Jimdo Review 2024

Edited by Tony Moles

Updated


Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported, which means we earn commissions from links on Digital. Commissions do not affect our editorial evaluations or opinions.

Bottom line: Jimdo is a Jack or Jill of all trades. It does almost everything you need a website builder to do, but places a lot of limitations on you, depending on your plan. What you can do is also based on which site builder you choose: the no-code version or the flexible coding version.

Who should choose Jimdo? People who have never built a website. The no-code, artificial design intelligence (ADI) website builder is simple to use, and you’ll get a great-looking site no matter what.

What we like about Jimdo

  • Speedy in many ways: You can create a website in minutes with Jimdo’s ADI-assisted site builder. Also, Jimdo page loads are faster than most other website builders.
  • Easy to use: There’s no denying how easy it is to use Jimdo to create a website. There is a bit of a learning curve, but it’s a simple interface once you get used to it.
  • Mobile-optimized sites: Between the speediness of page loads and the responsive template designs, Jimdo is one of the best site builders for mobile sites.

What fell flat

  • Lots of limitations: Jimdo limits so much, from storage and bandwidth to the number of pages. These restrictions may help page load speed, but you’ll still have to deal with them.
  • Support: If you have a free plan, expect zero support from the Jimdo team — you’ll only have access to the help center. But if you have a paid plan, you get faster support when paying for high-tier subscriptions.
  • It can be buggy: The site builder didn’t save my changes multiple times, and the screen went white a few times.

Digital.com’s Editorial Review

Jimdo may not be as well known as some of its competitors, but it’s making a name for itself with its ease of use and speed. In some ways — namely, its ADI-style site editor — Jimdo is ahead of the curve of its competitors. Still, it places a lot of limitations on you (especially in low-tier plans). It is also outdated with its older site editor but offers the flexibility you may want.

You can easily create a website without coding experience using Jimdo and its many templates. But the design abilities will be limited, prices will increase, and customer service has been criticized.

See how we review website builders.

Plans & Pricing

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  • Play ($0 per month)
  • Start ($9 per month)
  • Grow ($14 per month)

Features

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  • Your choice of two site builders
  • Modern and clean templates
  • Fast building and load times
  • A highly-rated mobile app
  • A logo creator for new businesses

Security

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Jimdo offers significantly fewer security options than other site builders, only publicly and accessibly offering HTTPS security for every tier of its free and paid memberships — otherwise known as the Play, Grow, and Start plan tiers.

Support

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A main drawback of Jimdo’s platform is the lack of one-to-one customer support as you’d see with other site-building platforms. Agents generally respond to all ticketed requests within 48 to 72 hours.

Improvements

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Jimdo commits to the success of its customers, consistently updating the platform to stay on the cutting edge of site design and marketing best practices.

Plans and Pricing

All plans include the design features of the site builder — including the ADI site creator — and a free subdomain. Upgrade to paid plans to unlock a custom domain, search engine optimization (SEO) features, analytics, and support. It’s worth noting that all website plans have limited storage, bandwidth, and pages per site. Jimdo offers three website builder plans:

Play ($0 per month)

  • Good for: Testing the service, hobbyists

Start ($9 per month)

  • Good for: Personal websites, small business info-only websites

Grow ($14 per month)

  • Good for: Small businesses, entrepreneurs, and growing startups
Three plan options offered by Jimdo, including Grow, Start, and Play.

Features

Jimdo errs on being too helpful if there is such a thing. Building a website is more of a modular experience — choose prebuilt bits and piecemeal them together on a page. All the designs work well together, as do most of Jimdo’s features.

There’s a generous free plan, but you must be good with a subdomain and Jimdo ads and branding. If you’re willing to pay a modest monthly fee, you’ll unlock many more helpful features.

Your choice of two site builders 

Jimdo follows the trend of using artificial intelligence to help you create websites quickly with its site builder. You can choose either the no-code version or the flexible coding version.

Using the ADI shaved time off the building process for me, but the strict system doesn’t give you many choices. You can skip the AI-powered site creator help if you want more design flexibility.

The coding site builder lets you design your site how you want it — and you get more template options but not the built-in image picker or editor. With that said, you can add a blog.

Go through the “make it for me” ADI-style builder. You’ll get these options:

  • Recommended styles, such as modern, minimal, fresh, dark, natural, or elegant, to name a few
  • Color palettes for buttons, borders, and text
  • Template preference
  • Change your theme’s layout one “block” at a time
  • As for what you can’t do, I couldn’t find a way to swap out my template easily. It makes little sense — Jimdo offers 40 templates to start, but you only get two options if you go the ADI builder route.

Honestly, the design process was a bit frustrating. Modularly creating your site feels too strict and risks frustrating people with minimal experience using no-code builders. I like that I can remove an element, and the site builder readjust the remaining elements to center the content and photos.

Adding the HTML/Widget element is only possible on the coding site editor. It will allow you to add third-party apps that aren’t on the Jimdo app marketplace.

Modern and clean templates

If you’re looking for well-designed templates (also known as themes), Jimdo has a handful. I found more than three dozen templates you can start with, but you can modify them in hundreds of ways. The designs themselves are on par with some of the top website builders known for sleek designs, such as Squarespace.

If you choose the coding version of Jimdo’s site editor, you get a few questions at the start meant to help narrow your choices. And if you want more choices, skip that step to see more templates.

The only way to get a real blog on Jimdo is to start with the coding site editor. There are workarounds to get a blog-like page on the other site editor, but it won’t have comments or meta descriptions.

I found the Jimdo blog easy to use, but outdated. As you add an element and content, you hit the save button after each one. That said, you get many more options to build with the coding editor.

Fast building and load times

Jimdo is the fastest site builder compared to 24 other content management systems (CMS) and site builders. That’s important when you consider Google gives better rankings to websites with quick page load times.

Despite my misgivings about the built-in image picker’s lack of a search function, all the other tools seem created with speed in mind.

Jimdo Tools

  • Pages: You can add a pre-built privacy policy or terms of service page to your site. Change the content if you want, but they’re fairly complete.
  • Layouts: You can modify the look of blocks (sections) of your site. All the layouts are prebuilt, so pick what you like most, add your content, and voila.
  • Color palette: There are many suggested palettes with two colors from which you can choose, seemingly based on the images on your site. You can select the colors yourself, though.

These tools, including the handholding of the ADI-style site builder, are meant to help you get a website up and running quickly.

A highly-rated mobile app

Most website builders today offer proprietary mobile apps for blogging, design, and order fulfillment on your site when you can’t be at your desk. The only caveat is there is no app for the ADI-assisted site builder — the app only works for the coding version of Jimdo. I used a mobile browser to log in to my Jimdo account to modify my ADI site, though.

A logo creator for new businesses

If it seems like Jimdo is targeting a specific demographic, there’s a reason. A logo creation tool is most helpful for new businesses that don’t have branding yet. Established businesses and personal users likely won’t have much use for this free tool.

The tool is simple: you can choose from icons, fonts, borders, and colors. I don’t think it adds a ton of value because you could easily build a logo with any free online image editor, but logo creation tools are quickly becoming table stakes for website builders. The so-so execution of this feature feels a little “us too.”

That said, it could be useful for those new to websites or who plan to create multiple businesses and don’t mind cookie-cutter logo designs.

Security

Jimdo’s site security features page has been removed. Despite this, you can find out about the security constraints on the service’s paid plan page. The service offers significantly fewer security options than other site builders, only publicly and accessibly offering HTTPS security for every tier of its free and paid memberships — otherwise known as the Play, Grow, and Start plan tiers.

What is HTTPS?

HTTPS, otherwise known as the Hypertext transfer protocol secure, is a pathway that allows web servers and web browsers to share information safely and securely in the cyber universe.

What are the perks of HTTPS as a service offering?

When your platform of choice offers complimentary HTTPS perks, you can enjoy the associated benefits — such as acceptance by top web browsers like Google, encryption protocol through Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) tech, now known as Transport Layer Security (TLS), and a layer of extra security.

This is an especially useful tool to have if you want to ensure the integrity of the data and content displayed on your site. Without HTTPS, service providers may be able to alter or muddle the data and messaging you’re presenting or insert self-serving pop-ups and ads in your page without your permission.

Support

A main drawback of Jimdo’s platform is the lack of one-to-one customer support as you’d see with other site-building platforms. If you are on the free plan, you are restricted to support tickets alone — following an antiquated approach to customer support compared to its competitors. Agents generally respond to all ticketed requests within 48 to 72 hours.

If you don’t feel like waiting for an agent to ping you back on your ticket, go for the Grow or Start paid plans. With the Start plan, customer service is guaranteed to connect with you within one to two workdays. However, you are promised support within four hours with the Grow plan.

As a free user, I was disappointed in the lack of available options, despite how easy the ticket system was to access. Comparable platforms generally offer 24/7 support aligned with customer service best practices, promoting availability through phone, chat, email, and ticket systems. If you plan to use Jimdo only on a free or “tester” basis, this is something to consider.

Jimdo support request form.
Jimdo support message response.

Once I submitted my support ticket, I was pretty unimpressed by what seems to be a strong site-building tool otherwise. It gave the generalized, expected response of high call volume, finishing off the email with redirection to help articles.

I was unimpressed When I compared the availability of previous site builders I’ve considered (such as Wix’s 24/7 callback system). The expertise of Jimdo’s customer service appears promising given the helpful technical articles and support it offers on independent avenues — but the human touch and true “soft product” of a concierge customer service experience was lacking.

Recent Improvements

Jimdo commits to the success of its customers, consistently updating the platform to stay on the cutting edge of site design and marketing best practices.

Here are some of the most recent updates to Jimdo I experienced during our testing process:

  • SmartApps: With a single paste of a link, you can integrate with some of the top tools in business — including Twitter, Calendly, and Canva. Content will appear in savvy widgets on your site, easily arranged to fit your overall aesthetic.
  • Business listings: This is a useful hub to brand and market your online business on top sites easily. After you add in your business’s information and brand elements, you can connect and post to Google Maps, Facebook, Bing, Google My Business, and more.
  • Updated web features: Smart color themes, logo designers, and automatic harmonization are just a few of the perks you can get with this.
  • Photo editing: You can finally abandon the dual-platform editing flow and edit your content directly using Jimdo’s native photo editor. While I didn’t believe it was on par with Photoshop, it’s comparable to a tool like Canva.

Compare Alternatives

As great as Jimdo is for beginners who have no desire to control their design, it might not be for everyone. If you’re looking for a more affordable website builder with more design flexibility, or better SEO features, consider an alternative to Jimdo. Opting for one of the best web hosting providers paired with a popular CMS might be better.

Here’s how Jimdo does against some of the top-ranking website builders:

Web Builder Platform

Pricing + Basic Plan Features

Free

  • Free subdomain
  • 500MB storage
  • 2GB bandwidth
  • 5 pages
  • Image library

$2.99 per month

  • Free domain and SSL
  • AI-assisted tools
  • Unlimited storage and bandwidth
  • Blog

Consider Hostinger for: Innovative free tools to help you build your brand and website.

$16 per month

  • Award-winning design templates
  • Mailchimp integration
  • Access to raw code
  • Marketing tools
  • 0% to 3% transaction fee

Consider Squarespace for: Modern templates; easy template switching.

$16 per month

  • Free domain for one year
  • 2GB storage
  • Stream up to 30 minutes of video
  • 800+ templates

Consider Wix if: You need more design template options. Wix offers far more (and better) predesigned templates to get you started.

What You Need to Know

What makes Jimdo unique?

Unlike other website builders, Jimdo created two site editors: one for beginners and one for pros. You can choose the editor that uses artificial intelligence to help you design a site from start to finish in just minutes. Or go with the classic site editor, which gives you more design and coding flexibility.

What can you do with Jimdo?

The cloud-based platform helps businesses create websites, add images, logos and text using drag-and-drop and modify colors and layouts.

How many templates does Jimdo have?

It has 100 variations.

Why is Jimdo better than WordPress?

Jimdo is a simple code-free website builder that works well for do-it-yourself (DIY) creations. WordPress is a CMS that requires basic coding proficiency.

Is Jimdo good for blogging?

It is straightforward but lacks many options to play with. You can create and schedule a new post, modify the title, summary, and add featured images.

What are the disadvantages of using Jimdo?

There is no support team, and you must run ads. You are limited to a Jimdo subdomain on a username.jimdosite.com instead of a custom domain. Also, you only get 500MB in storage.

How We Reviewed Jimdo

At Digital.com, we know how important it is to test products thoroughly and compare how they measure against the industry leaders. I spent hours familiarizing myself with Jimdo’s dashboard, setup process, website builder, and all of its features. While my definition of “easy to use” may differ, I approached this as though I was new to website builders and compared it to my experience with some of the top site builders we’ve also reviewed.

This comprehensive overview of Jimdo can quickly answer whether it’s the right website builder for you. We also drilled down to specific features, so you can have a more detailed look at features or services. I gave more weight to some parameters, including features, security, support, pricing, ease of use, and how Jimdo has improved since our last review.

I test website builders based on the following factors:

  • Customization options: Can you change the look and feel of a template or add your own code?
  • Ease of use: Is the navigation intuitive with built-in tools, such as an in-app photo editor?
  • Value: Can you get a free plan or trial to give the builder a test drive? Are there extensive features on paid plans that justify the cost?
  • Security: What does the website builder do to keep your site and your customers’ data safe?
  • Templates: Are the templates attractive, updated, and generally high quality? Can you find many to choose from?
  • Support: Can you get help when needed, whether it’s from a human or support center articles?
  • Recent improvements: Has the builder done anything lately to step up its offerings?

Learn more about our review methodology.

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