uKit Review

uKit contemporary and sleek website builder doesn’t have such popularity as its competitors, yet, on the other hand, it is not inferior to them in terms of usefulness. This lesser-known tool is well-made and business oriented. Through this in-depth review, I will pinpoint all the company’s benefits while not neglecting the downsides.

By the end of the review, you will have a clear image of what uKit represents and understand why it doesn’t make it to the top website builders.

uKit Quick Summary

uKit is a mobile-responsive professional website builder that empowers small businesses with straightforward and versatile site creation. The company was launched in 2015 by a multicultural tech squad behind the code-based site builder uKit Group.

uKit is primarily geared towards small businesses since it puts a strong emphasis on its selection of eCommerce tools, while the suggested designs are clearly geared towards business practices. You can spot themes optimized for raising brand awareness and selling products or services online.

uKit exploits a business-first WYSIWYG drag-and-drop editor interface, effectively removing the fuss of creating a strong online business presence. Furthermore, it offers a decent selection of widgets to integrate a good level of extra functionality into one’s website.

So, if you are searching for a simple site-building platform that goes easy on the bells and whistles, it’s worth giving uKit a look. Despite the weaknesses in the SEO and usability departments, uKit offers a decent editor with beautiful design modification options, site analytics, templates, and some amazing store features.

uKit supports a range of languages, including English, Russian, Portuguese, Romanian, Turkish, and Polish, to help its users from around the world maneuver with the service easily. However, like most of its contenders, uKit doesn’t offer any option of moving your website pages to a different hosting provider. Despite this, uKit is evidently catered to providing a good user experience.

uKit Price

Website building services are always tricky when it comes to pricing. If you aren’t cautious enough when purchasing a plan at a good price, you may end up with an annual subscription. Here, too, uKit offers an individual price for each of its four pricing plans and prompts about discounted costs in case of purchasing a plan for a lengthy period. In all cases, uKit is a very affordable website creation tool compared to other companies.

Subscribing for a uKit plan for three months, six months, one year, and two years in advance, you will get 15%, 20%, 30%, and 50% off, respectively. Since most site builders highlight prices for annual subscriptions, I will introduce the uKit plans pricing system per yearly subscription, too.

• Minimal – At $6.30 per month, you activate all the necessary tools and features to run a virtual store.
• Basic – The plan with extended statistics and a live chat support option is priced at $7.70 per month.
• eCommerce – To run an online shop with shopping cart and checkout functionality, upgrade your plan to eCommerce, priced at $9.10 per month.
• Pro – The full potential of uKit with more creative and coding possibilities for professionals is suggested in the Pro plan at $10.50 per month.

uKit also offers a one-of-a-kind service – to order a ready-to-use website geared to a client’s specific needs. At a fixed price, uKit professionals can create a mind-blowing website that best portrays your business’s essence and style.

The uKit plan you choose (except for the Pro plan) will come with a 14-day trial period. The company also provides a 100% money-back guarantee within the first 14 days after the purchase is made. You can pay for uKit services via Visa, MasterCard, JCB, MIR, and PayPal payment gateways.

Building a Website on uKit

When you need to build a website quickly without a designer’s assistance, assembling the site interface from ready-made blocks and widgets is expedient. And uKit is one of the most suitable platforms for such tasks. You can build an excellent business site within minutes with practically no coding knowledge or former expertise. While eCommerce tools and great templates are vital, the ease of use of a site-building solution is still nothing to scoff at.

uKit offers a website-building wizard that will guide a new user throughout the process. Take your time, and don’t bypass the guide. In a few steps, you will get a clear image of how to settle a professional-looking site quickly.

Start by signing up at uKit with either your social media account or email. In a few seconds, you will be guided to your Dashboard, where you must choose a website design that best fits your business. To get more information on the preferred template, click on Preview and see its demo. You can also switch between desktop, tablet, and smartphone views to see how your website will look across different devices.

Choose your template and assign a domain name to it. Once done, you can start customizing the website with your unique content from the Site Pages tab. You can see several pages by default, depending on the chosen template and niche. Then, click on + Add page and add other pages if necessary.

Other than the Site Pages, other tools are suggested, such as Builder, Design, Adaptive site version, System, Pop-Up Windows, etc. Use all the functions of the drag-and-drop editor to bring your website to its perfect state. The final steps of building a website with uKit are verifying and publishing.

uKit Interface

uKit introduces two basic modes to work with your website. These are the Dashboard and the Builder. The uKit interface is highly intuitive and simple to navigate. It serves as a one-stop location to manage your account and sites. Switch between your sites and create new ones, manage your profile, get help from uKit experts, and see what’s new on the platform. And if you intend to augment your sites, edit them in the Builder mode. From here, you can also upgrade your subscription.

The Main Menu contains important data for your account and site. You will find Payments, Domains, Bonuses, various tools, and side widgets, such as statistics, Google Tag Manager, Facebook Pixel, badges, and footers.

Through the builder mode, you can adjust how your website looks. Look for all the functional elements in the left-hand panel. The panel provides access to the Dashboard, allows adding blocks and widgets, building an online store, choosing a design or creating your custom color scheme, adding new pages or switching between the existing ones, applying the change or reverting them, and, finally, publishing your website.

uKit Templates

uKit provides hundreds of sleek and attractive templates at your disposal, neatly organized into business-specific categories. This helps users seek the perfect template for their niche at the appropriate place without having to scroll through multiple options.

All uKit themes are mobile responsive. They fit any screen size of a tablet or smartphone and don’t require any modification on your part. So, once you build a website, it’s automatically adjusted to a mobile screen, and you don’t have the ability to change the appearance of your mobile website if you need to.

uKit templates are categorized into 40 business niches, from Automotive to Construction, from Education & Training to Farming & Agriculture, etc. Besides, you can filter them by General, One pager, New, and Best options.

Although the entire portfolio of templates looks professional and modern, they are a bit similar. You can feel the same uKit style and signature across all of them. This saves an inexperienced user from picking a template that won’t work for a business site despite looking lovely. Still, on the other hand, this similarity between the templates strictly limits a creative user.

What makes uKit stand out is the custom template offer. If none of the suggested variants meet your requirement, order a custom website tailored to your needs. At the price of $100, you will receive a ready-to-use custom site for your business in only ten days.

uKit Website Design

As for website designing, the customization options are limited here compared to other, more popular website builders. For instance, users have no access to custom colors or change the font type or text size unless they are Pro plan owners. Nevertheless, let’s delve into the overall website design capabilities.

The uKit editor is beautiful and easy to use. It lets you interact with the website creation tools via the already common drag-and-drop functionality. The beginner-friendly editor can freely compete with more popular site-building platforms. Aside from many widgets, uKit allows adding and editing premade blocks, headlines, content, and blank blocks.

The advanced tools include rotating, flipping, and adding icons, as well as a drawing tool, text, and shapes. In addition, choose aspect ratios and freely crop images. The editor also supports such resizing tools as the zoom-in/out feature, alt attributes, and image captions.

The media library of uKit features only several free images. For a more extensive selection, check out the available stock photography collection from DepositPhotos. Images can be presented in a grid, slider, or collage. Additionally, it’s possible to upload your images from your PC or import some good options from your social media accounts.

All color, formatting, style options, and other content editing tools appear easy to use. To further enhance your website or online store design, implement price lists, user reviews, or tables into its structure.

uKit Online Store

uKit is primarily built via a business website building platform. Therefore, the eCommerce functionality is quite rich. But to get the full power of eCommerce functions, you should consider using the integration with Ecwid. This is a feature-packed software that supports most of uKit eCommerce functionality. For instance, the store layout cost calculation and product catalog can be added from uKit.

Accessing the online store, use Settings and adjust the currency (uKit allows integrating tens of options to choose from), unit of measure, turn on Google Analytics, and select the further actions when items are added to the cart. Order forms can be adjusted, too. Add promo codes, and specify any information your buyers should know before completing an order. It will appear on the Checkout page of your web store. Also, adjust the order form from this section.

For shipping and payment configurations, there are respective sections. Connect payment gateways, and set your products’ shipping method and price. To increase your brand awareness, uKit suggests integrating social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, VK, Disqus) and adding share buttons.

Note that all these online store tools are available only if you upgrade your account to eCommerce.

uKit SEO

uKit offers blogging and SEO tools, which are, yet not extraordinary. The available features are all essential and can help you optimize your site or web store for search engines. You can add a sitemap of the site, meta tags, and several other options that will increase your brand visibility for search engines. Furthermore, some features will show you how ready your site is for promotion. You will be promoted if your website lacks meta tags, widgets, meta descriptions, text information, and other crucial aspects.

uKit also provides users with integrated analytics. They will help you to check how your platform is doing and whether or not it needs some improvement. All the essential website traffic data are available from the Dashboard. SEO-savvy users will also find it helpful that they can hide a page from indexing.

To make the most of your uKit website in terms of SEO, the company suggests ordering an SEO setup. At a fixed price, uKit provides a website audit, collecting semantic core, content optimization, adding meta tags to site pages, internal relinking, user-friendly URL structure, structured heading levels, adding ALT attributes to images, adding the site to Google Search Console, and website optimization consultation.

uKit Technical Support

uKit website-building software offers dedicated email support. And yet, I can’t consider the support system satisfying since it lacks the most convenient options to communicate with the company specialists. For example, there is no telephone support or live chat (available only for owners or Basic and higher plans). Instead, to contact uKit, use the in-built message system.

The company has an extended Knowledge Base with several sections to make the uKit journey smooth for a new user. Such sections are available as Interface, how to get started, widgets, online store, domains, pricing, publication, promotion, and general.

Before getting in touch with a uKit specialist, check the FAQ section. It holds a bunch of questions and accurate answers to them.

uKit Review: Verdict

uKit is a modern and sleek website-building solution that gets the job done definitely well. It is a relatively new company and hasn’t yet gained its competitors’ popularity. It lacks some integrations and customization options. And yet, uKit has all the appropriate features for a small or medium-sized business owner to create a decent website or web store and run their business effectively.

uKit features powerful eCommerce functionality, a robust blogging platform, sophisticated mobile-responsive templates, and an intuitive website editor, making it an affordable but reliable solution regardless of your business niche.