Best and Easiest Website Builders for Teachers & Schools
Are you a teacher or webmaster of your school? Are you looking for the best and easiest website builders for teachers and schools that offer great functionalities and high storage for your classroom courses? You are in the right place now.
In this article, I will list and review the best website builders for teachers and schools. The purpose is to help you pick the best option. I haven’t listed any tool that is hard to configure and use. So without further ado, let’s start with the list.
Why do teachers/schools need websites?
In the modern digital age, every company, institute, and professional must have a properly functional and presentable website. It should have relevant and accurate content about whatever or whomever it represents. It should also be professional-looking and easy to navigate.
For example, if you are interested in promoting a new company, you should focus on social media integration and SEO tools.
Similarly, the principal of a school should have an online portal to keep the staff, students, and their parents updated. In other words, you need to optimize your website for your specific requirements.
You will need to help of a website builder to put together such a site. However, not all website builders are the same. If you start working with a website builder without properly learning about its features first, you might eventually discover that it is not able to meet your needs.
That will result in a big waste of money, time and energy.
But worry not. I’ve taken a close look at several website builders and compiled this list, which has my choices for the best website builders for teachers and schools.
Table of Contents
Stop: Have a team that can handle the website?
Use WordPress with an LMS.
What are the features of the best website builders for teachers and schools?
In my opinion, these are the most important features that an ideal website builder for teachers and schools should have:
- It should be simple to use and user-friendly. You cannot afford to unnecessarily waste time while designing your website.
- It should have all the tools needed to meet the requirements of various educators. This includes blogs, chatrooms, newsletters, SEO tools, and more.
- The available templates should be professional in appearance. It leaves a strong impression on your visitors and makes them take your work more seriously.
Some people feel that professional website builders like My School Design, Educator Pages, and Edublogs are good options for an education site. But such tools have very limited features, although they cost as much as a well-equipped website builder.
I don’t recommend that you initially work with a basic builder and then build your site all over again in the next academic session.
In this article, I have listed quality website builders that will give you a wide variety of options to build your website the way you want to. You will also be able to add more features to your site in the future, as needed.
Weebly
Weebly is undoubtedly one of the best educational tools available today. Up to 40 students can create a website individually with its help, although limited to five pages each. This gives you the opportunity to educate them in a rich, interactive manner.
Weebly features a simple drag-and-drop editor which is very easy to use, even for beginners. It offers over 70 templates to help you customize your website. Besides, you will also find stepwise tips for every function featured in the editor. Thus, you won’t have any issues learning to work with it.
The teacher can control students’ accounts from his or her dashboard. These accounts can serve as hubs to share data, journals, or simple modes of interaction. For administrators in the school, Weebly Campus Edition will be of great help. With its help, you will be able to handle a number of different accounts from one dashboard.
Similarly, there is a handy Assignment Form feature that lets teachers upload study material, assign tasks to students, and accept completed assignments from them. Weebly also allows you to create unlimited blogs to help teachers interact better with parents and students.
SITE123
Like SimpleSite, SITE123 is a handy website builder that can help you put together a professional-quality website relatively quickly. This is especially useful for private teachers and tutors who urgently require a functional website to promote their work. It offers you a variety of attractive layouts to add your content. You can also personalize your site in numerous ways, including features like social media tools, live chat, and a large number of free plugins. You can also go through its free icon and image libraries for more content. However, you need to subscribe to a paid plan to access all of its features.
SITE123 is highly versatile and readily adapts to any device you use on it. It is remarkably straightforward and simple to use – even more than drag-and-drop builders. Admittedly, the structured layouts can feel somewhat uncreative at times. However, if you have limited time available, they can actually be very helpful. Similarly, you can optimize your site for search engine results with the help of SITE123’s SEO tools. It also includes a powerful language editor, which can help you reach out to a wider, multilingual audience.
You will get 500 MB of storage and 1 GB of bandwidth with the free plan of SITE123, which is quite sufficient. However, they will give you a randomized subdomain, which looks awkward and is hard to memorize as well. Fortunately, its paid plans are reasonably priced and offer you a 14-day money-back guarantee as well. By subscribing to the Premium package, you will get 10 GB of storage, 5 GB of bandwidth, and a free custom domain for an entire year.
SimpleSite
SimpleSite is essentially the fastest way to create a properly functional website. You can actually get the job done in just a few minutes! All you need to build your site is to select a theme and change images, text, and colors the way you want. The only thing that might take some time is adding custom content.
If you are a beginner, or have very limited time available, then SimpleSite is a great option for you. Another advantage of SimpleSite is that it is compatible with most smartphones. In fact, you do not even need to download any app. Just use your browser to login to their website and get started.
Unfortunately, despite all these benefits, SimpleSite has pretty limited features to offer. If you need to create a large-scale website with a stunning layout, then SimpleSite will prove to be inadequate.
Also, the free plan of SimpleSite allows you to produce only fifteen pages on your website. After subscribing to (reasonably priced) paid plans, you can add many more themes, a custom domain, and unlimited pages. Personally, I feel even these paid plans do not have enough features to produce a truly professional educational website.
However, for creating a basic functional site, SimplePlan is a recommended choice.
WordPress.com
First of all, it is important to mention that WordPress.com is different from WordPress.org. The former is a much more user-friendly editor, which you can avail for a reasonable price and even for free.
WordPress.com features a decent selection of themes, most of which are free to use. They are innovatively designed and, in my opinion, can give tough competition to the ones offered by Squarespace. After clicking on the theme entry, you will be shown a preview of the same. Press the “Activate” button, and you will get access to the Customize options.
Unfortunately, WordPress.com’s free plans lack a bit when it comes to the level of customization offered. It does allow you to add more third-party themes and plugins to give your website more features if you pay for business or higher plans.
When it comes to video lessons, WordPress.com is arguably the best choice. It is a wholesome package that offers all the features you need to create a truly engaging website.
Even its free plan comes with 3 GB of storage which should be more than enough for most users. It is more than sufficient to store educational material like eBooks and video lectures. You will also have access to many customizable free themes and can enable or disable comments on your posts and pages whenever you like.
Apart from this, WordPress.com’s personal plan ($5 per month) will also give you access to Jetpack Essentials. You can use it to promote your website by optimizing its search engine ranking and automatically sharing all your posts to your social media profiles.
WordPress.com has out-of-the-box support for LaTeX and Markdown.
For getting access to more features, you will have to subscribe to the Pro or Business plan. That will allow you to use a large number of helpful plugins and improve your site even more. You can get better customer support and even connect your own domain as well.
Update: WordPress.com has changed its pricing. Check the rates here.
Wix
With over 30 education and community templates, Wix allows you to customize your website freely. It is well-known for its handy drag-and-drop editor, which even students can easily use to create their own websites. Apart from this, it has a truly unique feature – the Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence). To use this tool, you simply need to answer a few simple questions regarding your teaching services or school. It will then automatically design an excellent website based on your needs, usually taking no more than a few minutes.
There are also a number of other useful tools you will find on this platform. For example, the Wix App Market sells a number of apps that can improve your website’s functionality. Some of these apps include Comments, Wix Video, Wix Chat, Online Calendar, and Scheduling Pro. Similarly, the Wix SEO Wiz helps you promote your school or services better by optimizing your website’s search engine ranking.
Wix’s free plan already comes with plenty of useful features, including unlimited pages and Wix branding. However, it only gives you 500 MB for bandwidth and storage. You can upgrade to a paid plan whenever you like. The prices are reasonable and, apart from more bandwidth and space, give you the ability to connect to your own domain name as well.
Squarespace
Squarespace is particularly well-known for its appealing and professionally designed templates. They are diverse in appearance and can make your site look truly dashing. The editor itself is pretty well-organized, although it might take some time to get used to the large number of options and buttons on there. Squarespace is mostly simple to use and offers many useful features for your classroom. For example, you can use the newsletters feature to keep staff and parents updated about recent and upcoming developments. Similarly, your students can use the forms feature to turn in their assignments and projects.
It allows you to embed high-resolution presentations in your website, including both images and videos. Your students can use the acuity scheduling integration feature to schedule appointments with you or your staff regarding their studies. Squarespace also offers a helpful post-scheduling feature, which allows you to set publication dates for every lecture or assignment. As a result, your students will automatically be given relevant parts of the lesson for the whole term, according to the schedule. Finally, you can integrate your social media profiles with your site and promote your educational services.
As of now, Squarespace does not have a free plan. However, you can avail their 14-day free trial. You will have to subscribe to the paid version in order to publish your website. Presently, there is an excellent 50% discount available for students and teachers who use an academic email address to register.
Which of these website builders for teachers and students should you choose?
Website Builder | Free Tier? | Blog Functionality |
---|---|---|
Weebly | Yes | Yes |
Wix | Yes | Yes |
SquareSpace | No | Yes |
Site123 | Yes | No |
WordPress.com | Yes | Yes |
SimpleSite | Yes | No |
The website builders I have included in this list are all user-friendly and equipped with useful features. However, all of them have their unique advantages and disadvantages as well. Besides, every person who wants to create a website has different goals and needs. What works well for one person may not be suitable for someone else.
Thus, you need to know what your expectations are from website builders. Based on your specific requirements, you can choose one particular website builder in the beginning itself instead of spending time checking out all of them. I have included some scenarios below:
Which is the best website builder for beginners?
For beginners who simply want to put together a working website quickly, Weebly is the best option.
Which is the best website builder for hosting videos and documents?
If you need a website that can host video lectures and a number of files, you can go for Cloudways or WordPress.com.
Which website builder offers the best templates and design?
If you need a professional and state-of-the-art website loaded with lots of features, which can help you strongly compete with online rivals, you can choose Weebly.
I want students and parents to be updated with classes and events. Which website builder should I choose?
If you need to keep your students and their parents updated regarding classes and events, Weebly will integrate nicely for you.
Which is the easiest-to-use website builder?
Weebly and Site123 are easies ones.
I want a fully functional online classroom. Which website builder provides that?
Hire a developer or build a custom website on WordPress with an LMS plugin. WordPress.com Business is the easiest way to do this. Bluehost offers cheaper options for a WordPress installation.
I hope that this article helps you find an excellent website builder and create a wonderful site for your school or program.