20+ Best Web Design Software for Beginners & Professionals

Are you looking for the best professional web design software? Design software makes it possible for you to create web templates and beautiful designs in much less time.

Not long ago, you had to write complex code and make web design programs to create even the most basic templates. But with more advanced software now on the market, anyone can build beautiful web designs quickly and easily.

In this article, we’ll share the best web design software that you can use to create website templates or full-fledged websites.

How We Tested the Best Web Design Software for Beginners

To identify the best web design software for beginners, we implemented a three-pronged testing approach:

• Hands-on Project Building: We put the Web Design Software to the test by using them to build real projects. This included creating websites and landing pages for various purposes. By using the software in a practical setting, we were able to assess their ease of use, functionality, and suitability for beginners.
• Popular Platform Evaluation: We went beyond our own projects and analyzed the most popular web design software on the market. This allowed us to compare features, see what others were saying, and identify any common issues beginners encountered. We focused on factors like ease of use, the availability of beginner-friendly templates, and the learning curve associated with each platform.
• Beginner-Focused Analysis: We understand that beginners have unique needs. Throughout our testing process, we prioritized features and functionalities that would be most beneficial to someone starting their web design journey. This included analyzing the software’s learning curve, the availability of tutorials and support resources, and the overall user experience for those with no prior coding experience.

Before we get into this article, here are the top 3 picks so you can look at them at a quick glance. This will help you make a decision quickly if you do not have time to go through all the entries in the list.

Now, we’ve categorized the best website design software by how you can use them to make the list easier to navigate. Use the quick links to jump to the section that interests you the most.

• Best software and platforms to build a website
• Best web software for eCommerce
• Best web tools for graphic design and marketing
• Best design software for HTML sites

Best Software and Builders to Design a Website

Below, you’ll find our pick of the best web platforms and tools in the market that will help you create either a full-fledged website, landing pages, or website templates.

1. WordPress

WordPress is a free and open-source software that lets you build any kind of website with ease. Over 40% of the web uses WordPress, making it the most popular Content Management System in the world.

WordPress comes with built-in themes and if that’s not enough, you can always choose from the thousands of third-party WordPress themes that are available for just about every niche.

Each theme has a basic structure, and you can change anything in a theme like its colors, text, background, and images. There are also WordPress page builders like SeedProd that let you customize the theme from the frontend, so there’s no coding required at all.

Added to that, you can also use WordPress plugins for endless customization options.

We must mention that we’re talking about WordPress.org, which is very different from the fully-hosted platform WordPress.com. You can find out the difference here: WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org.

WordPress.org is the best platform for site owners and developers who want access to cPanel and phpMyAdmin to control website files and databases. If you are serious about growing and expanding your website, then WordPress is an obvious choice.

Now installing WordPress is easy and free! But first, you need a domain name and web hosting plan, which costs around $14.99 per year and $7.99 per month, respectively. It can be quite a lot when you’re just starting with a new website.

Fortunately, we’ve worked out a special deal for IsItWP users. You can start a website for only $2.75 per month with Bluehost. They’re the best web hosting provider and are even officially recommended by WordPress.org.

With our special deal, you’ll get a free domain name + 72% off on web hosting.

If you want more details, check out the latest WordPress.org review here.

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2. SeedProd

SeedProd is already the best landing page builder for WordPress sites. And now, with its new Theme Builder, you can use SeedProd to easily create a custom WordPress theme from scratch.

The software comes with full theme kits and over 300+ beautiful and responsive page templates. The theme kits include matching designs for every part of your site, not just the homepage.

Customizing your theme is easy with the drag and drop builder, text editor, layout navigation, and live previews. You’ll also find smart sections, headline animations, WordPress template tags, and powerful page blocks to build unique pages all by simply dragging and dropping them to where you want them to appear.

You can choose what you want to show/hide on desktop and mobile devices. Your site’s design will be mobile-friendly in every way.

Plus, the platform integrates with email marketing tools and other WordPress tools. This makes it easy to sync other features of your website such as contact forms, WooCommerce products, and more.

With SeedProd, the best part is there’s no coding required whatsoever. The design process is contained smoothly within the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface. However, SeedProd also has advanced settings and a code editor for developers if they want to insert custom coding.

One thing that stands out about this builder is that it has built-in coming soon and maintenance modes. You can enable these modes with a single click and your website will be hidden from the public eye while you design it.

SeedProd has a free plan and a premium version. You’ll need the Pro plan to access the Theme Builder. 

See our full SeedProd Review for more details.

3. Thrive Suite

Thrive Suite is one of the best ways to build a WordPress site that’s optimized to convert visitors into subscribers and buyers.

You’ll get premade themes and a drag and drop theme builder to design a custom website in no time. If you want to create an online store, Thrive integrates seamlessly with Woocommerce There’s even a setup wizard that makes it incredibly easy to set up your eCommerce site.

There are hundreds of pre-designed sections and templates to customize your header, footer, blog post template, page template, site bar, and more. Simply choose your brand color, tweak a few details and your site is good to go live.

When you sign up for Thrive Suite, you also get access to powerful conversion optimization tools including:

• Thrive Theme Builder: 100% front-end visual theme building 
• Thrive Automator: Smart automation that integrates with your marketing tools and website
• Thrive Architect: Visual page builder to create beautiful content & layouts
• Thrive Leads: Build your email list faster than ever before
• Thrive Apprentice: Create and sell online courses
• Thrive Comments: Leverage comments to make your site more engaging
• Thrive Quiz Builder: Create powerfully engaging quizzes
• Thrive Ovation: Set-and-Forget Testimonial Plugin for WordPress
• Thrive Ultimatum: Create scarcity marketing campaigns
• Thrive Optimize: Find out what works with landing page A/B tests 

With Thrive, you’ll have everything you need to set up and grow an online business.

4. Web.com

Web.com is one of the original and most popular do-it-yourself website builders on the market. Using the intuitive drag and drop builder and readymade website templates, anyone can quickly build a website, no technical skills are needed.

You can easily add features like contact forms, photo galleries, videos, social media buttons, map locations, and more. Plus, you get access to thousands of stock images you can use on your site.

All Web.com plans come with a free domain name, business email address, autosave & backup features, website analytics, SEO features, and other essential website tools.

The Starter website plan starts at only $1.95 per month.

5. Gator Builder

Gator Builder is a web design and development software by HostGator. It’s packed with dozens of web templates for every business niche. The templates are beautiful and fully dynamic to work with third-party services. You can use the user-friendly drag and drop interface to add images, videos, Google Maps, and more in a few clicks.

Since it’s built by HostGator, one of the best web hosting companies on the planet, each plan comes with a hosting option as well. Gator Builder integrates with social channels to display feeds from your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts.

6. SiteBuilder

SiteBuilder is a web design software with hundreds of ready-made templates that let you easily build a website. You can either customize the web templates or design your layouts from scratch with the drag and drop builder. It offers a free domain name and web hosting with each plan to help you get started quickly.

It also offers great customization options to design a complete website, start a blog, or run an eCommerce store. It has several design tools to add images, content, and other media files to your web template.

7. Divi

Divi is a popular WordPress theme and web design software. It comes with a drag and drop editor that lets you create custom web templates easily. Divi’s template portfolios have hundreds of premade designs for restaurants, cafes, medical, fitness, the list is endless. It gives you an advanced visual editor to customize your templates with effects, shape dividers, transformations, and more.

Its point and click tool allows you to add text anywhere on your web template. It’s a modern software with options to edit, undo, redo, and revise your customizations. Divi Builder is packed with dozens of global elements, style options, and content blocks to ease your website designing process.

For more details, check out this complete Divi review.

8. Weebly

Weebly is a popular web building and designing software. It can be used to create web designs for general websites and online eCommerce stores — millions of users on the internet trust it. Weebly comes with a drag and drop interface to create your web design in just a few minutes.

It’s a hosted solution so you won’t have to worry about additional web hosting charges. It’s built-in to your pricing plan.

The drag and drop feature makes it even simpler to develop your website design without writing a single line of code.

Though the free version of Weebly comes with everything you need to make beautiful websites, it’s worth checking out their paid plan for more features and options. For more details, read the complete Weebly review from our experts.

9. Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder is an easy-to-use page builder for WordPress users. It comes with responsive templates and a simple drag and drop builder.

This makes it one of the most beginner-friendly website design tools out there.

It works great for everyone including freelancers, developers, agencies, eCommerce stores, and businesses.

Beaver Builder is developer-friendly if you want to make advanced changes. Plus, there are addons to extend features and functionality of the page builder.

Interested in this platform? Get more information inside our Beaver Builder Review.

10. Wix

Wix is designed to be a beginner-friendly website builder. Once you sign up, there’s a setup wizard that helps you take all the steps you need to design and publish a website.

The visual builder lets you make changes in real-time. And you’ll find tons of customization options inside the editor to add headers, footers, images, and more. The great part about Wix is that it takes care of website maintenance like updates, SSL, and security.

However, it uses a fully-managed subscription service model. This means you need to pay a monthly or yearly fee to keep your website on the internet.

The downside to this platform is that you’ll be very limited in terms of web development control and customizations.

While ease of use takes priority, you won’t be able to design your site the way you want it. There are premade responsive website formats that your site will automatically follow.

Wix is a good option if you’re new to website design. But as your own website grows and expands, you’ll want to switch from Wix to a more flexible platform like WordPress, and that can be very complicated.

See our full Wix Review.

11. Webflow

Webflow is a code-free website design software. It lets you build a custom professional-looking website using a visual canvas. The responsive design makes sure your website looks good on all devices.

There’s also a Webflow Designer where you can use HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. Added to that, you can build custom databases, eCommerce sections, and more.

With Webflow, you can get your website up and running fast. It also lets you create and update pages as you go.

That’s our list of the best web design software for building and launching a regular website. If you had to ask us what is the most popular web design software? The winner would be WordPress.org, hands down.

Up next, we’ll check out the best design software and apps available for online stores and anyone in the eCommerce sector.

Best Web Design Software for eCommerce

To create and design an online store, choosing the right platform is critical. Once you get started, it can be difficult to switch later on.

We have a detailed comparison of eCommerce platforms to choose from. Below, we’ve highlighted our 3 top picks in the market.

12. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a free eCommerce platform for WordPress. It’s incredibly easy to set up and is the most flexible eCommerce option available.

There’s a beginner-friendly setup wizard that makes sure you cover all the steps you need before you launch your store.

It lets you easily create customized product catalogs and product pages. You can list both physical and digital products. Plus, it’s easy to configure taxes, shipping, payment options, and more so your customers will have a better user experience.

Since it’s built on WordPress, WooCommerce is compatible with thousands of themes so you can get the UI design you want. Plus, you’ll get access to tons of third-party plugins that you can use for SEO, speed optimization, contact forms, and mroe.

With WooCommerce, designing an eCommerce website is easy, however, you’ll need to have a WordPress site for that. We also recommend choosing a WooCommerce hosting plan that will give you ample bandwidth to run your store smoothly.

Learn more in our WooCommerce Review.

13. Shopify

Shopify is a fully hosted eCommerce platform. It’s beginner-friendly but it’s also a managed platform like SquareSpace. This means you won’t have to worry about technical stuff. Your site will also come pre-installed with an SSL certificate for better security. But this also means you get very limited control over the design of your website.

This eCommerce design software comes with premade templates to create any kind of store you need. Plus, you can customize these templates using the intuitive web builder.

The good thing about this platform is that you’ll have lesser maintenance tasks to take care of. However, it comes at a hefty price especially once your website starts growing.

14. Big Commerce

Big Commerce is another popular eCommerce platform that’s fully hosted. You can integrate it with WordPress so you can convert your existing site to an online store.

It’s easy to design a beautiful storefront using customizable themes. And BigCommerce handles product images, crops them, and creates beautiful gallery layouts.

Shopify and BigCommerce pricing is quite similar.

See which eCommerce platform is the right one for your: BigCommerce vs WooCommerce: What Should You Choose?

With that, we’ve taken a full tour of the best web design platforms and software to build websites. Next, we’ll show you the best tools for graphic design and marketing.

Best Software for Graphic Design and Marketing

Below is our pick of the best web design software programs that can be used both online and offline. You’ll mostly need this to enhance your website’s design, create marketing campaigns, sale promotions, and more.

15. Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is a premium web design tool. It has tons of options to create and edit your web templates. It works with images and you can create the graphics for your web design. With infinite color and gradient options, you can make high-quality template designs.

It gives you a blank canvas to bring your imagination to life. You can attach images, move elements, draw boxes, crop the edges, and edit your template exactly the way you want. It works with layers, which makes your job really simple. You can show/hide a layer to manage your web design elements with ease.

Adobe Photoshop is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) tool which means you’ll be editing your design the way it would appear when it’s live. Keep in mind though that it’s a highly advanced tool and you’ll likely need some training before you start. Once you know how to use it, you can enjoy the best experience in web designing.

16. GIMP

GIMP is a popular free web design tool. Like Adobe Photoshop, it works with images to create web pages and template designs. It may not have the same advanced features as Photoshop, but it comes with all the tools that you’ll need to build a beautiful web template.

The software is available for all your devices. You can work on high-resolution images to create artwork, mockups, and web designs.

17. Sketch

Sketch is a web design software for Mac devices. It’s a professional tool focused on creating web templates and designs. It works with vector images, so you’ll get the best, highest-resolution results. The toolbar and options are very simple. Sketch gives you the full flexibility to create and manage your web design projects.

Also check: Best WordPress Responsive Themes.

It comes with a mirroring feature that allows you to test your web design template on multiple devices like a mobile phone or a tablet. That way, you can be 100% sure how your web design will appear on different screen sizes.

18. Figma

Figma is a multi-user web design software. It allows you to connect with your design team to work on the same web template. It’s a smart tool to share a project with your client and make live changes on a template design. Figma takes web designing to a whole new level.

It comes with fonts, colors, and other settings in its editing panel. The tools and options are amazing when used to create an icon or a complete web template. Figma has both free and premium plans.

19. Canva

Canva is a free graphic design software. It can’t be considered a full-fledged web design software, but you can use Canva to create interesting and attractive designs to support your web template. It’s perfect to build images that you can add to your web design, email campaigns, blogging pages, and marketing promotions.

It comes with hundreds of templates that make your work easier. If you don’t have any designing skills, you can use a template in Canva and effortlessly build professional-looking images for your web template.

Canva comes with mobile apps for iOS and Android so you can edit your designs on the go right from your smartphone.

Canva also lets you schedule your designs to be shared on different online platforms. This lets you streamline your website and social media workflows. One thing to consider is that, unlike Photoshop, you can’t use Canva offline.

You may also want to see: 8 Best Places to Find Perfect Stock Illustrations for Your Website.

Best Design Software for HTML Websites

20. Bootstrap

Bootstrap is a popular framework for creating and prototyping web designs and websites. It’s made for technical users to create front-end designs beautifully. It comes with the most advanced development features. The framework is powerful and can be used to make web designs with HTML, CSS, and JS.

It has pre-built web templates that work great with the Bootstrap framework. You can fully edit these templates to get your desired results.

21. Adobe Dreamweaver

Adobe Dreamweaver is one of the most advanced web design programs. It comes with a screen to write code and design your web template. It also has a drag and drop section where you can create your web design with a live preview.

You can use both features together, which means that when you write the code, you can preview it live on the Dreamweaver software. And, if you’re designing your template by dragging the options, you can go back to the coding screen to make your adjustments.

It’s a great web designing tool for beginners to advanced-level users. You’ll need to have basic coding skills to use Adobe Dreamweaver.

Keep in mind that you’ll need ample space on your system whether it’s Windows, Linux, or Mac. When you sign up, you’ll get access to Creative Cloud where you’ll find more design tools and software that you can purchase like Adobe Wireframe Tool and Adobe XD.

How to Choose the Best Web Design Software

When making a decision, you’ll need to consider the factors that matter to you and your business.

When you choose platforms like WordPress that offer more flexibility and customization options, it also means there’s a learning curve. But once you use the software for a while, it becomes easy to use and is a better option for when your website grows.

On the other hand, self-hosted platforms like Webflow and Web.com are beginner-friendly but you also lose control over the administration of your site.

To recap, here are the best web design software and platforms in the market:

1. WordPress: Most popular and flexible website building software that’s perfect for every website
2. SeedProd: #1 WordPress theme builder plugin and landing page builder
3. ThriveSuite: Best WordPress website builder that’s focussed on conversion optimization
4. Web.com: Easiest website builder at a low price
5. Gator Builder: Website builder by HostGator
6. SiteBuilder: A good website design software
7. Divi: Best theme and drag & drop software for WordPress
8. Weebly: Affordable website software for small business
9. Beaver Builder: Best page builder for WordPress
10. Wix: All in one beginner-friendly website builder
11. Webflow: Easy to use website software
12. WooCommerce: Most flexible and free eCommerce platform
13. Shopify: Fully hosted eCommerce web builder
14. BigCommerce: Fully hosted eCommerce software that integrates with WordPress
15. Adobe Photoshop: Most popular graphics and web design program
16. Adobe Dreamweaver: Most popular web design software
17. GIMP: Free web design software
18. Sketch: Web design software for Mac devices
19. Figma: Web design software for collaborative work
20. Canva: Easiest online web design software
21. Bootstrap: Popular web design framework

FAQs on Web Designing Software

1. What is the easiest website design software to use?

To build a website, SeedProd is incredibly easy to use. SeedProd works on top of WordPress so you’ll get the ease of use plus flexibility to grow the way you want.

2. Which is the best software for web designing?

We love WordPress. It’s the best open-source software to design any kind of website you want. You’ll get access to thousands of themes and plugins to customize your site. And let’s not forget, it’s free!

3. How do you make a website?

You can make a website using a website builder. Follow our guide: How to Make a Website (Step by Step).

4. What is the easiest program to build a website?

We believe that WordPress is the easiest program to build a website that you can grow and monetize. You can use a builder like SeedProd or Thrive to customize your site easily. However, if you’re looking to build a simple online presence, then you can look at platforms like WordPress.com and Wix.

We hope this article helped you find the best web design software on the market. Next, you’ll definitely want to check out these resources:

• 14 Best Website Builders for Small Businesses Compared
• How to Make a Website From Scratch (Step by Step)
• How to Create a Profitable Online Store – Step by Step

These posts will help you find the right web tools and give you easy tutorials to set up a website or online store the right way!