It goes without saying that you need a website to survive in the online world. It serves as your house on the web where visitors can contact you. While there are many benefits to having a website, the process of building that site may seem daunting. Thankfully, there are site builders out there that make this process seem like child's play.
As a beginner in the web-building world, selecting a site builder is yet another challenge you need to scale. There are a variety of them out there with WordPress, Wix, and Weebly being the most dominant. However, the 'most-popular' should not be the priority when making your decision. Countless other builders are just as impressive. One such platform is Strikingly.
What is Strikingly? And why should you consider it? In this article, you'll get the answers to those questions as it provides you with a Strikingly review.
What Strikingly Is
As a site builder, Strikingly helps users create an attractive and mobile-friendly website easily and within minutes.
Founded in 2012 by David Chen, Teng Bao, and Dafeng Guo, Strikingly is aimed at helping users design single-page sites with ease. What's more, like other top site-builders, you can use Strikingly without any prior coding skills.
As such, it is suited to both beginners and experts. But this is just one of its several impressive features. Let's see in detail, more features offered by Strikingly.
Features
Themes and Customization
Here's one thing common with all top site builders. They offer themes to aid customization. Platforms like WordPress are known for their themes. But Strikingly isn't lacking behind either. It offers various templates with several themes within each template.
And to aid selection, these templates are grouped into categories. From business to personal and portfolio to blog, you can get themes suited to different website types. But are these templates easily accessible? Of course! You can get access to tons of them at https://www.strikingly.com/s/discover
When selecting templates, it's common knowledge to go for ones that are SEO-friendly and Mobile-responsive. Thankfully, all Strikingly themes are mobile-friendly. Thus, you only need to select a template with easy navigation to improve the user experience. And believe it or not, this is a step forward in designing a well-optimized website. Without a doubt, Strikingly puts users in the control seat of their web design and customization.
SEO
Now, let's talk about one of the most necessary factors that affect your site's well-being - SEO. As seen above, a website is essential for surviving on the net. While that's true, a website without SEO is still no good. Such a site is practically invisible on the web. As a result, a good site builder should be able to help users optimize their website on search engines. Rest assured, Strikingly's got you covered on this.
With Strikingly, you can optimize your website for keywords with titles and meta tags. It also provides users with a built-in 'Analytics' option. Here, you can view the data of your site's visitors. Such data includes where your traffic is from. But the info provided by this feature is limited. Not to worry, you can make up for this by adding Google Analytics.
But note that this feature is not available in Strikingly's free plan. Furthermore, since Strikingly dwells on single-page sites, its free version may not give you the SEO results you expect. But with Strikingly's pro plan, you can overcome this.
Backup and restore
Do you have a previous version of your site you would like to restore? If so, Strikingly is here to help. Its backup and restore feature will help you do this. However, this feature is available to only paid users. On the plus side, it allows you to restore one of the prior twenty versions of your website.
Security
It's no news that the net swarms with potential dangers to websites. To help keep your site secure, Strikingly's pro plan allows you to add a password to your site.
In addition to that, Strikingly also lets users limit certain content to members alone. This is the Site Membership feature. To view certain content, your visitors will have to register as members. Here's an interesting feature of the site membership - You can set a fee that users will have to pay to sign-up. Note: this feature is only available in the paid plans.
Easy-to-use Editor
As seen earlier, you don't need any coding knowledge to use Strikingly. It offers an impressive drag-and-drop editor that anyone can use. You only need to drag, then drop page components on various sections of your site. Afterward, edit the properties of those components. That's all it takes to use Strikingly. Isn't that great?
E-commerce
Are you selling any products? If so, you may find the E-commerce feature interesting. With this feature, you can showcase your goods (Digital and physical products) to your audience through videos and photos. With various shopping options, you can get an online store up and running with Strikingly. Remember that you can always ask customers for reviews.
But how does payment work? Through payment gateways such as Stripe and PayPal. Rest assured, Strikingly won't charge you for your transactions.
24/7 Customer service
Strikingly is undoubtedly one of, if not the best when it comes to Customer support. The speed and quality of their customer service exceed that of many site builders out there.
Single-page websites
Unlike the others on this list, this is not a physical feature of Strikingly. However, it's worth mentioning. As seen above, Strikingly focuses more on helping users design sites that offer all its content on a single page.
This may serve as a roadblock for brands as it comes with many limitations and downsides. For instance, taje SEO. Since all your info is jam-packed on one page, you won't be able to optimize for keywords. If you add information for several pages in one, search engines like Google won't be able to tell what exactly your site is supposed to be. And surely, you can't expect to receive high rankings for that.
That said, some businesses may find it appealing as single-page layouts are perfect for webpages such as online stores, landing pages, portfolios, and even blogs. It is basically perfect for any site where you can showcase all your info on a single page.
All that said, thankfully, Strikingly offers the option to build multi-page websites with the PRO plan.
Strikingly is a builder rich in features. As such, the seven mentioned above are just some of its many features. Strikingly offers a lot more such as domain name, contact form, and a newsletter tool.
Pricing Plans
Aside from Strikingly's free plan that lasts forever, it offers three paid package plans to users. Note that each package unlocks more features than the previous, with the VIP plan unlocking all of Strikingly's features.
Limited. Costs $8 per month but is billed annually.
PRO. As seen above, this plan unlocks a variety of features. And it does so for $16 monthly but is billed annually.
VIP. Get access to all of Strikingly's impressive features for $49 per month. Like the two previous plans, it is billed annually.
Not sure whether to purchase a pricing plan? If so, you can get started with a fourteen-day trial for free to help you make your decision.
Pros and Cons
Above, we discussed different features of Strikingly with the pros and cons to some features. Didn't get them? Here's a summary of the benefits and drawbacks of using Strikingly.
Pros
It is easy to use
An excellent customer support
It has an editor perfectly suited for single-page layouts
It offers a fourteen-day free trial
It makes provisions for security
Allows for backups and restore
Cons
It is difficult to optimize a single page on search engines. As a result, it is not suited for brands looking to pursue SEO.
Strikingly's free plan is very limited in features
It offers a poor template usability
Bottom Line
Many users have a second thought about Strikingly considering its free version is not very feature-rich when compared with its peers. But that doesn't define the builder.
To be brief, Strikingly is recommended for any user looking to design a single web page and looking to get next-level customer service. Also, if you need multiple websites, you'll find Strikingly's single-page layouts very helpful.
On the other hand, if you desire a more complex website or your brand is focusing on SEO, you may find Strikingly less appealing.
Still, the fact that Strikingly remains one of the best website-building platforms doesn't change. And a simple solution to most of its downsides is opting for a paid version. If you do so, you'll no doubt realize it's worth the cost.
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