Launching your business online or starting a blog can open multiple income streams. It can even help you build brand credibility and reach a broader range of audiences. But to launch your business or a blog, you need a website. And for that, Strikingly is one of the most suitable options.
Strikingly is a ridiculously easy-to-use website builder which lets you create responsive websites within a few minutes. It doesn’t require coding or web designing knowledge and doesn’t cost as much money as a website developer.
Read along to know Strikingly’s review – pros, cons, and features, which makes it worth spending your time on.
How Does Strikingly Work?
Strikingly offers more than 200 customizable website templates. To build a website, select a template you like, and customize it according to your preferences.
Strikingly’s website editor is designed for everyone, from beginners to experienced web developers and designers. Changing background colors, images, videos, and other modifications are just a few steps away.
Strikingly Review – Best Features
Strikingly offers a wide range of features to make your website stand out.
1. Online Store
Launching your business online can open up opportunities to offer your products or services in numerous countries. For that, you need an e-commerce store, and Strikingly can assist you in building an exquisite one.
You can add an online store to your Strikingly website as a new section. Then add your products and design them to match your site’s theme.
Here is a list of reasons why you should choose Strikingly to build an online shop.
- Accept payments via multiple methods in your e-commerce store.
- Sell digital items, physical products, and services.
- Add different shipping methods.
- Import products to your store from a CSV file to save time.
- Add a product filter and categories to make finding items easy for your consumers.
- Ask for additional information your brand needs from customers through a custom checkout form.
- Showcase and sell more than 500 products in your store.
Moreover, with the help of the Strikingly app, you can check your online shop orders on the go.
2. A Simple Blog
A blog can be a great source of side income for people who love writing. Blogging helps you earn money through offering subscriptions, Google Adsense, and affiliate marketing.
Blogging is also one of the most effective content marketing strategies. A blog can greatly add to your online shop or brand’s website.
Strikingly’s simple blog features make blogging easy for you. You can add a simple blog as a new section like the store. You can enable comments on your post, categorize your blog posts, pin a post at the top, add custom code to the header and footer, and schedule your blog posts.
Strikingly allows its users to enable AMP for their blog posts. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is Google’s technology that allows specific pages to load faster on mobile phones. Since there’s been an increase in mobile web users, you will see a significant increase in your traffic with this technology.
Furthermore, activating AMP for your blog posts will portray a positive image of your blog in front of Google, hence a higher SEO ranking.
Another way Strikingly helps its users rank better is by allowing them to set up Google Analytics for their blogs. You can see the number of visitors your blog posts get and know what type of content your readers like and dislike.
One of the most useful Strikingly blog features is a blog email subscription. It enables you to collect your readers’ emails and update them about your new posts.
3. Custom Domain
A custom domain is crucial if you want consumers to take your brand seriously. It helps people remember the name of your site and business, then visits it later easily. Custom domain names positively signal Google’s Search Engine algorithm, improving SEO ranking.
Strikingly enables its users to either connect an already purchased domain to their Strikingly website or buy a new one from them.
If you subscribe to any of Strikingly’s yearly (or longer) plans, you will get a custom domain for free for one year.
4. Send Newsletters
Email marketing is one of the best ways to educate people about your products/services, brand values, the latest products, sales, and discount coupons.
With Strikingly’s newsletter feature, you can send emails to your subscribers in just a few minutes. Go to the dashboard and click newsletters. Compose your email, then send it to your contacts. It’s that easy!
You can filter recipients based on site and sources when sending your newsletter. You will even have the option to send a test email to yourself, save it as a draft, or send your newsletter directly to your subscribers.
You can either upload contacts for sending newsletters manually or use the ones your website collected through forms and live chats.
Strikingly’s VIP and Audience Plans users have the privilege to send emails to up to 2000 contacts per month. Pro and Limited users can send newsletters to 100 contacts per month.
5. HTTPS/SSL
HTTPS (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) is a set of rules to send and receive data over the web. When a visitor accesses your site over HTTPS, the connection between the user and your site is secured.
This gives users satisfaction that the information they share with you is safe. HTTPS is essential for online stores as people share their addresses, card, and bank information with you.
Moreover, Google’s search engine favors sites using HTTPS and rewards them with a better ranking.
Strikingly provides all its users, free and premium, websites with already enabled HTTPS/SSL. The best part is that they don’t charge you any extra money.
6. Built-in Analytics
It’s crucial to monitor your site’s analytics to see what pages are doing well and what are not so that you can make changes accordingly.
Strikingly’s built-in analytics is one of the most useful tools that helps enhance your website’s experience and appearance.
Here’s what you should expect to know from Strikingly’s built-in analytics.
- The number of unique visitors.
- The most visited page of your site.
- Whether your user visit your site on their phone or desktop.
- Source of the traffic. Meaning if the audience lands on your site via social media platforms, or other sites, or directly enters the URL of your website.
- The country of your audience.
7. Integrate Social Media
Almost every person on Earth is familiar with social media. And it would be best if you learned to use it for your company’s benefit.
You can embed live chat with Facebook Messenger on your site so your users can access your support team whenever they need help.
Adding a social feed, you can include dynamic content in your Strikingly website. The social feed section on your web page will display your recent posts from social media accounts. It is a great way to keep your site updated without much effort.
Strikingly Plans & Pricing Review
Strikingly offers three subscription plans. With each plan, you can build unlimited free sites and get a 14-day free trial. Moreover, Strikingly has a Free Forever plan which doesn’t even cost a dime and allows you to build unlimited free websites.
With both free and premium plans, Strikingly offer 24/7 live chat support.
Limited Plan:
- Costs $8 a month.
- Up to 5 pages in one site.
- Build up to 2 limited sites.
- Can sell up to 5 products in the online store.
- Connect a custom domain.
- 5% transaction fee.
- 1 GB storage per site.
Pro Plan:
- Costs $16 a month.
- 20 GB storage per site.
- Connect a custom domain.
- Can sell up to 300 products in the online store.
- Build up to 3 Pro sites.
- 2% transaction fee.
- Up to 100 pages in one site.
It also offers features, such as removing Strikingly branding, custom forms, etc.
VIP plan:
- Costs $49 a month.
- You can create up to 5 VIP sites.
- 100 GB storage per site.
- Connect a custom domain.
- You can sell unlimited products in the online store.
- 0% transaction fee
The VIP plan offers everything included in the Pro plan and more.
The prices mentioned above apply to yearly subscriptions. These plans get even cheaper if you opt for more extended subscriptions.
Pros of Strikingly
Here is how building a site using Strikingly will benefit you.
1. Ridiculously Easy to use
One of the many reasons for Strikingly’s popularity is its easy use. Familiarizing yourself with Strikingly’s website editor won’t take time because of its simple interface.
The ease of use doesn’t limit the site editor’s capabilities. It offers numerous features such as built-in e-commerce and blog tools, and other settings like connecting a custom domain, adding mobile-action buttons, etc.
2. Allows to Take Mobile-First Approach
Because there’s been a drastic increase in the number of people who access the web through their phones, designers tend to design a website for mobile devices first then make it responsive for desktops.
Strikingly allows you to view your site in mobile mode. If you’re going for a mobile-first approach when designing your site, you can view your website in mobile mode and then design it accordingly.
3. Numerous Marketing Tools on One Platform
Strikingly makes the whole process of creating and marketing your website simple and time-saving.
You can spread knowledge about your brand through Strikingly’s newsletters feature and build a solid customer base. Other marketing features include connecting custom domains, getting custom sender emails for sending newsletters, and built-in site analytics.
4. Plenty of Customization Options
Strikingly’s customization options are countless. You can select a blank page and start designing your website from scratch. You can create new sections, change their layout, and even add more buttons to specific sections.
Personalization is crucial if you choose to go with templates to set your brand’s website apart from other sites. Strikingly’s latest templates come with advanced customization options. You can modify everything in your navigation menu, from layout and colors to spacing and font sizes.
Cons of Strikingly
Like every other thing in the world, Strikingly is not perfect and has flaws.
1. Limited Online Store Options for Free and Limited Plan Users
Free users are allowed to sell only one product in their online store. In comparison, Limited plan users can sell up to five products. If you want to build an online store to sell more than five products, you either have to upgrade to the Pro plan or find another website builder that suits your online store needs.
2. Limited Targeted Modifications for Mobile Users Only
Strikingly makes your website mobile-responsive automatically. However, you can’t create a different layout for mobile users only. Whatever changes you make to your website’s layout automatically apply to desktop and mobile devices.
Strikingly’s Customer Support
Their customer support is one of the things Strikingly is renowned for. They value and care about their users’ time and efforts and help them with the website-building process as soon as possible.
If you ever encounter a problem, you can talk to Strikingly’s Happiness Officers through live chat. They take no longer than 20 seconds to respond. You can contact support through email as well. The response time for emails is 15 minutes max.
Further, Strikingly’s knowledge base is packed with articles about almost everything related to building a website with Strikingly.
Conclusion
Strikingly is an excellent option for beginners to build a website in just a few minutes without spending hundreds and thousands of dollars. Its features, such as a simple blog, custom domain, sending emails, etc., aren’t only sufficient to build a website. They even help you with marketing.
The countless customization options, mobile responsiveness, 24/7 customer support, marketing tools, and ease of use make Strikingly one of the best website builders.
In conclusion, Strikingly values its customers’ time, money, and efforts and ensures that its goal, to make website building easy for beginners, is achieved.
