Wirecutter has been writing about website builders since 2018, and I’ve been testing and writing about software professionally since 2010. I have a long history with web design, having maintained a personal website since 2009. In that time I’ve hand-coded sites in HTML and React, built and maintained WordPress blogs, created quick landing pages in Carrd and Google Sites, and built company sites in GitHub Pages, Framer, and Shopify.

For this guide:

• We’ve researched and tested dozens of web builders since 2018. For our most recent update, I spent two dozen hours testing 20 builders, retesting our previous picks along with the latest AI-focused website builder tools.
• We interviewed three design and web builder experts via email: Sara Worrell-Berg, director of Stanford Web Services; Garreth Tigwell, assistant professor at Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Information and co-author of the study “Website Builders Still Contribute To Inaccessible Web Design”; and Paul Boag, author and user experience consultant.
• Melanie Pinola wrote previous versions of this guide. Some of her reporting and writing are still present in this version.
• Like all Wirecutter journalists, I review and test products with complete editorial independence. I’m never made aware of any business implications of my editorial recommendations. Read more about our editorial standards.

Everyone should have a website.

“The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information,” said the web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, to the BBC in 2003. Indeed, the original web browser included editing tools so that anyone could create a website.

Website builders fulfill the web’s original dream. They make website building accessible to everyone — no coding, developer, or server-management skills required.

If you know how to make a PowerPoint presentation, you can build a website with today’s website builders. Start with a template, customize it the way you like in a drag-and-drop editor, and then share it with the world on your custom domain. The best website builders guide you through the entire process, with smart presets to help your site rank on search engines and make your content accessible to all visitors.

Such tools are useful for anyone who is intimidated by the mere thought of coding, but they can also be handy for more technically inclined people who simply need to create a new site fast. On the flip side, they can also be limiting for businesses that have more advanced website needs.

There are a few questions you should think through before deciding whether to use a website builder or to invest in a custom-coded website, said Sara Worrell-Berg, Stanford University director of web services. “I always start with a critical question: Why do you need a website, and who will it serve? Then consider the resources available for maintaining the website in a sustainable way over time.”

Custom, hand-coded websites are better for large organizations and technical users. If your organization can afford investing hundreds or thousands of dollars in designing a site and has the resources to maintain the site over time, a custom website is worth considering. The same goes if you’re a developer who wants to manage every aspect of your site and has the time to maintain it when necessary.

Website builders are better for those with simpler website needs. This includes both smaller businesses and individuals, as well as people doing one-off projects inside larger organizations.

“If you’re just creating a basic marketing website with simple functionality like a contact us form, then there is no reason to hire a professional web developer when you can use platforms like Wix or Squarespace,” said user experience specialist Paul Boag. And with a website builder, other than paying for a monthly subscription of around $20 or less, you don’t have to worry about the long-term maintenance and upkeep of your website.

Reach for a website builder when you need a landing page, a signup page for an event, a portfolio site, or a quick way to test a business idea. If you hit its limits, and your business needs more, that’s the time to consider building a more advanced site.

Websites contain multitudes. They could be plain text, or they could be filled with animations, photos, and videos. They could be static, or they could be active with contact forms, comments, and communities.

What they all have in common is that they’re viewable in any web browser, each with a domain name that makes it unique from any other site online.

For this guide, we focused on website builders that offer the following key features geared toward building a professional website:

• Drag-and-drop editing: The best website builders let you add sections to your site and click or tap to move shapes, text, images, and other elements on the page as desired. You should be able to edit anything on your site without any coding skills, and what you see should be what you get.
• Modern templates: The easiest way to start a website is with a template. The best website builders include dozens or even hundreds of built-in templates with your subscription.
• Smart AI features: Although today’s AI tools still cannot make a full website for your business from a single prompt, the best website builders incorporate AI to help you choose smart defaults for your website theme and settings.
• Custom domain names: A website is a place to call your own on the internet. With a domain name (like yourcompany.com or yourname.com), you can start your site on one website builder and then migrate it to another without losing your audience or search rankings.
• Responsive design by default: Your site should look equally nice whether it’s viewed on a computer, a tablet, or a smartphone. You shouldn’t have to manually customize your design for each screen size.
• Built-in editing tools: Website builders should allow you to resize and crop images, format text, and perform other basic editing tasks without needing to switch to other software.
• Clear, affordable pricing: If you’re building a site with a custom domain and hosting — as opposed to a free site with a subdomain and branding from the builder — you’re likely to pay around $20 per month. That amount should cover a basic site with multiple pages, a custom domain, and no ads or branding from the website builder itself. Website builders should also offer a free trial, without requiring payment info, so that you can first confirm your ability to build the site you want.
• Analytics: You should be able to see how many people visit your website, and ideally you should be able to add a third-party analytics tool such as Google Analytics to your site to collect more in-depth data.
• Blog, storefront, and other add-ons: Although we expect website builders to be focused on quickly launching a simple website, the best builders also include additional tools to embed forms, add an e-commerce store, build a community, and more.
• Accessibility and SEO-friendliness: Website builders should create sites that work well with screen readers and rank well on search engines.

Based on the criteria above, we tried 20 website builders to see if they met our criteria, and then we built and published a new website from scratch with the 10 most promising.

Each time, we built the site once with AI tools (if available) and then again with a built-in template. We customized each site, adding and formatting text, uploading and resizing images, and adding standard header, footer, and site details.

We then tested the sites in desktop and mobile browsers, and we ran each site through Google Chrome’s Lighthouse tools to check for performance, responsiveness, accessibility, SEO, and compliance with best practices.

For this guide, we focused on website builders that help you quickly launch a website that you can customize any way you want. We didn’t include CMS tools focused on building blogs or e-commerce tools designed primarily to build an online shop. The website builders we selected are instead intended to help you quickly launch a web presence.

Top pick

The best website builder

Wix

With 900-plus templates, drag-and-drop editing, a CMS, e-commerce tools, and an AI assistant to guide you through the process, this builder is the best way to construct a website without knowing how to code.

Buy from Wix

Wix is the best tool for quickly building and launching a website thanks to its painless drag-and-drop editor and 900-plus themes. It also has a guided AI chatbot that can help you start your site with smart defaults, as well as checklists that surpass those of other website builders we tested in ensuring that you have SEO and accessibility covered.

With Wix, everything is included. You can buy a domain within Wix itself or bring your own. You can edit photos in Wix or with the included Adobe Express tools — which together offer more editing features than other website builders provide — or import images you’ve edited elsewhere. You can add text directly to a page or organize and publish longer articles in a content management system (CMS). You can publish a single page or build a full-featured website. And you can do all of that without writing a single line of code.

It has advanced features for added customization. Wix lets you build sites from sections as quickly as in Google Sites or Canva Websites, but it also pairs that functionality with advanced features that simpler website builders often don’t include, such as a CMS, support for header code, and developer tools to expand your site as needed.

Its autosave, version control, and real-time collaboration features help you work with others better than you can in Squarespace or in WordPress’s website builder. And unique among website builders, its checklists help you avoid having to search through settings pages to find obscure features. Its broad mix of the best website builder features simplifies creating a well-rounded website.

It offers a guided website-building process. Wix leads you through the process with an AI chat bot that asks a set of questions about your business and goals for the website and then shows a checklist of tasks required to launch your website. Afterward, another AI chat bot helps you create a custom theme, complete with AI-generated images and text placeholders to give you an idea of how the finished site would look. You don’t have to prepare anything before building your site; Wix tells you exactly what’s needed.

Wix’s AI tools then help you accomplish tasks throughout the process of building the site. They can generate text from a prompt, suggest color palettes and theme changes, automatically tag images to simplify search, and answer questions about your website and Wix’s features.

Each AI tool is more limited and more specific than something like ChatGPT. For example, the Theme Assistant cannot recommend specific colors for a high-contrast, accessible theme. But the tools are useful for accomplishing small tasks, stuff such as locating a hidden tool in Wix or shortening a wordy description. That helps you stay focused on building your site, rather than having to search through documentation for answers.

It lets you use sections to build the pages you want. Wix themes are broken into sections, typically a header and footer sandwiching sections such as “About” or “Media.” You can add dozens more, including blocks for team photos, contact forms, promotions, client testimonials, stores, and events, plus generic sections for basic text and lists. You just drag the items you need for your site into your template and then use arrow buttons to move full sections up and down into the site design you need.

You can click and then drag-and-drop to edit anything. Every element on a Wix site is editable. Click once on a tagline, for instance, and Wix shows a border around the box. You can drag elements around the site, and you can even move them between sections or have them straddle sections for an overlapping image or text box. Click again to open the editing tools. You can edit and arrange everything, from the site logos to the copyright notice in the footer, as you wish.

Everything you need to build a site is included. You can edit any text area with familiar rich-text tools and standard keyboard shortcuts similar to those found in PowerPoint or other design tools. A variety of Adobe, Google, and system fonts are included, or you can upload custom fonts for your site.

Whenever you change fonts, colors, or formatting, you can apply those changes to a single text area or to all text with the same formatting; for instance, you can update all headlines with the same font and formatting at once. And if you’re building a site for a multilingual audience, you can enable additional languages and add text variants right from any text box.

Wix similarly includes all the tools you need to quickly edit photos on your site. You can upload photos from your computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, and other online storage services, and you can choose free stock photos from the Wix library and Unsplash or license media from Shutterstock in the app.

You can then crop images, adjust brightness, remove backgrounds or objects, add text and other overlays, or even use your photo as the starting point to generate AI images. In other words, you shouldn’t need to use any other editing apps while building your site in Wix.

Sites created in Wix are responsive by default. In our testing, Wix scored well in Google Lighthouse tests for mobile accessibility, with only Squarespace ranking better for our customized site. Wix also scored better than Squarespace in performance, though we should note that this measure is highly subjective since it’s based on your site’s theme and customization. (Most default themes in modern website builders generally rate well in this regard.) Wix sites look great on both mobile and desktop by default.

In aspects where Wix sites tested worse than competitors, such as scoring lower in SEO out of the box, Wix’s checklists effectively guided us through smart defaults to make better sites. After we followed the checklists, our Wix sites consistently scored perfectly in Lighthouse SEO tests — better than the results from every other website builder.

When you’re moving items around on your site, Wix shows boundaries on the sides so that you know what will get cropped out on smaller screens. It also formats headers and detailed section layouts such as product listings and testimonials with columns, showing items side by side on larger screens and stacked on mobile. That saves you the hassle of designing both desktop and mobile versions of your site.

Wix Apps let you add features to your site. Wix includes a CMS for blog posts and other longer content, an e-commerce store for selling products and receiving payments, event-management tools, a form builder for contact forms, and a live-chat box for you to talk to customers. There’s also the Wix App Market, which offers tools to add maps and reviews to your site, show a stream of social media posts, sync with other marketplaces and accounting tools, and more.

This means you can start small, with a single-page website, and then upgrade over time to build out a comprehensive company site.

You can undo changes, anytime. Wix autosaves every change you make to your site — something that everyone is used to in Google Docs and other modern software but also something that is not included in many popular website builders, such as Squarespace, Carrd, and WordPress’s theme editor.

Did your last edit break something? Just click Undo or press Cmd+Z or Ctrl+Z to roll back the change. Or check your site history to see every revision of your site.

You can name site versions, mark favorite versions that you want to reference in the future, and roll back changes whenever necessary.

Developer tools are available, if needed. If you’re not comfortable with code, feel free to skip this section, but devs, take note: Wix, like many website builders, includes built-in Google Fonts and basic analytics, the two things that web designers most often need to add to the site header with custom code. If you’d like to bring in new web fonts and use Google Analytics instead, you can also edit your site’s header code to include scripts in your site, something that isn’t possible in simpler website builders such as Google Sites and Canva Websites. You can also embed HTML iframes and other code or, unique to Wix, enable developer mode to write custom JavaScript for your pages and sync changes to GitHub.

Wix also includes an API to push data to your site, integrate with third-party services, schedule jobs on your site, and build new functionality with unique Wix apps. You can’t edit the theme’s HTML and CSS, but the platform exposes CSS variables for your site’s theme so that you can, say, style a new element using your site’s Subtitle style with the --wst-color-subtitle variable.

It’s a pairing that lets developers add functionality to sites while leaving the design and content in the hands of the rest of the team.

It encourages you to check off everything to finish your site. Once you’ve added your content and edited your theme to your liking, the Wix dashboard picks up where you left off with onboarding.

It allows you to publish your site without checking off all the boxes — but if you do that, it’ll continue to remind you to add a site description, connect your custom domain, and finish any other remaining tasks until you’ve covered everything Wix recommends.

That’s simpler than digging through pages of settings and trying to decide what you should change.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The Wix editor is a bit slow to load. It took around 35 seconds to load the first time we opened our site and 10 to 15 seconds most other times. Once it’s open, though, it’s as fast and responsive as other tools.

By default, Wix sites aren’t indexable by Google. When you first create your site, Wix sets your robots.txt file to “noindex” by default. It then prompts you to “allow indexing to make your homepage visible in search results” as part of its SEO Setup Checklist. That task can be easy to miss, though, if you don’t follow through on every Wix setup step.

The AI-generated content can be hit-or-miss. Wix automatically generates text and images for your site when creating a new AI theme. That can be helpful for you to visualize how your site will look when it’s finished, but the content is also unlikely to showcase your work and company as well as you could on your own. You should always treat the AI content as placeholders and replace it with your own words and images.

Tools are duplicated in spots. You can crop images, remove backgrounds and objects, and do even more in both Wix’s native tools and the built-in Adobe Express tools. In addition to those free Adobe Express tools, you can pay for a separate, $10-per-month Adobe Express Premium subscription, which allows you to resize images, make multiple image variants, and build a brand kit. This option is handy, but it’s also potentially confusing for people who are already paying for Wix.

Image alt-text options are hidden. To add alt text to an image — that is, to describe it both for people using screen readers and for search engines — you must first click an image, then select the gear icon to open Image Settings, and finally add alt text to the “What’s in the image?” box. By default, Wix uses the file name as the alt text and doesn’t prompt you to add new alt text when you’re uploading or editing images. It does remind you to add custom alt text as part of its SEO checklist, but we wish it made the setting clearer.

Best for...

Best for quick, one-page sites

Canva Websites

This software lets you remix bits from any template, easily edit, and publish a responsive, one-page website in minutes. Its tools are simpler than those of our top pick, but it has fewer features overall.

Buy from Canva

Canva Websites is the best tool to quickly turn your ideas into a one-page website to share with the world.

It isn’t a traditional website builder: It doesn’t focus on headers, footers, and grid layouts, nor does it give you any way to add custom code. Instead, it’s part of Canva, a design tool that allows you to create anything — brochures, flyers, social media banners, presentations, documents, and websites as well. Canva Websites builds responsive sites that score well on Google Lighthouse’s SEO and accessibility tests, without any extra input from you.

It’s quick and easy to use. In the best kind of way, it’s a modern take on Geocities, the ’90s web host where many people created their first websites. It’s the quickest way to build a simple, one-off site, too — we built and published our one-page Canva site in eight minutes flat, a task that took at least 12 to 20 minutes with other website builders.

You can remix elements from any Canva template. Canva takes the idea of layout sections to the extreme. You can choose which sections of its website themes to add to your page, as in Wix — or you can select any other Canva theme and add sections from those themes to your design.

Like the cover section of one theme, the contact form of another, and the “About” section of a third? In Canva, unlike in any other web builder we’ve tried, you can pull all of those elements together into a single website.

It allows for truly freeform editing. Most website builders, including Wix, keep the traditional format of a website front and center as you’re building, placing a header and columns at the top, presenting SEO considerations throughout the app, and so on.

Canva, meanwhile, is a design tool. You can move anything you want anywhere on the page, and you are never limited by columns, section height, or other common web builder issues. The interface shows margins around your content, so you’ll know if something will be cut off, but otherwise everything is up to you.

And it includes a surprising number of image editing tools to crop photos, remove backgrounds, add filters, and more while you’re building images into your site.

You can add charts, polls, forms, and more with Canva Apps. Canva’s Elements sidebar includes the shapes, graphics, and stickers you might expect from its standard design tools, but it also provides more website-specific elements, such as buttons, along with interactive polls, charts, and tables.

Its Apps tab also includes a number of third-party apps for embedding forms, videos, social media streams, and other elements into your site. You can’t add standard iframe embeds, but Canva Apps covers the basics for building a quick site.

It includes domain, SEO, and accessibility features. Canva can publish websites to its domain for free, with a yoursite.my.canva.site link, or to a custom domain that you own with a Canva Pro account. You can set your site’s favicon and description, and you have options to password-protect your site or to allow Google to index it.

You can’t add Google Analytics, but Canva does include basic analytics for you to see how many people visit your site. When you’re previewing your site, it reminds you to add page titles, and it also includes a Design Accessibility tool that flags low-contrast text and lets you add alt text to all of your images at once.

You can publish anything as a website — or transform your site into anything else. The key thing that makes Canva unique is that anything you make can be a website. Have you created a presentation for your next big event? You can share the slides as a website — complete with a custom domain. Have you designed a brochure for your business? You can resize it, add more details, and make that the basis for your website.

The same is true in the opposite direction: If your Facebook profile needs a banner image, and you’ve already put time into designing your website header, you can use Canva’s Resize tool, which has built-in sizes for popular social media assets, to turn your site into a Facebook Cover. Then you can simply make any final tweaks and download it as an image or share it directly on Facebook.

You can repeat that to build social media posts, flyers, and any other media you need. Or, you can download your site as an image or PDF to include an example of your site in a presentation or portfolio.

Canva lets you get more deliverables out of your design work. Instead of designing a website, social media content, and print media separately, you can check them all off at once.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Search engine indexing is turned off by default. Similar to Wix, Canva keeps new sites hidden from Google. That might be good for temporary pages that you intend to share only with friends or inside your company, but if you’re building a site that you want people to discover, you should enable indexing. Click Publish Website, choose Settings, and enable Search engine visibility to let your site show up in search.

It has no support for custom code. You can’t add custom code to a Canva site, not even to your site header. That means you can’t add Google Analytics, third-party font services, or other tracking and verification codes. Instead, you have to rely on built-in Canva features for all of your website needs.

The truly freeform editing environment means you can break things. Canva generally does a good job of rearranging elements to make websites responsive on mobile devices, especially when you’re using Canva templates to build out your design. But it’s possible for you to drag elements off-screen, where they’re not visible on your website, and long paragraphs of small text may be too tiny to read when Canva shrinks them for mobile. Before publishing, be sure to check your design in both the desktop and mobile preview modes to confirm that everything looks correct.

It offers few ways to grow your site. You can add extra pages to your Canva site and build a makeshift blog, page by page. Similarly, you can add links to your site to products on Amazon, Etsy, Gumroad, or other e-commerce platforms, but you can’t build a store directly in Canva. The best use for Canva is to build a one-page website (or at most, a site with a few simple pages) for a quick way to share ideas with the world. Then, if you need additional features, you can switch to another website builder.

If you want a free site with a custom domain: Google Sites is the only drag-and-drop website builder we tested that lets you add a custom domain. It’s easy to learn, with an interface similar to that of Google Slides and the ability to embed Google Forms to gather data or Google Sheets and Docs to share tables and documents. You can start with one of Google Sites’s handful of templates, drag and drop content blocks to build out your site, and then edit the text, buttons, and images with familiar Google tools.

Google Sites lets you add pages to your site and connect Google Analytics to track its metrics, but beyond that it offers few ways to upgrade your site over time. As a result, it’s best for one-off landing pages for events and marketing campaigns, or as a place to launch your web presence for free before moving your domain to a new web builder later on.

If you want a simpler interface with fancier templates: Squarespace is the website builder that designers and photographers often favor, with templates that feature full-bleed images and tastefully animated text.

Squarespace’s editor is the most minimalist of all the web builders we tested, with tools that remain hidden until you click an element to edit it. Thanks to Squarespace’s wide range of built-in font pairings and color palettes, along with an AI that guides you through the default choices for your website, you can easily build a site that looks more custom-designed than the results you can get in most other tools.

Settings and SEO tools are also easier to find and customize in Squarespace, with a single sidebar that includes everything in one place. You can start with a basic site and then add a blog, paywalls, and an e-commerce shop later, if you’d like.

The only thing holding Squarespace back is its conspicuous — and baffling — lack of an autosave feature and tools to revert to previous versions of your website. If you choose Squarespace, be sure to regularly save your site as you make changes.

The website builders we recommend create responsive sites that look great on desktop or mobile, follow standard accessibility guidelines, and cover the SEO basics to help your site appear higher up in results on search engines such as Google.

Those smart defaults make it easy to be complacent, however. A 2022 website builder accessibility study by the Rochester Institute of Technology found: “The most common issue was color contrast, with heading structure and image alt text following closely behind.” It’s worth putting in a bit of extra effort to make your site more accessible and more likely to be easily found on search engines.

Follow your web builder’s guides and checklists before launching your site. Wix, for example, shows nine core SEO tasks in its SEO Setup Checklist, including SEO-focused settings such as entering page titles and enabling Google indexing, along with accessibility-focused settings like adding alt text to images.

Add alt text to each image. These are descriptions that screen reader users will hear when browsing your website. Most website builders, by default, use your file name as the alt text, an accessibility issue that Google Lighthouse and other SEO tools may not flag. If you don’t add unique alt text for each image, though, screen reader users may hear “Screenshot 2025-07-10” or “logo_final” instead of a description of the image.

Check legibility. Fonts should be easy to read, with high-contrast colors that stand out from the background. Most default themes use clear defaults, but experimentation with colors and font sizes can render your page unreadable. Use WebAIM’s Contrast Checker to test your website’s foreground and background colors and confirm that you’ve picked colors that pair well.

Order your site headers correctly. The largest, h1, should be your site’s title, with smaller, h2 and h3, titles nested underneath, similar to a document outline. As you drag and drop elements around the page, it’s easy to get the order wrong, which would make your website especially confusing for people using a screen reader.

“The web is a place for everybody,” said Garreth Tigwell, one of the researchers behind the Rochester Institute of Technology study. “If you are putting work online, then you need to make sure it is accessible; otherwise, you are excluding people from engaging with your content.”

This is not a comprehensive list of all the website builders we’ve tested. We have removed those that are discontinued or no longer meet our criteria.

WordPress.com is a content management system that remains one of the best ways to build a blog. Its website builder tools, though, vary per theme and are less flexible than those in dedicated website builders. If there is a WordPress theme you like that needs minimal customization, it can still be a good choice for a blog-focused site, but further customizations often require coding.

Ghost, which is focused on blogs and newsletters, does not include features to create landing pages or to customize designs with drag-and-drop tools.

Carrd is good for building one-page sites, such as a landing page for an upcoming project or a résumé site. It features fewer customization features than our top pick Wix, though, and it’s more developer focused, with Markdown formatting, options to name element IDs, and CSS-style width and padding options instead of resize handles.

Framer and Webflow each include professional design tools reminiscent of Photoshop that let you customize everything down to the pixel. They’re built for designers and developers who want to design visually, but they have a more difficult learning curve than other web builders.

HubSpot’s CMS is designed to create landing pages for events and marketing campaigns with forms to funnel leads into HubSpot’s CRM. Its web builder includes only five theme styles, with more limited options than in many other web builders.

Weebly was acquired by payments app Square in 2018, and today it’s a basic landing page offered alongside the e-commerce–focused Square Online. Weebly gives you a quick way to make a landing page with a default template, but it’s less customizable than most other builders, with no drag-and-drop editing.

The paid plans for Hostinger are surprisingly cheap ($3 per month with a two-year plan), and in our tests its AI onboarding tool did a decent job of creating a site based on our criteria. Its editing tools and autosave seemed inconsistent, though, and it offers fewer features overall than our picks.

Lovable, Bolt, and v0 are all similar AI-powered, code-centric website builders. We were excited to test them and see if AI has made drag-and-drop web building obsolete, but we concluded that the technology hasn’t gotten there yet.

Each of these tools asks you to input website details into the chat box so that the AI can then code a complete site for you. Afterward you can reply to the chat to tweak the site, but you still have to edit the code directly to make any deeper changes, and you need a server or a hosting service such as Vercel to publish your site.

User experience specialist Paul Boag said that he sees AI “as a productivity tool for the professionals rather than something that will turn everybody into a professional web designer/developer,” and we agree after testing these AI-based website builders.

Builder.io makes AI-driven website building more accessible than Lovable, Bolt, and v0. You start by chatting with the AI, and then you switch to a Figma-style visual builder to edit your site. Dora offers similar features, along with animation tools. They’re better at mixing code, chat, and visual editing, but currently they require more effort than template-driven website builders.

This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.

Melanie Pinola, a Wirecutter senior staff writer, died in October 2024.