Homestead Website Builder Review – Is it any good?

When it debuted back in the 90s, Homestead was a real game-changer. The company was the number 1 choice of many people interested in website building and creating the best website or web store. In fact, Homestead is now one of the longest-standing companies for site-building. The question is, how well does this web builder hold up by current standards?

Well, the truth is, there are plenty of web hosting companies nowadays, and Homestead is no longer the most popular one. Still, Homestead’s site has about 12 million users, and plenty of people still choose it to create websites for all types of enterprises.

Homestead has received many positive press reactions since it was launched in 1996. If you’re wondering which hosting provider to choose for your website, reviews always come in handy, and Homestead has many positive reviews!

We were curious, so we decided to give Homestead’s website hosting services a try. That’s how this Homestead review you’re reading was created. We will tell you our honest opinion and give you the information you need about this site builder’s pricing, customer service, tools, and other features.

Homestead Free Website Building Software

Homestead pricing

Years ago, Homestead.com made site creation possible by using Homestead SiteBuilder, a downloadable design program that is no longer used. Nowadays, the company uses a new, more modern web-based builder, which makes it ideal for creating a small business website or online store. You don’t need to be a professional to create your own site with Homestead. The platform is user-friendly and good for business owners with zero design and coding experience.

Homestead offers 3 website pricing packages: Starter plan, Business plan, and Business Plus plan. We like website builders that are straightforward; after all, nobody likes surprises connected to paying a larger amount of money than expected! That often happens with website builders that offer discount prices for a specific period of time.

You sign up for, let’s say, $3 per month, and you’re happy you’ve made the deal of your life! However, after this initial period expires, you realize that the renewal price is 3/4x higher, and you have to pay $12/mo for a basic plan! Well, with Homestead, this won’t happen!

Homestead Pricing

The Starter package costs $7.99/mo and includes everything site builders need: easy-to-use website builder software, plenty of customizable templates, and over 1 million royalty-free images. However, a personalized domain name and email address are included only as add-ons.

The most popular package is the Business one. It includes everything we mentioned above + 100GB bandwidth, 100 pages, 3 sites, 1 personalized domain, and 5 email accounts. It costs $22.99/mo and is perfect for small businesses.

The third plan costs $62.99/mo. It includes everything the Business plan does, with the difference that here you get 10GB storage, 500GB bandwidth/mo, unlimited sites and pages, 3 personalized domain names, and 50 emails. Moreover, the plan includes marketing tools such as WebListing and website statistics.

We liked the most about Homestead because it offers a 30-day free trial for all three of its plans. That means that you can give the platform a try, and if you’re not happy with its terms and performance, you can cancel any time! All three plans include relatively good customer support: toll-free phone support and community support.

The company offers various add-ons that you can add to your preferred plans. This can be considered a disadvantage since you will have to pay extra for essential features such as search engine optimization and e-commerce. In the end, when you add all of the features you want, you might have to pay $99 per month and more.

Read Further: The 13 Best Free Website Builders of 2022: Their Pros & Cons

Pros and Cons of Homestead

Pros:

  • Many customizable templates
  • Ease of use due to the company’s drag and drop builder
  • Free image galleries
  • Overall affordable prices

Cons:

  • Limited bandwidth
  • No free domain name in the Starter plan
  • Paid search ads and SEO services are available only as add-ons
  • The online shop option costs $14.99/mоnth

Rating Details

  • Ease of use 5/5

Even though Homestead offers the most basic features, the platform is easy to use and suitable for beginners. You just pick a design, drop in your graphics, add your logo, and edit what you want!

  • The flexibility of design 3/5

With this host, you get a ready-to-use template with industry-specific text and images. Still, even though the templates are customizable, this customization is quite limited.

  • Are there any ads shown 5/5

Paid plans do not show any ads, and only paid subscriptions are available

  • Supported Languages 1/5

Although the text editor supports all western European languages, your Homestead site’s interface can be only in English.

  • Features 3/5

We liked and didn’t like many things about Homestead’s services. The good news is that this site builder offers you your own domain name. You could also transfer your existing domain easily. Like many other web hosts, this site builder has thought about Monetization as well (you get Google AdSense inserted via an HTML widget.)

Even though the company offers SEO tools only as add-ons, they include everything you need. Page titles, meta tags, and meta descriptions can all be edited, and the URL is also available from the name of the menu item. There’s also a W3C Validator that finds HTML errors in the source code, so we were quite pleased with Homestead when it comes to SEO services.

However, if you want to add a blog, you need to use the blog manager module, and we were really disappointed with how difficult it is to work with it. We were not impressed with the storage space offered in the plans as well. In terms of support, you get email and telephone support, but there’s no live chat and FAQs. Luckily, users can use the built-in RealTracker or add Google Analytics to track their visitor statistics. Users can also add HTML code.

Conclusion

Homestead is basically the dinosaur of website builders, and that’s probably why we were not really happy with its services. Yes, when it comes to plans, there’s something for everyone, but when we compare the company’s pricing to that of other providers…well, it’s not really worth it.

The most basic plan offers only 25MB of storage and costs $7.99/mo is more than enough for users to make up their minds. The truth is that Homestead offers most of the features needed to create the perfect website, but they just have to learn how to adapt to the new environment. Otherwise, people will simply stop trusting them!

Related: The Best Website Builders in 2022

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