Hostinger Website Builder Review 2025
If you need a site up yesterday and your budget’s tighter than a plumber’s crawl-space, Hostinger’s builder won’t waste your time. On the base plan—£2.99 a month (48-month term)—you get one year of domain registration, unlimited SSL, and an AI tool that whips up layouts in minutes.
Step up to the Business tier (£11.99 a month) and the gloves come off: full e-commerce, five mailboxes, daily backups, plus plug-and-play hooks for Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel and Hotjar across as many as 50 sites.
Performance? Rock-solid. Lighthouse scores land at 91/100 on desktop and 84/100 on mobile, while real-world LCP averages 1.9 s—numbers most drag-and-drop rivals only dream about.
Security ticks the right boxes too: TLS 1.3, AES-256 encryption, Cloudflare DDoS shield, and GDPR-ready cookie and data-subject tools.
Add 24/7 live chat, a searchable Help Centre, and a 30-day money-back window, and Hostinger earns its keep as a straightforward, GDPR-compliant choice for UK site owners who just want to get on with the job.
At-a-glance
- ✅ Entry price from just £2.99/mo.
- ✅ AI builds a site in under a minute.
- ✅ Zero‑fee ecommerce on Business plan.
- ✅ Built‑in TLS 1.3 and GDPR tools.
- ✅ 91/84 Lighthouse & 99.9 % uptime.
- ⛔ Limited SEO & CMS depth.
- ⛔ Editor feels basic vs Wix/Square.
- ⛔ Best rate needs 48‑month term.
- ⛔ AI layouts often need tweaks.
*Discount on 48‑month contracts; VAT not included.
 Hostinger Builder | |
| ⭐ Rating: | 3.5 ★★★★★ |
| 🏅 Overall rank: | #8 out of 8 |
| 💵 Price: | Plans from £2.99 /mo (75 % off first term) |
| ✂️ Free version: | Yes – unlimited time, Hostinger sub‑domain |
| 💻 Platforms: | Browser‑based; publishes to any device |
| 🔥 Offer: | Extra 7 % off code BUILDER7 |
| Claim 75 % Off Now | |
Test Scope & Devices
During a focused burst in April 2025—evenings after work and one weather-blown Saturday—I spun up three lightweight, live demos on Hostinger’s Premium and Business plans:
- Portfolio (showcase gallery)
- Consultancy one-pager (lead-gen form)
- 20-item test store (physical goods)
Templates and the AI builder handled the scaffolding; I confined myself to copy edits, image swaps and checkout tweaks. Each site was stress-tested on Chrome, Safari and Edge across Windows 11, macOS Sonoma, iOS 17 and Android 14.
- Performance: Google Lighthouse + Hostinger CrUX ⇒ LCP 1.9 s, FID < 70 ms, CLS 0.07
- Uptime: 5-minute pings via StatusCake for 30 days ⇒ 99.95 % (beats the 99.9 % SLA)
- SEO: Hostinger SEO Wizard cross-checked in Google Search Console
- E-commerce run-through: product edits, inventory, abandoned-cart email and Stripe/PayPal checkout flow
Enough hands-on time to spot real-world snags—without needing super-hero hours.
Regulation & Trust
Legal backbone & data handling
For UK customers your contract is with Hostinger UK Ltd, registered at 6 Lloyds Avenue, London EC3N 3AX; everyone else falls under Hostinger International in Cyprus. Their privacy policy is explicitly GDPR-compliant and comes with a downloadable Data Processing Addendum, so you can slot Hostinger straight into your own paperwork. In 2024 the company also bagged ISO / IEC 27001:2017 certification, meaning an external auditor has checked that its information-security controls exist beyond the marketing deck.
Security & uptime guarantees
Traffic is encrypted with TLS 1.3 and guarded by a web-application firewall and anti-DDoS filters (Cloudflare edge optional). That’s backed by a contractual 99.9 % uptime SLA; if they miss the target you get service credits, and there’s a public status page to keep them honest. In practice, my own 30-day probe logged 99.95 % availability.
Transparency & recourse
Hostinger now publishes an annual Digital Services Act transparency report, detailing takedown requests and moderation steps—handy if you host user-generated content. New customers also get a 30-day money-back guarantee (cryptocurrency payments excluded) for a risk-free trial.
Reputation pulse
On Trustpilot the service scores 4.7 / 5 from roughly 48 000 reviews, and the support team replies to almost every negative post—reassuring when you need help at silly-o’clock.
Trade-offs in plain view: Hostinger’s servers aren’t certified for PCI-DSS or HIPAA workloads, so route card data through Stripe/PayPal and keep medical records elsewhere. Otherwise, for a typical UK brochure site or small shop the compliance boxes that matter are firmly ticked.
Snag up to 75 % off with Hostinger’s AI Website Builder and launch a professional site for as little as £2.99 / month. A bargain for side‑hustles or small businesses.
Fees & Specifications
Hostinger Website Builder keeps life simple with just two tiers. Whether you choose the entry-level Premium plan or the e-commerce-ready Business upgrade, you still sit on the same LiteSpeed servers, Cloudflare CDN and TLS 1.3 encryption—so performance and security never depend on how much you spend.
Start with Premium for portfolios, blogs or lead-gen pages; step up to Business the moment you need a basket and checkout or daily backups. The jump doesn’t buy you faster hardware—it adds storefront tools, extra mailboxes and doubles the site allowance.
| Feature | Premium (£2.99 /mo) | Business (£11.99 /mo) |
| 48-month term price | £2.99 /mo (billed £143 / year) | £11.99 /mo (billed £575 / year) |
| Free trial | 7 days | 7 days |
| Sites per account | 25 | 50 |
| Custom domain | ✓ (1 year free) | ✓ (1 year free) |
| Unlimited SSL | ✓ | ✓ |
| Mailboxes per site | 2 | 5 |
| AI Website Generator | ✓ | ✓ |
| Templates | 150 + responsive | 150 + responsive |
| Drag-and-drop editor | ✓ | ✓ |
| SEO & marketing integrations | Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel | All Premium + Hotjar |
| E-commerce suite | — | ✓ (products, variants, checkout, cart recovery) |
| Backups | Weekly | Daily & on-demand |
| DDoS protection & TLS 1.3 | ✓ | ✓ |
| Uptime SLA† | 99.9 % | 99.9 % |
| 24/7 live chat | Yes | Yes |
| 30-day money-back | Yes | Yes |
For portfolios and brochure sites, Premium keeps costs down while still giving you the AI builder and marketing hooks. Move to Business as soon as you need a checkout button—its e-commerce suite, daily backups and extra mailboxes justify the jump. Remember the headline prices assume four years paid up-front, so use the seven-day free trial and 30-day refund buffer to make sure it’s a fit before you commit long-term.
Product Features
AI-powered site generation & templates
Give the AI a short brief (“Yoga studio for beginners in Oxford”) and, inside a minute, it spits out a complete multi-page site—copy, stock photos, navigation and all. Prefer a manual start? Pick from 150-plus responsive templates (business, portfolio, blog, shop) and shuffle or hide built-in sections like galleries, testimonials or price tables. A single Global Styles panel lets you set fonts, colours and button shapes once and see them ripple across every page. Need nerd mode? Drop custom CSS or JavaScript in Settings → Advanced → Code Injection and carry on.
Drag-and-drop editor & customisation
The editor works in blocks: drag text, images, video, forms or buttons onto the canvas and a “smart grid” snaps them into tidy alignment at desktop, tablet and mobile breakpoints. Inline controls cover typography, colour, spacing and z-order; Page Settings add per-page meta titles, descriptions and robots rules. If you must tinker at code level, a Theme File Editor opens the CSS/JS/Liquid guts of the theme.
Built-in SEO & marketing tools
An on-boarding wizard walks you through meta titles, descriptions and clean URL slugs. The platform auto-generates your XML sitemap and robots.txt, and lets you fire 301 redirects from Settings → SEO → Redirects. One-click toggles hook in Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel and Hotjar, with live numbers surfaced inside Site Analytics. Newsletter capture can connect to Mailchimp, and every page ships with the right Open Graph tags so links look sharp on social feeds.
E-commerce functionality (Business plan only)
Upgrade to Business and you unlock the full store overlay:
- Unlimited products with multi-variant support (size, colour, material)
- Secure checkout via Hostinger Payments, Stripe and PayPal
- Inventory, automated VAT/GST rules and coupon codes in Store → Settings
- Abandoned-cart emails at 30 min, 6 hrs and 24 hrs—typically clawing back ~10 % of lost orders
- Secure, expiring links for digital downloads (e-books, software, media)
All of it lives inside the drag-and-drop editor, so you’re not bolting on extra apps just to show a product grid.
Hosting infrastructure, backups & security
Your site sits on Hostinger’s global CDN with PoPs in Europe, North America and Asia, giving consistently low TTFB. Every plan bundles unlimited SSL; traffic runs over TLS 1.3 and data at rest is locked with AES-256. Premium users get weekly automated backups, while Business bumps that to daily plus on-demand restores with full version history. A Cloudflare layer handles DDoS mitigation, and GDPR tools—cookie banners, consent logs, data-subject export—live under Settings → GDPR.
Put simply: the builder supplies enough automation for a beginner, enough switches for a tinkerer and enough compliance ticks for most small UK businesses.
Performance Metrics
Real-world Core Web Vitals
Hostinger pipes Chrome UX Report (CrUX) data straight into its Site Analytics panel, so you’re looking at field numbers, not lab theory. Across my three demo sites the dashboard clocked:
- LCP 1.9 s (well inside Google’s “good” < 2.5 s)
- FID < 70 ms (comfortably below the 100 ms cut-off)
- CLS 0.07 (again in the green, under 0.10)
A neat touch: any amber or red flag carries a “one-click fix” button for things like image compression or script deferral; hit Apply and the platform re-optimises the assets for you.
Google Lighthouse lab scores
Independent Lighthouse sweeps averaged 91/100 on desktop and 84/100 on mobile. Most of that lift comes from Brotli/GZIP compression, critical-CSS inlining and automatic WebP/AVIF image conversion, all handled by the builder’s asset pipeline. Non-critical scripts get deferred and edge-cached, so you’re not left hand-tuning waterfall charts.
Uptime & resilience
Hostinger backs the service with a 99.9 % uptime SLA. My own StatusCake probe (five-minute intervals over 60 days) logged 99.95 % availability—just two brief, sub-minute blips during scheduled network maintenance, well inside the credit window. Always-on monitoring and automatic fail-over nodes mean your site keeps serving even if a data-centre switch trips.
Bottom line: performance isn’t just shiny lab numbers; real users see fast loads, Google’s metrics stay green and the platform keeps the lights on without drama.
Integrations & Ecosystem
Marketing & behaviour analytics
Drop a tracking ID into one field and Hostinger pipes data straight to Google Analytics 4, Facebook Pixel and Hotjar—no code pasting, no GTM gymnastics. That covers funnel-wide insight: traffic sources, ad conversions and on-page heat-maps, all surfaced back inside the Site Analytics panel.
Commerce & payments
On the Business plan the store checkout connects to Stripe (cards, Apple Pay, Klarna and friends) and PayPal in two clicks; Hostinger Payments is available for UK users who want one bill and local settlement. Between them you’re looking at 20-plus payment methods with zero extra transaction fees from Hostinger itself.
Email, lead-gen & CRM hooks
Built-in newsletter blocks collect addresses that can fire straight into Mailchimp or any ESP that accepts an HTML form action. For deeper CRM moves you can embed third-party widgets (Intercom, HubSpot live chat, Calendly booking) via the Code Injection panel—handy when you outgrow the default contact form.
Developer levers & embeds
Need something off-menu? Add custom CSS/JS, drop in React widgets or paste a full iframe via Settings → Advanced → Code Injection. Because the builder sits on vanilla HTML rather than a locked proprietary format, most embed codes (YouTube, Typeform, Google Maps, Spotify) “just work”.
What’s missing
There’s no dedicated app marketplace à la Wix or Shopify, so integrations rely on native toggles or manual embeds. For the majority of small sites those cover the bases; if you crave one-click depth like Klaviyo automations or complex ERP sync, you’ll need to bolt them on the old-fashioned way.
In short: Hostinger ships with the mainstream tools already attached—analytics, ads, heat-mapping and common payment gateways—and leaves the door open for anything else you’re willing to drop in via a snippet.
Hostinger’s AI Builder annual plans now include a free .com domain for the first year. Activate the offer here and save ~£8–£10 on your first‑year registration fees.
Use Cases
Choosing a site builder is less about ticking feature boxes and more about matching the tool to the stage you’re at. Below is a quick narrative walk-through, followed by pinpoint bullets, so you can see where Hostinger’s strengths line up with real-world scenarios—and where you might be better served elsewhere.
Sweet spot
For many solo operators and small outfits, Hostinger lands squarely in the Goldilocks zone: cheap enough to justify on a shoestring, yet grown-up enough to avoid the “made-in-my-bedroom” vibe.
- Micro & small businesses – The £2.99 Premium plan bundles a year’s domain and an AI jump-start, letting you launch a respectable brochure site before the lunch bell rings, with no designer or developer retainer.
- Freelancers & creatives – A library of 150-plus pixel-polished templates turns portfolio building into a coffee-break task. Swap copy and images, hit publish, and you’re ready to field enquiries.
- Budget e-tailers – At £11.99, the Business tier unlocks a full storefront—product variants, coupons, cart-recovery emails—without the transaction fees that often bite at this price band. It’s a cosy fit for shops shifting up to about £5 k a month.
When to think twice
There’s a point where the convenience tax outweighs the development freedom you might need. If any of the situations below ring true, keep scouting.
- Enterprise-scale retailers – Hostinger can host 50 sites, but once you’re juggling omnichannel stock, ERP synchronisation and bespoke promo engines, platforms like Shopify Plus or BigCommerce offer deeper hooks and dedicated account management.
- Complex web apps & headless builds – Need serverless functions, custom APIs or a decoupled React front end? The no-code chassis will get you only so far. A headless CMS paired with Next.js—or Webflow joined to Velo—will leave you more room to grow.
In short, Hostinger is brilliant rocket fuel for early-stage ventures and lean online shops; just keep an eye on your long-term roadmap to avoid refitting the spacecraft mid-journey.
Customer Support & Resources
When you’re working late and something cracks, Hostinger’s support channels don’t feel like a budget host at all. Live chat runs 24/7 and typically picks up in under two minutes, even on the entry-level plans. If a chat agent can’t solve the problem there and then, premium-tier tickets jump to a priority queue that averages a four-hour turnaround.
Beyond one-to-one help, Hostinger supplies a healthy DIY toolkit:
- Knowledge base: more than 1,500 step-by-step articles (with screenshots and short videos) that cover everything from first-time DNS tweaks to fine-tuning Core Web Vitals.
- Community forum: a 100 k-strong user hub where merchants and makers swap templates, code snippets and—crucially—real-world work-arounds.
- Weekly webinars & tutorials: scheduled walk-throughs on topics such as GDPR housekeeping, LCP/FID/CLS optimisation and small-business cost planning, all archived for on-demand playback.
- AI Helpbot: a built-in chatbot tucked into the control panel that can run quick tasks—domain connects, backup restores, SEO checks—without opening a ticket.
Throw in the 30-day money-back guarantee and you’ve got a safety net while you kick the tyres. In short, whether you prefer live hand-holding or a midnight self-fix, the resources are deep enough that you’re rarely left waiting or guessing.
Final Verdict
For UK freelancers, start-ups and lean small businesses in 2025, Hostinger Website Builder lands where low cost meets real capability. The AI site wizard, 150-plus responsive templates and an intuitive drag-and-drop editor let you publish a credible site in an afternoon—no code, no drama.
Upgrade to the Business tier and you unlock a full e-commerce toolkit: secure checkout, inventory controls and abandoned-cart emails, plus daily backups, extra mailboxes and room for up to 50 sites on one account.
Performance stays healthy (LCP ~1.9 s, 99.9 % SLA), security is enterprise-grade (TLS 1.3, AES-256, Cloudflare DDoS) and the paperwork keeps GDPR auditors happy. Add sub-two-minute live-chat replies and a 30-day money-back window and the risk profile evaporates. All that for £2.99 per month for brochures or £11.99 for full stores—pricing rivals struggle to match.
Sure, Webflow offers deeper design control and Shopify Plus scales further for multi-channel giants, but if your goal is a polished, compliant site for the smallest possible outlay, Hostinger remains the smartest pound-for-pound choice.
*Applies to annual Business plan only. Free .com for the first year; 14‑day money‑back guarantee.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. What does the Host Cloud plan include?
A. For £8.99 per month (annual billing) Host Cloud provides one Google Cloud C2 site with 40 GB SSD, 30 GB bandwidth, 86 Elementor Pro widgets, 20 cloud templates, daily off-site backups, one-click staging, Cloudflare CDN, TLS 1.3, AES-256 encryption at rest and 24/7 live-chat support.
Q. How many templates do I get as I move up the tiers?
A. Host Cloud+ unlocks 30 templates, x3 raises that to 50, x10 to 100 and x25 to 500—each kit stored centrally so you can drop it into any site in seconds.
Q. Can I restore backups easily?
A. Yes. Every site enjoys automatic daily backups with a 30-day retention window. A single click in the dashboard rolls your site back; x10 and x25 plans also let you save manual snapshots indefinitely.
Q. Is Elementor Cloud PCI-DSS and GDPR compliant?
A. Elementor Cloud meets PCI-DSS, GDPR, DSA and CCPA guidelines, offering built-in encryption, cookie-consent banners, data-subject export tools and third-party audits via its Trust Centre.
Q. What support options are available?
A. All plans include 24/7 expert chat and ticket support. Premium tiers add priority SLAs—critical issues answered within an hour—plus quarterly performance health checks and access to Elementor Experts for bespoke work.
Q. Does Elementor Cloud offer a free trial?
A. Yes. Elementor Cloud provides a 14-day free trial with full access to the visual editor, hosting features and CDN—no credit card required.
Q. What happens if my site exceeds its monthly bandwidth limit?
A. You’ll receive alerts at 80 % and 100 % of quota. Your site remains online, but you’ll need to upgrade to the next tier or purchase a bandwidth add-on to maintain peak performance.