1&1 IONOS MyWebsite review

1&1 IONOS MyWebsite is an easy-to-use website builder with affordable plans for creating basic websites and online stores.

Coming from 1&1 IONOS, one of the best web hosting providers, all sites are mobile-responsive, and include a blog, SEO tools, and analytics, and ranks among other providers competing to be the best website builder available.

1&1 IONOS MyWebsite review: Snapshot

MyWebsite’s design process is what differentiates it from other site builders. It doesn’t enable you to drag and drop content elements onto your site and move them around freely. Rather, you can only add page sections, which are premade content blocks containing text, images, and more.

The content inside each page section is customisable, but you cannot change the layout of the individual elements. There are only 18 templates to choose from, but the designs are eye-catching enough that we didn’t find this to be a major problem.

A major advantage to 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite is that its plans are much cheaper than those from competitors like Squarespace. Basic website plans start at just £9 a month, and ecommerce plans start at £19 a month.

Overall, this website builder is a decent option if you want to launch a professional-looking website quickly and cheaply, and don’t mind giving up some creative control along the way. In our 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite review, we cover everything you need to know to decide if this is the best website builder for you.

Score: 3.5/5

Read on for the full 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite review.

1&1 IONOS MyWebsite's competitors

1&1 IONOS MyWebsite offers an inexpensive and fast way to set up a website or online store. However, it’s not nearly as customisable as competitors like Zyro and Squarespace, which allow you to drag and drop content elements and edit most stylistic aspects of your website. Both Zyro and Squarespace also offer dozens of templates to choose from, while MyWebsite only has 18.

One key advantage that 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite has over Squarespace is that it’s cheaper. You can set up a basic online store for as little as £19 a month. For similar ecommerce functionality, you’ll pay £12.31 a month with Zyro and £24 a month with Squarespace.

So, 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite is best suited to anyone who can take advantage of its narrow template selection and doesn’t mind a relative lack of customization features. If you want complete control over your site’s design, though, you might be better served by Zyro or Squarespace.

How does 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite compare to its main competitors?

1&1 IONOS MyWebsite: Key features

1&1 IONOS MyWebsite has a fairly small selection of only 18 templates. The designs are modern and attractive, but they didn’t feel particularly unique relative to one another. In fact, the only thing separating the templates is a handful of style settings that you can change in the website editor.

Still, the templates can be useful, especially if you want to launch your site quickly. MyWebsite has themes for a variety of common industries, including restaurants, photographers, and designers.

The website editor for 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite is very simple compared to what we’ve seen from other website builder platforms. There are no individual content elements to move around your pages, but rather, full-width page sections that you can move up and down. Sections might have customisable elements like images and text boxes, but you don’t have to worry about rearranging them.

The site editor also lets you choose from a handful of style options. You can change your color palette, fonts, and the transitions between page sections. There aren’t many other options for customising the look of your site, but MyWebsite does offer an HTML and CSS editor to enable you to make more significant changes.

MyWebsite makes it easy to set up an ecommerce store—all you have to do is add a store page to your site. If you already have your products listed in a spreadsheet, you can import a CSV to populate your storefront.

Given the lack of customisation options in the website editor, we were impressed at the level of control you have over product pages. You can add product images, ribbons to advertise free shipping or sales, and options for different sizes and colours. MyWebsite also lets you decide what products to recommend to visitors as related items, and even offers SEO descriptions to boost your product pages in search engine results.

We were also happy to find that MyWebsite includes an analytics dashboard, so that you can track visitors and monitor which products are most popular. The platform also supports cross-channel sales on Facebook, Instagram, Google Shopping, eBay, and Amazon.

1&1 IONOS MyWebsite: What’s new in 2022?

A lot has changed since the last time we reviewed 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite. For one thing, the platform’s templates have been completely revamped. We think the new templates are better designed, and the layout of the main pages is better thought-out. However, there are now fewer templates—18 in all—so you don’t have a lot of choices when starting off the design process.

Another major change is in the premade content blocks available in the MyWebsite page builder. It used to be that you could drag and drop so-called widgets onto your site in something approximating a grid pattern. Now, you can only add premade page sections, which are blocks with multiple customisable content elements.

There’s no way to drag and drop content elements within a page section. This speeds up the design process and helps ensure that your site looks professional, but it significantly limits your creative freedom.

1&1 IONOS MyWebsite: Pricing

1&1 IONOS offers three plans for MyWebsite: Starter, Plus, and Pro. The Starter plan costs £9 a month for basic websites or £19 a month for ecommerce sites. With this plan, you can customise text and images, but not much else within your template. In addition, the blog is limited in terms of functionality, there are no photo galleries, and there’s no mobile app for managing your online store.

The Plus plan costs £15 a month without an online store or £25 a month with one. You get complete access to the MyWebsite builder, including the ability to add page sections. With an online store, you can sell up to 5,000 products.

The Pro plan costs £20 a month for a basic website or £50 a month for an online store. It enables you to sell up to 10,000 products, but otherwise doesn’t add much beyond what the Plus plan offers.

All plans are billed annually. For your first year, the Starter plan costs £1 a month, the Plus plan costs £5 a month, and the Pro plan costs £10 a month. You can also cancel within the first 30 days for a full refund.

There are also three website design plans. ranging from £40 a month to £70 a month, but each with a setup fee of £199. Finally, there are two website and marketing plans. Starter + List Local Essential and Plus + List Local Essential, at £19 a month and £25 a month (for the first year, it's £4 a month for the former, and for the first six months it's £5 a month for the latter).

1&1 IONOS MyWebsite's pricing plans

Testing 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite

In order to comprehensively compare 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite to the competition, we analysed a series of its features and tools to see how it performed. This included using the website editor and designer, and both its uptime and customer support responsiveness, as these factors are key when taking website building into account.

How do you build a website with 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite?

We found the MyWebsite site designer to be very easy to use. Unlike other website builders, MyWebsite doesn’t actually let you drag and drop content around your pages. Rather, you build your website in sections using premade content blocks. There are dozens of section types available, including galleries, text blocks, grids that combine text and images, and testimonials.

The nice thing about this is that it doesn’t take much work to produce a professionally designed website. There’s also little chance of you ending up with a site that looks bad, since the layout of each section and your website’s colour scheme are largely outside your control.

The downside, though, is that if you can’t find a block that suits your needs, there’s not much you can do. In addition, since all pages consist of sections stacked vertically on top of one another, you have to be careful that your site doesn’t force users to scroll way down the page for key information.

How good are 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite's uptime and responsiveness?

1&1 IONOS promises users 99.99% uptime for all websites. We checked that claim by monitoring our website with Pingdom for two weeks. Over that time, our site experienced five short outages for a total downtime of 78 minutes.

While the resulting 99.60% uptime isn’t bad, it’s less than what 1&1 IONOS says it delivers, and isn’t as good as other platforms we’ve tested. 1&1 IONOS’s response time also wasn’t stellar: our site had an average response time of 455ms. That’s roughly 75% longer than Zyro’s response time in a similar two-week test.

How responsive is 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite's customer service?

1&1 IONOS offers 24/7 support for MyWebsite by phone and live chat. We tried out the live chat to get more information about customising content blocks, and were able to get connected to a support agent in seconds.

In addition, 1&1 IONOS has a detailed online knowledge base, where you’ll find over 100 articles explaining how to use the site builder and manage your online store. Most articles offer clear step-by-step instructions, although there aren’t many screenshots included.

Alternatives to 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite

1&1 IONOS MyWebsite offers affordability and high-quality designs, but it lacks the flexibility that you’ll find in other website builders. In particular, it’s worth comparing MyWebsite against builders like Zyro and Squarespace that put a greater emphasis on design features.

Both Zyro and Squarespace offer true drag-and-drop website editors that enable you to move content elements around your page, instead of simply building whole page sections at a time. Creating a website with Zyro is nearly as quick as creating one with MyWebsite, in large part thanks to AI-based tools that can replicate existing web pages and intelligently design your site.

Squarespace offers the most design options of all three website builders, including dozens of ways to customise your theme’s style. However, it also takes a lot more effort to create a website with Squarespace, so it’s not as suitable as MyWebsite or Zyro for those who want to launch quickly.

MyWebsite edges out Squarespace on price, especially when it comes to building an ecommerce site. You can launch a storefront for as little as £19 a month with MyWebsite, whereas you’ll pay £12.31 a month at Zyro but £24 a month with Squarespace.

Oddly enough, MyWebsite and Zyro use the same ecommerce software, so there’s no difference between the two in terms of product design or shop management features.

1&1 IONOS MyWebsite's features compared to the competition

1&1 IONOS MyWebsite: The verdict

1&1 IONOS MyWebsite is an affordable website builder that enables you to build a high-quality website quickly.

The main draw is its price. You can launch a basic website for just £5 a month or an online store for £5 a month, which is much cheaper than competitors like Zyro and Squarespace. That’s an especially good deal considering that Zyro’s ecommerce plan—which costs over 50% more—gives you access to the same ecommerce software as MyWebsite.

The downside to MyWebsite is that it has a limited number of templates and minimal design flexibility. Unlike competitors such as Zyro and Squarespace, there’s no drag-and-drop editor. Instead, you can build pages one section at a time using premade blocks of content.

This speeds up the design process and ensures that the result looks professional. On the other hand, it also means that you don’t have the ability to deviate much from the look and feel of MyWebsite’s templates.

We liked that 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite includes 24/7 support by phone and live chat. However, our testing found that the company’s promise of 99.99% uptime doesn’t quite hold up to scrutiny. The platform’s performance was decent, but this is something to consider when evaluating whether MyWebsite’s low prices are worthwhile.

Overall, 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite is a good option for launching a basic website or online store with minimal effort. However, if you want complete control over the design process, MyWebsite might not be the best choice for you.

Further reading on website builders

When it comes to website builders, see our tips for building your first website, how much it costs to build a website, and our buying guides for the best small business website builders, the best ecommerce website builders, and the best free website builders.