Strikingly Review : New Site Builder Worth Trying

Introduction

Launched in 2012, Strikingly is a relatively new website builder that has steadily been growing in popularity. Strikingly is focused on offering a platform to build simple websites and online stores with zero coding or design skills.

In fact, you’ll be able to launch a professional-looking single-page website within a matter of minutes. As David Chen put it:

Founded by David Chen, Dafeng Guo, and Teng Bao, it was the first Chinese company to graduate from the technology startup accelerator, Y Combinator.

What are the Pros & Cons of Strikingly?

Features

Strikingly is not the most feature-rich website builder on the market. Instead, they offer a streamlined and easy-to-use platform for launching and managing a website. However, they do provide the essentials, such as:

• Domain registration
• SSL certificates
• Blogging capabilities
• Backup and restore
• Ability to add custom code
• Pop Ups

E-commerce

All Strikingly plans allow you to sell online one way or another. You can sell up to an unlimited number of products, whether it’s digital, physical, or memberships. You can also add a basic store to your site with just a few clicks using the visual editor.

Marketing and Memberships

Strikingly offers all the basic marketing tools you’d expect, such as signups, forms, live chat, and newsletters. You can also track your visitors and traffic using Google Analytics. If you have at least a Pro plan, you can even allow member accounts with registration, login, and account management pages.

Mobile Apps

Strikingly offers pretty powerful mobile apps for Android and iOS. These allow you to customize your website, manage your store, view real-time site analytics, respond to live chats, and even manage orders.

Widgets

Strikingly doesn’t offer a dedicated app marketplace. However, it offers pre-designed widgets and section areas that can greatly speed up the website design process. With just a couple of clicks, you can add fully designed galleries, forms, CTAs, or commerce widgets to your pages.

Ease of Use

Strikingly calls itself a website builder with “zero code or design skills required.” So, obviously, ease of use plays a big part in what it has to offer. Indeed, you can get signed up with Strikingly in less than 5 minutes.

From there, creating a new website is as easy as choosing a template, editing it using the drag-and-drop page builder, and clicking “Publish.”

The dashboard is also really straightforward with almost no learning curve. When you’re new to Strikingly, they’ll even provide you with a handy to-do list. This guides you through all the most important aspects of using the platform:

Pricing

Strikingly offers a free plan as well as a free 14-day trial of all paid plans. Strikingly billing is also quite flexible with the option to choose between monthly, annual, 2-year, 3-year, and 5-year subscriptions. The longer you subscribe, the more you save in the long term. In fact, you can save up to 50%.

The bad news is that the free plan is very limited. You only have 5 GB of monthly bandwidth, 500 MB storage per site, 5 pages per site, and 1 product per site to work with. You’ll also miss out on a lot of other premium features, like multi-language support and e-commerce. Not to mention host on a Strikingly subdomain, like mywebsite.strikingly.com.

While you can only host a single website, you can create and customize as many other sites as you want.

Here is a breakdown of Strikingly pricing plans:

As you can see, higher-tire plans provide you with:

• More hosted sites
• More storage
• More bandwidth
• More pages
• More products
• Lower transaction fees

Other than that, you mostly unlock more and better e-commerce capabilities.

Overall, Strikingly’s pricing is slightly higher than other website builders. However, it’s still somewhat competitive considering that you can host multiple sites and can have e-commerce.

How fast is the website created on Strikingly?

First of all, Strikingly has an uptime guarantee of 99.99%. This is outstanding as most other web hosts only have a 99.9% guarantee. Most reviews and existing customers also seem to agree that Strikingly is highly reliable.

Unfortunately, Strikingly’s performance isn’t as good. We ran a performance test of a website we host with Strikingly and the results were good, but not great. Overall, our website got a C-grade with a performance score of 68%:

However, two important Web Vitals, Largest Contentful Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift also got high scores. These are important for determining search engine rankings.

How good are Strikingly Templates?

Out-of-the-box, Strikingly offers around 100 ready-made templates. These are essentially fully-functional websites that you can launch with just a few clicks.

As you can see, they span a decent range of niches, from stores to blogs to startup sites:

The designs are not the most cutting-edge or creative. However, they’re practical, modern, and easy to use. Another bonus is that you can effortlessly change a site’s template at any time.

E-commerce: Selling Online with Strikingly

All Strikingly plans allow selling online in one way or another. However, the scale at which you can operate and the type of selling you can do depends on your plan:

• Free:
  • 1 product

• Limited:
  • 5 products
  • 5% transaction fees

• Pro:
  • 300 products
  • Paid membership subscriptions
  • 2% transaction fees

• VIP:
  • Membership tiers
  • 0% transaction fees

You can argue that only Pro and VIP are really suitable for full-fledged online stores. There are just over 50 templates designed for online stores. Many of them specifically target those that mainly want a business site/blog with a simple store to sell some merchandise.

Other features Strikingly have that are important for an online store are:

• Multi-language support
• Membership options
• Product reviews
• Import/export products
• Marketing and SEO

Adding a New Store

It’s incredibly easy to create a store with Strikingly. If you didn’t choose a store theme, you can still add one to your website just by clicking “Add store” in the editor:

If you did pick a store theme, just click “Store” in the left hand menu and it will open up all your store-related settings:

And, below you can see the settings in action:

Adding New Products or Services

Adding new products is just as easy. Assuming that you have your store settings open, all you need to do is click the big “New Product” button.

That will open up the product details page. As you can see, you have a choice between physical, service, or digital products:

It’s pretty easy to configure the rest and stock standard if you’ve used any online store tool before.

The only catch is that you’ll at least need a Pro plan to create and manage different product categories.

Audience

Under “Audience” is where you can manage all your customer interactions. Once again, this is fairly basic and doesn’t allow for customer segmentation:

However, customers will be labeled according to their membership tier.

If you’re a Pro user, you can also set up:

• Automated emails
• Discount coupons
• E-commerce popups

However, newsletters and SEO settings are available to all Strikingly users. As you can see, Strikingly provides a handy checklist:

That being said, these are very basic SEO tools. You can find more advanced settings with most other website builders.

Payments

Strikingly allows you to set the currency of your store to nearly any currency. Conveniently, they also offer four different payment methods:

In terms of payment options, Strikingly is kind of in the middle. Some of its competitors only offer one or two options while others offer up to 100. The good thing is that these are some of the most popular options, particularly in the U.S.

Shipping and Taxes

Taxes are another Pro feature. However, Strikingly offers three tax “modes” that make setting up your taxes somewhat easier: Flat Tax Rate, US State Sales Tax, and EU VAT tax.

In terms of shipping, you have slightly more flexibility. However, there are still no advanced settings like real-time calculations or third-party shipping integrations.

Mostly, you can define your own shipping rules. For example, you can set flat rate shipping or create shipping rates according to weight/pickup location. You can also create different shipping regions with their own fees and rates:

Help & Support

Strikingly provides 24/7 customer support to all its users, even non-paying ones. One-on-one technical support is mostly offered via live chat from right within the dashboard.

The knowledgebase is quite thorough and it’s great that there are also video tutorials.

Usually, the chat support responds almost instantaneously:

The support rep was friendly and helpful. In this, and subsequent support interactions, they were able to provide me with an adequate answer. I also liked the fact that they don’t try and force you to talk with chatbots or resolve the issue yourself first.

Inspiration

Summary

There are many website builders today that claim to make creating, managing, and hosting a website effortlessly. However, Strikingly is probably one of the easiest and most beginner-friendly options out there.

Strikingly consistently favors ease of use above complex or in-depth features. For those that just want a simple personal, business, or online store it will be a godsend. However, others might find its lack of depth too restrictive.

Still, Strikingly offers everything that someone new to website builders could want:

• A low learning curve
• 100+ pre-designed templates
• Easy-to-use features
• A no-code, drag-and-drop page editor
• Free hosting

With a free plan and a 14-day free trial for all paid plans, there’s no reason not to try it out.

FAQs