Marc Schenker
March 31, 2021 · 13 min read
How Do Website Builders Work?
Website builders expect their users not to know much about site creation—that’s the beauty of these services. They’re designed for people who want a web presence for their business or organization in a hurry, so they can start selling their products or services immediately. As such, they’re ideal for smaller businesses and organizations—such as design entrepreneurs who’d much rather benefit from running their businesses and producing more creative products—who don’t want to get bogged down in the minutiae of coding. A 2017 survey of people who’ve used website builders confirms that 42% use them for business purposes and the majority only have a beginner-to-intermediate understanding of creating sites. That’s why they have to be simple to use and feature a relatively easy learning curve. They achieve this by letting you use a drag-and-drop editor that enables you to place various site elements exactly where you want them. For example, do you want the navigation menu horizontally down the left side of the webpage or across the top, as is more common? No problem—just use the editor for positioning. Do you want that image underneath that block of text? Done. Thanks to the editor, you can drag it specifically where you want it.

Step 1: Choose a Template
First, the user starts off by choosing a specific template from the site builder’s large library of templates. These templates come as part of the access to a site builder, but they’re really just ordinary website templates, just like the many website templates available in our CM marketplace.Step 2: Customize Your Template
Step 3: Publish
Finally, and here’s where the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) benefit of these site builders really becomes noticeable, all you have to do is press the “publish” button (or a button similar to that), and presto! Your site is now live for the entire world to see. Now the challenging part of marketing your site and driving traffic to it can begin in earnest. The beauty of site builders is also their all-in-one design: site builders usually have their own cloud hosting infrastructure, so you don’t even have to worry about finding a host to take your new site live. Therefore, launching a site is truly as straightforward as hitting “publish” within the platform once your design is finalized.Is Coding Still Necessary to Design Websites?
With all this talk of site builders and their rising popularity over the last several years, it begs the question: is coding necessary to design websites these days? Just for a bit of background, coding is the backbone of how a site is typically built. Web designers and developers usually learn how to code as part of their job requirements although, lately, even this is being brought into question. The big takeaway, then, is that site creation is moving farther and farther away from coding, whether it’s these no-coding-required site builders or the loosening of requirements for designers and developers. In fact, it’s getting increasingly common for designers to succeed at building effective, functional, and extremely beautiful sites for their clients—all without ever bothering with knowing how to code.

What About Themes and Templates?
While site builders come with their own libraries of templates, another option for those who want to hire an actual designer or developer to build their site is to simply have a designer or developer build the site on top of a pre-arranged/designed template or theme that you can buy. Think of a template as a subset of a theme. Several templates can comprise one theme, but not the other way around. A theme, therefore, is responsible for how an entire site can look, behave and feel. It determines how it’s going to perform for the user. Our CM marketplace has a huge selection of fine website themes and templates.How Many People Are Using Website Builders?
To properly answer the question of whether site builders are going to take over, we have to take a look at their user numbers. Many of the most popular site builders are some of the most popular (as in highly trafficked) sites in the whole world — which is just one measure of the demand for them.Weebly
But let’s talk specific numbers: according to Weebly’s meta description in Google, more than 40 million people already use this platform.

Wix
Then there’s Wix, another incredibly popular site builder. If you thought that Weebly’s 40-million number was staggering, you’re about to have your mind blown by Wix’s user base.

Squarespace
Now let’s move on to Squarespace, yet another huge site builder with a significant following.

GoDaddy
Any discussion about the most popular site builders can’t exclude GoDaddy, one of the earliest site builders around.

Other Site Builders
It’s important to stress that these numbers for some of the most well-known site builders are simply approximations. Nonetheless, they help us form an idea of how in-demand site builders are with the general public. Based on these figures for just these four platforms, there are close to 200 million people around the world who are using site builders. When we factor in the numbers for smaller and lesser-known site builders like Yola, Jimdo, Duda and Strikingly, it’s very likely that the overall number is well north of 200 million users worldwide. That’s not a bad growth spurt by any means, especially seeing as how site builders only became more popular in the last few years.WordPress
Finally, we can’t exclude WordPress in any discussion about site builders. WordPress has been around since virtually the beginning of Web 2.0, which makes it the pioneer when it comes to site builders and empowering people and businesses to actually create their own content instead of just consuming it. It’s still a massively popular choice today, powering more than 26% of the entire web.

Famous and Highly Trafficked Websites Built With Website Builders
One of the best measures of the popularity and therefore penetration of these site builders are the kinds of big brands that are building their own sites on these site builders.

- Lyft (transportation network company)
- Tudor (a Rolex watch brand)
- Fast Company (business magazine)


- Forbes
- The Walt Disney Company
- Microsoft
- The New York Post
- Human Events
- The Official Star Wars Blog
- Best Buy
- Xerox
On the Road to a Takeover?
A lot more needs to happen from a user standpoint before we can safely say that site builders are taking over the entire web. As recent as 2015, it was estimated that some 3.2 billion people used the Internet, according to the International Telecommunication Union. The estimates of people using site builders, which I put at more than 200 million users, is obviously much, much smaller than this whole. However, when you consider that site builders are relatively new, really only being invented in the last decade or so, the penetration of a couple of hundred million users overall is pretty impressive market penetration. Today, you can still easily hire designers and developers to build your site for you, if you have the cash. Big brands that have the money to burn for a great design and development team won’t ever feel hard-pressed to use site builders. Of course, ordinary people and small businesses—arguably the target market for these site builders—see things differently. When you don’t have unlimited financial resources and need a web presence, you’re going to welcome the usability and convenience of site builders. Now that site builders have been introduced to the market, there’s no turning back. They’ll continue to grow their user bases, and we’ll keep moving to a reality where fewer and fewer jobs and projects really need to be handled by professional designers and developers.Share your thoughts!
We’d love to know what you think about this ongoing debate. Please leave a message in the comments section below.

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Marc Schenker
Marc is a copywriter and marketer who runs The Glorious Company, a marketing agency. An expert in business and marketing, he helps businesses and companies of all sizes get the most bang for their ad bucks.
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