculator, or a social proof integration, Wix’s apps are ready to create your extra features.
Pros and Cons
Let’s start with the positive parts. Wix has a tremendous amount of templates, and there’s no exception in terms of real estate apps. They have 12 different real estate-specific templates, which is certainly enough to choose one that suits your needs.
As we already mentioned, their App Market is one of the biggest in the industry. On top of that, new and new apps are released every month. That means they monitor the industrial trends, and if something gets more and more popular they make it available to their buyers.
If we cover Wix Pros, we can’t move on without mentioning their SEO feature, which makes your real estate website better optimized. They also offer some real estate email templates, which will be good for real estate customer retention!
If we want to move on to the negative aspects, we need to mention that Wix was not specifically designed for real estate. If you have a problem and want to get in contact with them, it’s unsure whether they will understand your problem or not.
Even though Wix’s working mechanism is simple, it has limitations. One of the annoying ones is that you can’t change your template once your website is live. So, take care of what you choose, as that will determine your later progress.
Squarespace
Squarespace is an American website builder company, established in 2004. With a 1.9% market share on the top one million websites, Squarespace is a real weapon to grow big.
Price
In terms of the price, Squarespace is a little bit cheaper compared to Wix! Unfortunately, Squarespace doesn’t offer a free plan, only a 14-day-long trial plan. With that, you have the option to try all of their features to discover that their options can cope with your needs.
Outside of this “demo” plan, Squarespace’s prices are the following:
- Personal plan – €15 for a month
- Business plan – €24 for a month
- Commerce (basic) plan – €28 for a month
- Commerce (advanced) plan – €42 for a month
Who should use it?
Squarespace’s interface is the most simple on the market, and they combine that with other easy-to-use techniques to make your dream site without much preparation and practice. If you have no real experience in website building, and you have never used website builders before, this is your tool to create your real estate website!
Pros and Cons
We already mentioned the Squarespace tool’s simplicity. Well, their Fluid Engine feature helps them in this aspect. This feature is basically an editor, which helps you put more and more layers on the page without being messy. Its core element is a drag-and-drop technique but with a little change. You can move the layers anywhere, even after you place them in a previously desired place.
For a real estate website, they have one of the most in-depth apps for scheduling. This is an important aspect of many real estate websites, as you need to connect the vendors with the potential buyers. Or potentially, your real estate consultants with the potential buyers. Acuity scheduling can help you with that. With this app, potential buyers can book appointments, easily cancel or reschedule these appointments, or give access to security settings to prevent thefts to steal credit card information or other sensitive data.
Squarespace is not only designed for real estate websites as well. In this case, it’s an even bigger problem than in the case of Wix. Squarespace only offers six different real estate templates, and even if those are well-made, quality pieces, it’s still not enough.
AgentFire
AgentFire specifically focuses on real estate businesses to increase their online presence with their robust website builder platform. The company was founded in 2013 and located in New York.
Price
AgentFire’s prices are nothing but expensive. They offer you 3 different packages, these are:
- Ignite plan – $500 one-time payment, and $149 every month
- Semi-custom plan – $1500 one-time payment, and $149 every month
- Custom plan – $3500 one-time payment, and $149 every month
Who should use it?
Due to its high price, we only recommend this tool to those who really want to create a site with a fully real estate-orientated website builder.
Pros and Cons
For this high price, AgentFire knows everything a real estate website should know. A highly customizable neighborhood guide, a guide creator function, a featured listings page, a reviews page; and many other additional tools for creating the most impressive real estate website.
According to their buyers’ opinions, their communication with the buyers is superb. They always use an understanding tone to discover their buyers’ problems and solve the problems as soon as possible.
If we look into this website builder’s negative aspects, we shall speak about the site itself. Unlike in the other cases, AgentFire is for a smaller group of buyers, therefore they have fewer resources for creating a seamless interface. It’s time-consuming to learn AgentFire’s working mechanism, and bugs are more likely to occur.
GoDaddy
GoDaddy is an American company, launched in 2004. Even if at first, this company was rather interested in domain name registry, and domain name registrar, they recently started to jump in the website building industry. Nowadays, this company is almost the market leader in this area as well. Their market share in the website-building industry was 28% in 2023, which is the biggest among all the businesses that grab a place in this article.
Price
GoDaddy’s website builder is one of the cheapest on the market! Their cheapest website-building opportunity only costs you $10.99 for a month. The other plans are the following:
- Standard Plan – $11.99 for a month
- Premium Plan – $14.99 for a month
- E-commerce Plan – $16.99 for a month
Although these offers seem like bargains, you always need to check what you buy. Here, GoDaddy only lets you buy annual plans, so you need to multiply these numbers by 12 to get the exact price of the chosen product.
Who should use it?
GoDaddy is one of the biggest fish in the sea. That’s why if you want the most secure website builder, and money is a very important aspect, this has to be your choice!
Pros and Cons
As you may have discovered by now, no other business can compete with GoDaddy’s prices. Even if you have to purchase annually, if you want a long-term option, this site provides the ideal opportunity.
Also, GoDaddy has numerous plans in terms of security, domain, and hosting. If you have other problems, aside from finding the ideal website builder, this tool can help you. They can help you to put everything under one company’s wing, so you don’t need to write emails to hundreds of companies to solve your issues.
GoDaddy also has an AI integration to help you more easily decide your real estate website’s template. However, they can only offer 10 real estate-type templates, which seems a bit less than what other companies can offer.
Unfortunately, GoDaddy can’t offer too many apps to real estate websites as well. In addition to that, you can’t create virtual tools for example!
WordPress
WordPress is the oldest competitor in this article, the initial release was in 2003. At that time, this website had one function only: users could create blogs and articles. Even if this part of WordPress still exists, it’s not their main priority now. People can also publish other web content, even websites with the help of their tools nowadays.
Price
While WordPress is free to use, you can’t create a website for free; even with WordPress! The power of this tool comes from the plugins. If you want to create a mid-quality real estate website, you need so many plugins to succeed. Even if these plugins are sometimes cheaper than actual website builders, you still need to pay for them!
Who should use it?
We recommend you use WordPress as your website builder if you understand how the plugins work, and have a little knowledge in programming, but you also want to save money.
Pros and Cons
WordPress is great because you can almost find anything in its plugin section. Around 474 million websites are created with WordPress as of 2024, they also offer 30000 different themes by now according to Wpzoom.com. Plugins are not specifically generated and published by WordPress itself, but by individual creators and everyday users.
With the help of that, there are more real estate templates and tools than on any other site. You can create property listings, search filters, and even customer testimonials.
The problem is, that if something goes wrong with one of the plugins, WordPress can’t fix the problem. However, reaching the designated plugin’s customer service can be a real nightmare.
Setting up different plugins is not hard, but two main problems come up from time to time. These plugins need to be updated, so if you do not check for potential updates regularly, your whole system can be outdated. On top of that, rarely two plugins can not be combined, you need to check that also.
The importance of online data analytics
In this article, we haven’t really emphasized the importance of website analytics in the case of a real estate website. When you create your website, you not only need to care about designing a great site, or finding the perfect domain. You strive to understand your visitors better and better.
Not all of the website builder software offers data analytics tools that we covered in this article. Luckily, the WordPress plugin section is a good way to download a data analytics tool to your site.
We highly recommend you use Capturly Analytics’s tool simultaneously with your website!
With the help of our tool, you can get access to numerous crucial statistics from your visitors, just like:
- Where they click, and how long they scroll down in a chosen page
- How many of them successfully achieve your conversions, and what are the drop-off rates
- Where individual users go, and what kind of problems they face during their session
With this information, you can fix your website’s mistakes, and tailor your site to your buyers’ needs, which will lead you to the increase of your real estate website’s conversion rate.
How to install Capturly?
Installing Capturly with the help of WordPress is nothing but a simple task. If you want automated installation you need to:
Go to the plugins menu in WordPress → Search for “Capturly” → install and activate the plugin
On the other hand, if you want a manual installation, your task is the following:
Unzip and upload the “Capturly” directory to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory → Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress → Configure the plugin
Conclusion
In this article, we met with the real reasons for using a website builder, and how statistically you can gain better results when you use them than if you do not. After that, we discovered one of the best real estate website builders for you. We gathered some that not only offer real estate-specific content, but we also mentioned one that was specifically made to serve the real estate buyers’ needs.
You need to understand that there is no better and worse in this article. You need to find that one that can make your imagination come true. One thing is sure: online data analytics will be always necessary, so if you can’t directly download Capturly Analytics’s tool from WordPress, you should register to Capturly, and install our tracking code directly to your website!