BlueHost.com
- Price per month: Starting at $2.95
- Uptime: 99.99%
- Money-back guarantee: 30-day
Is Bluehost Worth It?
The SiteGround website builder is a simple yet powerful editor built on top of WordPress. With SiteGround’s premium managed WordPress hosting, you get access to over 200 themes and customizable content blocks, allowing you to personalize your website design directly within WordPress. While SiteGround’s WordPress builder may not offer the same level of flexibility or ease of use as a dedicated site builder, it remains one of the top choices if you’re looking to build a website with WordPress.
Overview
What Is Bluehost?
Bluehost is a web hosting provider based in the United States, established in 2003. Known for its managed WordPress hosting services, Bluehost offers plans that come with WordPress pre-installed, ensuring automatic software updates to keep your site secure and up to date.
In 2021, Bluehost introduced a WordPress website builder to simplify the website creation process for users, even those without coding experience. This builder allows you to toggle between adding pre-designed page sections and utilizing WordPress’s standard editor to customize content. While it may not be as intuitive or flexible as standalone site builders, it remains one of the easiest options available for building a website using WordPress.
Using Bluehost
Using Bluehost is a straightforward process, as the company is known for its user-friendly approach. During our site setup experience, we found this to be true. When you first sign in, Bluehost provides a helpful checklist of tasks to guide you through the process. Switching between the Bluehost website builder and the standard WordPress editor is seamless, making it easy to manage your site. However, if you’re new to WordPress, the site builder may have a slight learning curve. Once you familiarize yourself with it, though, it becomes much easier to navigate.
Features
Managed WordPress Hosting
All website builder plans come with managed WordPress hosting from Bluehost. This includes unlimited storage and bandwidth, a free SSL certificate, and a free domain for one year. Bluehost will also handle automatic updates for your WordPress installation and plugins, ensuring everything stays up-to-date without you needing to worry.
Unlimited Websites
One of the best features of Bluehost’s site builder is that there’s no limit on the number of websites you can create. Each website comes with its own WordPress dashboard and can be linked to a unique domain.
How Bluehost Works
How to Create a Website with Bluehost
Creating a website with Bluehost is a bit more involved than using other website builders. First, you’ll be taken to your hosting dashboard where you’ll be prompted to create a new WordPress website. Before selecting a template or making any edits, you’ll need to log into your new WordPress dashboard.
Once logged in, you can choose from over 300 pre-installed themes to get your site started. You can also apply any WordPress-compatible theme, but only the themes provided by Bluehost are fully compatible with their site builder. Unfortunately, switching themes later is not easy—doing so will require you to redesign your site from scratch.
You can access Bluehost’s website builder directly from your WordPress dashboard. The editor offers a variety of premade page sections, each containing multiple elements like text boxes, image containers, buttons, and more. You can customize each section by selecting which elements to display or hide, and there are predefined layout options for every section to choose from.
We found the Bluehost site builder to be much easier to use than WordPress’s standard editor, though you can still access the WordPress interface if you prefer. WordPress’s editor can make it challenging to divide your site into sections with different backgrounds, and arranging content side by side can be even more difficult. In contrast, the Bluehost editor simplifies these essential design tasks.
However, the Bluehost site builder isn’t a drag-and-drop editor. By default, page sections are full-width, and there’s no option to add or rearrange individual content elements within sections. While you can edit the HTML code for more precise customizations, this is only recommended for experienced site designers.
One benefit of Bluehost’s builder is that once your site is created, you can migrate it to another host as you would with any other WordPress site. While migrating will give you access to WordPress’s standard editor, you’ll lose access to Bluehost’s site editor, though all the page sections you created will remain intact.
Overall, Bluehost’s site editor makes designing a WordPress website significantly easier. However, it’s still not a drag-and-drop tool, and it doesn’t offer the same flexibility as independent site builders outside of WordPress.
Adding Multimedia to Your Bluehost Website
Bluehost utilizes WordPress’s built-in media management system to handle multimedia, which is one of the standout features of using WordPress. We were pleased to see that this system is retained in Bluehost’s website builder.
You can easily upload photos, videos, PDFs, and most other common file types from your computer. Simultaneous uploads are also supported. Once your files are uploaded, you can organize them into folders, add descriptions, and make your media library fully searchable. Bluehost also provides a library of hundreds of stock images to help you get started with your design.
Overall, we were very satisfied with the multimedia tools on the website and found them to be user-friendly.
Marketing Functionality with Bluehost Websites
Bluehost includes several essential marketing tools to help promote your website. One of the key features is the CreativeMail email marketing plugin, which comes with all Bluehost website builder plans. This tool allows you to collect contacts, segment them into groups, and create an unlimited number of email campaigns for free.
In addition, Bluehost websites benefit from WordPress’s powerful blogging tools. You can schedule posts in advance, run ads on your blog posts, and share your content across social media platforms. Notably, you can create blog posts directly from within the Bluehost editor, allowing you to seamlessly integrate Bluehost’s content sections into your posts.
SEO Functionality & Add-Ons with Bluehost Websites
Bluehost’s website builder enhances your site’s SEO by making it easy to add meta titles and descriptions to your pages. Additionally, you can add meta descriptions to images and videos using WordPress’s built-in media manager. All sites have access to WordPress’s extensive plugin marketplace, which includes numerous add-ons for improving SEO.
One notable limitation of Bluehost’s website builder is the absence of a built-in traffic analytics dashboard. However, you can easily integrate Google Analytics or use a WordPress plugin to track and assess your site’s traffic.
Ecommerce
Bluehost’s website builder seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce, allowing you to sell an unlimited number of products, digital downloads, and subscriptions on your site. WooCommerce offers a high level of flexibility and provides built-in tools for customizing your product pages, managing shipping and inventory, and marketing to customers.
It’s important to note that many of WooCommerce’s advanced features require paid extensions. Which extensions are included with your Bluehost website builder plan will depend on your chosen plan tier.
Help and Support
Bluehost offers 24/7 customer support through phone, email, and live chat. The company also maintains an online knowledge base and a resource center. While there is no specific section for the website builder in the knowledge base, the resource center contains several step-by-step tutorials that guide users on how to create a website using the builder.
For WordPress-related questions, there are numerous online forums where you can find additional support and guidance.
Bluehost Pricing
How Much Does Bluehost Cost?
Bluehost offers some of the most affordable hosting plans among major providers. However, the displayed rates are typically discounted “first month” prices. After your first month, Bluehost hosting plans will increase by a few dollars.
Plans require payment in 12- or 36-month terms, and there is no free trial available. However, you can take advantage of steeply discounted rates for your first term.
For those seeking more control, Bluehost also provides dedicated and VPS hosting options for tech-savvy users or those needing single-tenant servers.
Bottom Line
The Bluehost website builder simplifies the process of creating a WordPress site. With more than 300 templates and premade sections, you can easily add elements to your pages with a click. The builder also comes with Bluehost’s managed WordPress hosting, which means you can build unlimited websites and not worry about keeping your software up-to-date.
Ultimately, whether Bluehost’s website builder is right for you depends on your desire to use WordPress for your website. While it may not offer the same design flexibility as standalone builders like Wix, it gives you access to WordPress’s powerful tools for blogging, media management, SEO, and ecommerce, plus the ability to move your site to another host later. Therefore, Bluehost’s site builder is a great choice for individuals and small businesses that prioritize flexibility and scalability over design freedom.
