Building a website that communicates your brand values to your customers or clients is something many people and businesses are doing nowadays. Since online shopping has become so prominent in the past few years, everyone has been getting on that train and taking their business online. That includes artists as well.

Artists need different features and services to show their work and creative liabilities through their websites. Also, not many artists have the time and resources to learn how they build their own websites from the ground up. Therefore, we have compiled a list of our top 7 picks for the best website builder for artists so that they can find a builder that suits their needs in an easier and faster way. You can check out which website builders made it to our list via our comparison chart below, and stick with us to find out more about each builder separately.

Check Our Top 7 Best Artists Website Builders:

1. Squarespace – best all-in-one website builder
2. Wix Website Builder – best overall website builder

How to Choose the Best Website Builder for Artists

As you already might know, the art sector is an ever-changing and demanding industry with new trends emerging almost every week. Because of that, artists always need to be on the lookout for the newest and hottest trends and hop on them as soon as they are born. Thus, in addition to displaying their skills and creativity online, artists also need to drive traffic and generate profits.

Creating a website is the best way for artists to showcase their skills and talents while also selling their work and targeting as many people as possible. The Internet exposes artists to the largest audience there is. That is why artists need the best builder they can find for their websites. Also, the builder should offer all the features an artist might need to make their website shine and stand out in the vast online world. Some of the features artists need to look out for when choosing the best website builder are:

• Photo display – when choosing a website builder, look for one that supports a high-quality photo display so that you can display your visual content in the best way possible. This feature is even more critical for those who want to create an online art portfolio website.
• SEO optimization – SEO is crucial for all kinds of websites, whether you’re an artist, retailer, or work in any other industry. Finding a builder that offers SEO-optimization for your website will allow you to rank higher on Google and thus be among the first options people see when they are looking to buy art online. In turn, you will increase traffic and sales, and more people will know about you and your work.
• Templates – make sure to find a builder with a wide array of high-quality templates from which you can choose for your website. That way, you will have a unique theme on your website that is high-quality and not seen before on other sites.
• Mobile compatibility – another essential feature you should look for in a builder is mobile compatibility. Namely, you need to make sure that your website will be optimized for mobile users and will look just as great as the desktop version. Also, some builders offer websites that are optimized for all screen sizes, which is an excellent feature to have.

1. Squarespace – Best All-In-One Website Builder

• Overall Score: 4.8
• Ease-of-use: 4.9
• Features: 5.0
• Support: 4.7
• Pricing: 4.7
• eCommerce features: 4.9

Squarespace is one of the best all-in-one website builders on the market. It is designed with artists in mind, so it offers many opportunities for artists to express and showcase their creativity online.

With Squarespace, you can create a beautiful website that will showcase your work and sell it to clients. You will be able to add an online store through which clients can easily buy your work.

Pros:

Cons:

Squarespace is best known for its artistic templates that are entirely customizable and designed for art-related websites. It also comes with built-in engines for both blogging and eCommerce, which you can use if need be.

Unique Features:

Templates

With Squarespace, you can choose from a plethora of different templates meant for many different industries, including:

• Art & Design
• Photography
• Health & Beauty
• Fashion
• Entertainment
• Media & Podcasts
• Local Business
• Personal & CV
• Professional Services
• Food
• Travel
• Events
• Weddings
• Home & Décor
• Nature & Animals

As you can see, you can find a template for almost every kind of business at Squarespace. All the templates are made by designers and offer a modern and sleek look that can emphasize your products or art. Squarespace’s templates are specifically designed to help you put your art first. Also, if you can’t find a suitable template from Squarespace’s wide range of pre-made templates, you can pick a blank theme and customize it from the ground up.

Features Made for Artists

The first feature we would like to mention here is Squarespace’s image manager. You can choose, edit, and integrate multiple images into your website with the image manager. Also, you can use features and tools like:

• Rag-and-drop image adjustment
• Content Delivery Network
• Lightbox presentation
• Automatic image scaling
• Progressive and responsive image loading
• Focal point control
• Getty Images integration
• Upload photos from external resources
• Image SEO
• Adobe Image editor
• Metadata importing

With Squarespace, you can also add a gallery to your website and update it with new content when you need to. Also, you can add blocks to your gallery, including photo/video integrations, presentations, slideshows, grid layouts, sliders, multiple display effects, and many more.

Another helpful thing you can do with Squarespace is create a personalized show window design. With a personalized show window design, you will have a place where you can create and update product lists, introduce special deals, add image galleries or update your existing ones, add and customize product descriptions and SKUs, and more.

Squarespace is a website builder specifically made for all kinds of artists. It has everything you need to create a modern website where you can present and sell your work and add a personal touch to it. To learn more about Squarespace, check out our expert review.

2. Wix – Best Overall Website Builder

• Overall Score: 4.9
• Ease-of-use: 5.0
• Features: 5.0
• Support: 4.9
• Pricing: 5.0
• eCommerce features: 4.9

Wix is a household name in the website building business. It has been around since 2006, and ever since then, it has been improving its services and adding features continuously. Wix is a suitable choice for anyone, no matter their background or their line of work, who wants to build a website and sell online.

Not only is it the best overall website builder on our list, but it is also suitable for online selling and offers many excellent eCommerce features and tools to its users.

Pros:

Cons:

Wix is best known for its high-quality templates and wide range of features and third-party apps. Also, it is known for making modern and unique websites suitable for all kinds of industries, including art.

Unique Features:

Wix ADI

Wix ADI is the ideal feature for beginners. Namely, it creates your whole website from scratch all by itself. You will only need to answer a few questions regarding your website and how you want it to look, and that’s it. It will ask you want your website is to include, and what are your personal design preferences and based on that information, it will build your website.

Thus, with Wix ADI, not only will you get a whole website tailored to your needs and preferences, but you will also get it without lifting a finger! Wix ADI will build your website fast and have it up and running in no time.

Wix Art Store

You can find the Wix Art Store widget in the App Market and easily add it to your website. Also, the Wix Art Store widget is free of charge for all Wix users. With the Art Store, you will get features like the ability to sell digital and printed artwork, create a custom license for your work, add a custom watermark to your art for protection against unauthorized third-party users, and choose from twelve layouts that you can customize and create a personalized design.

However, the Wix App Market offers many other widgets that you can get for your site. For instance, you can get an event calendar, Wix events widget, Wix Pro Gallery, Wix Video, Gift Card, Wix Chat, Wix Forms and Payments, and many other widgets from the Wix App Market.

Wix is a website builder jam-packed with features and third-party apps that you can use on your website. It also offers hundreds of high-quality templates and an ADI builder that can do all the work for you. So, if you’re someone who wants a modern website with many features and options for your clients, then Wix is definitely an excellent choice. If you want to learn more about Wix and all it has to offer, check out our expert review on the builder.

How Can a Website Builder Help You as an Artist?

As an already-established and well-known artist, you might not need a website at all. However, a website builder can help artists who do not have a well-known brand or loyal, returning customers to buy their work or order custom art.

A website builder can help such artists as it can get them online and help them be seen in the vast world of the Internet. By boosting your SEO and generally helping you create your online presence, a website builder can help you attract more clients who may potentially become regular customers and recommend you to their friends and family. Thus, a website builder can help you reach a lot of people at once and increase your sales and brand recognition.

Also, a website builder can help you make your website as professional as possible and therefore be taken seriously by clients. Sure, you can sell your art only on social media, but people tend not to view so-called “Social Media Artists” as serious and professional artists.

Your website will add a much more professional look to your name, and people won’t be influenced by the number of followers and likes you have as they are when they’re buying something on social media platforms. Also, having a website adds to the legitimacy of your work, and people will be more sure that you are not some scammer trying to take their money and leave.

6 Tips to Promote Your Work Online

Promoting your art in the right way will help you gain traction and attract clients even faster than usual. Thus, in the long run, a good promotion strategy will help you increase your sales and profits and be able to create even more art. So, if you are wondering how you should promote your work online, you can follow our six tips to promote your work online.

1. Influencers and publications – we hate to admit it, but influencers genuinely have an impact on what some people buy and what they ignore. That is why, when promoting your art, you should find a few well-known and respected influencers, publishers, and journalists who will promote your art to their viewers and readers. People like them can give a huge amount of exposure to your art, and you will find yourself with a new audience you never thought you would reach.
   
2. Competitions and events – participating in art competitions and similar events can get you free PR, especially if you win an award. But, even if you don’t win anything, events like those tend to have large numbers of people come and go, who will see your art and hopefully check out your website when they get home.
3. Ads – Running paid ads requires financial resources, of course. Still, if you have some resources set aside, you should definitely use them to run ads on popular social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and others.
4. SEO – as you might have noticed, throughout this article, we have stressed how important SEO is for any online business multiple times. Positioning your website at the top of search engines takes some time, but it pays off in the end. While positioning your website on any search engine, make sure you find a suitable and exciting keyword for which your website will pop up on Google.
5. Promotion via email – you can promote your new art or special offers by sending an email containing information about it to your registered clients. You shouldn’t expect your clients to always know about your new art pieces or deals by only putting them on your website since most clients will probably not check your website for news every day, or even every week, or ever, to be honest.
6. Be active on social media – even though a website is a better medium through which you can sell online, social media platforms are the best mediums for spreading news and promoting websites. Thus, you should be as active as you can on several platforms, like, of course, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, but also Pinterest, Dribble, and others.

Summary

With the help of our recommendation system, we have managed to create a list of the top 7 best website builders for artists in 2024. Since our recommendation system involves buying plans from each builder and putting every website builder through a series of rigorous tests, you can rest assured that each builder on our list offers some of the best features and services on the market.

So, suppose you don’t want to spend days and weeks analyzing and comparing hundreds of website builders by yourself. In that case, you can use our recommendation system instead, which was made by professionals in the field, and save yourself the trouble.