Ucraft Review
Ucraft is one of the most sought-after modern website builders. Much like its artsy name, this solution puts design at the forefront of anything it does. A sleek editor, a bunch of templates that let your website “pop,” and many useful features are only a few things that Ucraft can bring to your table.
However, there are other things to mind when picking a website builder. After all, your site will become the brainchild that will ensure the success or failure of your virtual presence.
Therefore, besides the design functionality, a good website builder must provide its users with other crucial features such as SEO tools, the property of creating a multilingual site, trustworthy and expanded analytics, etc.
In this comprehensive review, I will elucidate Ucraft’s all pros and cons, introduce its whole functionality, and specify whether you should give it a try or you’d be better off bypassing it.
Ucraft Quick Summary
Ucraft is a multi-tailored website builder with all the tools required by a reliable modern website builder. It’s also an efficient content management system that lets a user launch a virtual store without a hassle.
In addition, it offers free domain and website hosting services, supports a logo designer feature to enable companies to draft one from scratch, and introduces its basic services entirely for free.
Ucraft has been around in the industry since 2014, accumulating a big following during these years and establishing a name of a trustworthy SaaS solution.
It requires no coding or website design experience due to the WYSIWYG editor. And yet, it provides premium services at competitive pricing.
Nevertheless, Ucraft is a somewhat unconventional site-building platform where website pages are built by placing content blocks vertically on top of one another.
And each of them stands for a page and composes individual elements which are all customizable thoroughly – a quality and property that most block-based website builders don’t have.
With Ucraft, you get ensured a dynamic website and improved user experience. In fact, Ucraft is a great option for one-page sites, personal websites (especially for art-based ones), and landing pages.
So, if you are looking for a robust solution with perfect eCommerce functionality for your big company or store, you may be better off looking elsewhere.
Ucraft Price
Ucraft offers four pricing plans, ranging from free to $69 per month, depending on what type of site you create – a personal website, a landing page, or an eCommerce website.
Regardless of the chosen plan, you will receive all the basic elements and visibility settings that Ucraft has, plus SSL security, unmetered bandwidth, robust Google Analytics, and round-the-clock customer support.
The Free plan will allow you to create a landing page or a multi-page site with up to 15 password-protected pages.
As long as your requirements regarding your website aren’t high, the Free plan will go smoothly (note that you can’t escape Ucraft branding that will be visible as a watermark on your site).
Other than the Free plan, Ucraft offers an introductory Pro Website plan priced at $10 per month, a Pro Shop plan at $21 per month, and an Unlimited plan at $69 per month.
All the paid plans allow users to build multilingual sites with unlimited pages and embed CSS/HTML/JS; offer advanced features, robust SEO, designer, and blogging tools; provide Google & Custom fonts, RSS feed, membership functionality, tens of integrations, and a decent range of eCommerce functionality.
These were the paid plans for building personal sites. If you are interested in building white-labeled sites under your brand and domain name, Ucraft will get that covered, too, without a free offer this time.
The suggested white-label PayGo plans are priced at $39, $69, and $109 per month. If Personal Ucraft plans pricing is calculated per month, but for an annual subscription, white-labeled plans are available only for monthly payments.
All paid plans come with a 14-day trial period during which you can explore the company’s service before you commit.
Building a Website with Ucraft
Building a website with Ucraft is no big deal. You needn’t be an expert or master of coding. Just sign up with your email and hit Create a new website from the My Sites tab. This is to be done in two steps: choosing a template and setting the subdomain or site name.
Once done, you can get started. If you are on your free plan, note that the domain will end with ucraft.site. For a custom domain, you should upgrade your subscription.
Now start crafting. The basic steps include adding your brand’s logo, editing the content, using pre-made blocks, changing color, and editing elements.
Advanced and extra functionalities of crafting the website involve adding pages, effects, integrations, articles, and a new language, as well as changing the layout, enabling eCommerce, etc. The possibilities for crafting the site are multiple – take your pick.
By the way, Ucraft guides you through the entire process with small popup windows. This will help novice users get settled even easier.
During the process, you can always switch between the desktop and mobile views to check how the website looks on both. Use the left-hand menu to access all the website design options available per your pricing plan.
Ucraft Interface
While there are certain kicks to deal with here and there, the website editor is definitely easy to use, just like it’s easy to navigate through the user interface.
Generally, Ucraft features a well-organized interface with all the tools necessary for building a website within easy reach. It’s created based on the concept of blocks and elements.
For example, the left sidebar holds all the tools required to drag and drop on the main preview section.
Note that all elements here are completely customizable, and contextual popup tools appear once you click on an editable section.
Accessing the dashboard from the website you are currently evolving, you will open the scads of features there. This makes the entire process of site development a lot more organized. You can alter main, secondary, and system pages through the Pages section.
The Media folder opens up Free Stock, Canva, and Media options (you can upload pictures from your PC, use free stock images, or select them from Canva). To enhance search engine optimization, access SEO from the dashboard.
Aside from the reviewed sections on the dashboard, you have such options as Domain, Team, Logo Maker, Articles, Site Settings, Integrations, Languages, Fonts, Customers, eCommerce, and Popups.
Ucraft Templates
Ucraft offers a choice of over 120 templates geared to probably all niches for photographers, artists, designers, bloggers, small businesses, realtors, etc.
Although there’s not a mountain of available options, they are still enough to help you take your site to new heights. In addition, the entire selection is mobile responsive; hence you won’t have to adjust your site to fit a smartphone or tablet screen size.
Ucraft templates all look elegant and classy. No way can you describe them as flashy or chic. The similarity of style and Ucraft’s unique signature is vivid equally from Fashion templates to Education-themed ones.
Therefore, if you aim to build a glammy website to make your site pop with luxury, Ucraft can’t be your destination.
You can preview the template you choose before designating it as your template. Furthermore, Ucraft introduces some information about every template, including the purpose, tags, and designer.
Ucraft Website Design
When you use Ucraft’s website editor, you can’t help but notice the developers behind the company went the extra mile to build a powerful user interface, still catering to the requirements of a beginner with absolutely no coding expertise.
Perhaps the only aspect I would personally love to incorporate into the editor is the “redo” button. You can undo the previous step, but there’s already no way to reverse it.
Ucraft has many merits, one of which is the possibility to swap templates anytime you need while building the website without losing the submitted content.
Moreover, you can change the fonts, colors, headings, etc., when interchanging the templates if you find the used design features don’t go well with the new template.
Ucraft provides an impressive array of customization opportunities for every template as long as the user has access to Design Tools (all paid plans include designing tools). If you do, Ucraft will unlock such properties as changing the page width, the distance between elements, navigation styles, etc.
You can also Install custom fonts and configure button styles.
The left-hand menu holds all the tools for website designing, including elements (images, sliders, galleries, titles, paragraphs, videos, icons, logo, etc.), colors, effects (left/right rotation, fade in/up/down/left/right/scale, parallax, and affix), blocks, etc.
Furthermore, far not all website builders can boast of introducing a Progress option. The latter pinpoints how complete your site is (via a percentage) and hints about what it misses – a definitely helpful and rare feature!
Ucraft not only incorporates over 120 templates into its platform but also offers more than 100 saved blocks with ready-made layouts involving FAQ, CTA buttons, sliders, eCommerce, footer, forms, and about us blocks. In addition, within the scope of collaboration with Noun Project, Ucraft also introduces royalty-free icons that are completely copy-right free for commercial use, so you needn’t attribute them.
Such an impressive spectrum of site customizability isn’t available even in some premium website builders. Ucraft definitely rocks!
Ucraft Online Store
Do you pursue the idea of building and running a superior-powerful online store? If yes, you should consider Ucraft eCommerce functionality meticulously to see if it can satisfy your business needs. Let me introduce the suggested features, and you will get a better idea of how effective Ucraft is in terms of eCommerce.
With its Pro Shop plan, Ucraft allows building a superb virtual store to sell up to 1,000 products (both physical and digital), gives you the possibility to edit invoices, reverse charge VAT, enable discount coupons, offer up to 50 payment and 20 shipping methods to your customers, activate abandoned cart saver and product inventory tracking, incorporate a store management app for an even easier enrollment, etc.
What type of products you will sell on your online store does not matter. The Pro Shop plan also allows selling on Facebook, Amazon, Instagram, and eBay. All this, and much else, becomes available at only $21 per month if paid annually.
Ucraft might not be as powerful regarding eCommerce functionality as eCommerce-specific website builders, but the available selection of features makes it quite a decent choice.
Ucraft SEO
Search Engine Optimization is the crucial process of enhancing a website in a way that helps it rank highly on search engines, with Google and Bing, in particular. And Ucraft introduces its own SEO app for this purpose.
It allows altering redirections, main, secondary, and system pages. For instance, set up Offline Page, 404 Redirect, Password Protected Pages, Sign In/Out Required Pages, Cookie Policy, Privacy, Shipping Policy, and Terms and Conditions pages.
Ucraft also runs a separate SEO manager for all images on the website. Accordingly, you can add Alt tags, the title, description, and the robots.txt (Index, Follow; Index, NoFollow; Noindex, Follow; Noindex, Nofollow) to every image on your website and include them in Sitemap, if necessary.
For novice users not backed with any site-building expertise, Ucraft suggests getting acquainted with all ins and outs of search engine optimization through a detailed marketing guide.
Through the guide, you will understand how to find the best keywords for the site or unique content, what’s the perfect length and structure of a keyword, how to build clickable links, etc.
The robust array of SEO tools also makes the platform suitable for creating and running a blog. For example, the company allows saving posts to publish later, save drafts, categorize and tag posts, add a section for comments through the Disqus integration, etc.
Ucraft Technical Support
Ucraft undoubtedly appears helpful whenever you face a problem in website building or running. Just like in the case of the rest of the functionality, Ucraft is good but not great at providing assistance to its customers. There are a few options for getting in touch directly with a Ucraft specialist.
The Live Chat functions the best and is accessible round the clock. The staff is helpful and knowledgeable. The usual reply to any question is received within ten minutes. Aside from this go-to resource for contacting customer support, you have no other option than relying on Help Center or FAQs. The search bar for filtering the helpful articles does not conceal the fact there is no phone or email support. Alas.
Ucraft Review: Verdict
By now, you must have come up with a pretty good idea of what Ucraft is and if it’s your best pick. However, to recap: Ucraft is a solid image-centric site-building solution introduced with all standard features, along with an array of amazing integrations.
It’s great for creative individuals, small companies, startups, and small eCommerce businesses searching for a simple but powerful website builder.
The Ucraft Free plan is a real draw! Unlike its contenders, Ucraft has packed the Free plan with various tools and features so you can start off entirely for free without worrying about your website quality.
Aside from the website builder, Ucraft provides users with a completely free landing page creator and logo maker – a big plus for the brand!
Today’s website-building market holds better options (though at higher prices) than Ucraft can offer. And yet, the pricing, ease of use, and high level of customizability make it a worthwhile choice for a newbie with no coding expertise.
