What Is Duda?

Duda powers over 15 million websites, with the mission to make web design painless and simple.

Website builders like Wix and Weebly don’t require any prior knowledge or development skills to create a website, Duda is exactly the same.

Duda has a variety of templates that you can start creating your website with. Simply edit the template and replace it with your own images, texts, widgets, and pages, then publish it online.

If you’ve got an internet connection, you can create a website with Duda. It’s a managed solution, so your web hosting is already sorted for you, creating a super simple process.

Anyone can use Duda, but I’d personally recommend it for designers or freelancers who might need to create mass websites in a short timescale.

Visit Duda.co

Pros & Cons

Who Is Duda Right For?

Duda is an ideal website builder for freelancers, agencies, or web designers.

They have a large pool of pre-filled templates that are suitable for a wide range of categories. Alternatively, there are blank templates to work from.

Templates are easy to edit using Duda’s drag and drop builder, however, are quite restrictive in terms of straying too far from the design.

For this reason, it’s very quick to build and publish a website with Duda, which is why I recommend it for agencies and small businesses, as opposed to individuals, online portfolios, or bloggers.

Duda offers a client management suite which is a perfect marriage for freelancers and businesses who have multiple clients, and need an easy all-in-one-place solution.

Visit Duda.co

Ease of Use

Duda has been designed to be a simple and easy-to-use website builder. Though many website builders make these claims, not all follow through with them.

I wanted to put Duda to the test and see what their existing customers thought about them too. Surprisingly, many people said Duda was beginner-friendly and lived up to its promises.

Signing up to Duda was painless; simply enter your name, email, and create a password to get your account set up. There’s a free trial for 14 days, so no credit card information is required.

Like Wix, Duda is a drag and drop website builder. You can find the elements you want to add to your template and drop them onto your template.

My only gripe so far with Duda is that the design limitations are quite limited. By this, I mean that you have less creative opportunities compared to Wix, because you can’t drag elements anywhere you want.

If you follow the template’s layout and guidelines, you can create a professional-looking website. However, you can’t push these limits too far, or you’ll give yourself a headache.

For people who are happy to be guided along and for those not wanting to experiment, Duda is a fantastic website builder that’s very easy to use.

Templates

Much like you’ll discover in my SquareSpace review, Duda’s templates, too, are outstanding and stunningly beautiful.

It’s easy to work through Duda’s categories, ranging from online stores, business templates, travel, services, and loads more.

You can view each template in desktop, tablet, and mobile mode, which is a really nice added little touch. Some templates, although mobile responsive, just don’t quite work on different devices, so it’s useful to have this feature.

When you customise a template, you can switch between device editors to ensure your website continues to look great across all devices.

If you don’t want to use one of Duda’s pre-filled templates, they have a selection of blank templates that simply provide you with a structure to work from – another nice feature.

Once you’ve chosen a template, you can edit the pre-filled content by replacing it with your own content.

However, each template has its own guidelines that you can’t stray too far from. You can add and replace images, change background colours, and alter menu layouts. But you can’t change the entire layout or structure of a template.

If you’re happy to take a pre-filled template and run with it, you’ll find creating a website really easy and quick to publish. But for people wanting to get creative or experimental, you’re going to hit a bit of a brick wall with Duda I’m afraid.

My recommendation here is to choose a template that you don’t plan to change too much. This way you’ll find one that works and you won’t have to stray too far from the design.

Tools & Features

Duda has a wealth of website builder features that are useful for agencies and freelancers.

Their design features are great for customising and personalising your website, everything from different font styles to a built-in photo editor, and videos.

Although you can’t extend your website’s design too far from the template, there is a developer mode option where you can access and edit your sites’ HTML and CSS.

If you’re running a business, it’s useful to be able to make changes on-the-go. Duda’s website builder has mobile editing meaning you can upload photos, change links, and do lots more from your mobile phone.

Much like WordPress, Duda has widgets that you can add and enable on your website. For example, you can add popups for email signups, create contact forms, enable Facebook likes, access 100 icons, and lots more.

Although Duda isn’t an eCommerce website builder, you can sell online with it. You can include add-ons (per website) to your pricing plan (which we’ll discuss in more detail later), to increase your product count.

Pricing

Duda has three pricing plans to choose from, along with eCommerce add-ons, and a 14-day free trial.

Whilst there’s lots on offer from Duda, their prices are the most expensive I’ve come across so far in my website builder reviews.

The basic plan is recommended for people who aren’t looking to build a client-based website. It’s more tailored towards individual or personal websites, which I don’t personally recommend Duda for (there are cheaper and better options).

The team plan is great for freelancers or for people running a small team. You can add up to 4 team members and test out the plan for free, for 14 days.

You’ll get more control with the team plan and better services that you can offer to your clients.

The agency plan is tailored more towards big projects where you need to build more than one website. You can have up to 10 team members and gain access to more advanced tools and features.

As I mentioned earlier, Duda have eCommerce add-on plans which you can use per site if you want to start selling products online (though I don’t really recommend doing this).

Whilst this is a nice option to have, in comparison to SquareSpace’s pricing, it’s actually really expensive and pretty terrible value for money.

With SquareSpace, you can create a website and sell products online with unlimited storage and bandwidth for £30 per month. That’s less than Duda’s add-on plan alone.

Visit duda.co

Customer Support

Duda’s support portal contains popular articles and categories to find the relevant help you need.

When you click on a category, lots of articles are displayed for you to view containing in-depth information and step-by-step guides.

For example, if you want to learn how to add a widget, the guide shows you how to add widgets from the widget panel from the context menu.

If you sign up to Duda’s plans, the basic plan will gain you access to email support, the team plan will get you email, chat, and phone support, and the agency plan gives you all the above, with priority access.

Duda does have a live chat service, of some sort, but it’s powered by a bot, so it is only really suitable for simple questions that have simple answers.

What Is Duda’s Client Management Tool?

One of Duda’s best features (in my opinion) is their client management tool. This is actually what makes their website builder so great for agencies and freelancers.

The tool includes the following fantastic features:

• Client feedback: You can enable site comments so that you can interact directly with your clients by allowing them to leave comments and feedback regarding the design of their website.
• White label: You can use Duda’s platform with your own branding, so your clients can be managed and they can edit their site under your brand.
• Control: You can set permissions based on individual clients, controlling what they can and can’t do, e.g. edit site design and elements.
• Content import: If you want to import all of your client’s existing content from their website to their new one, you can do this with Duda’s content import algorithm which saves a lot of time.

What Is Duda’s SEO Like?

Unfortunately, there aren’t many good things to say about Duda’s SEO tools (or lack of).

Compared to Weebly or Wix’s SEO features, Duda offers very basic tools that will get your website found online, but not very well.

For example, all of their plans include a free SSL certificate, which means your site will be secure and rank higher with search engines like Google.

All of their templates are responsive, again, another bonus point for SEO. And you can edit your site’s titles, meta descriptions, and page URLs.

Aside from the above though, there’s not much else in the way of SEO for your website. This is very frustrating and a real downfall.

Summary

In comparison to other website builders, Duda isn’t the best website builder out there, but it’s certainly a competitor, and a lot better than some I’ve reviewed.

If you’re an agency or freelancer, creating and managing multiple websites, Duda is a solid option and offers features like their client management tools that are honestly worth considering.

However, if you want to create an online store or personal website, I wouldn’t recommend Duda. It’s expensive and it doesn’t offer anywhere near as many features as other website builders.

Their lack of SEO tools let them down, along with their chatbot style live chat, and their templates which you can’t stray too far from.

I’m not here to tell you which website builder to choose, only give you guidance on what I’ve reviewed, and base my opinions on.

Remember, Duda offers a 14-day free trial, so if you want to give them a go, by all means, sign up and give them a try.

Visit duda.co