Best Website Builder for Magazine Publishers in 2025

Best Website Builder for Magazine Publishers: Our Recommendation

Our #1 recommended website builder for magazine publishers is Shopify. Its featured collections tool makes it easy to highlight your top sellers or new items, and the Shopify website builder makes it easy to add products, edit pages, and add anything your online store might need to thrive.

Using the Shopify Website Builder for Magazine Publishing Websites

It’s important to understand what your goals are when you begin creating a website for your business. As you build a magazine publishing website, your primary objectives will be to:

• Keep customers updated on your new magazines by integrating email and other subscriber features.
• Expand your customer base with the power of social media.

The screenshot above shows just how easy it is to add a “Subscribe” section to your website’s footer. This’ll allow visitors to input their email addresses so they can receive monthly, weekly, or even daily email updates about your new magazine issues. You also can use these customers’ email addresses to update them about your upcoming events, current discounts and deals, and any other products you may sell like journals, newsletters, and writing materials.

As a magazine publishing business, you must build a loyal following and keep those customers updated about your company’s ventures in order to thrive. Capturing a list of customer email addresses is, perhaps, one of the most important aspects of your business website.

Shopify also allows you to connect your site to social media, making it easy for you to spread the word about your magazines and engage new customers.

This screenshot shows how easy it is to connect your website to your business’s social media accounts. Simply enter the URL for your social media page on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter. Facebook and Twitter are perhaps the best platforms on which to engage customers and inform them of your magazine publishing business.

By conducting social media research, integrating marketing strategies, and taking an active role in reaching out via different social platforms, you can use Shopify to successfully expand your magazine subscription base.

Getting Started With Shopify

One of the other major benefits of the Shopify Website Builder is the ease of getting started. All you have to do to begin your free trial is enter in your email, a password, and the name of your shop. Shopify will then ask you a quick series of questions to better customize your shop theme. Fill out the sections accordingly and select “Services” for the industry you operate in.

Once you click “Enter my store,” you’ll be taken to your Shopify dashboard, where you can begin creating your online shop.

Shopify’s builder uses your answers to better understand your business name and type so as to construct a theme that’ll best suit your business.

Once here, you can begin to customize the theme to match your branding or choose a new one entirely. There are ways to begin adding products, connecting to social media to sell on other platforms, and even ways to collect customer emails for future alerts and sales campaigns.

Depending on the level of customization that you would like to do, you can continue to add, change, and move things around until you have your dream website!

Cons of the Shopify Website Builder for Magazine Publishing Websites

While this website builder is our recommended pick for magazine publishers, it’s not totally flawless. There are a few things that may push certain users to other builders. These cons include:

• Lack of Payment Flexibility — When people shop online for your magazines, they’ll likely want to use regular credit and debit card payments to make a purchase. Unfortunately, Shopify will charge you a 2% transaction fee for any purchases made outside of its Shopify Payments system. Those fees can add up so you may need to either increase your prices slightly or factor them into your overall budget.
• Limited Versatility — Magazines have the power to inform the public and provide valuable information. However, Shopify can’t necessarily integrate other services into your website (e.g., in-depth news reporting, apps, or other news items). It’s best to use the Shopify platform solely for selling magazines or other tangible products. If you plan to expand your magazine publishing website to include other services, you may want to consider another platform like GoDaddy or Wix.

For more information on the Shopify Website Builder, check out these articles:

• Shopify Website Builder Review
• How to Make a Shopify Website
• How to Use the Shopify Website Builder
• Shopify Website Builder Pricing and Plans
• Shopify Website Examples

Web.com

Like most website builders nowadays, Web.com enables users to quickly create a functional website without needing to write a single line of code. It also includes an extremely affordable signup offer for the first month, which allows for time to learn the platform before having to truly pay for it. As one of the first website builders available on the internet, it has also perfected the art of drag-and-drop functionality and includes fast uptimes, allowing your site to be better optimized for search engines. 

The problem is that Web.com hasn’t entirely updated with the times. Its templates feel a bit outdated, and there are moments when using the editing tool feels a little less intuitive than it does on more modern platforms like GoDaddy, Wix, or Squarespace.  Additionally, despite the low cost of premium plans at signup, these prices skyrocket after the first monthly billing cycle. This may make it seem like an affordable option, but in practice that might not shake out to be true.

To learn more about the pros and cons of Web.com, read our Web.com Website Builder Review.

WordPress

WordPress is one of the most popular website builders on the market, and with good reason. This content management system (CMS) is highly customizable, endlessly flexible, and can be one of the least expensive options available to small business owners. WordPress consistently ranks as one of the best website builders in the world, and it can be a good choice for your business website.

However, WordPress does have its drawbacks. Site owners must purchase their own domain name and hosting package, and they also have to perform routine maintenance tasks like updating their website and plugins and conducting site backups. In addition, WordPress is not an easy-to-use builder, especially when compared to other recommended options like GoDaddy, Wix, or Web.com. Typically, we only recommend WordPress to business owners who already have experience with the builder or are more tech-savvy.

To learn more about the pros and cons of WordPress, read our WordPress Website Builder Review.

Wix

Wix consistently ranks high in our list of best website builders, and it’s easy to see why. Having been around for a while, Wix has updated well with the times and remains a very sleek, modern platform where users can create a high-performance website without having to spend too much time learning about web design. Its templates feature beautiful designs, and there are many customization options available — as well as a (very limited) free plan for users looking to save some money.

Despite all of this, some of these added features come with an extra layer of complexity. Using Wix’s editor is simply not as easy and intuitive as some of its competitors. Wix also lags behind when it comes to analytics and other basic metrics a small business owner will need to keep track of growth. Finally, despite offering a free plan, there are a lot of features missing from it — like a Wix subdomain — and Wix premium plans run a bit steeper than the likes of GoDaddy and Web.com.

To learn more about the pros and cons of Wix, read our Wix Website Builder Review.

How to Choose a Website Builder for Magazine Publishers

Choosing a website builder is one of the most important decisions you will make when it comes to building your online store and website for your magazines. If none of the suggestions above seem like they will fit your needs, then you’ll need to select a different builder. This section will give you a framework to make the decision in the most effective way possible. 

Once you have an idea and guidelines of how you will make this choice, check out our Best Website Builder of 2025 review for several different options and reviews of each builder.

Ease of Use

The most important factor when choosing a website builder is its ease of use. It doesn’t matter how many bells and whistles or beautiful templates the builder has if you can’t figure out how to use it.

Of course, all builders will have a learning curve. But, some are just considerably simpler than others. WordPress, for example, is an absolutely amazing tool that gives you almost limitless flexibility but is one of the least intuitive builders on the market. 

Most small businesses that use WordPress end up hiring developers and marketers to create and manage their websites. This is not a bad thing, per se, but it’s a decision you will have to make. After all, you know your business and its needs best.

Speed of Implementation

Similar to ease of use, speed of implementation is an important factor when starting a new site from scratch. When beginning a new business, you will have a massive number of tasks that need to be taken care of in order to get things going. Creating a website is absolutely one of the most important.

With this being said, it obviously makes more sense to use a tool that can have you up and running quickly. Some builders are better suited than others when it comes to a new site. 

Some give you a blank slate to work from, others give you templates, and others still use AI to understand your unique needs and help to fill in some of the blanks for you. The right answer for you may be different than for someone else, but understanding this will give you a massive advantage when selecting your builder.

Expandability

Expandability is less about what you want to do with your website now and more about what your long-term ambitions are. 

For example, let’s say that you are starting a basic website that helps your customers find where your business is and gives them multiple ways to contact you. Two years from now, you know that you want to have a full-blown software-as-a-service (SaaS) app on your website. There’s a good chance that the tools you need are going to be very different between now and then.

Something to note is that using one system doesn’t mean that you can never change platforms. That being said, migrating a site from one tool to another is usually a pretty in-depth undertaking and at least a medium-sized headache.

In the beginning, try to look forward and plan into the future for what your needs will be at different stages of your business. This will give you the insight you need to make the best decisions possible.

Additional Factors

Along with the three that we have mentioned, there are other factors that may guide your choice of website builder:

• Price — Naturally, price is a factor when choosing a website tool. If you’re starting a small blog, there’s no reason that you would need a major ecommerce suite. Keep in mind, however, that your business will be supporting this website, and hopefully, your revenue will make these $10 to $30 per month expenses look like a drop in the bucket.
• Templates and Themes — Good web design can be tricky. Do you know exactly what should go on your homepage? Having a large library of templates gives you a running start when it comes to designing the pages that will make up your website.
• Responsive Design — For the most part, all builders nowadays should have this figured out for you, but keep in mind that if your website doesn’t look good on all screen sizes (e.g., mobile, desktop, tablet, etc.), you’ll alienate a large number of your customers. Have you ever backed out of a website because it looked terrible on your phone? That is what you want to avoid for your own website.

Final Thoughts

Magazine publishing websites can thrive online if they use the right platform. The Shopify website builder enables you to integrate your online store with your business’s social media accounts. It also will allow site visitors to easily subscribe to your email newsletter about new magazine issues, deals, and more.

The Shopify platform is incredibly easy to use, helping new business owners build a professional website in just a few hours. If you need help creating a robust ecommerce website for your magazines, Shopify is our number one pick.