Strikingly is kind of the new kid on the block in the website builder market. It was launched in 2012 - years later than its main competitors - and has gained quite some popularity since then. The website builder’s focus is creating single page websites without any programming skills.
This makes it very interesting for marketers and small businesses. Typical examples are portfolios, product landing pages or events where you show all your information on one good-looking page. In addition to your showcase you can also add an online store (500 products max.) and a blog.
The designs look very modern and will be displayed perfectly on smartphones and tablets. You can even enhance the mobile experience by adding a mobile action such as an easy access ‘call’ or ‘send email’ button. This will make browsing your website even easier on smartphones and tablets.
Their entry plan is free forever and will allow you to create a basic website and test Strikingly’s main features. But what if you need more than one page? You have to pick the Pro plan. It can handle up to 20 pages. That’s not a lot, but good enough for most small websites.
FEATURES
If you need a simple online business card for your company, or a basic personal blog, you’ll find all the essentials on Strikingly.
But if you need detailed website analytics, or advanced e-commerce capabilities, I would recommend looking at the more extensive website builders like Wix or Squarespace.
All the Blogging Essentials
Strikingly provides you with basic tools to set up and manage a blog. You can easily add images to your blog posts, as well as a comments section so your readers can interact with you. There’s also a search bar to make it easier for visitors to find content they’re looking for.
You can sort posts into categories, and each post can be labeled with up to five categories.
The Analytics section allows you to monitor the page views of your blog posts, and see basic details, such as where your readers are from. With the blog subscription feature, readers can sign up to receive an email every time you post. You can choose to turn RSS feeds and Social Bookmarking on or off.
Simple E-commerce Tools
Strikingly’s free plan lets you add an online store and even sell one product. The Limited plan offers the ability to sell five products. If you want to open a larger store, you can theoretically sell up to 300 products on the Pro plan or even up to 500 on the VIP plan.
You can build an online store on Strikingly for less than what you’d pay on most other major builders. While Strikingly’s e-commerce features are easy to use, I would only recommend using it for e-commerce if you sell a single product. For example, if you run a blog and want to sell an e-book, you could do that through your Strikingly website.
Strikingly doesn’t offer any advanced e-commerce tools like stock management, offline sales, or an automatic tax calculator. If e-commerce is the main purpose of your website, there are much better options for making the most of your store.
Squarespace costs more, but offers advanced e-commerce add-ons, including a fully integrated shopping cart, inventory tracking, a coupon builder, and an automated cart recovery tool.
Site Analytics
Like most website builders, Strikingly has a built-in analytics feature that allows you to monitor visits to your site. The analytics feature is available on all plans but feels limited compared to what other builders offer. You can see page views, the number of unique visitors, their geographic locations and device type, and sources of web traffic.
But you don’t have the option to view your analytics through a mobile app, and you can’t see detailed user engagement data.
If you want to learn more about your website visitors, you can connect Google Analytics to your site.
Social Media Integration
I was easily able to connect my social media accounts and include a social feed. This feature enables you to keep your website visitors up to date with your latest social media posts from Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
With the free plan, you can only import posts from your personal Facebook profile, but with the Pro Plan and up, you can import posts from a business page.
A Few Apps & Third-Party Integrations
Strikingly doesn’t have anything close to the range of apps you’ll find on Weebly or Wix, but it does offer some third-party integrations, including Google Maps, Google Calendar, Facebook Comments, and SoundCloud.
For my trial business website, I was able to add a map, upload a PDF document to work as a downloadable lead magnet, and even set up PayPal to receive payments.
PRICING
Strikingly offers a free-forever plan. You’ll get a Strikingly subdomain (e.g., mysite.strikingly.com), 5 GB monthly bandwidth, 500 MB storage, 24/7 customer support through live chat, and even the ability to sell one product from your website.
This free plan has a lot of value, but if you want to remove the Strikingly branding from your site, sell more products, get more storage, and use your own domain name, you’ll have to upgrade to a paid plan.
Strikingly offers three paid plans that provide increasing amounts of storage and bandwidth, the ability to sell more products per site, and more features. You can test each paid plan on a 14-day free trial.
The Limited plan gives you everything in the free plan (including the Strikingly branding on your site, unfortunately), plus the ability to sell five products to your store. You get 50 GB monthly bandwidth and 1 GB storage, and you can connect your website to your own domain.
If you want to remove the Strikingly branding, you’ll need to upgrade to the Pro plan. The Pro plan also enables you to add multiple pages to your website, and up to 300 products to your store. It comes with a free domain name for the first year and unlimited bandwidth. You can also add click-to-call buttons, a great feature if you are building a business or CV website.
The VIP plan is the most comprehensive offering, but it has far more features than you need if you are building a single website. Aimed towards web designers and agencies, the plan offers account management, phone support, and up to 5 Pro websites.
Strikingly offers good value across all of the paid plans.
Cancellations & Refunds
For the 14-day free trial, you’ll have to provide your credit card details, and cancel within the trial period to avoid being charged. Strikingly sends an email three days before the end of the trial to remind you.
If you decide you don’t like your paid plan after the free trial, you can revert your website back to a free plan. This will strip your website of all paid features.
As I’m writing this, Strikingly doesn’t offer any refunds, so make sure you like your paid plan during the trial, or you’ll be paying for at least one month or one year, depending on which billing cycle you choose.
Conclusion
Strikingly is a website builder that shines when you want to create a single page layout. These designs have become quite popular, because they give you a good overview without having to navigate several pages. You just scroll up and down.
Every page is divided in several sections. You just click on the spot where you want a certain feature and add it. This can be a picture, some text or a contact form. If you don’t find what you need, you might find it in their app store (which, unfortunately, doesn’t hold a huge selection of apps) or you can also add some HTML directly. Keep in mind that you will need a paid plan for this.
Strikingly also comes with ecommerce. Of course, this makes only sense for small online stores. Managing a store with hundreds of products on a single page might not be very user-friendly and you will clearly have some SEO disadvantages.
Why is that? Normally, you optimize every single page for a specific keyword. Since you put all your information on one page, your info will get watered-down for Google. Is your content mainly a contact page, product page or just a portfolio of your best works? I guess you see the problem here. The only way to avoid this issue, is to pick the Pro plan and create pages with more focused content.
