Hostgator

Founded in 2002 in a Florida dorm room (hence “gator”), HostGator is a popular web hosting and site building platform that provides solutions for the full gamut of clients, from small businesses to blogs to large-scale companies with dedicated servers. 

You don’t need to have experience building websites - HostGator will help you through the process. It boasts customer support available around the clock, 365 days a year and in multiple languages, like Russian, Chinese and Spanish. Thanks to its robust, feature-rich builder, eCommerce tools and professional templates, thousands of users choose to host their websites on HostGator.  

• Great for bloggers
• One of the few builders that will never post ads on your site
• Extensive template gallery
• 24/7/365 support team means HostGator is there for you

• We’ve seen better-functioning templates
• The editor could be modernized
• Pricey premium plans

HostGator is one of the most user-friendly builders out there, making it a favorite for beginners. Their drag-and-drop editor is very easy to use, with straightforward third party app integration and a built-in image editor - even adding eCommerce features (an online store, payment options, etc.) doesn’t present difficulties. We’ve already mentioned the availability of their support team, but before you reach out to them, check out the vast supply of tutorials and FAQs onsite that provide all sorts of how-tos and step-by-step explanations.

One small problem to note: when choosing a theme, HostGator’s display shows only small thumbnails. It’s a bit hard to see and scroll through, but luckily they offer a feature not seen in most builders - the possibility to display previous versions of your site and even revert back to them. As you customize your site, HostGator automatically saves each version, allowing you to access them through the Manage menu or the clock icon on the top bar of the editor. 

When it comes to relocating a website to their hosting services, HostGator has no trouble offering this service for free (within the initial 30 days after signing up).

Hostgator’s website builder comes with three plans:

• Basic: $3.95/month You’ll get hosting, SEO tools, Paypal integration, a maximum of 6 pages and HostGator ads. This number is low, but there’s an asterisk… you’ll only get this price if you commit to three years. After that, prices jump significantly.
• Pro: $16.90/month Remove the HostGator ads, get an unlimited number of pages, embed videos, get custom analytics and a custom favicon.
• eCommerce: $28.94/month Ecommerce includes everything in the Pro plan plus eCommerce capabilities - a shopping cart, inventory management, your choice of payment processors and coupon codes. This is, by the way, much more expensive than competitors like Wix or Weebly. But again, if you want to pay for three years up front, the price drops significantly to $19.94.

Their website is pretty unclear about contract length, discounts and what’s included (that pesky asterisk is all over the place). There’s much to be said for being straightforward with clients, and HostGator has a lot of room for improvement on this front. But they do offer a significantly longer money-back guarantee period than other builders - at 45 days, you have quite a long time to figure out if you want to stick with them or try another builder.

HostGator offers a wide range of features. We’ve put together a list of some of the more notable ones:

Drag-and-drop editor: To be competitive in the world of website building, it’s crucial to have a good drag-and-drop editor, and HostGator’s meets the cut. To use this simple editor, just drag and drop content into place on your site. No coding know how needed.

Mobile optimization: Today, over half of website traffic comes from mobile devices, so it’s hard to overstate the importance of designing websites that are compatible and easy to use on multiple devices. HostGator has your bases covered - their themes are fully optimized and responsive for mobile devices, automatically, no plugins or headaches necessary.

Stock photos and image editor: HostGator offers a trove of stock photos integrated through unsplash.com - so you don’t have to leave the site to browse images. Plus, you can use Adobe’s built in Image Aviary to edit and add effects to photos.

Free analytics: Analytics can be a bit tricky, but they’re a very important tool for managing your site. They provide you with information about how many people visit your site, the bounce rate and much more. HostGator provides free analytics, so you’ll get lots of valuable information hassle-free.

Free SSL: As of July 2018, all HostGator plans come with SSL, which is an important security protocol that ensures that data transfers between browsers and servers  remains encrypted.

HostGator has over a hundred mobile-optimized templates from which to choose. These aren’t the state of the art, designer templates that some other builders offer, but they’re solid and practical. Search by category or industry, and you’ll find a variety of respectable options. The template gallery display leaves much to be desired, as you can only see a few templates at a time (lots of annoying scrolling) and they tend to be similar or repetitive. At least you can get a full-screen preview of each template before you make a final decision. Once you choose a template, you’ll be able to customize the color scheme, text, fonts and more.

Overall

HostGator is known more for web hosting than website building, but its builder is pretty solid. Great for beginners, the drag-and-drop editor, integrated tools and apps and around-the-clock support ensure that the process is headache free. There’s a lot of freedom to customize details of your website and the effort and time invested is minimal.

For more advanced users, there’s not as much room to play as other builders offer. It can be a bit more frustrating, as you can’t always access or edit CSS or HTML codes. It’s best for blogging and for smaller online stores, so if you’d like to do something else then HostGator may not be the best choice.