Coding a website can be daunting, especially without development experience. Whether you are new to website building or are a developer looking to save time, a user-friendly site builder will make your life simpler.
Set up your own online store with just a few clicks. Our team of experts have reviewed the best e-commerce builders to date - benefit from the detailed breakdown and learn which suits you best.
Running an online business without the right supplementary tools can be a complete waste of time and money. Take a look at the best additional tools you can use with your website.
Strikingly Review: ‘Make a Website in Minutes’. But Will It Be Professional?
Looking for a simple to use website builder? With Strikingly you can build beautiful single page responsive sites that look amazing on both desktop and mobile devices. Read our Strikingly review to learn what this tool can do. Visit Strikingly.com
Disclosure: Your support helps keep the site running! We earn a referral fee for some of the services we recommend on this page. Learn more
Strikingly review (2021 update) with genuine ratings from users on social media to help you make an informed decision before you go and sign up with Strikingly.com.
What is Strikingly?
Strikingly is a feature-rich website builder tool that enables people with no experience to quickly create modern and beautiful websites. It’s recommended by marketing guru and best-selling author Seth Godin.
Who is Strikingly For?
If you need a tool for designing single page responsive websites that look amazing on mobile devices, then Strikingly.com might just be the perfect solution for you.
Strikingly is perfect for creating personal, small business or small e-commerce websites. No coding knowledge is required. You’ll get easy-to-use custom templates and elegant design features, powered by a powerful and intuitive drag and drop website builder tool.
Strikingly’s cheapest paid website builder plan is 8.00 per month. If you are undecided you should take advantage of their 14-day free trial.
Strikingly is a modern website builder tool that was founded by David Chen, Teng Bao, and Dafeng Guo in 2012.
Strikingly’s focus is on creating simple, minimalist designed and long-form one-paged websites. One page sites are perfect for portfolios, online business cards, and presentations.
Strikingly released its beta website builder platform in 2012. Year after in 2013, Strikingly was selected for Y Combinator’s startup program, and being chosen to be a part of this startup accelerator is a testament to the tool’s features.
Founded by David Chen, Teng Bao and Dafeng Guo in 2012.
What Does Strikingly Offer?
Creating a website used to require a lot of knowledge and tech wizardry in aspects such as web hosting services, programming languages, and domain registrars.
However, all that has changed all thanks to website builders. Using a “point and click” site builder, anyone with average computer skills can now create a website quickly.
But with that said, with dozens of site builders available these days, choosing a fitting one may seem like a daunting task. So, if you need a tool for designing single page sites, then Strikingly.com might just be the perfect solution.
Modern, Single-Page Scrolling Websites
Most similar platforms offer tools for designing multi-page websites. Strikingly’s focus, however, is on creating simple, minimalist websites that house content on just one page. The company achieves this approach by offering layouts where vertical scrolling is highly utilized.
While this approach may seem to limit, there are situations where it’s highly applicable. For instance, single page sites are perfect for product launches, portfolios, some business services, online business cards, and presentations.
Multi-Page Sites are an Option
Interestingly, you can even design a simple blog or online store with the tools that Strikingly offers.
Quick Overview
Here are some of the most popular features of this site builder:
No coding skills needed
Simple to use editor
Built-in e-commerce tools
Responsive designs that perform well on mobile
Ability to use your current domain or purchase a new one
Before designing a website with Strikingly, you have to choose from one of three plans.
Yes, There’s a Free Website Option
The first option is the free account, which comes with 5GB monthly bandwidth and allowance to sell one product per site.
You can design unlimited single page free sites, which do not expire.
However, domains take the format of “yoursitename.strikingly.com” on a free plan, which is rather unprofessional if your aim is to build an e-commerce site.
The Limited Plan
The second option is the Limited paid plan, which is billed monthly, annually, or bi-annually. Committing to one year of paid services includes free domain registration at no added cost. Alternatively, paying month-month allows you to transfer a custom domain from any registrar of your choosing at no added cost.
When subscribed to both the Free and Limited plans, your website will display a “Powered by Strikingly” badge in the footer section.
The latter plan caps monthly data transfers at 50GB and allows you to sell up to five products on a simple store. What’s more, you can still build unlimited free sites at this level but subscribers have a limit of designing only two Limited sites.
The Pro Plan: Sell Products, Get Unlimited Bandwidth
Finally, the Pro plan is the most expensive option available among all Strikingly site building accounts. At this level, the company’s branding is removed from your site and no limit is placed on bandwidth.
This plan will also give you the ability to design three single-page Pro sites, sell up to 20 products per site, design unlimited free sites, connect your own domain, and customize HTML/CSS/JavaScript coding.
Other exclusive features for Pro sites include the ability to use third party widgets as well as enabling phone calling and emailing from mobile sites.
Plans are listed on the Strikingly site.
It’s worth noting that all plans include a forwarding service with three email accounts. With all paid plans, you can sign up for the 14-day risk-free trial before committing to a subscription.
Need Web Hosting?
If you're in the market for a new web hosting provider, be sure to check out our user reviews, our A-Z hosting guide and our top three popular hosting picks:
Let’s take a closer look at what it’s like to use Strikingly.
It’s Easy to Use
Like most drag-and-drop site builders, Strikingly is easy to use. Thanks to the graphical editor, you won’t have to write a single line of code. All you have to do is drag and drop page elements on different sections and then edit their properties.
Once you get a hang of the intuitive interface, it’s possible to have a well-designed single-page website up and running in just a few hours. Skilled users will also appreciate the fact that the Pro plan offers access to HTML/CSS files.
Themes Design and Customization
Strikingly offers a selection of about 10 main templates. These are narrowed down in categories such as business, personal, and portfolio, just to name a few. While they may seem few, the choice of themes within these templates is wide.
Sample of themes from Strikingly.
Building a website with Strikingly involves adding sections. Sections are simply large content blocks that split up the page. Each theme that you choose has its own individual set of sections and allowable page elements. For instance, some themes may have a section for employees while others won’t.
Therefore, it’s advisable to try out different themes before you begin editing page elements as switching themes, later on, resets your entire website. Upon choosing a template, you can change the background color and choose from a large variety of fonts.
Strikingly Blogging vs. WordPress Blogging
Unlike powerful content management systems like WordPress, the blogging functionalities in Strikingly don’t allow you to auto-publish posts at a future date.
On the plus side, you can create draft posts and even include an RSS button on your blog to give readers an easy way to subscribe.
Add Any Type of Content
Strikingly allows users to add any type of content, from text boxes, images, and videos, to contact forms, social feeds, and slide-shows. If you decide to build a blog, there will be a section that links to posts published on separate pages. Blog posts have their own unique style and you can even integrate them with the Disqus plug-in to enable commenting.
Need an Online Store?
To set up an online store with Strikingly, you’ll just need to simply enable the e-commerce section.
This section allows you to add product items, set shopping options, and create coupon codes. With a Strikingly simple store, there’s no tax system nor will you have the ability to categorize products or sell digital items.
However, the Pro plan simple store can sell up to 20 products.
Use PayPal or Stripe
Any plan you chooses offers customers the option to pay for purchases with either PayPal or Stripe. Strikingly doesn’t charge any transaction fees but do note there will be charges from both payment gateways.
Additional Editing Functions
Strikingly also doesn’t have a preview function in design mode. However, you can preview full sample sites built in templates before starting to work on a website. The editor does not autosave changes either but it features “Save” and “Publish” buttons. What’s more, this site builder lets users choose a custom favicon, that small icon that appears next to a website’s title on the browser tab.
Use a LinkedIn URL to Create a Website Automatically
One nifty feature of Strikingly is its ability to create the basis for your new website based on your LinkedIn profile. This means that, if you already have a business page on Linked, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
Strikingly will take the information you have provided and turn it into the beginnings of a beautiful, mobile-friendly website.
You will likely want to add to the base page Strikingly created, but why re-enter details like your address and other contain details if you don’t have to?
Facebook Integrations
Strikingly also offers numerous integrations with the Facebook platform. Some of the things you can do include:
Track the conversion rate of your Facebook ads
Embed Live Chat onto your site using Facebook Messenger
Share content, such as images, to Facebook
Strikingly Embeds!
In the App Store & HTML area of your Strikingly editor, you can extend the features you have on your website by copying and pasting provided code.
This means that you can easily extend the functionality of your site even if you do not know how to code. It’s simple to add tools for your customers to communicate with you or for you to gather information about your clientele. Some of the things that you can embed include:
Tawk.io, a Live Chat app
Disqus Comment Sections
MailChimp Sign Up Forms
There are many other options available as well.
SEO
Strikingly websites can be easily optimized for search engines. You can optimize the single-page site with Meta tags and keywords. On the Settings window, there’s the Analytics button that lets you view visitor data and other statistics that date back up to 90 days.
Analytics
Site stats show traffic sources and country of origin, but they don’t segment visitors based on devices used to access your website. Fortunately, Google Analytics can be added to provide more detailed visitor data but bear in mind that this functionality is only available to paying customers.
One of the great aspects about Strikingly is that all their themes are responsive. This means that when you create a website with Strikingly, it will look and perform equally week on any device including smartphones and tablets.
Thoughtful Design of Mobile Navigation
Naturally, single page sites are ideal for a mobile device. Strikingly allows you to design your mobile site with touch-friendly menus that jump between sections, thus allowing easy navigation.
Click-to-Call and Direct Emailing
The only drawbacks to point out are the lack of “click-to-call” and direct emailing on mobile sites designed on the lower tier Limited and Free plans.
You’ll have to opt for the Pro Plan to get these features, which are must-haves for online stores or services.
What is Their Customer Support Like?
At the time of writing this Strikingly website builder overview, no live chat or phone support is available for users who choose to use this site-building platform.
However, Strikingly has an online contact form so you can send your inquiries or communicate with the support team via email.
A Good Knowledgebase
What Strikingly lacks in live chat and phone support they more than make up for with an easy to use knowledge base. The online knowledge base is easy to navigate.
Help articles, getting started videos, troubleshooting guides, and other support materials are grouped into various categories. There’s even a search box, which makes it easy to find what you want quickly.
Visit the Idea Forum
In the support center, you can also find Strikingly’s idea forum. Over there, other community members share tips and tricks for using some of the tools Strikingly offers, which you can incorporate into your own site building projects.
In-Dashboard Help
Another great feature that Strikingly offers is quick access to support materials while using the editor. They achieve this with a question mark button that pops up a text box into which you can type keywords about various page elements and run a search to find relevant knowledge base information.
Alternatively, this function also lets you send messages directly to the Happiness Officers when in need of assistance.
Summary
If you’re looking for a single page website builder, Strikingly is one of the best platforms available. It’s easy to use, designs sites optimized for mobile and tablets and offer the option of creating a simple blog or online store. Of course, no single site-building platform is perfect. It’s therefore wise to learn about the good and bad aspects about Strikingly in order to decide whether this site builder is worth it.
Pros
You can keep the Free plan forever. The 14-day trial for paid subscriptions also allows users to test Strikingly before diving in.
Easy to use drag and drop editor with pre-designed page sections.
Templates come mobile optimized right out of the box.
Excellent online help materials.
A solid number of options (blog, e-commerce) without being overwhelming
Cons
No phone or live chat support.
Company branding not removed from all paid plans.
One-page websites have inherent limitations that make them suitable only for a few applications.
Single-page sites make SEO a bit tricky.
Strikingly can’t be compared to other fully-fledged website site builders like Wix, Weebly, or Squarespace because it’s so different. However, the simplicity it offers is perfect for beginners yet powerful enough for professionals to design a fully functioning website in a few short hours.
Overall, this tool is the ideal choice if you want to design an online portfolio, business card, limited/single-product store, or any other website with limited content that can fit on one page.
Got questions about Strikingly site builder? We’ve got answers!
Can I use Strikingly to build an e-commerce store?
Strikingly does offer e-commerce features, but it does not have the features needed to build a full-fledged online store. It will work to sell a few items.
Do Strikingly plans include hosting?
Yes, all plans offered include fully-managed hosting. You won’t have much control over your hosting, but for a simple one-page site, this shouldn’t be an issue. In addition, they include most of the features you would want from a host, including HTTPS.
Does Strikingly offer a free trial?
Yes, they offer a free 14-day trial. In addition, they offer a free plan with limited features. So you could build your site for free (minus a few features) and decide if you want to upgrade later.
Strikingly Plans & Prices
Strikingly website builder plans come with a simple pricing model. All plans come with a risk-free 14-day free trial and you can up/downgrade your plan as you want. For latest and most up to date prices visit Strikingly’s website.
People share their opinions about companies on Twitter each and every day. We monitor tweets about Strikingly and apply a sentiment analysis algorithm that classifies these tweets as positive or negative. Every review is from a real personal opinion. We use this information and output an approval rating score, which is based on real people, positive and negative, opinions about Strikingly on Twitter.
Strikingly Review on Twitter
We monitor tweets about Strikingly and apply sentiment analysis to classify tweets as positive or negative. This allows us to output an approval rating score, which is based on real people, positive and negative, opinions about Strikingly on Twitter. Strikingly approval rating score is 33%. This is based on a total of 3 tweets that mention Strikingly on Twitter. There are 1 mentions that share a positive sentiment and 2 mentions that express a negative sentiment. Find out more about how it works.
Strikingly Rating
33% Score
Strikingly vs Competitor Ratings
All reviews: 3
|
Positive: 1
|
Negative: 2
Josh Callahan @Jschmuck2
@strikingly Hey there -- am I reading this correctly and the only way to remove Strikingly branding is via the $20/mo tier?
Eric luttrell @Ericluttrell4
Saw an awesome one pager. Check it out @strikingly https://t.co/fJ9cty0lyX
Jay Stansell @jaystansell
@strikingly I can't seem to send this in app, see error below. ☎️ https://t.co/lIp28zeXeO
