Best Real Estate Website Builders of 2023 | Tried and Tested!

The Internet Data Exchange (IDX) is software that has all the nitty gritty information needed to display real estate listings on websites. It includes best practices, policies, and other standards to uphold.

Wix is one of the few builders on this list that fully integrates with IDX. The IDX has to be added via code but, unlike with Squarespace, this doesn’t seem to be a seamless process – some users report that it’s quite buggy.

Wix offers over 800 professionally designed templates, with around 12 dedicated entirely to real estate websites.

Wix receives a 3.5 out of 5 for design flexibility because it continues to expand its template offering, focusing on the navigation of websites, and the life-long visual appeal of websites. You can’t switch your template after you go live, so just keep this in mind.

Wix uses drag-and-drop tools to help you design your website. This means your template is just a guide, and you can move elements like images, paragraphs, and menus where you want.

Wix’s real estate templates come packed with helpful marketing features, including contact forms, dynamic maps, Mailchimp emails, social media integrations, and even online booking forms that clients can use to arrange viewings.

Contact forms are an integral part of any real estate website, and Wix provides user-friendly form builders that allow you to create custom contact forms to capture inquiries, schedule showings, or gather information from potential clients.

The plans have different features but we’d recommend either the Light or Core plans for real estate agents. Wix offers four paid plans:

• Free: 14-day free trial
• Light: $16/month
• Core: $27/month
• Business: $32/month
• Business Elite: $159/month

The free plan is a great way to test the water and start building your site, but we recommend upgrading to the Core plan. This is ideal for businesses, whereas the Light plan is aimed at personal projects.

As you upgrade, you’ll also unlock more features, like extra video storage for virtual house viewings (this starts at one hour on the Core plan), and extra paid ad credit for landing local searches.

Wix scores 4.4 out of 5 for ease of use, snapping up the highest score alongside Squarespace for ease when compared with all other builders.

You don’t need any tech experience to build a website with Wix because the whole platform is intuitive for beginners. This is a big reason why it was the third platform our users were most likely to recommend after testing.

Having 12 ready-to-go real estate templates is a real time saver that some builders lower on this list don’t provide. Instead of having to tailor a template to your needs, it’s more than likely that one will already fit the bill.  It is then just a matter of swapping in your own content, which is something that’s designed to be really beginner-friendly.

Wix is ideal for anyone without much SEO experience. Wix scores a perfect 5 out of 5 for SEO, giving you personalized recommendations. It’s tailored to your site and the search traffic you’re trying to capture, and offers SEO prompts, keyword tools like Semrush, and detailed guides on SEO.

It even has the Wix SEO Learning Hub to help you learn everything about basic SEO to advanced strategies.

Squarespace’s real estate website templates don’t come with pre-integrated IDX. However, there’s a pretty simple way to add this functionality as well as a comprehensive Squarespace article to guide you through the process.

You’ll need to find the embed code from your IDX service, and then add this to your Squarespace website in a custom code block. This sounds tricky, but it’s really just a matter of copying and pasting – no technical expertise is needed.

We’ve already mentioned how impressed we are with Squarespace’s template designs. In fact, they’re the best we’ve tested, earning a 4.7 out of 5. Comparatively, GoDaddy has the second-best design functionality with a score of 3.7 out of 5, so Squarespace is racing ahead.

You have access to over 100 free templates, but Squarespace has identified five designs that would work best for a real estate website. The platform lets you design a website that puts listing images front and center that so you can really show off your properties.

While these templates may not have changed aesthetically in the last year, there are permanent features that are now available on all templates, such as adding videos on pages and forms.

However, Squarespace doesn’t give you total design flexibility when compared to the likes of Wix – which has a freeform editor where you can drag elements anywhere. While you can easily switch out content and add new elements and pages, you can’t drastically change the layout you see.

While this may be less fun for the creatives, it does mean you’re forced to stick close to the professional design – and your website will look all the better for it.

Squarespace scores a lower 3.2 out of 5 in our website feature testing, compared with last year’s score of over 4. This is because it will take time to add third-party features and apps to give you the full range of real estate specific features.

This doesn’t mean you can’t have those extras to capture leads. You can add pop-ups with the Business plan, which can be a really effective way to alert people to a reduced price, or a new property.

When designing your website, you can add new elements like forms, images, or maps by selecting them from the menu. Also, integrations like Mailchimp allow you to follow up with leads and clients via automatic email marketing.

Along with a free 14-day trial, there are four paid plans:

• Personal plan – $16 per month

• Business plan – $23 per month

• Ecommerce Basic – $27 per month

• Ecommerce Advanced – $49 per month

Squarespace isn’t the cheapest website builder on this list. This is why it scores below WordPress.org, GoDaddy, Square, and Hostinger in our value for money testing with a score of 3.8 out of 5. Still, with such professional-looking designs on offer and the ability to weave in the features you need, it’s well worth the monthly fee.

For ease of use, Squarespace is a no-brainer because it has a joint top score with Wix (4.4 out of 5), making it one of the easiest to use. Our users said that Squarespace was both easy and it allowed you to create a more cohesive design, ending in websites that looked more professional than Wix. One user noted:

I really like the preview options you get when choosing a template because it includes mobile versions as well as desktop.

What we noticed when testing is how each Squarespace template almost seamlessly fits into mobile versions. You will need to tweak text and images but, for the most part, it looks better on mobile. Perfect for property searchers on the go.

Squarespace also had the joint best help and support along with Wix. It scores an outstanding 4.9 out of 5, and has a handy live chat to help you find what you need. Remember, you have a two week trial to try it out, totally free.

Squarespace has the best SEO tools along with Wix, gaining an SEO score of 5 out of 5 during testing. While Squarespace doesn’t have as much hands-on instruction as Wix or Wix’s integration with Semrush to help discover keywords,  it does have everything you need to give your site the best chance of ranking well for searches in your area. Some SEO help and tools it provides are:

• Meta description
• Custom URLs
• Header code
• Image alt attributes
• Mobile friendly
• Google analytics
• Google search console
• Social media integration
• Keyword support
• SEO specific app
• SEO best practice prompts

Adding an IDX integration to your WordPress site is a really simple process. From your main dashboard, go to “Plugins,” then select “Add New”. You can then search for a well-rated IDX plugin in the WordPress plugin directory – this yielded a few pages of results when we tried it, so you’ll definitely have plenty to choose from.

Once you’ve chosen a plugin, just click the “Install Now” button, and it will automatically be applied to your site. It’s a really quick and simple process.

WordPress receives a  2.2 out of 5, the lowest design score of any builder we’ve tested this year. This is because the range of template categories, especially for the real estate industry, is limited to around 73 results for “real estate” themes. It also doesn’t come with beginner-friendly design options like Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI), and you’ll need to know the basics of code to create the website you want.

WordPress works a little differently from website builders since all of the themes in the WordPress theme directory (also accessible from your WordPress dashboard) are uploaded by third-party developers.

While the WordPress themes look good, they don’t have many (or in some cases any) user reviews. While this probably isn’t cause for concern, it might be worth branching out and looking at a third-party theme website, such as ThemeForest, or even exploring the option of getting a custom design from a web designer. This is the nature of working with an open-source platform.

Part of the reason we’ve thrown the web designer idea into the mix at this stage is that it’s not as easy to customize a WordPress theme as it is to alter a website builder template. Making basic changes is easy enough, but playing around with the general style and vibe can be difficult, and may require coding knowledge. For a few hundred dollars, a custom website builder design may end up seeming as an appealing and savvy option.

Any lead capture components can be added in the same way as the IDX integration – via the (almost) infinite selection within the WordPress plugin directory. Again, anyone is free to upload to this directory, so we recommend taking user reviews into account when choosing between different options.

But, ultimately, your options are endless here – there won’t be anything you can’t add to your WordPress site. The question will just be whether it’s a good quality plugin and if it’s one you need to pay for.

WordPress.org stole the show in our value for money testing with the best score of 4.8 out of 5. The open source platform is completely free to use, and there are plenty of free plugins to choose from to make a functional site for free.

That said, you will have to purchase your own web hosting, which costs anywhere from around $2.95 per month upwards, depending on the size and needs of your site. You’ll also need to purchase a domain name at a cost of around $10–$15 per year.

There are plenty of other costs too, from plugins that cost $0 to anything upwards of $1000.

While the cost of hosting and a domain name are pretty easy to account for, the cost of design and plugins is not. This is because it really depends on what you’re prepared to do yourself, and what your site requires. While the ongoing cost is likely to be comparable to that of a website builder, the setup cost could be a lot more – potentially several hundred dollars more.

At the very core you could just pay $47.40 a year for your website’s domain and hosting and, if you want to secure it, an extra $50 a year. Reaching a total of $97.40 a year.

Luckily, we have a separate guide to WordPress.org pricing to break this down into more detail for you.

While it’s very easy to add an IDX integration to your WordPress.org website, don’t be lulled into thinking it’s an easy option for building your real estate website.

WordPress is a powerful platform that allows for infinite opportunities for your website, so it’s no surprise that setting it up is more time consuming than it is with other platforms. This is why it falls behind the other builders in our ease of use testing, with a low score of 3.2 out of 5.

During testing, users noted frustration with building a website when compared with builders like Wix and Squarespace. One of the users said:

You are initially presented with so much to do that I became flustered. I couldn’t work out how to do the simple things, because there was so much in the way.

The frustration with building a website with WordPress.org is that it’s tailored for web designers who have coding knowledge. Whereas a builder like Wix is made for those who want to build without any web design knowledge.

WordPress has a really good reputation when it comes to SEO, and in testing scores 5 out of 5 for SEO. Because so many websites are built with WordPress (around two thirds), Google is well-practiced at understanding them.

You can install a range of SEO plugins to your WordPress site and hit the ground running. Alongside the usual meta descriptions, Alt tags, and other page optimizations, some tools you can get with WordPress are Google Analytics, keyword support tools, and best practice prompts..

We recommend adding an SEO plugin to your WordPress site, especially if it’s content rich (our favorite is Yoast SEO) to make sure you’re giving your site the best chance of ranking well for those all-important local searches.

We were a little surprised to see that Shopify doesn’t have a native IDX/MLS  functionality, given how advanced the platform is. Instead, you can take the code for a third-party IDX widget and add this to your site when in developer mode.

While Shopify does have some real estate themes, it’s not clear if those come with IDX or MLS. Instead, our research shows  that people primarily use Shopify to create property listings and to book viewings. This is because Shopify is tailored for selling products online rather than in-person.

This is where Shopify is bittersweet for us, gaining the third best design score out of the builders on this list, with a score of 3.6 out of 5. Shopify has 24 really nice home and décor templates, each professionally designed and cost between $0–$350 for a one-time purchase. However, these templates aren’t centered on property renting or selling, which means it could take quite a while to adjust one of these templates to fit your needs.

That said, it’s easier to edit your website than with WordPress or Square Online. It’s fairly intuitive to add imagery, and really easy to add in “products,” such as your listed properties.

Shopify’s template features help with the building process, including Shopify Magic, which is an artificial design intelligence that helps write product descriptions. It is fantastic for those who want to write about a property in a few seconds using only keywords.

Shopify’s sales features are impressive and really help capture new leads. Here are some tools you’ll get with a home and décor template:

• Great email marketing (for keeping leads engaged)
• A members area (just note that it’s not password protected)
• Contact and appointment forms (for gathering leads)

While these templates aren’t for real estate, it’s the built-in features that really elevate it. You’re able to customize them easily enough and create email marketing funnels for keeping leads engaged with your new properties.

Shopify offers four main premium plans:

• Basic Shopify – $29/month
• Shopify – $79/month
• Advanced Shopify – $299/month
• Shopify Plus – $2000/month

The bad news is, Shopify is the worst value real estate website builder we’ve tested, along with Wix. It’s pretty expensive and includes transaction fees, along with high pricing for themes that aren’t specifically designed for the real estate industry.

But it’s not all doom and gloom because what you pay for is great tools to capture new leads and the second most popular builder we’ve tested. During interviews with Shopify users, they always praise its inventory system, marketing abilities, and ability to scale.

When compared with WordPress.org, Shopify is easy to build a website with. During testing, users noted:

You’ll get a lot out of it, but you have to put a lot in.

In this year’s tests, Shopify fared well for ease of use, with a score of 4 out of 5. This puts it behind Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy. The reason it wasn’t as easy in these tests was because it didn’t offer the necessary tools to make an ideal real estate website.

However, it is possible if  you’re tech savvy and have some creative work-arounds. During testing, a user said:

Shopify’s builder doesn’t come loaded with stock images and text like all the other providers, it highlights the areas you can add these in yourself. This is a much cleaner way to build a website because I wasn’t constantly deleting the placeholder images and text.

Receiving a score of 4 out of 5 for SEO, Shopify does incredibly well at providing the necessary tools to get your website seen in local listings. During testing, we found that some of the SEO tools and abilities Shopify provided are:

• Custom URLs
• Ability to add meta descriptions
• Image Alt attributes
• Mobile friendly designs
• 301 redirects
• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• Social media integration

You should have no trouble learning about SEO and applying it to Shopify for the best outcome.

GoDaddy provides a step-by-step guide on how to add IDX or MLS real estate listings to your site. These steps will include heading over to the IDXBroker.com website and creating an account in order to integrate.

Although it seems daunting at first, once your IDX account has been created, it’s a pretty seamless process to complete the integration with GoDaddy’s website builder.

GoDaddy soared past WordPress.org, Shopify, and Wix with a score of 3.7 out of 5 for design functionality. What stands out to us is how simple it is to add sections to a page via the “+” button in the editor. This is particularly useful when it comes to adding photo galleries to successfully showcase your listings.

In addition, GoDaddy’s Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) will ask you a few questions and then create a template for you in minutes, which is why it’s the fastest builder to use.

When it comes to design, GoDaddy saw a drop in its performance score due to other builders having a range of sectors they support when creating templates, including real estate templates. Also, mobile site editing isn’t as sleek as that of Squarespace.

That said, with various real estate templates to choose from, you won’t be far off from creating a modern, image-led website with GoDaddy.

We can’t say that GoDaddy is the best when it comes to features. In our research, it scored 2.3 out of 5 for not having an app market, lack of password protection in the members’ area, and its blogging features are not as strong as the top builders on this list.

Email marketing is an important tool for generating leads in real estate. GoDaddy allows you to integrate with Facebook ads to showcase your listings beyond your website. You can also add a booking section so visitors can arrange viewings.

It’s fair to say that GoDaddy relies on social media, newsletter sign-ups, and on-site chat boxes to help nurture your leads, as opposed to the direct email marketing strategies and exclusive members areas that Wix and Squarespace use.

The four GoDaddy pricing plans are:

• Basic – $9.99 per month
• Premium – $14.99 per month
• Commerce – $16.99 per month
• Commerce Plus – $29.99 per month

If you just want your real estate website to showcase properties, we’d recommend starting with the Premium plan as it comes with SEO tools and 500 emails. If you plan to sell properties directly online, go straight to the Commerce Plus plan as it’s the only plan that lets you create product listings and the ability to sell online.

GoDaddy’s ease of use score stayed the same in this year’s testing – a strong 4.1 out of 5. With a simple editor that lets you add elements and page sections without fuss, we see why users find this platform super easy to navigate.

When testing the builder, we noticed how GoDaddy has multiple – and really useful – elements available to insert with ease. These allow to include an events calendar to showcase upcoming viewings, upload photo galleries, or supply testimonials. Any added functionality can be dragged and dropped to wherever you like. A user mentioned:

I like that the review element has the option to automatically pull reviews from external sites or add them in manually.

Helping estate agents build trust through adding customer reviews and thereby showing social proof without breaking a sweat.

Similar to Wix, GoDaddy is great for anyone with little to no experience when it comes to SEO.

GoDaddy has built-in features to help you optimize your website, and it lets you embed external reviews users have left on Facebook, Zillow, and Yelp. Being able to share listings across multiple channels is also a great way to expand your reach and attract more visits to your site without needing any SEO expertise.

Although, if you do want to optimize for search engines, GoDaddy’s Search Engine Visibility tool works perfectly to help optimize for Google search. By tweaking your keywords, page titles, and metadata, the builder can help you get found online faster.

Square Online, like other builders on the list, doesn’t come with IDX or MLS integrations because it doesn’t have tailored real estate templates or tools.

However, you can install third-party plugins or hire a developer to integrate it with your website. It might be frustrating for beginners to find the right way to integrate, but the Square Online phone support can easily lead you in the right direction.

Scoring 3.2 out of 5 for the design flexibility category, Square Online isn’t the most design friendly. The lack of real estate specific templates, and the inability to integrate IDX or MLS makes it less than ideal.

However, you can create it from another template and you’ll be able to copy code over to add those features. Square Online templates offer plenty of white space, which will allow any properties displayed to take center stage.

The end result is a clean site that looks good and is easy to navigate – an estate agent website you’d be pleased to publish.

With Square Online, you’ll need to spend some time adding third-party apps to ensure you have the right real estate tools and features. Square Online does come with some great additional features for real estate websites to capture leads, such as:

• Professional product photos
• Checkout links
• Merchant Account/Card Reader
• Square Appointments
• Live Customer Messaging

In addition, Square Online allows for integrations like Mailchimp for email marketing and turning more leads into clients.

Square Online offers two paid pricing plans:

• Free plan – $0 per month
• Plus plan – $29 per month
• Premium plan – $79 per month

Square Online offers a free plan so you can start listing properties risk-free. Still, you won’t be able to proceed with IDX integration without getting to grips with some coding, so we recommend it for those who are tech savvy. 

Plus, if you choose Square Online you’ll be sacrificing the features that are essential to create a successful real estate business like no keyword support in SEO, no real blogging capabilities, and no search terms with relatable results. Which is why we put Wix at the top of this list as it does offer those and more.

That said, Square Online is a budget-friendly builder, and proves to be cheaper than Wix, Shopify, and Hostinger – scoring a solid 4.3 out of 5 for value for money in our testing.

Square Online takes the second to last place for ease of use in our testing, scoring 3.5 out of 5. It’s certainly not difficult to create an ecommerce site with Square Online, but it might be a little trickier for real estate websites because you’ll need third party apps. Users said:

Product pages had so much detail, you could add everything while on the same page and not have to jump between menus.

This was a really great feature for property listings but, on the flip side, another user mentioned:

The editor was quite slow. When adding products it would take a long time for them to show up onsite, and at times I was unsure if it had worked properly.

This could cause frustration if you have plenty of properties to showcase on your site.

Square Online only lacks keyword support and SEO apps that would help to guide you. Otherwise, it has all the tools needed to show in search results.

Gaining a middle-of-the-road 3 out of 5 for SEO, you’re able to change meta descriptions and integrate social media, Google Analytics, and Google Search console as with any other builder on the list.

Like some platforms, there’s no available IDX or MLS in the platform itself. It also doesn’t have an app market, so you will need a third-party installation of IDX to run it on your website. Of all the platforms tested, it was the most difficult provider to integrate software with.

With the same design score as Square, Hostinger received a 3.2 out of 5 in this year’s testing, which means it’s easier to use than WordPress.org but not the other builders on this list.

When testing design functionality, we found that the Hostinger website builder had very basic templates, but there were over 140 templates primarily for portfolios, sales pages, online stores, and business sites. There were some home and décor themes, but there weren’t any that focused specifically on real estate.

That said, changing the template to suit your business isn’t too complicated. It has a grid-style drag-and-drop editor which made it simple  to edit color and imagery, but we were limited as to where we could place items.

The main disadvantage to Hostinger’s templates is the lack of flexibility – the elements library fell short when compared with Wix or Squarespace. While you can add a new gallery or include an Instagram feed, you won’t get the professionally designed templates of builders like Wix. Also, if you want to switch templates later down the line, any progress you’ve made will be gone, and there’s no switching templates once it’s live.

Even on third-party template websites, there seemed to be a lack of real estate focused templates. That said, templates were easy enough to edit and users in testing discussed that it’s a simple and easy builder if you want to create a website quickly. However, the design does suffer somewhat from a lack of features.

Hostinger does have the ability to use Hotjar and Google Analytics, but the lead capture tools are limited. Dedicated social media and marketing features, such as social selling and email marketing, are not available with this builder, which makes it difficult to promote your website to potential buyers and renters.

Hostinger received 4 out of 5 for value for money during testing. To make things easy, Hostinger offers just one plan: Website Builder & Web Hosting. It offers all the essential features you need from a website builder, such as a free domain and some SEO support.

But if you need a more complex website to capture more leads and showcase more than one property, we recommend the previous builders on the list.

Hostinger tested easier to use than WordPress.org and Square, but not as easy as the rest on this list. It scored a 3.9 out of 5, with users noting that it was surprisingly easier than expected. One states:

It does the basics right, so you can be quick to get your store up and running.

It’s ideal for a real estate business that wants a quick way to showcase one or two properties. Anything more than this and it gets a little more complicated, as users said in testing:

It has a lot of half-baked features to distract you from the fact that it doesn’t actually offer you much.

Hostinger scores a very low 2.4 out of 5 for its features, and while it does have SEO tools, they aren’t nearly as comprehensive as Wix’s.

You are able to discover basic keywords, optimize your pages, and an AI writer can write an SEO copy for you at the click of a button. Plus, being a hosting provider, it also provides a free SSL certificate, along with the majority of the website builders on the list.

But, when compared with Wix , which provides plenty of SEO tutorials, Semrush, AI text generators, mobile-friendly designs, SEO apps, along with regular page optimizations – it makes Hostinger’s SEO look lackluster.