IONOS Website Builder Review: Is It Worth the Cost in 2024?

IONOS Website Builder at a Glance

Should You Use the IONOS Website Builder?

IONOS Pros, Cons, & Things That Could Be Better

IONOS prides itself on offering a complete suite of solutions for professionals looking to establish an online presence. Its collection includes shared, VPS, and dedicated web hosting, business email hosting, e-commerce services, and of course, a website builder.

Seamless integration with IONOS’ existing ecosystem, affordable pricing, and simple design make it an attractive option. But can it hold its own against the top user-friendly web builders?

After weeks of testing and research, I can say that the IONOS website builder offers an easy-to-use and budget-friendly option for business websites. That said, it won’t give you in-depth control over your website’s look and functionality. Also, its plans are a little pricier now than they used to be. It’s not an outrageous increase, but IONOS’ extreme affordability was one of its greatest selling points.

So, is IONOS still worth looking into for your website, or should you look elsewhere? Keep reading to find out.

The Options Are Limited But Good

The good news is that the templates look attractive and work well. They’re clean, modern, and mobile-friendly. But you don’t have many to choose from.

IONOS’ MyWebsite Now plan (its standard website builder) offers no more than 25 templates (one per industry: ie. Photography, Restaurant, or Fashion). The templates themselves look sleek and professional. The design is clear and well-organized, and each option includes just the right number of elements for a site to look professional. While 25 is still a pretty low number compared to other website builders, I can’t blame IONOS too much for its “quality over quantity” approach.

Design and Customization

Though the site editor is somewhat limited, it still gives you enough tools to adapt any template to your unique professional needs. It’s also a remarkable tool if you’re in a hurry. Thanks to its point-and-click editor, you could have a professional website ready in just a few minutes.

Instead of opting for full drag-and-drop control like other builders, IONOS lets you edit your site by adding pre-designed sections based on functionality. You can then choose from a handful of different styles for each section.

While this approach is less than ideal if you’re looking to design a fully customized website, it can be just what you need if you don’t have much design experience and you’re looking to get your site up and running ASAP.

The content blocks you can use include an about section, article blocks, galleries, a contact form, and various headers.

Each section is reasonably customizable, providing several predefined and sometimes overlapping “zones” where you can drop your text and images.

You can quickly alter the look of your whole site with options to change the default colors, typefaces, and spacing of elements. Unfortunately, the typeface/font selection is extremely limited. See the options below? Yeah, that’s it.

Other notes: You will lose any content you’ve added to the site if you change templates after the initial setup. The site builder also doesn’t support multi-language sites or right-to-left (RTL) languages like Hebrew or Arabic.

All-in-all, IONOS won’t be the best builder if you want complete control over your website’s look or if you want to implement advanced functionality like custom CSS support. But it’s a decent option if you want to create a good-looking, professional site with minimal effort.

IONOS Has a Ton Of Features… On Top of the Site Builder

IONOS offers full integration with a wide variety of intuitive and powerful e-commerce solutions for your website. Although somewhat pricey, IONOS’ e-commerce features are worth it if you’re serious about your e-commerce business. The online store integrations include light inventory management, sizing options, tax and shipping settings, and ways to show related products on your product pages. You also get functions for discounts, coupons, and abandoned cart emails.

So here’s the trouble with this review: IONOS, as a web hosting company, has features galore, but many aren’t relevant to the site builder. Even so, I went hunting and found three interesting features to showcase.

First up, you should know that all plans come with a free domain for one year, and that’s awesome. Sites built with IONOS are also GDPR compliant, and you get basic security features like SSL.

Seriously, don’t hang around any service that doesn’t provide SSL. That’s just dumb nowadays.

Now, on to the interesting stuff.

There’s an Online Store

Okay, so you have to pay a little extra for the Online Store Starter plan, but it’s one of the cheapest e-commerce-enabled site builder plans I have ever seen. Seriously, the price is that good.

It’s no Shopify, but the online store comes with light inventory management, sizing options, tax and shipping settings, and ways to show related products on your product pages. You also get functions for discounts, coupons, and abandoned cart emails.

Whether you’re selling digital or physical goods, this shop can handle it.

You can also sell your products via Facebook, Instagram, Google Shopping, eBay, and Amazon. Plus, if you’re selling items face to face, it integrates with Square’s point-of-sale system.

You can run the store via a mobile app for iOS and Android and accept payments via PayPal, Square, Stripe, or other local options.

Lastly, you have some control over how your store pages look, and the user interface (UI) integrates nicely with the templates available.

Email

Every site comes with free email. That’s “[email protected],” and it works with any domain you purchase from IONOS or connect from elsewhere. Yes, you can use domains bought from a third party, which is much more than other builders usually offer.

RankingCoach Integration

RankingCoach is an app designed to help you set up your site’s SEO, rank higher, and learn a bit about SEO in the process. So no, you don’t get an actual coach, but RankingCoach appears to have support for IONOS’ services built into it.

It’s usually advised to get an actual SEO expert to help you out, but these automated tools are becoming better and better. Plus, SEO experts who know what they’re doing are a lot more expensive than this (paid) add-on.

Powerful AI Integrations for Effortless Website Building

If you ever find yourself needing a little bit of extra help designing your website and populating it with content, IONOS offers an extensive selection of AI tools for you to use. All you need to do is input information about your business and goals, and IONOS can generate specialized content exclusively for you.

IONOS offers AI tools from the beginning by giving you access to an AI design assistant to help you create and organize your site. If you need to add extra content, you also get access to an AI text generator that writes effective copy for you. There’s even an AI image generator that takes your site’s design sensibilities into account.

I Have No Complaints, But It Won’t WOW You

Okay, the actual MyWebsite Now site builder is very easy to learn. If you’ve ever used a site builder before, the learning curve is downright trivial. I have no problems there.

However, I feel like the IONOS website could be better organized. I had to ask for help to find several things. It’s by no means terrible, but there’s no clear path “forward” for any particular task. And clicking around to find what you want involves even more trial and error than I’m accustomed to.

Still, IONOS provides a few handy quality-of-life features that make managing your site easier.

There’s a Variety of Extra Tools

These tools are all outside the site builder and can be used to help you spruce up your website:

• Website checker – For performance, optimization, and basic security testing.
• SEO analysis – It’s not the full RankingCoach app, but it can help you get started with SEO.
• WHOIS domains lookup – Find out who owns any given domain name… unless they have WHOIS protection.
• Logo generator – Create and edit simple logos for free. Helpful if you don’t have a logo design budget, though I’d recommend going for a cheap logo on Fiverr1 if you can.

The purpose of these free tools is to motivate people to enroll in the service. Additionally, they can help you identify issues with your site and manage certain quick and straightforward tasks.

A Hefty Knowledgebase With Tutorials, Tips, and Tricks

If you like to do your own research before asking for help, look no further than the IONOS knowledgebase, which contains most of the basics you’ll need to know.

Like I said before, I still had to ask about some things, and not everything in the knowledge base is up to date. For example, I found more than one reference to analytics features that I could never find. It turns out they’re not available at the moment.

Legal Page Outlines

Dear God, get a lawyer to do your legal stuff. Okay? Okay.

That being said, every MyWebsite Now website comes with some legal policy pages pre-generated. The actual policies are not written for you, but each page has a general outline of what should be included. If you’ve never written a data or privacy policy, for example, this will help you understand what is expected.

You Might Want to Use the Phone

So, I had an okay time with support for the most part. Responses were prompt (I managed to reach a person in under 5 minutes every time), service is available 24/7, and the support agents certainly did their best to be helpful. The score for this section is only as high as it is because the agents clearly put in the effort. 

But the agents just didn’t always know what they needed to know. You know?

In this case, I don’t hold the support agents responsible. I simply think that IONOS didn’t adequately provide them with all the necessary information. It’s an issue with IONOS as a whole, not with any individual.

Live Chat

First up, I asked if there was a way I could use the Mexican IONOS site in English. The American support agent didn’t even know there was a Mexican website until I told them!

The short answer to my question is no, of course. You may recall, I went over that little mess back up in the Features section.

Next, I asked how to use the analytics feature that the marketing mentioned. It appears it’s not accessible at the moment, or at least not to me. The agent suggested the SEO checker as a substitute, which didn’t help me at all… but it’s the nearest option to the service.

Like I said: they tried to help.

My last complaint: the text in the live chat windows is TINY. Seriously, view the screenshots above at full size. Last I checked, I had 20/20 vision, and I still got a headache trying to read some of this stuff.

Phone

My experience on the phone was far better. You can call the team directly or request a callback, so you can go and do other things. Since I don’t live in the US, I couldn’t test the callback feature myself.

I asked if MyWebsite Now could handle RTL language and multilingual sites. It cannot.

The support agent had to ask a supervisor for the information I needed. Again, I’m not blaming the agent – she was great and got me an answer. I just think IONOS needs to provide the support agents more information. The info they might need to know.

“Starter” (the version I tested for this review) offers a basic editor with simple point-and-click functionalities, besides a well-rounded set of tools for most professional sites. It comes at $1.00 per month and costs about half during the discounted period.

If you’re looking for something more advanced, the “Plus” plan offers more templates, creative control, and functionality. It might seem like the cheapest plan at first since its advertised price is no more than $1. But after the first six months, it’ll set you back $1.00 per month. That’s still quite affordable, in my opinion, but a bit more transparency would be nice.

There’s also the “Pro” plan, which offers the same functionality as Plus but includes a higher selection of SEO tools to help you get your website noticed online at an extra cost.

For any of the previous, if you want to include e-commerce functionalities to your site, it will cost you extra after that six-month window. E-commerce starter comes in at $17.00 per month, and e-commerce plus at $1.00.

Though IONOS has no free plan, it offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on all its products. That means that besides the discounted price for the first six months, you could test any one of IONOS’ plans for a month risk-free.