4 days ago
Bluehost WonderSuite Website Builder
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WordPress is a popular, flexible content management system that powers millions of websites, and Bluehost makes it the backbone of its website builder, WonderSuite. If you need extra help building a site, WonderSuite gives you the tools to easily make dependable, attractive pages with e-commerce options. Editors' Choice winners Duda and Wix hold up better as standalone site builders, but Bluehost WonderSuite is an accessible alternative if you're willing to embrace its WordPress focus.
Although it lacks a free plan, Bluehost is reasonably priced. You just need to suss out exactly what you pay under each WordPress hosting plan. You can subscribe for a year or up to three years, which determines the introductory price and the renewal price. Bluehost offers several tiers, including Basic ($11.99 per month), Choice Plus ($15.99 per month), or eCommerce Essentials ($18.99 per month).
The Basic plan includes unlimited monthly data transfers, the option to build ten websites, and 10GB of SSD storage. The Choice Plus plan lets you build 50 websites, and offers domain privacy, 50GB of SSD storage, and a free CDN and Secure Socket Layer (SSL). The eCommerce Essentials tier adds more business features, such as the ability to offer discount codes, site memberships, and online booking. The e-commerce functionality, payment, and storefront tools are the main draw, and WooCommerce is one of the best WordPress plug-ins.
All tiers provide shared hosting. With the included hosting, you receive email marketing tools and a free domain for the first year. If you want more high-powered hosting, consider Bluehost's VPS or dedicated hosting plans.
Bluehost gives you two options for creating a WordPress-powered website: the traditional WordPress interface or the Bluehost WonderSuite website builder. Like fellow website builders from GoDaddy and Hostinger, Bluehost has adopted AI tools to make building sites even easier and faster. Now, if you opt out of WordPress, you must use the new AI-powered WonderSuite experience when starting a site. You simply answer questions and let the builder generate text and image suggestions (or provide SEO and commerce help). WonderSuite breaks everything into simple blocks to customize and rearrange in its WonderTheme template. For my test, I created a podcast-focused website that features a big pair of headphones on the home page.
Bluehost features just one WordPress theme, but the sheer variety of drag-and-drop templates and layouts lets you make near-endless tweaks. Although you can't change your theme selection (a common website builder limitation), you can alter numerous visual components within a selected template, such as fonts and background colors. In addition, you can swap between desktop and mobile previews to see how your site looks on different displays.
This stylistic freedom doesn't apply to image editing. You can import your own photos, including a logo, and browse Bluehost's stock photo library. However, you can't really edit those photos, besides resizing them or adding a link and alt text metadata information. Wix gives you more robust photo editing options.
Bluehost doesn't skimp on tools. Under Sections, you can browse many different elements to add to your site. Each element presents you with a few examples to choose from before dragging it onto your page. The standard options include text forms, video embeds, and image galleries. More bespoke elements include a countdown timer, map, and carveout for custom HTML/CSS.
Here you access e-commerce features, such as product listings, reviews, promotions, and pricelists. With WooCommerce, you can sell tens of thousands of different products, physical or digital, as well as subscription memberships.
Bluehost's website builder is simple to use, but placing all elements under the same Sections banner makes it take longer to find what you're looking for. Once an element was on the page, I spent a few more seconds than I wanted adjusting values to get what I desired. Establishing a workflow won't take long, though.
You can view all of your site's pages, alter global appearance settings, and enable transition animations. Likewise, you can enter business and shipping information, as well as social media account credentials, if you want your site to sync with Facebook or Twitter/X. It's easy to track traffic progress via Google Analytics, too.
The website builder also includes WordPress-specific features that make your site shine. For example, you can create a blog that lives on your site or swap back and forth between the simplified website builder and fully featured WordPress admin interface at any time. In that way, Bluehost serves as useful training wheels as you teach yourself to ride the WordPress bike. To learn even more, check out how to get started with WordPress. For more on website building, check out our stories on how to create a website and 10 SEO tips to boost your traffic.
An attractive website won't do you much good if no one can reach it. That's why we also investigate how well traditional web hosting services and website builders stay online. Bluehost has historically been very stable, and that's still the case. The company has a 99.9% uptime promise.
With Bluehost WonderSuite, you can leverage Bluehost's proven customer support team. Through its Blue Sky service, Bluehost provides 24/7 telephone support, online web chat, a ticket-based system, and a helpful knowledge base. As with uptime, Bluehost's quick and reliable customer support continues to impress us in testing. If you aren't satisfied, you'll receive a full refund upon canceling within 30 days. For more details, check out our full Bluehost web hosting review.
