Best Website Builders for Contemporary Artists

Introduction: Why You Need an Industry-Approved Website as an Artist

In the 21st century, the artist’s website plays a crucial role in the development of the career of any artist. It can be the difference between remaining unknown forever or having your first solo exhibition at a serious gallery, launching your job, and being rewarded for your passionate, hard work in the studio. Your website is your professional artist’s resume, online business card, portfolio, and the online link between you and the rest of the art world.

You must realize that your artist website is where a collector, gallery director, curator, or critic ends up after noticing your work on social media or at an exhibition. Here, on your website, they will decide whether to contact you to offer you an exhibition at a gallery, to include you in an institutional show, to write an article about you, or to purchase one of your works. Or not.

As a result, it is crucial that your artist’s website works well, comes across as professional, communicates the information the art world expects you to present on your site, and that the website is in line with the art world’s unwritten rules about artist websites. If you get this right with your website, they will take you seriously and consider contacting you. But before we can start creating our website, we have an important decision to make first. What is the best website builder for contemporary artists?

Today there are numerous website builders out there. We are spoiled for choice, which makes choosing even more difficult. Further, some website builders are more suited for businesses such as hotels or restaurants like Wix, others for e-commerce such as Shopify, and others for prominent blogs and platforms such as WordPress. But what is the website builder most suited to artists’ needs today?

We have used, tested, and analyzed twelve website builders, creating a shortlist of the top four best picks for contemporary artists today, encompassing Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, and ArtLogic. We have ranked all four, from best to worst, scoring the overall quality of the website builders, the ease of use, and the price.

1. Squarespace: The Perfect Website Builder for Artists

Our number one pick is, without any doubt, Squarespace. Other online resources that suggest other platforms are better—especially when creating portfolios, as is the case for artists today—are wrong or are getting paid better by affiliate programs. The truth is, regarding the overall quality, ease of use, and price, Squarespace is the best website builder there is today for artists.

In the art world, having the right design is crucial. Your website must communicate professionalism, a high-end feeling, and a minimal look and operate flawlessly. Within this price range—arguably the lowest price range for easy-to-use/drag-and-drop website builders—Squarespace offers the best designs and overall quality in terms of the look and feel of their templates. They are responsive and fast, and everything looks great. It is almost uncanny to see how the same font looks terrific on a website made with Squarespace compared to a website made with, for example, Wix—even though it is precisely the same web font. Graphic designers who have used both will confirm this without a doubt.

Regarding ease of use, Squarespace is as easy as it gets, with a minimal learning curve. The responsive templates can be edited using obvious tools, dragging and dropping everything where you want it to be, and has a built-in system to get your SEO right without having to do anything technical. With Squarespace, it’s almost hard to get it wrong; when in doubt, there are numerous tutorials to help you.

The price point is also excellent. For artists, you will only need the Personal plan, which costs only $16/month and can be reduced even more using the promo code CONTEMPORARY10 to get 10% off. You don’t have to pay straight out of the gate—you can try their free trial of fourteen days to try out the website builder before deciding. But our advice and opinion are very clear, do not hesitate too much; Squarespace is today’s best option for artists’ websites.

Read and watch our full article and video on how to design your website with Squarespace here.

2. Pixpa: Professional Portfolio Websites at the Best Price

Next, we have Pixpa, the website builder that predominantly focuses on portfolio websites—perfect for artists. The websites’ overall quality and the templates’ design are top quality and work perfectly for artists. In my humble opinion, regarding the overall look, feeling, and quality, I tend to favor Squarespace, but it is as close as it gets. Even more when we consider the pricing, starting at just $6/month up to $10/month for the basic and creator—which can be sufficient for our industry-approved artist website purposes—making it the best-priced all-in-one solution for portfolio websites on our list.

While these prices do not include the personal domain name, Pixpa does offer a free custom domain for the first year, starting from the Creator plan on an annual subscription. The setup isn’t too complicated, and their 24/7 customer support will happily assist you in taking care of this if necessary. This brings us to ease of use, which is very good but not as good as the aforementioned Squarespace or the upcoming Wix. Besides the domain name, the editor feels a bit less intuitive and drag-and-drop friendly compared to number one and number three of our list, but it does the trick conveniently and professionally.

Feel free to discover Pixpa and try out their 15-day free trial here.

3. Wix: (Almost) As Good As Squarespace

Arguably the most popular website builder in the world, Wix is another excellent choice for creating your artist’s website. As with Squarespace, using Wix is easy. You can drag-and-drop the widgets intuitively, use appealing templates, and it comes at the same price as Squarespace for just $16/month—as cheap as it gets. Wix also offers a free version, but you won’t have a professional, custom domain name, and you’ll have ads on your website—after trying it, you should purchase a paid plan.

So regarding ease of use and price, Wix and Squarespace match stride for stride. However, when it comes to the overall quality of the look and feel of the website, Squarespace will be the better option. With Wix, your website is less responsive with various sizes of screens; sometimes, a button or a pop-up might not work as fast as it should, and the overall design feels inferior to the methods and software of Squarespace.

Therefore, Wix is our third-best website builder for artists today. Feel free to discover Wix here.

4. WordPress: Endless Possibilities (Too Many?)

Another option is to start your website from scratch and create a WordPress website. Did you know over 40% of all websites worldwide are WordPress websites? With WordPress websites, the possibilities are limitless. And whereas this is one of the main reasons why most websites are WordPress sites, it is also why you should not go for WordPress to create your artist website. It is to say artists do not need that many possibilities because artist websites are and should always be simple, uncomplicated, and straightforward.

The main downside of all those possibilities is the ease of use. With WordPress websites, you need to figure out a lot more yourself. You need to purchase a domain name and buy web hosting on another platform before you can even start to figure out how to build your site in WordPress. With WordPress, you must create your website in the site’s backend instead of seeing what you are creating in the easy-to-use drag-and-drop editors of Squarespace and Wix. So there is a steeper learning curve, and it will take some time to figure out how to do things properly.

WordPress also provides themes, but it is more challenging to customize and design them how we want and need to design our artist website. Here, you would have to purchase and install a design plugin such as Elementor and connect it to your site so you can design it conveniently and professionally. So it is safe to say there is a lot more to figure out, whereas, with the previous platforms, everything is already sorted out as they provide an all-in-one website builder—from purchasing the domain name to the web hosting to the design and SEO, all in one place.

On the other hand, using WordPress is the least expensive way to have an artist’s website. We recommend buying your domain name and web hosting at a WordPress-recommended hosting server such as Bluehost, where you can purchase the minimum you need for approximately $25 per year! However, if you want to design your website professionally—crucial in the art world—you must consider purchasing the Basic Plan at Elementor for approximately $60 per year. Nevertheless, the overall costs remain below $100 per year, making it less expensive than all-in-one website builders. So if you have more time than money to figure things out, you could go for a WordPress website, making it our third-best website builder for artists today.

Set up your WordPress website via Bluehost here.

Purchase Elementor here and design your site.

5. ArtLogic: Powerful, Professional & Pricey

Last but not least, we have the industry-leading website builder—or website building service—Artlogic. For years, Artlogic has provided solutions and services for websites, databases, CRM, and sales management tools for galleries, artists, studios, and collectors. They work with industry-leading mega-galleries such as White Cube, Marian Goodman Gallery, Kasmin, Simon Lee, Victoria Miro, and many more.

So it is safe to say Artlogic knows what they are doing, providing top-quality websites used by the leading figures in the art world. They also offer databases and websites for artists to manage, organize, present, and share their art online professionally. Artlogic will assist you along the way with various templates to choose from—and if you want something more customized, you can reach out, and they will gladly assist you further.

However, this top-quality all-in-one service comes at an entirely different price than our other website builders. The least expensive plan for an artist website comes at $50 per month, more than three times more expensive than Wix, Squarespace, and six times—or more—more costly than a WordPress artist website. If you want to use their database system with an artist’s website, the price tag will be $117 per month.

In short, Artlogic is significantly more expensive, but it does guarantee a top-quality website. However, when considering the basic requirements for a good and professional website, we would suggest you consider the options mentioned above.

Discover Artlogic here.

Last Updated on August 17, 2024