Site123 Review

Even with the limited resources available on Site123 for their free plans, the offering is pretty impactful because of the sheer potential of even such a plan. Site123 accounts come with access to a basic website builder and users can choose in what direction to take their sites. They cater for everything from standard ‘Hello World’ websites all the way to full-blown eCommerce stores.

The latter can be achieved thanks to their app market which lets you build past the basic site stage. You can integrate a plethora of features in such as inventory management, payments processing, or even handling order shipping and taxes. There is virtually no limit and even taking into account the price of premium plans, it comes cheap.

Not everything is peachy since there seems to be some disconnect between what they claim is on offer and what you can actually choose. For example, Site123 claims they have four packages available but only Free and Premium are selectable. Free accounts are designed mostly more simple sites and exclude eCommerce functionality, while Premium throws in everything.

The problem is that from there, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else to scale to. For example, you don’t have the option of increasing resources or even moving to a dedicated server. This might be doable if you talk to them directly, but in a world that demands instant gratification, where’s the power in that?

Worst of all is that if you grew a site here to a certain extent that an expansion was really necessary, you can’t move your website since there is a no-export policy. You’ll basically have to re-create a new site elsewhere from scratch. This makes Site123 only appealing to sites with a low to mid-range volume of traffic and no intention to grow.