What Is Strikingly?

Strikingly is a website builder that was founded back in 2012.

They firmly believe that anyone can create a website without any prior technical experience (catering to a wide audience).

Make a website in minutes. Build your brand. Conquer the world. Zero code or design skills required.

Strikingly’s aim is to provide a simple tool for everyone, making it possible for people to create a website quickly and cheaply.

When I first heard about Strikingly, I was a little dubious. I wondered whether a website builder could offer high-quality tools and features at an affordable price, or whether they would cut corners.

To save you the dirty work, I signed up for Strikingly and rigorously tested them so I could tell you everything you need to know, in a completely honest and unbiased Strikingly review.

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Pros & Cons

Is Strikingly Right For You?

Due to its simple nature, Strikingly is suitable for a variety of people.

We’ll look more into their templates later in this Strikingly review, however, for now, I’ll say that Strikingly’s templates are very eye-catching and stylish. For this reason, I would highly recommend Strikingly for people wanting to create a portfolio or personal website.

Strikingly would be an ideal choice for freelancers. Whilst it doesn’t have the necessary features to boast a big business website, you can definitely use it for certain businesses. Sometimes you just have to think outside the box.

One of Strikingly’s strong features is their blog tool. Again, it’s very simple but includes the basics to get you going, like analytics and an RSS feed.

It’s no match for WordPress’s blogging features, but it will certainly do the job if you’re happy with simplicity.

Beyond what you create, whether it be a personal portfolio or small business website, you can upgrade your Strikingly account as you please.

Their pricing plans offer different storage limits and features, but unfortunately, they will never be good enough for an eCommerce website. It terms of scalability and growth, you’re not going to find that with Strikingly.

Ease of Use

Given Strikingly’s model of creating a simple website, quickly, I expected Strikingly to be easy to use. Would you agree?

Unfortunately, I wasn’t always met with that notion, and nor were others.

Now, I’m not saying Strikingly is hard to use, but I didn’t find it as intuitive as Wix. If you want to know what I thought of Wix, for comparison, check out my Wix review for more details.

When you select a template with Strikingly, everything is laid out for you. Templates contain stock images and text, which of course you can edit with your own content. That’s simple and is great for beginners.

However, if you want to customise your site or push its design boundaries, you’re not going to get very far with Strikingly.

Whilst I appreciate users want to get their website’s published quickly, I found that Strikingly did too much of the work for you, leaving a large gap for creative freedom that couldn’t be filled.

For some, Strikingly may work wonders. After all, you can create a website for free and get online within 15 minutes. However, with that in mind, you’re not going to have a stunning website as you might have with SquareSpace.

Themes

Strikingly’s templates are something quite spectacular. I would say they are quite close to Wix and SquareSpace’s quality, but not quite as good.

You can view Strikingly’s templates all at once, or filter by a specific category like portfolio, personal, or blog.

Each template displays a real-life example of it being used. I actually really like this feature because it allows you to see what can be achieved with their templates, and frankly is good for inspiration!

In an iframe, you can view each website, or view the site template to see what you can do with your own customisation and design skills.

Each template is easy enough to mess around with, and they are all mobile-responsive which is a bonus. Unlike Wix, you can swap templates as much as you want to, where Strikingly’s platform will reformat your work for you.

However, the templates aren’t entirely customisable. Most of the work is done for you which is great for beginners, but if you’re looking to express more than that, you may struggle.

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Features

Strikingly’s features aren’t too far different from what other website builders in the market are offering. However, I wanted to take a look at them in more detail.

For some, features are the be-all and end-all of a website, for others, not so much.

Strikingly does have an app store, similar to Weebly and other website builders, but it’s a far cry from what else is out there. In fact, it’s quite basic and limited (a little bit like their builder).

Pricing

Strikingly has one free plan and three premium plans. These start from as little as £6.10 per month.

Their free plan obviously doesn’t boast as many features as their premium plans, but you still get a fair bit included considering the plan is free for life. Let’s take a look at the free plan first:

Each of Strikingly’s premium plans come with a 14-day free trial. I think that’s very generous considering they offer a free plan as well.

If you opt for their annual payment plans, you’ll get a free domain with them. However, if you choose to pay monthly, the benefit of the free domain will disappear into thin air.

Compared to other website builders, Strikingly’s prices are quite affordable. Considering you get a free domain, I’d say they are actually really great value for money.

Visit Strikingly.com

Customer Support

When I first landed at Strikingly’s Help Center, I thought it was nicely laid out, clear, and informative. You’re immediately greeted with a knowledgebase, including a search bar, as well as helpful videos to get you started. This is ideal for beginners, or people wanting to learn more.

Next up, I checked out Strikingly’s Idea Forum, a place for people to discuss issues and ideas with other members of the Strikingly community. However, when I filtered by the newest post, the latest topic was posted on February 8th, 2020, which is well over 3 months ago now. It seems like the forum is a bit of a dead-end.

If you’re looking to contact Strikingly directly, their contact us section leads you to leave a message with them. The message will be responded by a member of their support team “as soon as possible”. Aside from this, there are no other obvious ways to contact them.

I decided to see what other people thought about Strikingly’s customer support, as it felt to me like it was lacking somewhat. Strikingly’s TrustPilot page didn’t have many reviews, but the ones that were there were very mixed.

Twitter page seemed reasonably active, certainly more than their forum. But again, there seemed to be mixed vibes coming in from their customers about their support and services.

Is Strikingly Safe to Use?

Strikingly offers an SSL certificate on all custom domains. This means your site will be secured, so when people visit your site, they will do so over HTTPS. This is reassuring for both Strikingly customers, and people visiting your website.

Whether you bought your domain from Strikingly or not, your SSL will automatically be applied to the plans that allow for custom domains.

Can You Buy a Domain from Strikingly?

Even if you’re using the free plan, you can buy a domain name from Strikingly.

You can purchase a .com, .net, .org, .me, or .co domain from Strikingly for £19.78 each. On top of this, you can actually register your domain name for up to 10 years which is very helpful if you’re sure about your domain.

If you sign up to Strikingly’s Limited or Pro plan, you can connect your domain to your website, otherwise, you’re stuck with a Strikingly subdomain.

If you’ve already purchased a domain from someone else, you can connect it to your Strikingly website, or transfer it to Strikingly. I’d personally recommend transferring your domain as it’s handy to have all of your website details in one place.

What Are Strikingly’s SEO Capabilities?

Strikingly keeps SEO simple, which is certainly a good thing, especially for people who are beginners or have never done SEO before.

Strikingly offer a basic SEO checklist, where items will be stricken off once they have been completed, for example, “set a title for your site”, and “set a meta description”. Their tool will guide you through what needs to be done.

There’s a built-in analytics feature which is handy to have. You can see how many people have visited your site, as well as countries, and sources. You can filter the results by hours or days, and offers a basic view of your website analytics.

If it were up to me, I’d definitely be using Google Analytics, as Strikingly’s analytics tool is very much bare bones. Again, great for the basics, but not suitable for more advanced users or people wanting to drive more traffic to their site.

Compared to other website builders though, there’s much less on offer with Strikingly. If you’re looking to take your marketing to the next level, the only email marketing tool available is reserved for Pro users, which uses MailChimp.

Summary

Strikingly is very much Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for me. There are many contrasting opinions about them, and these ring true for me too.

If you’re wondering whether Strikingly is right for you, let’s have a little recap about my thoughts on them.

Strikingly’s aim is to make creating a website quick, painless, and affordable. I think in most aspects they do achieve that, and they’re certainly a good option for beginners. Pick your template, edit your content, and away you go.

However, if you’re looking for more customisation, growth, scalability, and advanced tools, Strikingly isn’t going to meet your needs. It’s all about simplicity with them, so a lot of what’s on offer is very basic.

If you’re looking to set up a personal website or blog, Strikingly is great. They are cheap, easy to use, and their templates look good. But that’s pretty much all they have to offer. I don’t believe they can compete with the likes of Wix, SquareSpace, or Weebly, but they definitely have their own place in the market.

Not sure whether to give Strikingly a chance? Sign up to their free plan (because, well, it’s free), and if you do like them, you can upgrade later down the line.

Visit Strikingly.com