Web design software: the 12 best tools to build great websites fast

Web design software can help you build a next-level website—but with so many different options, it’s hard to know where to start or which features to prioritize. 

We’ve created a list of the best web design software out there to help you identify which tools align with your site's vision and will produce a design that delights your users.

12 excellent design tools to create user-centric sites

Design software streamlines the process of creating and managing a successful site. But how do businesses find the right tools to build a site that helps them achieve their unique business and user goals? This list covers the best tools for each phase of web design to help guide your decision-making process and master customer delight. 

We’ll look at: 

• Research tools 

• Prototyping and wireframe tools 

• Website creation and design tools 

• Testing tools 

3 excellent tools for research

Choose a great research tool to understand your customers' problems and pain points so you can design your site around their needs.

1. Google Trends 

Google Trends is an easy-to-use tool that gives you a high-level understanding of search trends—helping you pinpoint what your target users are looking for so you can design your website to meet their specific needs and search intents. 

The data Google Trends provides about keyword trends and search volume tells you what information users are searching for and what matters most to them.

You can also use Google Trends to search in specific locations, so you can cater to user needs regardless of where they are. 

Screenshot of Google Trends

Highlights  

• Helpful comparison charts 

• Easy to hop between keywords to explore related terms

• Displays trends across different regions

• Displays product and category seasonality

• Shows a range for search volume rather than an exact number

• Can compare up to 5 keywords at a time

2. Contentsquare 

Contentsquare provides website and product teams, UX designers, marketers, digital researchers, and more with quantitative and qualitative information about how users engage with their website to facilitate a better online experience.

Tools like Session Replay and Heatmaps show you how users are behaving and where they’re getting stuck. Voice of Customer capabilities, like Surveys and user feedback widgets, let you collect insights from users ‘in the wild’ as they’re browsing your site or test site.

Session replays show you how real users navigate your website, surfacing web design issues and improvement opportunities

Gather direct user feedback and behavior analytics insights to understand your users’ wants and needs, and what’s blocking them in your current design so you can quickly spot issues. Then, put user feedback into action to make high-impact, data-driven design decisions for improved UX and conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Highlights

• A flexible tool that can be used throughout the web design process, for user research, pre-launch testing, and general website monitoring

• Survey users for an in-depth account of their experience

• Session replays and heatmaps that help you optimize CTA placement and maximize conversions

• Optimize site navigation by observing how users click, scroll, and u-turn 

3. Semrush 

This SEO competitor analysis tool locates potential competitors, keywords, and popular marketing strategies to help you discover what’s out there, whether there are any gaps where you could better serve users, and make sure they can find your site.

Semrush lets you monitor business growth and enhance advertisement campaigns, so you can understand who you’re reaching and what design and messaging are most effective. 

They also offer over 50 online visibility tools, products, and add-ons.

Semrush is a powerful SEO tool

Highlights 

• Great visuals for keyword position tracking 

• Intuitive page grader feature to analyze the on-page and technical SEO of your site

• Creates simplified reports 

2 excellent prototyping tools

Use prototyping tools to communicate your layout ideas, planned design, and desired user flows to key stakeholders. Then, use their feedback to improve your web design and UX.

1. Figma 

Figma is a highly versatile prototyping tool that helps you turn static design files into an interactive user experience.

It’s an all-in-one platform that lets you move between a design file and live prototype. Your design edits will appear instantly in prototype form, ready to be shared and viewed online.

Use Figma to create prototypes for logos, websites, and web apps based on your business and user needs. Source: Figma

Highlights

• Intuitive to use—simply connect UI elements and choose interactions and animations

• Advanced transitions with Smart Animate

• Interactive, multi-layered overlays

• Animated GIF elements can represent motion designs, video elements, and subtle animations

• Promotes collaboration with prototype comments that carry over into design files—so nothing gets lost

2. Sketch

Sketch is a design tool for prototyping and wireframe design that simplifies the process of creating high-fidelity mockups. 

Their software has an intuitive interface and comes with a wide variety of extensions and plugins—so you can integrate Sketch straight into your existing workflow.

Sketch is also very accessible, so designers of all expertise levels can create beautiful, comprehensive designs quickly.

Screenshot of Sketch website prototyping tools. Source: Sketch

Highlights  

• Excellent for rapid prototyping

• Integrates with client-ready presentation tools

• Supports over 1,000 plugins 

• Compatible with an external library 

• Cloud-based storage 

• Auto-saves your work

• Available only for Mac

5 excellent web design and creation tools

Try these web design and creation tools to simplify the process of bringing your site idea to life—and avoid making common mistakes to create a product that delights customers. 

1. Wix

Wix is an affordable, easy-to-use web design software that lets users create all kinds of websites, from ecommerce stores to agency websites. 

Their platform has powerful design tools and customization options, with 500+ adaptable templates to choose from. Other features include animations, image editing, social media buttons, and more. 

Wix also has tons of built-in integrations, so you can connect with all your favorite apps like Mailchimp, Zapier, Typeform, and Airtable.

With Wix Analytics Behavior Reports, you can even discover how each of your web pages is performing by reviewing metrics like page views, bounce rates, site searches, and conversion rates.

Screenshot of Wix website editor. Source: Wix

Highlights

• Multi-channel selling 

• Wix editor shows you how your edits impact your storefront 

• Built-in analytics

• Closed source code that increases security 

• Advanced ecommerce tools, including abandoned cart recovery

2. WordPress 

WordPress is the most popular web design software on the market, largely because of its flexibility.

It’s an open-source platform, meaning you can alter your site’s code and connect an unlimited amount of tools. You can also add plugins like WooCommerce to bolster your site’s ecommerce capabilities. 

WordPress has thousands of free and paid website design themes to choose from, so you’ll be sure to find an option that aligns with your site concept. It's best for web developers who know how to code or bigger ecommerce operations looking to scale. 

Screenshot of WordPress website editor. Source: WordPress

Highlights

• SEO friendly 

• Highly scalable

• Open source code 

• Variety of integrations and plug-ins

• Well-protected against security threats

• Lets you create custom themes  

• No built-in analytics but plenty of plugins available if you want an out-of-the-box solution

3. Shopify 

Shopify is an ecommerce software that lets you build intuitive websites to sell physical or digital products online, with a platform that offers a range of web design themes that you can customize to meet branding requirements and user needs. 

Shopify caters both to beginners who don’t know how to code and experienced developers with access to CSS, HTML, and Liquid (Shopify’s templating language).

They also provide you with templates, a payment processor, and marketing tools, equipping you with everything you need to create a successful ecommerce site in one place.  

Shopify’s interface lets users set up and manage a variety of sales channels to reach their customers at every touchpoint, such as

• Facebook: a tab on your Facebook page where users can buy products 

• Buy buttons: embed ecommerce functionality into any website or blog

• Instagram: make your Instagram posts shoppable

• Wholesale: create a separate, password-protected storefront where you can sell products B2B (for Shopify Plus customers only)

Sample Shopify product catalog template. Source: Shopify

Highlights

• Shopify Payments has lower transaction fees than other payment processors

• Fully-hosted

• Hundreds of built-in features and apps 

• 13 free ecommerce themes, or the option to build your own

• Bundled, premium themes are responsive, giving users a better, more versatile experience 

• 24/7 customer support

• Premium themes cost between $150-$350

• Third-party apps available to add more sales channels like Amazon and Etsy

💡 Pro tip: install the Contentsquare tag on your Shopify site to get actionable insights on how users navigate and interact with your ecommerce website. Use your discoveries to optimize, scale, and improve CTAs, product pages, and checkout for a better UX and improved conversion rate.

4. Squarespace 

Squarespace, known for being the leader of all things web design and even setting various web design trends, is a great tool for small online stores, especially those that sell digital products.

Their platform is feature-rich, easy to use, and offers 180 beautifully designed, mobile-optimized website templates. It’s also equipped with a drag-and-drop interface for easy editing and many built-in extensions and plugins to choose from. 

Squarespace also has its own built-in analytics feature, Squarespace Analytics, which gives you a broad overview of user behavior to help you make data-informed design decisions.

Sample Squarespace design template. Source: Squarespace

Highlights

• A library of stunning, responsive website templates

• Marketing features, like built-in SEO tools, email marketing capabilities, and social media integrations

• 24/7 customer support 

• Comes with a range of ecommerce tools, like an online store builder and ecommerce-specific website templates

5. Weebly 

With its generous free plan, Weebly covers all the web design basics and provides step-by-step guidance on a range of design components, from UI elements to SEO, making it a great option for beginners.

Weebly also has an impressive app store, supports a range of third–party integrations, and has a number of ecommerce plans, so you can select the plan that best fits your user and business needs.

Screenshot of Weebly website editor. Source: Weebly

Highlights

• One of the few platforms that lets users sell for free

• Supports online stores with both digital and physical goods and services 

• Good value for your money 

• Super helpful SEO guidance

• Limited customization options for those who want a bespoke site

2 excellent website testing tools

Use testing tools to try out your site with users before launch, and continually optimize it once it’s live. Try out the tools below to explore site performance, see where your website is best serving users, and uncover potential product page improvements.

1. Uptrends 

ITRS Uptrends is a great tool for testing web performance and monitoring uptime and downtime to make sure users can access your site and have a great experience as they browse.

It lets you easily monitor performance metrics, including speed, telling you which site elements load slowly or cause issues, and showing you which are performing well and attracting customer attention.

Uptrends measures your website element by element, so you can directly pinpoint which aspects of site performance are enriching or harming your UX.

Uptrends’ visual dashboard. Source: Uptrends

Highlights

• Accurate, detailed alerts

• Provides helpful educational resources when loading pages

• Worldwide checkpoints

2. Lighthouse  

Google Lighthouse is a free, open-source tool that audits your website across a number of criteria: performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. However, it doesn’t provide behavior analytics insights.

A report in Google Lighthouse. Source: Google

Highlights

• Free and open source

• Quickly assess whether your website meets Google’s standards in key areas

• Provides feedback on the issues Google finds

• Assesses any URL you provide 

• Feedback is highly technical (which may be overwhelming for some)

How web design software improves customer-centric design

• User-focused research and testing tools keep your design tailored to your user’s needs and remove blockers and friction

• Great web design software gives you full control over the design process, so you can create a unique, interactive experience for users

• The right tools help you create a professional website on a budget so you can build—and improve—your online presence quickly and cost effectively

• Software simplifies the design process, empowering you to create a website without coding experience, so you can give users a consistent, responsive experience no matter what your expertise level is

Use web design software to build a site your users love

Web design software helps teams create fully functional websites that look beautiful, work well, and solve their users’ problems.

Use our guide to help you choose the right web design tools for your specific customers to elevate their experience and keep them coming back time and time again.

FAQs about web design software