Ready to embark on a journey to showcase your artistic prowess to the world? In today’s day and age, a professional artist website is your gateway to reaching a global audience and building your brand.
Statista reports that 78% of respondents in a global survey said to have purchased art online in 2022. The total sales of the online art and antiques market worldwide amounted to approximately $11 billion in 2022. As a matter of fact, a survey, in 2022, by Artsy, revealed that there has been a year-on-year increase in art purchases made online.
Source: Artsy
To be successful on this digital canvas, finding the right website builder is your first brushstroke. Whether you are a photographer, painter, designer, or any kind of visual artist, choosing the best website builder is akin to selecting the perfect canvas for your masterpiece.
With a myriad of options available, each promising to be the ultimate solution for artists, navigating this landscape might feel like exploring an expansive gallery. In this guide, we will delve deeper into some of the best website builders for artists that are tailored to artists’ unique needs.
Best website builders for artists in 2023
Here are the top website builders for artists - each one offers attractive features worth looking into.
1. Pixpa
Pixpa is an all-in-one website builder designed for artists granting them the power to build professional websites. The platform includes an integrated online store, a dynamic blog, and client galleries to deliver a holistic online presence. Within the single platform, you will be able to save both time and resources needed to fuel your digital expansion.
Pixpa’s user-friendly website builder comes with a plethora of benefits for artists.
Online store:
You can easily build your own online store without any coding experience and start selling in minutes.
Your ecommerce store will have the same look and feel as the rest of your website, and your customers would find it extremely easy to browse your site and make purchases.
Selling products, services, and digital items become easy, complemented by seamless inventory, order, and tax management, offering customers an unparalleled checkout experience.
Ecommerce galleries:
Pixpa’s ecommerce galleries give you the advantage of growing your business online to greater heights and monetising your paintings or drawings. You get full authority over your products and pricing.
You can sell your work online in the form of prints, canvases, gallery wraps etc. Pixpa also lets you create your product categories and have complete authority over what you want to sell.
You can also sell digital downloads by selling single paintings or full galleries. All you need to do is choose the size and pricing for your image downloads. These digital downloads are immediately available to use after payment is received.
You can connect Paypal and Stripe accounts to collect payments directly from the customers. Pixpa doesn’t charge any commissions, and what you earn is all yours.
With Pixpa, you get to create your own pricing sheets and sell your drawings at any price and profit margins that you want.
Client Galleries:
Pixpa’s client galleries allow artists to transition to a digital workflow easily and making it a downhill task for clients to view, proof, purchase, and download artwork.
You can showcase your work with beautiful online galleries that resonate with your brand identity.
Your clients would be able to easily proof your artwork and mark their favourites.
Pixpa allows instant digital delivery of files to clients, ensuring client satisfaction.
Mobile gallery apps:
Pixpa offers a superb mobile gallery app that enables clients to have your artwork at their fingertips.
You can easily create a mobile gallery to share a sneak-peak of your paintings or share highlights from a project you have done.
Artist-specific templates:
Pixpa, as an artist website builder, allows you to tailor your portfolio site to your unique needs as an artist. Choose from over 150 elegant, customisable, and responsive templates designed for artist websites.
You can flexibly switch to different templates even after the site is live.
Out-of-the-box tools:
By integrating a suite of built-in marketing tools like the SEO manager, Marketing Popups, and an Announcement Bar, Pixpa eliminates the need for additional plugins. These tools help immensely in driving traffic growth and transforming leads into conversions.
24/7 support:
Pixpa’s round-the-clock live chat and email customer service stand by to guide you at every step.
Price
Basic: $3.60/month (paid biannually)
Creator: $7.20/month (paid biannually)
Professional: $10.80/month (paid biannually)
Advanced: $15/month (paid biannually)
PROS | CONS |
Easy-to-use, no-code website builder | No free plan |
150+ customizable and responsive templates | Custom domain names must be purchased from a third party. |
Integrated ecommerce galleries and client galleries | |
Availability of a mobile gallery app | |
Built-in SEO Manager and 100+ apps integrated. |
Checkout these articles from Pixpa
2. Squarespace
Squarespace is a well-known website builder and is good for businesses and individuals willing to dish out a huge chunk of money from their pockets.
It offers an array of templates you can choose from for your brand. It comes packed with mobile-responsive web design, large bandwidth, mobile editing features, a design editor, and SEO tools.
The main issue is that, as mentioned before, it is extremely pricey and not suitable for artists who just want to have a simple, professional artist website to showcase and monetise their work with ease.
Squarespace doesn’t come with a free plan and compels artists to go for a pricier version after a free trial which makes it unsustainable for them in the long run. Also, being from a non-coding background, artists would find it difficult to learn its nitty-gritty and have to go through a steep learning curve.
Squarespace provides limited customisation capabilities. It doesn’t have an autosave option when you are editing your site and only comes with one aspect ratio on product pages.
Squarespace comes with good ecommerce capabilities but doesn’t have an ecommerce option on the starter plan. It also doesn’t have phone support.
Price
$16 per month - $65 per month
PROS | CONS |
Beautiful templates | Pricier than other alternatives |
Good ecommerce features on their pricey business plans. | Free plan unavailable |
Free trial | Steep learning curve |
Unlimited storage and bandwidth | Limited website customisation |
User-friendly editor | No ecommerce on the starter plan |
3. Wix
Wix is another pricier alternative like Squarespace that comes loaded with good features and functionalities in its premium paid plans. It provides customisable templates and is user-friendly.
The premium paid plans of Wix come loaded with storage provisions, video duration allowances, a custom domain, and 24/7 support.
Like Squarespace, the premium plans are extremely costly. Wix’s provisions have no specific focus on art, which makes it difficult for artists to customise their websites as per their needs. The unavailability of artist-specific provisions also makes it an arduous task for art professionals to build the right kind of website with essential features.
Most importantly, artists want to keep their creative flair going even on their website and would love the flexibility to change the templates as they get on Pixpa. But Wix doesn’t give you the option of switching between different templates once your site has gone live.
Also, the lack of SEO tools in low-tier plans is a cause of concern forcing the artists to go for high-priced plans.
Price
$16 per month - $59 per month
PROS | CONS |
Easy to use | Premium plans are pricey |
Free plan with limited features | No specific focus on art |
Drag and drop editor | Limited storage |
Third-party integrations | Can’t switch templates after going live |
Automatic backups | Unavailability of SEO tools in low-tier plans |
4. Shopify
Shopify is a renowned website builder widely recognised for its ecommerce capabilities and for facilitating online product sales. You can sell art online, such as on the website, across social channels, in-person at fairs, and even on online marketplaces like Amazon.
This comes with a caveat, though. It is more suited for selling products than showcasing your work. And Shopify gives you some nice ecommerce capabilities at a high price. Also, Shopify charges transaction fees on top of subscription fees and provides poor value for the money invested by creatives and small businesses.
Moreover, Shopify has a minor learning curve that would require artists to get used to its functionalities, unlike Pixpa’s no-code capabilities that streamlines the whole process of website building from the get-go.
Shopify allows you to furnish your products with comprehensive descriptions featuring multiple detailed images, videos, and 3D model files. But, it offers very few free templates and is also not easily customisable.
Price
$39 per month - $499 per month
PROS | CONS |
Free trial | Very expensive |
Ecommerce on all plans | Only a few free templates |
User-friendly website setup | Not customisation-friendly |
High security | Transaction fees charged in addition to the subscription charge |
5. WordPress
WordPress offers both free and paid versions of its website-building solution. It has a wide array of themes and plugins to choose from, probably more than any other tool out there. Many of these themes and plugins, though, require frequent updates.
WordPress is a nice option to build your portfolio showcase, an online store, event promotions etc. It also allows you to leverage third-party plugins for enhanced functionalities. But, it can be very hard to grasp early on. Artists would have to go through a steep learning curve.
As a matter of fact, the option of collaborating with a WordPress designer or agency would always be on the cards. This means WordPress is not suitable for artists looking for a DIY solution like Pixpa. If you possess a reasonable level of technical proficiency (which as an artist it is highly unlikely), you can, by all means, go ahead with WordPress.
Going with WordPress would also mean that you have to purchase domain and web hosting separately.
Price
$3 per month - $150 per month
PROS | CONS |
Wide range of themes and plugins available | Steep learning curve |
Free plan | Domain and web hosting are to be purchased separately |
Customisable | Themes and plugins require frequent updates |
Integrates with third-party apps |
6. Weebly
Weebly is known for user-friendliness and being beginner-friendly. It does provide you with a free plan, to begin with, but comes loaded with a slew of ads that hampers the user experience. A basic site can be built on Weebly for free, albeit with a Weebly-branded domain that might not align with the professional image most artists aspire to project through their websites.
For artists working within budget constraints, Weebly presents an array of pocket-friendly plans. But Weebly gives a very limited scope of customisability.
It has a lot of design templates to offer, but many of those could use an update.
Noteworthy e-commerce features include the ability to sell both physical and digital products, utilize coupons, manage inventory, and compute tax and shipping costs. If you come across any sort of difficulties, you would have to struggle to get phone support on the free and personal plans.
Price
$10 per month - $26 per month
PROS | CONS |
Free plan | Ad-laden free plan |
Ecommerce functionality | Limitation in customisability |
User-friendliness | Many design templates could use an update |
7. GoDaddy
Through its assertive consumer advertising strategy, GoDaddy has become a very well-known brand. GoDaddy offers an intuitive website builder with a free plan and a host of other features, such as content creation and editing, email and social media marketing, 24/7 support, and GoDaddy Payments.
A custom domain cannot be connected to a free account, and the GoDaddy branding will appear on your site. The option to transition to a feature-rich paid plan remains open whenever you choose.
GoDaddy is very expensive, though. And the site built using GoDaddy cannot be transferred to another host. There are also limitations attached to how much you can do with its SEO offerings. Not just that, there is limited scope for third-party integrations as well.
You have to go for a high-priced GoDaddy premium to fully leverage its true potential, such as integrated video creation tools. Or, the commerce plans for integration with social media accounts that open the door to selling artwork on Facebook and Instagram. Which, as an artist, becomes unsustainable in the long run.
Price
$9.99 per month - $29.99 per month
PROS | CONS |
Free plan | Expensive |
Round-the-clock customer support | Site developed using GoDaddy cannot be transferred to another host |
Unlimited storage and bandwidth | Limitations in third-party integrations |
Email marketing is available in all plans | Limited SEO functionality |
8. Webs
For struggling artists with no budget to spare for a new website, Webs is a promising avenue to explore. You can initiate your artist website on Webs without any cost. Similar to most free website builders, Webs introduces advertising banners to your site and necessitates the use of a Webs-branded domain.
As long as your intention is just to showcase your online portfolio, Webs is okay for you. If you want to build an online store and sell your artwork, an expensive Pro plan becomes necessary to list up to 20 items.
Weebly is plagued by an outdated UI, and the customer reviews aren’t that great either. And free plans get deleted when the users aren’t using them regularly.
Price
$5.99 per month - $22.99 per month
PROS | CONS |
Free plan | Outdated UI |
Easy to use | Low Trustpilot and G2 Review Scores |
Unlimited video storage in the premium plan | Free plans are deleted when users aren’t regularly active |
Conclusion
In an era where a great online presence is your gateway to a global audience, the importance of choosing the right website builder cannot be overstated.
Whether it’s about showcasing your portfolio or selling your artwork, the website builder can help achieve all that easily.
So, which website builder is best for artists? Pixpa’s offerings make it an ideal platform for artists to craft their unique online presence without any coding experience. Pixpa not just makes your website look visually stunning. But, with features like client galleries, ecommerce galleries, and a mobile gallery app that are designed specifically for artists, Pixpa is much ahead of other alternatives in the market.
Begin your journey today by signing up for a free trial, and embark on creating your architecture and interior design online portfolio website. Your artistic vision awaits its digital canvas!
FAQs
What is the best website builder for artists?
Pixpa is the best option that is tailored to artists’ unique needs. While Wix, Shopify, WordPress, and Squarespace also stand as viable alternatives, determining the ideal choice for you will ultimately hinge on your unique website requirements.
What kind of website should an artist have?
An ideal artist website should effectively display your artwork. Consider the design of art galleries—functional and minimalistic, with ample white space on the walls. This approach is employed to let the art take center stage without distractions.
How do I create my own website as an artist?
Pixpa is an all-in-one website builder empowering artists to effortlessly build and oversee their Portfolio Websites, eCommerce platforms, Client Galleries, and blogs, all without the need for coding expertise. With Pixpa, the process of website creation has been streamlined to unprecedented simplicity.