Sitebuilder Reviews 186

Firstly, the actual site editor software is functional on a very basic level and I built a simple site with it quite quickly. Not great but just enough to not feel like I have to take legal action to get my money back.

But the CONSTANT attempts to make you 'upgrade' to 'features' which should be included are incredibly tiresome. If you try to access your site's 'save history' you get a pop-up telling you 'you MUST upgrade' to access saves made more than two days ago, despite the fact that it won't even let you access one made 4 four minutes ago.

If you try to contact 'support' about anything you get a cursory reply from a piece of clip-art with a made up name who didn't read your support enquiry properly, consisting of a copy/paste response taken from the site's basic FAQ, and then telling you 'you MUST upgrade'.

There is a whiff of dishonesty and greed about the whole thing, despite it being just about competent on a very basic level. I would not recommend them to anyone. Stay away.

Had an email from "Matt" who told me that our current domain name was due to go back on sale and to repond straight away to secure this domain. We have owned our domain for the past 5 years!! When I emailed them to ask how they were going to sell our already owned domain, I simply got an automated response. Sounds very dodgy!!

After months of trying to cancel and them still charging my account I have had to finally cancel my CC and dispute the charges

Completely scammer. Don't even touch that website, whey will suck your money up. They put charges on my credit cards without my permission and refused to give refund. I've reported to local fraut investigation team about this website.

Never even signed up and they are taking money out of my account. Do not get involved.

They are a bunch of incompetent scroungers of thieving people of there money, once you have your details you've got no hope, you can't contact them as the phone number is wrong on the website, STAY CLEAR

Never got my domain and no upgrade provided. They attract you by making you build a free website and then you pay and after you regret. No customer support, No Billing Deptt. All what you see is what you get so please do not sign up for any plans as you will be charged unreasonably on credit card and then you can't do anything

I love the sitebuilder platform. I'm quite happy to pay all the extra money they charge because I really like the product however I hate the customer service. We've spent hours on the phone and got absolutely no where. This needs to be better or we will switch. So disappointing.

I signed up for sitebuilder.com and soon after I made my payment I realized it was a mistake. The payment took 2-3 days to process until they activated my account. Sitebuilder.com is run outside of the US maybe in the UK or AU who knows. I prefer to do business with companies here in the US.
Also, after I signed up I noticed that you have to pay extra to have a "fast website", this I hate because it should be included and they shouldnt be holding back your speed. I have worked with godaddy, and they are awesome, you pay for a site you dont get charged extra for speed, and they answer the phone with a US speaking person. Also tried WIX and they are really good.

The site had amazing reviews in one of those "Top 5 website building sites" and customer service was praised, obviously, that was a manufactured article to draw in business. As soon as I had a lot of trouble finding a phone number on their site, I started to wonder. Somehow I tracked it down, ONLY when I entered my name and email, called, then it rang about 10 times before an artificial voice answered and said to leave a message. That turned on my scammer radar and sure enough I get an email from "Matt". I don't trust it when they only give a first name.

So there were many red flags right off the bat here - I'm sorry other folks lost their money but I thank them for writing their reviews here...it confirmed my suspicions.

An absolute scam! Unauthorized credit card charges. Bully marketing practises. They charge you any amount they decide without asking you. The contact phone numbers do not work. BBB have an alert that the address of the company is fake. Had to cancel my credit card and spent countless hours building the site. Tried to cut my losses and just transfer my free domain and they will not respond. Flat out lie on their chat and customer service with names like ‘James Brown’ and other names that seem completely false. Will not respond if they do not like what you say and then will make unauthorized charges out of the blue. My visa company said they are making tricky charges and I have to cancel my card! This is an absolute scam! Do not give them your credit card info, it looks like they are planning to charge your card and run. Horrible consumer experience and massive waste of time and effort. Flat out scammers and liars. Now they have my domain and I cant get it back or through another company/provider. They charged me for what was supposed to be free and now they own my domain and wont respond.

Once I had entered my pay pal details it went to the next page and automatically registered me for a month by month charge of £140+ which I did NOT want. I immediately emailed after the paypal incident and requested my account be cancelled and NO payments taken however this was ignored. Guess what I received emails to say it had been cancelled and the charge wouldn't come off my account but of course, it did.

RIDICULOUS CUSTOMER SERVICE


Not sure if they use real names on the emails but the people who stole my money and lied to me via email are Orson West, Christina Smart and Matt

I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND THIS COMPANY OR THEIR "SERVICES" TO ANYONE

5 seconds to take my money without consent and 7-10 working days to get it back.

Disgraceful

I created a free site then upgraded to a .co.uk - I was advised to buy the SEO tool and to sign up for the monthly amount as I thought we might switch to another host. The debits then started to pile in at £12 per month and the SEO tool which was a waste of time as this site is just for people to go to so its on a business card - we are a garden maintenance business and not going to use the site that much for stats, online purchase etc. Just there for the card really to show we're 'genuine' although most of our business has been on recommendation so far.
After a while and many complaints I switched to a 'pay an annual fee' (not offered at the outset to a web builder 'virgin' like me!) and that was all cool.
Since November 2015 little has been done on the site until the last week when I added some pieces but then found I couldn't access the site. Support were good on chat and each time it was just that I was in site 'edit' and when published it eventually was ok. Tonight I tried to register for Google traffic analytics and it said 'URL ends with an invalid top-level domain name' so I contacted support on chat - they spoke of something called 'Nominet' which I was supposed to register with back on October! Nothing said to this point! I am in the process of doing this - support were going on about company registration but again I don't have to do this for what I'm doing! I will talk to Nominet but the lack of info is astonishing and I wonder what I will find out next - so much of this website creation is very much assuming that the builder (ie me) knows everything and more - this is not the case and these builder sites should be much more informative and idiot - friendly to people like me!

I signed up with Sitebuilder, transferred my domain from GoDaddy because Sitebuilder was cheaper.....BIG, BIG MISTAKE.

First Transfer Submission
1) Signed up for service
2) Began domain transfer process around the 4th of January
3) Was told it would take 2 - 5 days to transfer the domain after submitting their verification requirements
4) 6 days still no live site
5) I contact them via email on day 7, we need you to click the link in the email - so I click the link again
6) It will be 2 - 5 days for it to be completed
And all I hear is crickets.......and still have no live site or transfer at 8 days after initial request

Second Transfer Submission
1) Check status on transfer - am told we never got one you need to re-submit and click link in email
2) Re-submit transfer on 1/18 for 2nd time
3) Again, 2 - 5 days for it to be completed - that would mean between 1/20 and 1/23.......
4) I check to see if my site is live on 1/25 - nothing....crickets
5) Here we are on 1/26 and still no live site now they're telling me the transfer is completed and just waiting to be entered on name servers for recognition......and it's been escalated to be done in 4 - 24 hours.......
6) Now, 1/27 and still no live site........I've spent the last 2.5 hours on hold to get a live person - which is yet to happen even when I selected "Cancel Service" option.....you'd think they'd answer that extension quickly to keep the customer....NOT this company
7) I started a chat session with someone, gave them the ticket number from the 1/26 escalation and don't ya know, they want me to click the link in the email again just so they can tell me it will be another 2 - 5 days. He/she can't explain why I was told the transfer was complete yesterday and just awaiting name entry, nor can they tell me anything other than "we'll escalate it and it will be live in 24 - 48 hours".....

What a joke and the lost revenue to me is in the thousands having my site down for 3 weeks now.......I'm guessing they won't reimburse me for that either.

Oh and I'm still on hold to get a live person.....I'm first in line, but I guess they don't answer their phones EVER no matter what number in line you are.

Best advice, avoid this company at all cost - you get what you pay for and cheap means awful poor service.

During signing up I paid for the domain name and domain security.
After signing up I realised the company wasn't what I was after and emailed to have my account deleted with no reply. I find it confusing how they can't reply to emails but can managed to charge over $100 then charge another $10 in the same day. The customer service I received was horrible, customer service representatives like to try and keep you with faulty service, trick you into not receiving full refund amounts they 'forget to mention' and drag refund process out. Furthermore, I got hung up on during this process. They still kept $15.97 saying they couldn't refunded a domain name. If anyone has any legal or practical information to help me refund the additional money let me know, I'm honestly not happy with this company having any of my money.

So many hidden charges that it leaves you with a headache trying to work it out, I managed "After a massive effort" to get a refund only to find out that they had withheld £18 for the domain name which by the way, they claimed was FREE when I signed up with them..

Alan..

1. We tested the service and found it useful until had to use it on our own domains.

2. First they asked to upgrade to a £3.59 /month for 24 month service.
3. I did that.
4. The next day i got a call from my bank saying that Sitebuilder had claimed a $ 86 transaction.
5. I confidently said its ok as they may have asked for an approval of £ 3.59 per month for 2 years.
6. Then we added a 2nd website on 13 Jan 15 at £4.99/month for 24 months.
7. Little to my knowledge when i accepted, a fee of £ 11.98 was added along with for SEO Ebook. (Something i had not subscribed to but seems was auto added)
8. I went to my bank account today to check a few other things and found the below charges:
a. £143.77
b. £ 11.98
c. £ 11.94

9. I then went to my account to check the invoices and to my horror I was getting invoiced at £ 11.98 per month for the last few months for my previous site as well as a full charge of £ 143.77 for the new site that was to be £4.99 per month
10. I went to their online chat and there was a JUSTIN who was on.
11. He informed me that the discounted prices were valid for just 1 month and thereafter it was a full price account.
12. I then tried to remove my card details from my account profile. But it won’t let me remove my card.
13. So I called my bank to cancel the direct debit feature for these guys.
14. In the meantime I asked Justin to cancel my account and give me a full refund.
15. He said he can refund me 2 of the transactions but not the 3rd as that was for a NON refundable SEO product which I never bought in the first place! After an hour of haggling he agreed to refund it.
16. He sent me emails of cancelling my account and having processed 3 refunds
17. However when I asked for refund of the previous months £ 11.98 charges, he said I had already used the service and could not claim a refund. s
18. I suggested that he keep the £3.59 and refund the excess charged.
19. He had no answer. All through my chat I asked him what they mean when they say ‘£3.59/month for 24 months’ – he had no answer. All he kept saying was that the discounted fee is for 1 month only!
20. I then asked him where the company is HQ and the company reg number. He said they are in the UK and he cannot divulge company details on the chat.

I am hoping I get my refund back else will have to press charges.

I found them earlier as they were recommended as the best online site building company. Probably the website that recommended them belongs to them too.

Am truly shocked at such a practice. I know there is a TV programme on BBC that checks on companies like these. I have reported them and hope these guys are caught for unfair practices.

They collected my money, then said they need copies of my passport, drivers license, and credit card to process my order. This is a company that:
1. offers a FREE website
2. then charges $92.16
3. and offers many other ways to pay even more
4. then after receiving the $92.16, wants my passport, drivers license, and photo copy of credit card...SURE!
Would you also like my social security number, my tax id number, my bank account number, a list of my relatives, a list of all my other credit cards, etc., etc? How about my fingerprints?
How about if I just put you on all my credit cards as authorized user, and tell them to send you cards? And I could change all my bank accounts to joint accounts with you as co-signer. Anything else you would like?

How about if you just refund my money as I requested?

On Monday my email account via Sitebuilder.com disappeared.

Sitebuilder simply claim this never happened, they have no record of it happening and there is no way to restore lost emails.

I've experienced poor customer service before but never been absolutely lied to.

I have kept the full transcripts of my support logs. They refuse to share any technical information regarding my account, refuse to escalate my complaint, talk in circles and contradict themselves.

The nearest I've had to an explanation is "I've done it". I've not. My emails worked in the morning, I went to a meeting and returned to find my email account didn't exist! I've asked for a log/report of when "I'd done it" but of course, nothing.

Use sitebuilder.com only if you have nothing to lose. Expect nothing from them if anything at all goes wrong.

After reading through some reviews online, I decided to give SiteBuilder ago. All that I could read on the service was positive, it seemed like a no brainer!

I started off with SiteBuilder by registering my new domain, I loved the fact that it was free. I paid for a subscription (£4.99 / month for 2 years - yes I know! That's a long time!), and picked up the SEO eBook on the way in (which I highly recommend).

The steps from then on were extremely easy to follow. First, I picked out a template (there were thousands, and I mean THOUSANDS, to choose from), opting for the best looking plain blog template in the end. Then I was thrown straight into the website building environment...

Editing was extremely simple and it had the same feeling as old school Paint software we have all used at some point in our lives. To say the least, it was easy to grasp and use.

Within 10 minutes, I had my site. Ready. Done. Finito!

I am extremely happy with how my website looks and feels to use, plus I am now extremely confident about growing it because of the SEO tips and tricks I learnt from the SEO eBook I bought.

Overall, it was a great experience building a site on SiteBuilder and I recommend them whole heartedly to everyone who reads this! Those who rate one star? They must really hate being able to register free domain names...

Alton,