With Duda, simplicity is the selling point. The website builder lets you quickly and easily build attractive websites that look great on desktops, smartphones, and tablets. Despite its higher-paid tiers being aimed at professionals, Duda gets your site online with little design or technical knowledge required. Slick and powerful, Duda makes it easy to craft your online presence and begin selling your wares. For that, Duda reigns as an Editors’ Choice pick for website builders.
Many Pricing Options
In the past, Duda let users create a website for free, similar to Editors’ Choice option Wix. Unfortunately, like Editors’ Choice pick Gator, Duda lacks a free tier, but you can sample the service using its 4-day free trial. The service now has three paid tiers (powered by the excellent Amazon Web Services) that focus on collaborative websites. The first is Basic ($19 per month, down to $14 per month if billed annually), which lets a single user create one website. Unfortunately, Basic limits your customer support contact method to email.
Team is the next tier ($29 per month, down to $22 per month if billed annually). It increases the number of maximum team members to four, adds chat and phone support, and lets visitors leave site comments. The Team tier is where Duda’s larger focus on web agencies, software as a service (SaaS), and web hosting services begins to appear, with client management options and white-label analytics added as features. In fact, the next tier is called Agency ($59 per month, down to $44 per month if billed annually). It lets you build up to four websites, rope in 10 team members, and build widgets to gives your sites unique capabilities. Duda also has a custom option if you need managed services and 24/7 dedicated support, but you must contact the company to get a quote.
While each paid tier is built for a certain number of sites, you can add more for an additional monthly fee. This fee is dependent on which tier you’re subscribed to, coming to $19 per month, $13 per month, and $11 per month for each site you add for the Basic, Team, and Agency tiers, respectively.
E-commerce is also an additional cost. The standard eCommerce add-on is $8 per month, for a maximum of 100 products in your digital storefront. For an additional $22 per month, you can sell up to 2,500 products, sell on Amazon and Ebay, and even create multilingual stores. The top-end eCommerce plan costs $49 per month, and it lets you sell unlimited products and leverage a Square point-of-sale system. All these costs add up for Duda, pushing it out of the realm of the casual user. Editors’ Choice Wix has business plans starting at $23 per month if you’re just starting your online sales journey.
Start Building Your Site
To start a new site, you choose from one of 110 attractive, modern templates. There’s a search bar if you known which specific template you’re looking for, but Duda has a number of other sorting options to help your search. You can look by overall color, or filter by categories, such as Online, Travel, Restaurant & Food, and Blog. Duda just wants to show you everything it has available, unlike Squarespace and other website builders that present questionnaires to help narrow your template hunt.
When you click a template thumbnail, a panel shows you how the template’s look changes for phone and tablet viewing. You can even see how the template looks on all three device types—desktop, smartphone, and tablet—at once. That’s better than what many site builders do. Strikingly, for example, only shows one preview, though you can shrink the browser window to see how it will look on smaller screens.
Once you choose a template for your Duda site and start customizing, you can’t switch templates later, as you can with Squarespace or Simvoly. This is because Duda sites, though they fit the search engines’ criteria for mobile presentation, aren’t responsive in the strictest sense, meaning they don’t stretch and compress all elements as you resize the browser window. Duda uses the term responsive when describing sites it builds—not incorrectly—to mean that the presentation reformats based on whether you’re viewing it in a desktop browser, tablet, or smartphone. Duda’s approach, however, means you get a lot more control over your site design and can tweak it to look different on mobile.
Next, you build your own site using the selected template, which is prepopulated with dummy content, by replacing that with your own assets. You can pull images and so on directly from an existing site or a Facebook page. For testing, we started with the DigiStore template.
Web Design Tools
The site builder interface features an intuitive left sidebar, in which you find tools for managing and designing your site. These let you customize your theme colors, text, and navigation, as well as add and manage pages and site settings from choices on the left panel. An arrow lets you collapse this sidebar for a full view of the page, which can be helpful. Also helpful are Undo and Redo buttons that work no matter what you’re doing on the site. Ctrl-Z works, too. Furthermore, you can always get help by clicking a chat bubble icon at the bottom right—very handy.
The basic page elements—images, text boxes, buttons, dividers—appear when you click the Widgets button. You may find this a bit confusing, as widgets are typically third-party goodies rather than these basic site elements. You drag the elements onto your webpage as with Weebly and other competitors. You can only drop elements in allowed areas, but it’s not hard to add columns or change spacing to customize the layout to your taste. In fact, we love how you can choose Add Row or Add Column right from a page’s Row button, which appears when you hover over any section.
Third-party items, such as Facebook and Disqus comment modules, are included in the Widgets group, but Duda lacks a large catalog of third-party integrations like those found in Wix. Duda also integrates with services, such as Yelp, vCita online scheduling, OpenTable, and PayPal. The newest widget integration is with Yext, which embeds structured schema data into your website, making it easier for other sites to machine-read. In particular, it helps search engines parse your site. Duda lets you easily incorporate social sharing buttons, including Facebook Likes, comments, and albums; a Twitter feed; and a WordPress feed. When we added the Click-to-Call feature to our test site, it merely displayed our number, which smartphones display as a link that opens the phone dialer.
Part of why Duda’s editor works so well overall is its clean and consistent layout. Along the top is an ever-present toolbar that lets you switch pages, undo your last edit, save your work, preview your site, publish your site, and view your site in the three different screen sizes. The toolbar also offers access to your Dashboard page, from which you can access all the sites you manage or are building through Duda, start new ones, and connect them to a personal domain. There’s an option to purchase a new domain name through Google Domains or Hover, and Duda offers specific integrated help for using a custom domain obtained from the major domain name registrars.
If you don’t choose a custom domain, Duda assigns your site a URL such as mysite4036.multiscreensite.com; you can pick another prefix if it’s not already taken. If you’ve built some pages, but aren’t ready to publish, you can save your edits for later publication. Duda doesn’t, however, let you schedule overall site publication at a specific date and time, as Weebly does.
Whenever you hover over any item on your site, you see a button offering relevant edit options. Surprisingly, it supports right-clicking, which gives you a context-sensitive menu for each element. This provides an easy way to edit, align, or remove content. You can fairly easily move elements around the page and resize them, though, as with most mobile-friendly site builders, your choices of where to move items are limited. For a paragraph object, the context menu lets you pull content from another site, edit the text, format it, and hide it on a selected device type. Clicking a page navigation link in the site designer takes you to that page on your site; you don’t have to select it from a page menu as in some other site builders, though there’s also a dropdown menu for switching among your pages.
The Manage Pages panel is simple and clear, with SEO and navigation options available under a gear icon. It also lets you import images and site info from an existing site. To add a new page to my site, you simply tap the +New page button. There’s a selection of 10 page types to choose from, including Blank, URL, About, Contact, Photo Gallery, List, and Complex Page. Pages can be password-protected via the gear Settings menu. Hovering over a page type’s thumbnail shows its layout on the three device sizes. Duda also has a very serviceable blogging tool. This lets you save and preview posts that you can format and add images to taste.
Every option dialog for every Duda site element includes a Settings tab that lets you edit spacing in pixels, the CSS code, and—for premium accounts—the actual HTML code for the element. But it’s not just standard HTML. While the code looks fairly simple and standard, you need to familiarize yourself with the proprietary DMLE (DudaMobile Markup Language Extension) to work with it effectively.
Duda also lets you use secure socket layer certificates (SSL), so site visitors see HTTPS in the browser address bar. This is more important with the arrival of GDPR, and Duda offers all the tools you need to stay compliant with that privacy regulation for your European site visitors. You can activate a cookie notification, implement a privacy policy, enable opt-in consent for contact forms, and offer a way to delete personal data.
In the end, building a site with Duda is a pleasure: The interface is mostly quick, unlike some builders (1&1 MyWebsite in particular) that take forever and a day to load modules. As with most such services, moving objects around can be finicky, but Duda lets us get the results we wanted.
Working With Images
To add images on your site, you can either choose from the stock photography included, drag and drop photos from computer folders, or import them from online sources like Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, or Dropbox. The included stock photography selection has improved since our last test, turning up plenty of clothing rack shots when we searched for “thrift shop,” for example. You can even enter an image’s URL or perform a web image search to find the picture you want. Uploading multiple images at once? Not a problem, regardless of whether it’s a whole folder or multiple selected images within a folder.
You can crop, resize, and even open an embedded image editor for some online photo editing and effects. We added a clickable link and tooltip, and changed the Alt text in the image-editing dialog in testing. If you need more control, a gear icon gives access to CSS and HTML code.
When adding a photo gallery, you have a host of options, including image size, frame style, spacing, and even animation. We also like that, once you add an associated Facebook page, any public images from that appear in the Duda images manager. You can also connect an Instagram account, so your photo gallery can pull images from there.
Mobile Site Design
Duda offers separate site-builder views for desktop, smartphone, and tablet designs. Our test Duda site looked as good and felt just as comfortable to navigate on an iPhone as it did in a PC web browser. A cool option lets you hide any image on a device of your choice—desktop, tablet, or phone. Some content doesn’t work well in the smaller formats, so this is a valuable option.
On the other side of mobile development is the ability to actually build or edit your site on a mobile device. Duda doesn’t offer a mobile app for site building like Weebly and Yola do. Instead, it offers a mobile web version of the site builder. This features a touch-friendly design with a menu bar for adding and editing widgets. This also lets you add photos to your site right from the tablet.
Getting Social
With Duda you can add buttons that link to your Facebook, Twitter, and other social media accounts. As with Weebly, Duda offers many monochrome or color buttons in different size choices. An older-style Share bar also lets you add buttons, but these aren’t customizable in the way the buttons are, offering no choice of button designs or even which social networks are included. You’re better off sticking with the Social Icons option. You can also include an on-page Twitter feed, a Facebook Like button, and Facebook comments.
Making Money
Duda includes a full sales system, with shopping carts and checkout pages like those you get with Weebly, Wix, and Squarespace. You can also plug PayPal buy buttons on any site page, and add printable coupons for site visitors. Any Duda user can add a 10-page web store to their sites, assuming they’ve paid for the eCommerce add-on. The process is slick, clear, and guided.
When you add a store under the eCommerce section, Duda builds a new page for your site with a demo catalog, and it displays a Help box explaining how to set it up. A tooltip tour explains your store page, shopping cart, search, and store management features. There’s a whole separate Store Control Panel page, where you add products and configure shipping and payment options. Credit card transactions use SSL security.
Another well-designed wizard takes you through the store-setup process. Adding images and formatting text is easy, as is assigning categories and SKU numbers to your products. You can also change localization for different currencies. Shipping options are integrated with UPS and FedEx, or you can set custom rates. FirstData, PayPal, and Stripe are the available payment processing options. Import product lists in CSV, XCart, and LiteCommerce formats. Finally, selling digital downloads (which Duda calls “e-goods”) is supported, but there’s a maximum size depending on your eCommerce add-on. Standard only allows up to 100MB, while Advanced goes up to 1GB, and Unlimited kicks that up to 10GB.
Satisfactory Customer Service
Duda has a few customer support options, which are largely dependent on your service level. As stated earlier, Basic only gets you email the support squad, while Team adds phone and web chat to communication options. Agency offers priority support on top of that. Contacting support first brings you to a bot that takes your questions and tries to funnel you towards an answer in Duda’s Knowledge Base. Above that, you need to “Get in Touch,” which connects you with agent (in our case, it took less than 30 seconds). We received an answer to our questions 20 seconds after that. Very responsive!
Good Uptime
Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. If your site is down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services.
We used a website-monitoring tool to track our Duda-hosted test site’s uptime over a 14-day period. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings our website and sends an alert if it is unable to contact the site for at least 1 minute. The testing data reveals that Strikingly is remarkably stable; in fact, it went down once for a few minutes during the two-week testing period. In short, Strikingly is stable and dependable.
Awesome, Dude!
Duda is a highly capable and user-friendly website building service, offering many cool and impressive features. If a site’s look and function on mobile devices is a priority, Duda should be a top choice. Its site traffic statistics provide more details than most site-building services offer, and its editor is one of the best we’ve tested. All this earns Duda a PCMag Editors’ Choice award for website builders. Wix, another Editors’ Choice pick, offers more integration with third-party services, a solid editor, automatic site creation, and dynamic content with Wix Code, all for a lower price at the lowest tiers. Gator, our other Editors’ Choice selection, lets you easily switch site themes.
For more on getting started building your site, read our primer, How to Build a Website. You should also check out 10 Easy But Powerful SEO Tips to Boost Traffic to Your Website.
