Websites are part of the starter kits for online businesses. It’s so important that businesses pay good money to get one. In 2024, Siteefy shows that there are over 1.1 billion websites on the internet, with about 19.5 million sites currently active. That means the 1.1 billion websites are just around 13% or more of the world’s current population metrics (this is me being dramatic, don’t worry).

You understand the importance of websites, and that’s why you are here, reading this article right now. That’s because you are possibly looking for a website-building service that can give you what you are looking for. Worry not my dear reader, your answer awaits.

Building a website shouldn’t be so complicated, and that is what The Tech Toolbox is bringing to you today. In today’s edition of The Tech Toolbox, we will be showing you 3 website builders that you can use to efficiently create and host your very own business website/online store. All the tools listed are very easy to use and offer a variety of features that can help you build that amazing website your business needs. A quick tip: I added a tool for my Nigerian readers (wink wink).

But before we jump to the tools, why dont we talk a little about what to look out for when choosing a website builder/host?

Essential Factors To Consider When Choosing a Website Building Tool

1. Business Type: This is the first and most important factor to consider. A couple of site builders offer sites that are great for service-based or product-based businesses. While a lot of them offer for both. Consider the type of business you have and the type of site you need. If your business offers services, then you might have to opt for a website alone. But if you offer goods, a website is great for your business, but you still need an online store to display and sell your goods. When you put this into consideration, it streamlines your decisions.
2. Budget: this is the second most important thing to factor in. Yes, you want better for your business, but you want a better that is within your budget and that is understandable. There are a variety of site-building tools that have affordable pricing plans for any budget available.
3. Ease of Use: as a business owner, even if you would pay good money for a quality website, you still don’t want a website builder that would have you spending more time (and more money) figuring out how to use it. Most businesses want a tool that not only solves their needs but also helps them save time and money. While checking out website tools, keep in mind which tool is intuitive and easy to handle.
4. Business Goal: a lot of people don’t realize that this factor helps them in selecting a tool. When picking out a tool to stick with, you consider if it offers features that align with your business goals. Let’s say you are looking for a site creation tool that can help you create a very attractive and interactive website; you would pick one that has strong design and customization features. That is how your business goals, particularly branding preference define which tool you should go for or not.
5. Tool Offerings: another thing to look at is the features the tools offer its users. Don’t just look at the vastness of its offers, but also if they are relevant to your business growth. That should help you decide what to choose eventually.

These are just the most basic factors to note when choosing website-building tools. Other factors like SEO offerings, analytics, level of customization available, variety of templates available etc are also included and are important to note.

Benefits of Having A Website For Your Business.

This was a last-minute addition, but I felt it necessary to add why as a business owner, it is important to have a website/online store. Here are 3 great reasons:

1. Increased Visibility: Having a website makes you more visible to your audience and customers. You are basically making sure that you are everywhere for your customers to see. Imagine if your customer could easily go to a search engine and type in your business name and your site comes up. Sounds thrilling right? That is what you get with a website.
2. Brand Recognition and Trust: No matter the size of your business, having a website gives your brand silent (or loud) regard and confidence from customers. According to BusinessDasher, 84% of customers view a business’s website as more credible than its social media. This means that social media is good for your business, and a website is better. People tend to trust your business more and take it more seriously when they see you have a website (this even includes me). They know you more and they believe in your credibility better. Even you, my dear reader, know that you are more inclined to patronise a business that has a website/online store.
3. Wider Audience Reach: having a website covers a demography of customers you could be missing out on; those who search for information on search engines. Not everyone goes to X, Facebook or Instagram to search for a product or service. Most people would likely first visit Google before heading on to social media channels. If your competitors have websites, they would definitely meet them first, before they even consider or get to you. This means you are missing out on a whole population of leads that can give you more sales. So if you want to reach your audience better, why not get a website for better reach?

3 Website Tools To Help You Build Your Online Presence

Yola

While doing research for this article, I found this website tool and decided to do some research about it. Apparently, adding it to the list was a good choice. Yola is a website-building and hosting tool that offers users intuitive features to build a website with minimal technical knowledge. Basically, with Yola, you can build a website easily without needing any programming or coding knowledge.

As I mentioned earlier, as a business owner who is still small or mid-scale, you definitely need a tool that won’t stress you. Yola should be part of your options. With Yola, you can create a website from scratch, select from its available template or use its AI website builder to create a custom-made website. Either way, the choice is yours. But the main thing I am here for is to highlight the features and its pricing to help you decide if Yola is what you are looking for. Let’s have a look.

Major Features

• Website Builder: From its AI builder to its templates board and its Start From Scratch option, Yola’s website building feature is pretty easy to navigate. It offers users a drag-and-drop block editor type of interface that helps them create a website seamlessly. It also has advanced features and design automation that allow you to explore how far you can go with building a great website. Starting with its AI builder, this does all the work of producing a complete website that meets your desired specifications. It does this by taking in all the specific details about your business like the type of business, brand colours etc. But if you don’t want the AI builder, that’s fine. Yola has a variety of templates available for you to start from and still make the building process easier. But if you think you’ve got the website designing game under control and you want to start from ground zero, you can also do that with Yola.

• E-commerce: If you want a site that just focuses more on your products/services and less on your brand’s value proposition and all that, then this is the Online store creator feature to try out. Yola’s online store feature is more e-commerce-focused. This means that it centres around selling your products/services, receiving orders, managing online payments, keeping proper stock of your inventory and deliveries all from your online store. The feature, as is characteristic of Yola, is easy to use and find your way through while enjoying unique templates and mobile device compatibility. In addition to this, Yola allows you to explore marketing strategies and tools that promote your products on multiple channels, manage/relate with your customers, and even run special sales/campaigns.

• Custom Domain: Yola also offers a custom domain feature if you want your website domain to have your business’s name i.e. yourbusinessname.com. This custom domain is freely available to users who subscribe to any of their annual plans and offers a private domain, allowing you to manage all your other Yola sites in one platform. Using a custom domain helps with your online visibility because all your customers need to do is type out your brand name and your site appears immediately on the search engine. And when you have a strong online presence, your customers trust you better (speaking as someone who has been a customer).

• Customization: Yola’s customization feature is not just intuitive, it also has advanced features to help you create a website that has your brand elements and suits your branding preferences. For example, you can add specific HTML scripts to include special elements to your website. You get a variety of modern and attractive editable templates (free plan or not) that allow you to explore creatively while still meeting your branding specifications. These templates are also categorised based on business type. For example, if you run a bakery, you could definitely find a bakeshop-style template to start designing with. You also get to enjoy the block editor, which focuses on the layout and appearance of each block on the website. This way, site design options are flexible enough to create something attractive.

• Analytics: as expected, Yola gives you access to your site’s traffic with its built-in analytics feature. You can view your website’s daily visitors, whether old or new, amount of site visits, page views, profit made, status of purchases and a lot more. However, the analytics feature is only available for all the paid plans. This means if you want to effectively monitor your website’s or online store’s growth, you have to pay for Yola premium.

• Integration: Yola’s integration with third-party apps is quite straightforward. It offers integration with a couple of Google tools like Maps and Analytics and Meta Tools like Facebook and Instagram (for multichannel selling). It also allows you to integrate with Amazon, PayPal, and other tools to help you get the best out of your selling experience.

Pricing

Yola’s pricing structure is divided into 3 major plans across its 3 features; the website builder, the online store and the custom domain. For each feature, the price range differs.

• Website Plan: A free plan is available and the paid plan starts from $11.95/month.
• Online Store Add-ons: The free plan is available too and the paid plan starts from $15/month.
• Custom domain: you have two options with this feature; you either subscribe to any of the annual plans under the first two features, or you buy the domain directly, with the price starting from $19.95 per name.

Yola’s pricing might be a teeny bit complex, but it’s quite easy to understand once you get the hang of it. In addition, you actually get value for your money with this tool. Free things are nice, but to get the best out of this tool, you should go for any of its paid plans if you decide to opt for it.

WordPress

As a long-time WordPress user, this tool is great for creating and hosting sites for a variety of uses. WordPress has been around for a while, helping people just starting their website journey seamlessly create one. It offers users a website editor, with blog, newsletter and e-commerce store builders. It also has other products and features to help online-based businesses grow, but for now, let’s focus on its major features concerning websites.

Major Features

• Website Builder: WordPress also offers a drag-and-drop website block editor that is simple and intuitive. The builder also makes it quite easy to customize your website, giving you a whole lot of creative space to design it however you want. It might not have an AI website builder like Yola, but it’s still a solid building tool. It provides interesting templates, themes and already-built block patterns to help you create the kind of website you want for your business. WordPress’s block editor also contains attractive themes and patterns to give your website a unique layout and design.

• E-commerce: WordPress is not just all about the website life, it also has great tools to help you market your products or services on the website. But, creating an online store with WordPress is not as straightforward as doing it with Yola. To create an online store with this tool, you would need to use an e-commerce plugin like WooCommerce, which is the most popular plugin for WordPress. The WooCommerce plugin offers you editable themes for your store, payment processing, inventory management and a lot more. If you are wondering if you can also promote your products/services through various channels, yes you can. With its social media plugins, you can automatically promote your business site through your social media channels. There are also email marketing plugins like MailChimp, allowing you to send promotional newsletters and special campaign emails to your subscribers. Want to rank better on search engines? WordPress has SEO tools and plugins to help you rank higher, attract site visitors and get quality leads/customers.

• Custom Domain: This is definitely a yes with WordPress, as long as you subscribe to one of their paid annual plans. To be honest, getting a website or an online store is good, but getting a site with a custom domain name is better. Doing the latter will definitely put you ahead of your competitors, showing your audience that you take your business seriously. But if you want to stick with a subdomain (e.g. yourbusinessname.wordpress.com), then that is still a good choice. The most important is that you are taking a step to make your business more visible.

• Customization: I touched a little bit on this earlier, and now I have the chance to highlight it further. WordPress offers you appealing themes that contain numerous templates that are customizable to your preferences. WordPress has a variety of themes to work with, depending on what you want, even if you are on a free plan or not. Be sure you choose the theme that best suits your branding preference. In each theme, you can edit images by working with its stock images or using yours, edit the text to your liking, change the theme colour etc. The important thing to note is that you have options when it comes to designing with WordPress.

• Analytics: With WordPress, you can access relevant data that helps you track your site’s growth and visibility. It’s actually quite advanced with the statistics it provides. You can either take advantage of the statistics feature on the WordPress dashboard or get one of the analytics plugins available. A healthy variety of analytics plugins are available for you to try like Google Analytics, MonsterInsights, JetPack, Matomo and a whole lot more- technically, almost all analytics tools are WordPress analytics plugins. You’ve probably figured out a trend here, right? If you haven’t, I will be showing you right about now.

• Integrations: or should I call it plugins? If there is one thing I noticed since I started using WordPress, it’s the fact that it is obsessed with plugins. WordPress has a plugin for almost everything. From email newsletters, SEO, Shipping, Design, CRM(aka customer management), Media etc, you think of it, they’ve got it. They have over 50,000 plugins available. So when it comes to integration, you dont have to worry. WordPress has gone far and beyond for it.

Pricing

First of all, you can create a website on WordPress for free. It’s quite straightforward. But if you want a good website for your business, you are definitely going to need a paid plan for more options and benefits.

WordPress’s pricing plan covers monthly, annual, biannual and triannual payment structures (talk about thinking ahead). But since we are only focusing on the monthly payments, that’s what we will be looking at.

• The free plan is available, but very limited features. Not great for a business website.
• The Personal Plan: this is great for blogging and goes for $9/month. It comes with ads-free browsing for visitors, premium design themes, etc.
• The Premium Plan: a good website plan for your business which goes for $18/month and offers integration with Google Analytics and 13GB of storage.
• The Business Plan: this is a bit complex to navigate without technical help or knowledge goes for $40/month and offers the same features as the premium plan while allowing you to install plugins and use advanced developer tools to run it.
• The Commerce Plan: this is perfect for creating an online store and goes for $70/month. You get to use a variety of e-commerce tools and WooCommerce for hosting.

All the paid plans listed above do not come with a free custom domain. The only way you can enjoy this is by subscribing to their annual plans. You can check out their annual plans to see what is in store.

Bumpa

My Nigerian readers, this is a business app made by Nigerians for you. Bumpa is an e-commerce tool that helps business owners create websites for their businesses, while also helping them track their sales and manage their operations remotely. However, it is not very suitable for service-based businesses as its tools are more inclined towards goods management/distribution than services.

With Bumpa, you get not only a functional website but also an inventory management system, sales management feature, CRM system, business operations system, and payment structure. But let’s take a good look at Bumpa’s major features, shall we?

Major Features

• Website Builder: for Bumpa, the website building process is so seamless that you dont get to experience the building. You just need to sign up, input your business information, go through the verification process and a website is automatically generated for you. The website you are given comes with a shareable link that you can put on your marketing channels. With an automatic website creation like this one, you don’t have to worry about figuring out the layout of your website. All you need to do is upload your product through the dashboard and it’s done.

• E-commerce: Bumpa gives you a 2 in 1 deal; a website that doubles as an online store. You get to manage everything that happens on your site from your dashboard. From uploading products to receiving orders, getting payments and shipping out goods, everything is done on the backend, all from one place.

• Custom Domain: as much as Bumpa will remove the stress of making a website for you, this doesn’t mean you don’t need a personalized domain name. Thankfully, Bumpa offers its users such at a price. You can either buy it alone or get a free one when you get any of their annual plans.

• Customization: Bumpa has design features available to help you modify the website to your branding preference. However, customization is only available if you are on any of their paid plans. You can change the website theme from the default Bumpa theme to their alternative theme (SalesCabal), add your store logo/banner, structure how your products will listed on the site, edit your newsletter pop-up message etc. Compared to WordPress and Yola, Bumpa’s customization feature is not as diverse, but it gives you the basics to start with. If you are not particular about creating a website with an interactive design, then Bumpa is great for you.

• Analytics: Bumpa’s analytics feature has an interesting twist. Compared to other tools where you can view data on site traffic, growth and visibility, it’s more focused on giving you statistics on essential parts of your business operations. It gives you data on sales/expenses made, site visits, number of transactions done, product inventory, total number of customers/amount they’ve spent and campaigns run (if any). It also focuses on ads and product performance metrics using tools like Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics (this will involve connecting them with your website). You can view how your ads are performing and the rate at which your products are selling. Like I said, it’s more concerned about the essentials.

• Integrations: I’ve already mentioned two apps that you can integrate with your Bumpa website, (Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics) so you can add Instagram and Paystack to your list. If you have an active business page on Instagram, you can connect it with the website to make selling and receiving orders easier. Paystack is great for receiving payments from customers if you want another payment besides direct bank transfers and cash that is. Bumpa’s integrations are not vast like the other two, but it’s still functional enough to start with.

Pricing.

Pricing with Bumpa is divided into quarterly, annual and biannual plans. Each plan has its offerings, but as is my custom, I will be focusing only on the least plan i.e. the quarterly plan.

• Bumpa Basic: this is their free plan, perfect for if you are handling a new business and still trying to get things in order. However, offerings are very limited, with a simple website, invoices/receipts and sales records.
• Bumpa Starter: this plan costs 15,000 naira/quarterly ($8.86) and is great for solopreneurs managing a small business with a modest customer base. It offers some customization features while helping you accommodate and manage bigger customer/inventory sizes.
• Bumpa Pro: this plan goes for 30,000 naira/quarterly ($17.72). It’s perfect if you are a growing business managed by a small team with a considerable amount of product offerings. It provides a wider range of tools, including tools to help boost your visibility and manage sales through your social media channels better.
• Bumpa Growth: this plan costs 150,000 naira/quarterly ($88.61). Large businesses with numerous branches, a bigger employee base and products available. This plan gives you more advanced tools to help manage your various store locations, larger staff and goods offered.

Bumpa’s pricing is very Nigerian-friendly, taking into consideration the economic setting of Nigeria and the business structures available.

Building A Website: Your Business Growth Hack

Dear reader, let’s end today’s article here. To conclude, choosing a website-building tool is as important as using a website for your business. You need to find one that fits what you want, is easy to handle and will give you what you are looking for.

The tools mentioned above are great tools to use, each with its unique offerings and peculiarities. Yola gives you an easy website creation process. It also offers reasonably priced plans but the free plan is very limited in its offerings. It’s great for people with essential website creation knowledge, but not beginners who know nothing about creating a site. While WordPress has a variety of design themes and integrations with a lot of marketing tools. However, its pricing plans are quite pricey, especially for the online store. Its website creation process (even for e-commerce) is also very complex to navigate. Finally, Bumpa has a super easy website creation process but its customization is limited. It’s also not suitable for service-focused businesses.

Once again, each tool with its advantages and downsides, but each of them offers great and very capable features for your website creation journey. I hope today’s article has helped make your business scale an inch higher or even more.

Part 2 of this article is already in the works, so you will be seeing it soon. Until the next edition, grow!

If you found this post helpful, don’t forget to subscribe for more tech tips, or share it with fellow business owners who could benefit from these tools!

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Hello, Dear Reader. I am so glad to have you meet the second edition of The Tech Toolbox. We are officially 2 weeks old!

Are you a business owner looking for how to scale your business with technology? You are in the right place (or blog).

This blog is your weekly go-to resource for discovering cutting-edge tools and solutions designed to help businesses (especially small and medium-sized businesses in Nigeria and beyond) thrive. The focus is simplifying technology in a fun (and sometimes humorous)way, making it accessible and actionable for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and teams aiming to scale smarter. Whether it’s productivity software, marketing platforms, or innovative ways to manage your operations, the best tools and tips are curated to save you time and maximize your business potential.

The mission is to empower businesses like yours with the knowledge and tools they need to compete in today’s fast-paced digital world. At The Tech Toolbox, complex tech is broken down into practical and interesting insights, so you can focus on what matters most — growing your business.

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You can also contact me, your lovely author through my email: chioma.v.ubiji@gmail.com or on Linkedin: Chioma Vanessa Ubiji.