Web design gives your online business credibility and legitimacy. But you need to make sure that it is not all just looks. A good website should also be functional and effective. The layout and formatting should be perfect, and that is the hardest part when designing a website.
Luckily, there are web designing platforms like Strikingly that make web design a lot easier than it used to be. Even without knowing any code, you can create a good-looking site for your business, organization, portfolio, or personal brand.
If you’re looking for a site builder, this review of Strikingly, which some say is one of the best website builders on the market, will prove helpful.
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Pros:
- User-friendly interface with drag-and-drop editor
- Responsive designs
- Gorgeous themes
- Easy to switch templates without rebuilding your site
- Includes a free version
Cons:
- Customization is quite limited
- You will need a premium account to unlock standard features
- Multi-page sites only come with the higher-tier plans
- It only lets you sell products, not digital goods
- It is quite pricey
What is Strikingly?
Strikingly is a web page builder that allows you to create and design “strikingly” stunning and gorgeous professionally made web pages that will definitely entice the eyes of your potential visitors. Whether you own an online store, blog, or any type of website, Strikingly is worth checking out, especially if you want to create a site that looks good on both desktops and smartphones.
It was founded by David Chen, Dafeng Guo, and Teng Bao in 2021 with the primary focus of creating minimalist websites. It might only focus on one-form and on-page sites; you still have the option of creating multiple pages in the higher-tier plans.
Strikingly is recommended by marketing guru and best-selling author Seth Godin.
If you are in need of one-page websites (aka single-page websites) that look amazing on both desktop and mobile devices, Strikingly might be the perfect option for you.
Although it is far from perfect for medium to large businesses, it seems like an ideal option for personal web pages, portfolios, small businesses, and eCommerce websites, except for selling downloadable digital goods.
If you want to try it out for yourself, Strikingly offers a 14-day free account, which allows you to test out some of its features.
What are the best features of Strikingly?
Now that you have a pretty good idea of what Strikingly can do for you and your small business, let’s take an in-depth look into what striking features Strikingly has to offer:
Themes and design customization features
Strikingly’s best qualities are its themes. You can choose between a good selection of professionally-made themes that can make any website look like it was made by a professional, not knowing all you had to do was pick a theme and do a couple of tweaks to make it look stunning.
Strikingly has 10 main templates, and these are narrowed down into different categories. You can choose if the website you are building is for a business, personal use, a portfolio, an online store, and more. Choosing between these categories will help you land on the ideal theme with website functions that suit your needs.
When building a website, it will involve adding sections and content blocks that will format and split the page. Each of the themes has specific sections and page elements that you can edit or add more.
The best way to maximize the use of the website builder is to try as many themes as you can to see which of the options best suit your site. The best thing about this feature is that you do not need to rebuild the website if you want to change the theme. The required fields will already be filled out with the original content to make the necessary edits easier to execute.
Strikingly blog
Strikingly provides its own blogging platform, which can edit and publish blogs and articles. However, it is missing the ability to schedule content, which is essential if you want your blog to have a consistent schedule of posts for your subscribers and potential reach.
You can create draft posts that you can manually publish at a later date, which is not as good as scheduled but will do for now. One of the best additions to this blog feature is the ability to add an RSS button, making it easy for your readers to subscribe with just one click.
eCommerce
Creating an eCommerce section on your page is straightforward, and you can add and remove products from your inventory in just a few clicks.
This feature enables you to add products, set shopping options, create coupon codes, and more. However, the downside is the Strikingly simple store has no tax system and it doesn’t have the option to categorize digital downloadable products.
When checking out, you can integrate your PayPal or Stripe account, which is convenient for creating payment options when your customer decides to make a purchase. Plus, Strikingly does not charge any transaction fees if you choose the VIP Plan.
Integrations
Strikingly includes Facebook integrations, which is essential if you want to create a community of patrons and reach more people to generate new and effective leads for your brand. You can also integrate Facebook messenger so that your visitors can drop a chat from the website straight into your business’ Facebook Messenger account.
You can embed a Live Chat feature on your site using Facebook Messenger, which makes it convenient since you don’t need to download and set up different live chat accounts. Plus, you can quickly share content and images directly to your Facebook account and track the conversion rate based on your Facebook ads.
Additional integrations with Mailchimp and Google Analytics are helpful too.
SEO features
One of the primary reasons for setting up a website is to get discovered by more potential customers or leads. Search engine optimization or SEO is an excellent way to get discovered by more people, and Strikingly’s pages can be optimized for different search engines.
It allows you to change the URL, add meta tags, add keywords, and more. You can also check the analytics of your website to monitor which posts and which keywords bring the most traffic to your website.
What kind of security comes with Strikingly?
Overall, Strikingly is a pretty secure website. Using your credit card to purchase plans definitely feels safe since it will take you to a secure host to encrypt your credit card info. We have to say that Strikingly provides enough security for you as a subscriber and provides enough security for your future website visitors by adding a free SSL certificate to their websites.
Free HTTPS and SSL for Strikingly websites
To make sure your visitors feel safe when visiting your website, Strikingly will provide a free SSL for your custom domain name. This certificate will make your website look more credible and trustworthy, compared to other websites that do not provide enough security measures for their subscribers and future site visitors.
How much does Strikingly cost?
Strikingly.com allows you to sign up for their free plan and lets you decide if you want to upgrade to their paid plans after trying their features out. However, not all the features are included in the free plan, so you might want to check your options. Here’s a look at pricing for different Strikingly plans:
Free Plan
With the free plan, you can create unlimited websites, get 5GB of monthly bandwidth, 500MB storage for each site, and the ability to use SImple Store and add one product. The free plan is excellent if you only have one product to sell. However, it does not come with a free domain.
Limited Plan for $8 a month
This plan includes two limited sites, one custom domain, one SSL certificate, 1GB of storage per site, 50GB of monthly bandwidth, with 24/7 chat support. It is an excellent option for startups or small businesses that need to handle just a little bit of traffic. Instead of selling one product, you can sell up to five products with this paid plan.
Pro Plan for $16 per month
The Pro Plan is the most popular option for small to medium size businesses. With this plan, you can create three Pro sites, create unlimited free sites, come with a custom domain with an SSL certificate, 3GB of storage per site, and unlimited bandwidth. It also includes:
- 300 product listings
- The ability to remove Strikingly branding
- Custom forms
- Multiple pages
- Password protection
- Site memberships
- Pop Ups
- 24/7 support team via live chat
VIP Plan for $49 per month
This plan is a significant increase from the first three options. It is designed for businesses with a higher amount of traffic and more subscribers. It includes everything in the Pro Plan with 0% transaction fees for selling up to 500 products.
What kind of customer support can users expect?
Strikingly has an online contact form that you can fill out and send to customer support. Users also have an email and a live chat option. You can expect the fastest responses from agents via email. There is no phone support. The knowledge base is limited.
FAQs
Does Strikingly include hosting?
All Strikingly plans include hosting, even the free tier. You won’t have much control over the hosting features, but it is still a pretty stable platform for hosting your website.
The combined website builder and hosting options make Strikingly ideal for beginners or those looking to create a small web store.
Does Strikingly offer a free trial?
Aside from the free plan, Strikingly does offer a 14-day free trial that includes more features you can try out before committing to paid plans.
Are the sites designed on Strikingly mobile-ready?
Strikingly is known for being very mobile-friendly, meaning if you create a website using a computer, it will still look good on a mobile site. You might not have the most choices for themes, but you can rest assured that they are made very responsive.
Most people can easily get turned off by glitchy and unresponsive websites, which is why Strikingly focused on the quality of their themes, instead of focusing on quantity.
Besides website design tools, what other tools are available?
Strikingly has several additional features that entrepreneurs like, including a blog, sign-up, and contact forms, landing pages, social media plugins, and built-in analytics.
Is Strikingly the best platform to build an online store?
Strikingly does have eCommerce features readily available, however, the platform is best for “simple stores.” It’s ideal for someone with a handful of products that are not planning to have a ton of traffic on the site. If eCommerce is your main goal, other sites like Weebly, Wix, or Squarespace, might be a better option.
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