Affiliate Disclosure

Some links from this site to the builders it assesses are affiliate links. If you follow one and later buy a plan, the vendor may pay a commission. That is how maintaining the standard is funded. It costs you nothing: the price is identical whether you arrive through a link here or type the vendor's address directly.

How the links work

Every commercial outbound link on this site points to an address on this domain beginning /go/, followed by the builder's name. Those addresses redirect to the vendor and are marked as sponsored, so readers and search engines can both identify them as commercial. No vendor, network or tracking address is ever written into the body of a page, which means you can tell before clicking which links are paid and which are not.

What commission does not buy

Scores here are computed from six published criteria carrying fixed weights: ease of use, design and templates, SEO and performance, value for money, ecommerce and extensibility, and support and lock-in. Commission rate is not among the six. It is not a tiebreak, not an adjustment applied afterwards, and not a consideration at any stage. No vendor has had advance sight of a score, a right of reply before publication, or any route to paying for placement.

The proof, rather than the promise

Every affiliate site asserts its independence, so here is the arithmetic instead. The most lucrative programme in this set belongs to Webflow: a 50% revenue share for twelve months, then 10% for up to twelve further months, with a 90-day cookie and first-touch attribution. Webflow ranks third, at 29 of 40. The highest percentage rate belongs to Hostinger, at 40% rising to 60% with volume. Hostinger ranks fifth, at 28 of 40.

The builder ranked first is Wix, at 32 of 40, on a flat bounty of $100 per referral with a 30-day cookie and a $300 minimum payout, which is materially worse economics than either of the two platforms it outranks. Squarespace, ranked second, pays $100 to $200 once, behind the highest payout threshold in the set at $400.

If commission drove the ranking, it would open with Webflow and Hostinger. It does not; the top two positions pay us least. That inversion is the best evidence available that the rubric is doing the work, and it is published because it is inconvenient to us.

What to do with this

Treat every recommendation here as a claim to be checked rather than accepted. The criteria, the weights, the tiebreak rule and the full arithmetic are published in the methodology, and any scorecard can be added up by hand in under a minute. Disclosure is not a substitute for a standard you can audit; it is only the part that has to be stated in words.