One.com Review

One.com is one of the smaller website builders on the market, currently housing over 1.5 million customers. In many ways, it’s a bit of a diamond in the rough, with an excellent array of features and a cheap price tag to match. While the service is a bit overshadowed by the best website builders out there, you should certainly consider One.com as your solution of choice.

Over the course of this One.com review, we’ll talk about those features and why they’re important to building your website. Additionally, we’ll discuss some of the weak points of the service such as a poor blog implementation and an occasionally laggy interface.

At the end, we’ll give a final verdict of the service, so make sure you read through before upgrading. If you’d rather take it out for a spin yourself, though, you can do so with a 15-day money back guarantee.

Alternatives for One.com

Strengths & Weaknesses

Features

Despite the low cost of One.com, there are quite a few features. All plans come encrypted with SSL security and website builder support, with a generous amount of storage to boot. Outside of that, most features come at a premium, one that’s not too concerning considering how cheap plans are by themselves.

Starting with free features, though, every plan comes equipped with unlimited email addresses and Google AdWords credit. Email uses any typical webmail client with user definable mailbox limits. You won’t have the clean interface of something like GSuite (one of our best email hosting services) but instead any client you choose.

Every plan has access to a blog as well, but not a blog and the builder. You can have one or the other, each fit with their own set of templates. Blog templates are dated to say the least, with no sort of backend for organization or creating posts. This is one of the weakest areas of One.com, and something we’ll discuss later, in the “design” section.

The only workaround is to use a subdomain which, thankfully, is free. In your blog set up, you have to place the blog at “blog.yourdomain.com” instead of your normal domain. That’s the only way you can get around using the archaic templates as your main design.

Not all free features have a downside, though. One.com provides everyone with comprehensive analytics for their site, FTP/sFTP access and virus protection. Most of the bases are covered, and covered comprehensively, making the downside of an ugly blog hurt far less.

Overall, paid features are far more impressive. For an extra cost, you can add SiteLock to your site, a complete security suite for addressing malware and dealing with spam. The tool can scan up to 500 pages on a site and provide a complete look at any vulnerabilities. It’ll even do a reputation report and blacklist lookout daily so you know where you stand in the eyes of search engines.

Speaking of which, One.com also offers SEO services via MarketGoo. The basic plan provides you with basic SEO metrics, a weekly audit and up to five keywords to monitor. The more expensive Evolution plan expands on that with an enhanced report with a dashboard, up to 15 keywords and a daily audit of your site.

For the money, it’s hard to beat the feature set of One.com. The blog issue lies more in the realm of design choices so it doesn’t hurt this section of the review too much. Instead, features like an SSL certificate, SiteLock and MarketGoo lock up this section as an easy win for One.com.

Pricing

Hosting SSL certificate25GB of storageWebsite builder up to five pages Details 25 GB Storage Space Unlimited GB Bandwidth 1 Domains Domain Name	$ 2.45/ month
Website Builder HD image importBackup and restoreWebsite builder up to 200 pages Details 25 GB Storage Space Unlimited GB Bandwidth 1 Domains Domain Name	$ 3.72/ month
Webshop Unlimited products Details 200 GB Storage Space Unlimited GB Bandwidth Unlimited Domains Domain Name	$ 12.45/ month

One.com is a bit light on plans across the board. The service, in total, only offers three, two of which can take advantage of the website builder. Despite the limited selection, rates are pretty low, with a surprising amount of features to boot. No matter what plan you land on, you’ll get a lot of value for money.

Standard hosting is fairly straightforward. It’s a shared plan that grants you a single core CPU and 512MB of RAM. However, you can also take advantage of the website builder. It’s limited to only five pages, but that should be enough if you’re looking for a straightforward site.

Additionally, this plan offers flexibility to move out of the website builder in the future. You have complete FTP/sFTP access to your site, making WordPress installation possible. If you’d like to learn how to do so, make sure to read our beginner’s guide to using WordPress. On top of that, the plan also comes with unlimited email addresses and some Google AdWords credit.

If you’re all in on the website builder, though, the dedicated plan is far better suited. The page limit is lifted, granting up to 200 pages, all for only about a dollar more per month. It’s far cheaper than pretty much any other website builder in the space, rivaled only by web hosts who offer an additional builder such as GoDaddy (read our GoDaddy GoCentral review).

You get all the same features as web hosting minus the FTP/sFTP access, meaning WordPress is out of the question. However, that’s at the gain of premium templates that are fully responsive and optimized for mobile. You have backup and restore features and the ability to import HD images as well.

Prices are low, but the issue here is the lack of any free plan. Most dedicated website builders offer one, whereas hosts turned builders do not. Unfortunately, One.com sits in the latter category. It’s not surprising by any means, but surely disappointing.

One.com’s Ecommerce Plans

There are plans available for ecommerce as well. You can use the website builder for a webshop or WordPress, the latter option coming in a couple bucks more per month. On the website builder end, the plan is the exact same as the normal website builder, but allows you to sell products as well.

It’s a steep jump in price, but that doesn’t mean the plan isn’t cheaper than the competition. For example, an online store at Wix (read our Wix review) comes in nearly $5 more expensive than One.com’s rate.

Design & Tools

One.com has an editor that’s eerily similar to the one at Weebly (read our Weebly review). Even so, it doesn’t quite land on the fluidity level of that provider, with a laggy interface and confusing segregation of tools.

You have access to a fairly wide array of templates and they all look pretty good. Some are locked off for those without a premium plan, but that’s not too disappointing. One.com doesn’t hide the good themes behind this wall and leave the rubbish. Instead, there’s a nice mix of the two, meaning you should have a good option no matter what plan you’re on.

Choose your template wisely because you’re likely sticking with it. If you want to dismantle everything, though, that is possible. One.com has a fairly open editor, one that doesn’t hold your hand much throughout the process. It assumes you know a bit about how website builders work, granting the flexibility to change everything.

The editor itself works like Weebly. You have a true drag-and-drop interface, with the left-side menu holding the elements that you can place on the page. It’s an intuitive editor, but one that loses a few points from poor optimization. Lower-end machines will lag using it, losing some of the fluidity that Weebly has. It’s a small amount of lag, mind you, but it’s still there, nonetheless.

The real issue is the segregation of template settings and page settings. You can drag around anything on the page in the page editor, but can’t touch anything involved in the universal design of your site such as headers and footers. One.com thankfully grays out these areas to let you know. Even so, it’s annoying to pop back and forth between the two to get a few simple tasks done.

As mentioned in the features section above, you can blog at One.com, but it’s not included within the editor. Unlike most website builders, you can’t add a blog page or drag a blog element onto any page. You can only set up a blog within the control panel and, while the process is fairly straightforward, it’s an asinine implementation that only leads to frustration.

Ease of Use

Despite those frustrations, ease of use is actually quite good. One.com may make some strange decisions with blog placement and theme selection, but the build process itself feels fluid. It borrows a page of Weebly’s book, and that’s a good thing. As long as your theme fits your purpose, you should be able to design a site with few to no issues.

The left-side toolbar makes for a fully interactive experience. You drag the elements directly on the page, so there’s no fussing around with trying to find an add icon or digging for what you want. One.com includes some Photoshop-like markers as well so you can be sure everything is lining up.

Adding new pages is just as simple. Your editor is in the top toolbar, and a couple of clicks there will bring up the page selection screen. There’s a wide array of different options for webshops, galleries and contact pages, all filled with dummy content. It’s simple to add a new page and expand your website.

As far as the overall look of your site, you can customize the template, but it’s a bit difficult to do so. You have to go into the page editor, add a new page and then click on “explore One.com templates” in order to change yours. As far as our testing went, we found no other way to change the template, which is a bit annoying.

If choosing a new template isn’t for you, you can always design your own. One.com allows a strange feature where different templates can be used on different pages. It allows a lot of flexibility, but can be a bit confusing for newbies.

From a design standpoint, putting template options and page options in different areas doesn’t make much sense. From an ease of use perspective, though, it helps a bit. While the unique system takes some getting used to, it forces you to segment what you’re working on so you don’t have to worry about messing up universal elements of your site. For instance, dragging one element on the page won’t cause you to accidentally grab your logo along the way.

To be clear, that doesn’t mean splitting these tools up is a good thing. It helps ease of use a bit, but the small sacrifice in this area would make for a much more fluid builder despite some potential accidents.

For purely building your site, One.com is extremely easy to use because of its familiarity. The completely interactive interface means you can do exactly what you want with the click of a mouse. More advanced options such as template switching, though, are a cause for concern.

Support

As One.com is a full-fledged web host, support is quite good. Many website builders restrict support to a help center and an email address. While the same is true for One.com, you also have live chat, an around the clock solution for any pesky problem that may arise.

The help center is fairly straightforward. One.com has nine different categories with everything from getting started to managing your subscription. The getting started area is particularly helpful as it provides a nice overview of every service One.com offers. This will get you up and running on the website builder, WordPress, Microsoft Office 365 and more in a few short articles.

The pieces themselves are written cleanly with an included table of contents for more complex tutorials. A few of the articles have screenshots, such as those pertaining to the website builder, but it would’ve been nice to see screenshots in more articles as well as some accompanying videos.

Unfortunately, One.com falls into the trap that many website builders do in the help center. There are plenty of tutorials in there from activating a subscription to starting a blog, but there are no troubleshooting guides. In our reviews, Strikingly (read our Strikingly review) is the only builder that has these articles, which are extremely helpful for small, common problems.

Instead, you’ll need to contact support if you have any issues. Live chat and email are available with fairly quick response times. We received a response via email in a little over 10 hours and live chat within a few minutes. However, for non-English speakers, live chat will be slower. Only English speaking agents are available 24/7 whereas other languages have normal, eight-hour operating windows.

The forms of support are all excellent at One.com, though. Additions like a forum or phone support would certainly be welcome, but the implementation works well enough how it is. Articles in the help center are clearly written with a good amount of depth, and support responds quickly as long as you speak English.

The Verdict

If you’re looking for a feature-rich website builder that can save you a few bucks, then One.com is a great choice. You’re getting an awful lot for your money considering how important features like an SSL certificate are becoming for modern browsers. Ease of use is also top notch, with a familiar interface that focuses on the important areas of web design.

However, the proverbial elephant in the room is the design of the builder itself. Strange choices were made on One.com’s end, not the least of which is the horrible implementation of a blog. That combined with the split of tools, difficult to find template options and occasionally laggy interface make the service feel like a bit of a wash.

It is for some, though. If you want a cheap website through a user friendly interface, then One.com is for you. Just don’t plan on doing much blogging.

What do you think of One.com? Let us know in the comments and, as always, thanks for reading.