Strikingly website builder review

Strikingly is a website builder that enables people with no coding or design experience to create websites themselves. It is aimed at both individuals and small businesses, and promises a quick and easy process that enables users to build websites in less than 30 minutes.

There is quite a lot of competition in the market, and in this Strikingly review we find out whether it can be considered one of the best website builders as we look at its pricing, features, support, and ease of use.

Strikingly: Plans and pricing

The great thing about Strikingly is that it can be used completely free-of-charge forever for unlimited sites. However, that does come with some restrictions. Each site will have a strikingly.com domain - so not really suitable for business - and will be restricted to 500MB storage per site and 5GB monthly bandwidth in total. You can also only publish single-page websites with the free plan.

To get access to more features and fewer restrictions, there is a choice of three paid plans, which go from $8 a month for the Limited plan up to $49 a month for the VIP plan, if billed annually. You can get even cheaper prices if you choose to pay for two, three, or five years upfront, with savings of $144, $288, and $528 respectively.

With each step up in plan level, you can publish more sites, get access to more storage per site, and access more features. Each paid plan also gives you the ability to create a simple store, with the number of products growing per pricing level from five on the Limited plan, and up to 500 with the VIP plan.

All plans come with a free domain for the first year and 24/7 support. The paid plans are also available for a 14-day free trial.

Strikingly: Features

Strikingly’s primary feature is its website editor, which enables people with no code or design skills to build websites quickly. With the editor, you can click any element on a page to edit it. 

But Strikingly also has some other useful features which make it an attractive proposition. It can be used as a simple store with ecommerce functionality such as coupons, shipping, and the ability to sell digital goods built into the service.

It can also be used to publish a blog, and you can add contact forms, live chat, and newsletters to your sites. Other elements that can be added include image galleries, videos, sliders and carousels, and password-protected areas.

Through built-in analytics, you’ll be able to see who’s visited your site and what pages they’ve visited, among other information. You can also display your Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter feeds directly on your site.

And speaking of social media, Strikingly has a LinkedIn one-click website builder that will create a website directly from the information on your LinkedIn profile. However, when we tried it, we got an error message and couldn’t complete the process. 

Strikingly: Interface and in use

The first thing you do after signing up for a Strikingly account is to choose a template for your site. All the templates are well designed, and you can get a preview of a full working site from the same page on which you choose the template. But there are only 64 to choose from, which we were a bit surprised at as other website builders, like Wix, offers hundreds of free templates.

Once you’ve chosen a template, you can begin editing straight away. However, it’s worthwhile taking the short tour on offer to familiarize yourself with how the editor works.

The editor is really well designed, and is one of the best we’ve found in website builders in terms of not only its ease of use, but also the customization options on offer. Your changes are updated instantly, which is particularly useful when making customizations in font types and text size - you can see them update before your eyes as you scroll through the different options.

Other parts of the dashboard that deal with settings, promotion, audience, and analytics are also well designed and don’t feel overwhelming. There are also handy features like an SEO checklist to make sure you’ve covered the most important aspects of getting your site ready for the search engines.

Strikingly: Support

Support for Strikingly is offered in the form of a help center on its website that contains knowledge base articles and videos. 

You can also use the help widget after logging in to your dashboard. It will ask you to enter a question, and will then present you with a series of possible answers. If you can’t find the answer you’re looking for, you can start a live chat session with an operator.

Alternatives to Strikingly

The website builder space is quite a crowded one, and there’s no shortage of alternatives to consider, among them Wix and Weebly.

Wix also can be used for free, but has a much larger selection of templates to choose from. It has two separate sets of plans for ecommerce and standard websites, with ecommerce plans going from $18 to $38 a month, and standard websites from $10 to $27 a month.

Weebly has a similar number of themes (templates) as Strikingly, as well as a free plan. Paid plans start from $6 a month and go up to $26 a month (billed annually). It is also part of the Square product suite, which makes it easy for customers to pay how they want, in person or online.

Strikingly: Final verdict

Strikingly is an easy-to-use website builder with an attractive collection of templates, even if these are somewhat limited in number. Pricing is good if you’re building multiple websites, but not so good if you only want to build a single website, as other website builders offer more features at a similar pricing level. The free plan also has more restrictions than some of the competition. 

But Strikingly has one of the best editors we’ve used, and really delivers on its promise to help you build a site in next to no time.

Further reading on website builders

Before you set out on building a website, read our feature highlighting 10 tips to follow when you build a website for the first time, and check out our buying guides outlining the best ecommerce website builders and the best small business website builders. Take a look at the best web hosting services offering the best WordPress hosting too, if you want to use WordPress.