Best Website Builder for Animal Rescues in 2024

Building a website is one of the first and most important steps in starting a new business venture. Your website is essentially the online home of your business. It’s a place where you can showcase your products and services and freely communicate with your customers without the burdensome constraints of social media platforms.

Since you’re building an animal rescue website, your needs will differ slightly from other websites. This guide will help you find the best animal rescue website builder currently available and give additional recommendations to help you create the best website for your business.

Make sure you have everything you need to get started. Check out our Best Website Builder Review and How to Make a Website guides to get started on the right foot!

Best Website Builder for Animal Rescues: Our Recommendation

Our #1 recommended website builder for animal rescues is GoDaddy. Its tool has made vast improvements over the past few years and has become the simplest and most intuitive drag-and-drop website builder on the market. GoDaddy’s search engine optimization (SEO) tools are also quite robust.

Using the GoDaddy Website Builder for Animal Rescue Websites

It’s important to understand what your goals are when you begin creating a website for your business. When making an animal rescue website, the primary objectives of your site will be to:

• Show the animals that are up for adoption
• Allow people  to contact you quickly online
• Create an online home for new customers to find your business

The GoDaddy Website Builder has many built-in features that would be excellent for helping you build a website that lets you save as many animals as possible. Your animal rescue does its best to help animals in your community, so connecting to people with animal-related concerns and being able to showcase the pets you have up for adoption is crucial.

Even though there may be many different options you can use to create your website’s appearance, the image gallery and live chat are two that you should consider using right away. Why?

With the image gallery, you can show all the animals you have with you, so people can browse online before coming to visit your rescue.

Here’s an example:

As you can tell from this image, it’s simple to select an image and add it to your website. You can also easily delete it, which is something you may want to do after your rescues find a good home. Best of all, there is no coding or difficult formatting required.

Another major benefit of the GoDaddy builder is that you can add a chat directly to your website’s main page. If you have staff in the office, why not allow them to take direct messages from people with questions about the pets up for adoption or about animals that they feel need to be rescued?

The chat lets you connect immediately in real time, so you can get new information about animals who need help from people all over.

Open the chat to set up the feature and make sure that people can connect to you during your business hours. You can also add a bot that can answer questions on your behalf. 

The ease of use of this platform is excellent for beginners through professionals. There’s a reason why we rate it #1.

Getting Started With GoDaddy

One of the other major benefits of the GoDaddy website builder is the ease of getting started. When you log in to the builder for the first time, you will see a two-question form. For “Choose a category,” type in “animal rescue” in the provided field and click “Next.” Then, on the next screen, type the name of your business.

After about 10 seconds, GoDaddy will take you to the front page of your new website.

GoDaddy’s builder uses artificial intelligence (AI) to better understand your business name and type so as to construct a template that’ll best suit your business.

Once you make it this far, it’s as simple as customizing the information on the pre-built pages to match your business, and you’ll have a semi-custom website that’s ready to be published to the web — all in less than five minutes.

Of course, 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 GoDaddy Website Builder for Animal Rescue Websites

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

• Lack of design flexibility — You may want to add apps or third-party applications to your website to make it easier to collect donations or to run your business, but you won’t be able to do so with the GoDaddy Website Builder. Right now, GoDaddy does not have these features, so the tools available on the builder are all you can use. In the future, GoDaddy may provide access to developers, but until then, you may not have all the flexibility that you desire. 
• You have to pay to play — One downside of the GoDaddy platform is that it can quickly become costly for small businesses and nonprofit organizations. The basic plan is only $9.99 a month, but that doesn’t give you all the marketing or outreach power as a better plan. To get an opportunity to use unlimited social media outreach or to send thousands of emails in an email blast, you have to upgrade to a more expensive plan.

GoDaddy Website Builder Summary

Overall, the GoDaddy Website Builder is our #1 recommendation for animal rescue websites. the pros outweigh the cons by heeps and gobs.

Check out the

GoDaddy Website Builder

 for yourself and get a 30% discount by using our link.

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

• GoDaddy Website Builder Review

• How to Make a GoDaddy Website

• How to Use the GoDaddy Website Builder

• GoDaddy Website Builder Pricing and Plans

• GoDaddy Website Builder Examples

Other Website Builders for Animal Rescues

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.

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.

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.

How to Choose a Website Builder for Animal Rescues

Choosing a website builder is one of the most important decisions you will make when it comes to building your animal rescue website. 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 2024 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 — 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

Animal rescues are special businesses with unique needs. To help get your business online fast, we believe that the GoDaddy Website Builder is the right tool to get the job done. 

You’ll have a chat feature to talk with potential adopters or those with animals that need help, and you can show the animals in your care online in an image gallery, too. Best of all, you can get your site running in just a few hours with this simple platform.

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