Site123 Reviews

A Simple Way to Launch a Website & Online Store

Site123 aims to revolutionize the website builder market and allow everyone to create a blog, business website, or online store. Coding knowledge is not necessary by any means. However, our Site123 review shows that unlike Wix or Squarespace, its biggest competitors, the platform only scratches the surface when it comes to online bookings, events, and email marketing tools. Each of these additional tools is designed to complement the website building experience, rather than function as a standalone platform. The company continually enhances its products, so we might see more comprehensive versions of these tools soon enough.

Site123 Website Builder Review

As the vendor’s slogan suggests, building websites with Site123 is as easy as 1-2-3. The builder doesn’t rely on drag-and-drop functionality. Instead, it reduces user engagement to a minimum by offering ready-to-use templates and layouts. This approach is perfect for those who want to create a website quickly without making significant design changes.

If you’ve been using a drag-and-drop builder so far, you might need time to get used to Site123. You can’t move site elements around or experiment with colors and fonts as much. According to some Site123 reviews, the limited customization options are one of the builder’s main downsides. For novice users, the simplified approach to website development is a breath of fresh air. You don’t have to worry about how your site will look on different devices either, as all Site123 templates are automatically adjusted to fit different device screens perfectly.

The website editor comes with a clean interface, which makes getting around it pretty straightforward. The builder’s image library is quite extensive, featuring hundreds of royalty-free images from Unsplash and Pixabay. The image editor supports cropping and filters. Our research for this Site123 review, however, showed that advanced image editing options, such as adjusting image brightness or pre-set cropping ratios, aren’t available.

Site123 further offers an excellent form builder with a variety of fields, including text, numbers, and checkboxes. Creating a multi-step form is also possible. The builder further supports various menu layouts, allowing users to add drop-down menus for simpler navigation.

Free web hosting is included in all Site123 plans, while email hosting and domain names come with premium plans only. The current subdomain structure could be changed from random letters and numbers to something more meaningful, though.

Site123 Blog Review

Reviews indicate that users are satisfied with the site builder’s blogging capabilities. They can choose between several blog layouts, easily add new posts, and manage comments through Site123’s native commenting system, Facebook, or Disqus. While it’s also possible to add custom meta tags and modify a post URL, this option is available with premium plans only.

Site123 SEO Review

Overall, the company has done a great job of helping users optimize their sites for search engines. Each page has its SEO settings, allowing users to add keywords, meta descriptions, titles, and 301 redirects, while sitemaps are generated automatically.

In addition to its native analytics solution, Site123 offers 13 apps via the App Marketplace that can help you analyze your website’s performance. The downside is that you cannot integrate any of these apps with your site unless you subscribe to one of Site123’s premium plans.

Site123 Ecommerce Review

With its two top-tier plans, Site123 offers great ecommerce functionalities. The entire process of creating an online store is intuitive. Adding and managing products and services is simple. One of our favorites is the Duplicate Products tool that eases the process of uploading similar products.

The Site123 ecommerce platform further supports product categories and subcategories. It’s also possible to assign a single product to multiple categories. Product options allow adding different product sizes, colors, etc. The intuitive interface enables you to further set shipping and taxes in minutes.

Numerous Site123 reviews show that the Wish List feature, which unlocks with the Gold plan, is a user favorite. You can meanwhile accept payments via PayPal, Amazon Pay, Braintree, Stripe, and 2Checkout. Offline payments range from checks, cash on delivery (COD), phone payments, and bank deposits.

Your clients can leave reviews, while the Abandoned Cart Reminder enables sending a series of emails to your store visitors who’ve left items in their shopping cart without completing a purchase. On top of it all, Site123 doesn’t charge any fees on the products and services you sell.

Site123 Logo Review

First things first; the product is not like other logo makers on the market. Although users can create a logo using one of the many icons and images from the free Site123 media library, this tool's primary function is to help users get a perfectly sized logo. For this purpose, Site123 offers a cropping tool and lets users choose a header size to fully display their logo. The site builder further supports different layouts and has a nice selection of professional-looking fonts for text-based logos.

Site123 Schedule Bookings Review

The platform allows users to add services, including one-on-one meetings and group classes for up to 99 people. They can further set service duration, working hours, and pricing. Once they configure all the details, users can easily manage orders from the Site123 dashboard.

Unfortunately, the Site123 app isn’t available for managing bookings on the go. Instead, users can access Site123’s mobile site version from their mobile browser.

The site builder doesn’t stop here, further allowing users to choose between their native booking system and other appointment scheduling software.

Site123 Customer Support

According to Site123 reviews and our own experience, the website builder has a top-notch customer care team. The live chat agents are friendly and knowledgeable, typically replying in a couple of minutes. Another way to get in touch with the builder’s customer service is through email support. Impressively, Site123 support is available in 17 languages.

Alternatively, users can visit the support center, featuring an abundance of articles and videos on everything related to this website builder, but if you were hoping to find the Site123 contact number, you should know that the company doesn’t offer phone support.

Site123 Pricing

Site123 doesn’t have a free trial, as users can test their website building skills with the limited free plan, which includes 500MB of storage, 1GB bandwidth, and a subdomain. The vendor’s paid plans, however, are a bit on the pricey side. The prices for the shortest subscription, i.e., three months, range from $17 to $41/month.

In a Site123 vs Wix comparison, the latter offers somewhat lower prices. The Wix Combo plan starts at $13/month at the time of writing, while with Site123, the starting price stands at $17/month. If we compare the top-tier plans, the pricing becomes even more similar — Wix’s Business VIP plan costs $40/month, whereas Site123’s Gold plan comes in at $41/month.

Much like other top-rated website builders, Site123 offers discounts on long-term subscriptions. For instance, the Basic plan (regularly $17) is cut in half with a three-year subscription at $8.45/month.

Site123 Plans

There are four premium plans: Basic, Advanced, Professional, and Gold.

The Basic plan comes with 10GB of storage and 5GB of bandwidth. It further allows you to connect your domain and send 100 mailing list messages. It’s worth highlighting in this Site123 review that the Basic plan only removes Site123 branding partially, leaving the builder’s ad in your site’s footer area.

Next is the Advanced plan, which, apart from the Basic plan's features, allows you to create a multilingual website by adding one language to your site. The Site123 footer tag is removed, and you can have two domain-matching email addresses. Additionally, the bandwidth, storage, and mailing list messages increase to 15GB, 30GB, and 1,000 messages. The lowest price for this plan is $5.72/month with a three-year subscription.

The Professional plan provides 45GB of bandwidth, 90GB of storage, and 2,500 mailing list messages. It also unlocks the builder’s ecommerce functionalities, and users can receive 500 orders per month. This plan also unlocks Site123’s native website analytics solution. The most affordable pricing sits at $14.45/month, again, with a three-year subscription.

Lastly, the Gold plan unlocks all builder’s features at $19.45/month (with a 36-month subscription). It supports unlimited orders, wish lists, product reviews, coupons, and the abandoned cart reminder tool. This plan offers the best value for money, and also lifts the bandwidth, storage, mailing list messages, mailbox, and language limits to 135GB, 270GB, 10,000, 10, and 5, respectively.

The Verdict

In a nutshell, Site123 is an excellent website building tool that lets users create a site quickly and without technical knowledge. It’s fairly well optimized for search engines, its ecommerce capabilities are really good, and the support team is one of the best we’ve come across. In contrast, the free plan and customization options are somewhat limited, and we’d like to see a different subdomain structure in the future. Site123 reviews further show that the site builder is somewhat pricey. Still, with longer subscriptions, you can get a top-class website builder at an affordable price.