Strikingly Review

Today the market for free website-building platforms is rich. Such platforms allow an average person with no coding knowledge or practice to become their own web designer to set up and run websites with a pretty attractive look and feel.

Although this market is competitive, Strikingly has found a way to stand out. And this way is by creating one-page websites. This solution prevents inexperienced users from playing around with their editor and making a mess out of it by giving them only a one-page site-building option.

Since Strikingly has become one of the notorious names in the array of site-building software, we should review it thoroughly.

Strikingly Quick Summary

Founded in 2012, Strikingly is a robust website-building software best recognized for creating one-page sites. Still, it can be used to create multiple-page websites with a VIP plan, but those are not as impressive as single-page ones.

With Strikingly, your one-page websites can have the complexity you need for a fully functioning platform. For instance, you can edit on-page elements, change global styling, move sections around, add animations and parallax scrolling, and create any sort of website, whether it’s a blog, a store, a portfolio, etc.

As you can already consume, Strikingly puts the emphasis on the speed of a website building, and yet it doesn’t come with a sacrifice on customization.

Recently, the internet has been experiencing impressive growth in single-page sites. More and more people have come to appreciate such websites due to the convenience of scrolling through everything the site offers and not waiting till every subsequent page loads separately. Furthermore, one-page sites look pretty fashionable and concise.

So, Strikingly is a perfect variant for those who want to set up a single-page site and don’t have much time to spend on it. Additionally, the solution allows for generating sites from social profiles, switching between templates without losing the content, adding HTML embed codes for more advanced customization, and creating and running the site through a mobile app.

Strikingly Price

Strikingly is available in two forms – free and paid. The forever free plan, however, drastically differs from the paid ones and comes strictly limited in terms of functionality. Although the free plan still allows setting unlimited sites, you can build only a simple store with one product in each store. Your site will have the brand’s mystrikingly.com domain, only up to 5 GB monthly bandwidth, and 500 MB storage per website.

Obviously, it isn’t even worth considering the free plan. Strikingly’s paid tiers are three: Limited, priced at $8/mo, Pro, paid at $16/mo, and VIP, at $49/mo, provided that you get an annual plan. Although the cheapest Limited plan is a significant upgrade from the Free plan, I wouldn’t recommend it. It offers unlimited sites and a free custom domain (you can as well connect yours), and yet, the company will still issue a 5% transaction fee, while the Strikingly ads will still pop out on your site.

The Pro plan is what I recommend with peace of mind. It has tons of fantastic features, as well as custom code, site search, password protection, site memberships, pop-ups, no Strikingly branding, and the opportunity to build sites with up to 100 pages! Still, there is a 2% fee set on transactions.

By upgrading your plan to VIP, you can get rid of any transaction fees. Besides whatever the Pro plan offers, this tier includes a Live Chat widget, multiple membership tiers, 2,000 active contacts, the opportunity to sell unmetered products, and a number of other perks.
Other than the mentioned pricing plans, Strikingly suggests upgrading your customer communications to a professional level by adding custom email at a $25/year price. For this, you need a domain name.

Note that all paid plans come with a 14-day risk-free trial period, during which you needn’t pay for the services. You can use Strikingly’s full potential, but publishing your ready site only becomes possible after purchasing a plan.

Building a Website on Strikingly

Building a website on Strikingly is an absolute breeze! In mere minutes, you can have your site built and functioning. After choosing the template (a shout-out to Strikingly for providing unique templates despite being rather simple site-building software), you will get a tour of the site builder. It will facilitate your task and help you hit the ground running by building a single-page site.

Whatever you do with your site, let it control the design and settings or switch the template; it will be a click away. From the moment you sign up for a Strikingly free plan with your email and password, you will understand it was tailored for beginners and people who like simple things.

Strikingly Interface

Like many contemporary website builders, Strikingly features an intuitive and beginner-friendly interface. In fact, its dashboard is completely chaos-free, with absolutely no unnecessary tools cluttering the main left-hand menu.

The dashboard is clear and precise with functions such as Edit, Statistics, Forms, Blog, Store, and Settings. When you build your site, you must return to the dashboard to connect to the custom domain.

Creating a new site and upgrading the subscription (the default plan after signing up is the Free Plan) are also performed from the dashboard. Also, depending on what stage you have ceased the site-building process, Strikingly will introduce your personal to-do list. Step by step, the system will check the points as you get closer to winding up your website.

Additionally, on the dashboard, you can access Android and iOS apps to customize and manage your site from your mobile device.

Strikingly site builder’s interface is codeless and intuitive. The company doesn’t ask for technical skills and allows anyone with or without experience to build a perfect one-page site.

Strikingly Templates

Strikingly introduces tens of professional-looking templates split into such categories as Business, Portfolio, Service, Company, Event, Store, etc. All the templates are free and available in view mode before choosing. Whether you pick up a template per the niche or simply by looking at the potential layout, you will spot an appropriate one for your purpose.

All Strikingly templates feature responsive layouts. This ensures a fantastic look of your site regardless of the device visitors will use to access it.

Unlike most other website builders, Strikingly preserves the content after the template is switched to another. This significantly increases your chances of getting the perfect final results. Additionally, whatever template you choose, it will support blogs, eCommerce, forms, memberships, live chat, and much more. Also, some templates have animations, ready-made color schemes, parallax scrolling, and more.

Strikingly Website Design

Strikingly website designing revolves around sections dedicated to building one-page sites. A section here is a group of elements that make up a sophisticated unit together. For instance, you can assemble parts designed to show social feeds, information, store items, blog, etc.

Furthermore, the editing process at Strikingly is thoroughly section-oriented. Accordingly, you won’t have to add components one by one like you do with any other user-friendly website builder. Instead, add already pre-designed section layouts and edit them afterward. This is actually more an advantage than a downside, given the one-page design of Strikingly websites.

Later, when you have incorporated an entire section into your template, you can customize the included elements – change their order, edit images and text, add links, etc. If you don’t have any photos of yours to upload, Strikingly offers over three million images in stock, available for free use. You can pick any without any copyright issues.

Generally, every template has its own styling options, mostly dependent on the niche. For instance, if you pick up a service template, you will hardly find a product list (surely, you can add a store option via a section, but the customization will be strictly limited). Instead, such sections as Interests, Booking, Publications, etc. will be available.

However, regardless of the chosen template, you will get plenty of customization options to play with not only sections but also fonts (headings, titles, text, buttons), color schemes, header & navigation, buttons (colors, shapes, filling), text size and colors, etc.

It is convenient to work with Strikingly templates because you can switch the template, and whatever information you have inserted will be automatically transferred into the new template. Before publishing your ready site, the site building software allows previewing it in desktop and mobile modes.

Overall, with peace of mind, I can praise the customization of Strikingly templates for their simplicity. Along with lovely animations, the offered elements bring single-page websites to life. And yet, not all great options are available for free. You must subscribe to a premium plan to use the potential power of Strikingly website customization.

Strikingly Online Store

Strikingly features pretty good eCommerce functionality despite being oriented at one-page website building. Surely, it can’t compete with the industry giant eCommerce software like BigCommerce or Shopify, and yet, your site can still have a section devoted to a small online store.

With a free plan, you can sell only physical products and services, while Pro and VIP plans also open access to digital products. You needn’t worry about the download link when you add a digital product to your shop since Strikingly creates it automatically.

Strikingly allows arranging your product line into categories, managing taxes and shipping, and accepting payments. Surely, to add a product variety to your store, upgrade shipping taxes, add product reviews, as well as perform more advanced eCommerce functions, such as creating coupon codes, taking preorders, choosing the currency, etc., you need a Pro or VIP plan.

As for accepting payments, your Strikingly store customers can pay through Stripe, PayPal, Square, and Offline Payments (you need to provide a guideline for this option). Go to Accept Payments from Settings to adjust the function.

If you treat having a small store on your website as a bonus and not putting much thought into building an eCommerce platform, Strikingly is a good option. Otherwise, you’d better give up on this software, or you will get deeply disappointed.

Strikingly SEO

SEO functionality with Strikingly is rather limited. Surely, the basic checklist is available since the company understands the importance of search engine optimization. You can add social share images, add page titles and meta descriptions, set custom URLs and image alt texts, add favicon, and include keywords in the heading tag.

Quite possibly, the limitation of SEO tools is due to being just on one page, which makes it a bit more difficult to control how your site is optimized for search engines. And yet, the lack of flexibility and customization options necessary to improve your website’s standing with Google is frustrating.

Nevertheless, Strikingly also covers the basic analytics for better productivity of your site. It offers accurate data on the number of unique visitors per day, week, month, and 90 days. Additionally, you can check the regions/countries your customers accessed your site from and what devices and traffic sources they used.

Publishing a Website on Strikingly

Do you find you are through with editing your site? If the result satisfies you and you are happy with your current plan (note that during the free trial period of paid plans publishing a site will not be available), go to your site editor and find the Publish button on the left-hand menu. Click it, and your website will go live and become accessible to anyone who has your site’s URL.

In case you use your own custom domain, it may take up to 15 minutes before the website goes live because the service has to push your change to their CDN to let the site be online and fast anywhere in the world.

When publishing a site, it is automatically indexed (i.e., listed) on the search results by search engines. But if you don’t want your site to be indexed yet, you can disable it from Settings. Go to Show Advanced and then Privacy. Here you can add password protection to make the site accessible only to those with the password. These may be your teammates.

With Strikingly, you can have an entire team to collaborate with and create a stunning site together. The company allows inviting an editor, blogger, and store manager while you, as the Strikingly subscriber, are the admin.

Strikingly Technical Support

Like all major website-building platforms, Strikingly features an extensive help Guide with tons of articles on the platform’s functioning. If you are new to this platform, I recommend first glancing at the helpful information provided. The sections include starter videos, account & billing, third-party domains, site management, documents & media content, templates & styles, editing sections, etc.

As for the tet-a-tet collaboration with the Strikingly support team, the only options for ordinary customers are messaging the company on the site and the live chat. The latter is available round the clock, yet doesn’t always respond instantly. As for emailing the company, you can leave a detailed description of your problem and attach a file. If you are a Free plan user, expect an answer within one business day. Otherwise, they will get back to you within one to three hours.

And finally, phone support is available only for VIP plan users. And if strikingly allows setting up a multilingual site (only English, French, and Spanish languages are suggested), the support over the phone is available only in English.

Strikingly Review: Verdict

Given the statistics that over half of website visitors spend less than 15 seconds on a site and don’t pass from one page to another, the Strikingly single-page site approach is a perfect solution to increase your site traffic. This software ensures short and actionable sites that are fun to scroll and don’t bore visitors. And 15 seconds is sufficient for such a website to convince a visitor to take action.

If you are also a proponent of this theory, Strikingly can be your best choice! Your site will have everything necessary to become a powerful player on the web, including animations, parallax scrolling, and many other unique features.

Strikingly will undoubtedly satisfy your requirements if you intend to build a single product/service store, a company/organization site, an event, or a startup website. But suppose your purpose is a multiple-page website or a robust eCommerce platform. In that case, I recommend looking for more powerful site-building solutions that can offer services for about the same price as Strikingly’s paid plans.