Sometimes, a single page is all you need. Strikingly is a website builder built around this premise. Most website builders let you quickly build beautiful sites, and Strikingly measures up to the competition in this facet. But with this service, you build a single page with multiple sections, scrolling downward. It’s an intriguing idea, one that may appeal to bloggers and small businesses, but you should check out Duda, Gator, and Wix, our Editors’ Choice picks for website builders, if you want advanced options.
Getting Started and Pricing
The first page you’ll see when setting up a Strikingly account invites you to fill in a simple three-box form that asks for your first name, email, and password. If even that’s too much for you, you can click the Facebook button to sign up using your information from the social network. You can be off and running for free, without having to enter a credit card number.
Free accounts get a yoursitename.strikingly.com address, show a “Create a Site With Strikingly” badge at the bottom, let you sell one product, and limit you to 5GB data throughput per month. For $12 per month ($8 per month billed annually), you jump to the Limited plan that lets you attach your own registered domain, increase the monthly data transfers to 50GB, and sell five products.
The $20-per-month ($16 per month billed annually) Pro account offers unlimited monthly data transfers, increases the number of products you can sell to 300, and removes Strikingly’s branding. Importantly, only Pro lets you create multi-page sites. It also lets you use the full app store of third-party widgets and lets your mobile site include actions like phoning or sending email—both of which are included with all Weebly and Wix accounts. The VIP account level ($49 per month, billed annually with no monthly option) adds priority phone support and 500-product stores. Committing to a year of paid service gets you a year of domain name registration, similar to Squarespace’s $12-per-month plan. Custom email addresses are an additional surcharge of $25 per year for any paid plan.
As with most online site builders, your next move is to choose a template. Strikingly offers 64 choices, up from 29 the last time we reviewed the service. They look pretty good, but the competition, including Duda and Wix, tend to have more template options available. Buttons in Strikingly’s template chooser let you narrow down your choices to those suitable for business, personal, and portfolio sites.
You can either start editing right away or see a preview. The former doesn’t show how the sample site looks on mobile specifically, but you can narrow your browser to get a good idea. We tried the Sleek template, which uses a sizable side bar for navigation. Many Strikingly templates use scrolling effects and a top menu bar that elegantly reformats to a fixed position after you start scrolling down. You can change templates ay any time, though certain layout options from your first template will carry over unless you change them directly.
One cool capability is the ability to build a personal website instantly based on your LinkedIn account. Wix’s ADI feature is similar, though that scours the web for other services and sites with info on and images of you or your business. Jimdo and Simvoly now also include automatic site builders, though Wix’s remains the most potent. Our automatic Strikingly site was not bad looking at all, and all the standard editing tools of free Strikingly accounts are available for customization.
Strikingly’s Web Design Tools
Strikingly takes a fresh, perhaps even unique, approach to site design: It’s the only one of the dozen or so sitebuilders we’ve tested that uses a single-scrolling-page format. As mentioned above, Pro accounts offer multiple pages per site, but that’s not really Strikingly’s mission. The intention is to make the site-building process as easy as possible, and to ensure that the design is attractive. This comes at the cost of customization and control. The Editor Panel along the left doesn’t offer page elements as most other site building services do. Duda, Gator, and Wix, for example, let you choose the exact elements you want; for example, a button, image, text block. Instead, Strikingly lets you switch among and add sections, which show up as you scroll down a page. Within a section, you can only add elements dictated by the theme.
So, for example, if you’re working in your site’s Portfolio section, each additional item within that section will have the same format. In effect, each section defines allowable element types and their exact design. This often consists of an image and text. Some sections offer a Change Layout button that cycles through a few options, such as swapping photos and text from left to right. Undo and redo arrows helpfully let you revert to earlier and later edit states. Still, you might bristle at the the limited customization within some sections; there is a single Blog section type, with only a few layout changes available.
Oddly enough, there is a Make Your Own Section choice at the very end of the Add Section. This works like some other website builders, letting you delete elements or add new elements above or below existing ones. When you add an element, you’re given a menu with standard elements, such as Text, Image, Video, and Spacer. It’s odd that this ability is hidden, rather than making it more front-and-center, but that’s probably due to Strikingly’s focus on simplicity. Options cloud the waters.
Your route to greater customization is through adding and removing Sections. There are about 20 section types, depending on which template you chose at the outset. Types include content in columns or rows, social feeds, blogs, galleries, and forms. You can also add third-party site widgets, such as SoundCloud playlists, Facebook comments, and PayPal buttons. Some apps—and even some Section types—require a Pro account.
You can change a template’s background colors (now with an unlimited color picker), and you get a large font selection, after tapping the tool panel’s Styles button. Some of Strikingly’s newer templates enable greater customization, including transparency, padding, and width. Even these are somewhat limited compared with other site builders, though. For example, the width option is limited to Full, Section, and Centered, and padding choices are just Small, Medium, and Large. On the upside, you can swap templates without needing to rebuild your site, unlike Squarespace.
The Settings button offers a wealth of sitewide options such as site title, domain name, descriptions for SEO, navigation, and privacy. The last option lets you require a password and hide your site from search engines. For Pro users, there’s even an option to add multi-language support to your site. Other paid-only options include mobile actions, custom code entry, and site-building collaboration. Multiple pages for Pro users are simply multiple-sectioned Strikingly pages. Navigation and links are automatically added for them. As with most of the other, more-standard website builders, you can drag page entries in the left panel up or down to change navigation.
We like that Strikingly’s toolbar includes a Save link and a Publish button, preferable to some builders, like Squarespace, that immediately publish any edits. Once you do hit Publish, you get a message box with the live site link and share buttons to send the site to Facebook and Twitter.
Working With Photos and Images
Like Wix, Strikingly has the commendable feature of letting you save images you upload to its online storage in case you want to use the pictures elsewhere on your site. By comparison, Weebly tasks you with uploading the same photo for each place on your site you want to use it.
True to Strikingly’s approach, you can only add photos to sections designed with photos in mind. So on one site type, we couldn’t add any photos to the Who We Are section. The photo-adding dialog supports drag and drop for uploading multiple files at once. You can easily add a content or gallery section, which accepts video as well as photos, but the video must be hosted—you can’t just upload your own AVIs, MOVs, or MPGs.
Strikingly lets you add a custom favicon, that tiny image that appears next to the site title in the browser tab. The builder also includes stock button art for social media and other uses that you can add to your page; they’re mostly in the modern flat design style. But you don’t get any stock photography like you do with Duda and Squarespace. There is a library of icons and badges you can use, however.
Strikingly includes a basic image editor that lets you crop and rotate an image, or change the brightness, saturation, and contrast. Gallery layout options are limited to a few choices, like square thumbnails versus rectangular ones, or justified images versus spaced out ones. You switch among these with a button that changes from A to B to C as you click. A square button at the top right corner of the gallery does a similar thing for color, switching from a black background to gray to white.
Mobile Sites
Strikingly automatically produces good-looking, functional mobile sites. These include touch-friendly menus that jump viewers between sections. You can also edit within the mobile view if you want. The simple fact that Strikingly websites are one deep page is a plus for mobile—they don’t have to contact the server repeatedly to fetch separate pages.
One drawback is that mobile actions—clicking to call a phone number or to send an email—are only available in paid accounts, something that’s not the case for competitors such as Wix and Weebly.
E-commerce Options
Strikingly’s Simple Store is a well-made feature, with inventory and order tracking. You can accept credit card payments using Stripe or PayPal. Pro users can create coupons, and any accounts can have automatic email notifications sent for each step of the purchasing process. However, Strikingly lacks custom fields for things like size and color, and you can’t sell digital downloads. Nor does it integrate with UPS or FedEx to streamline shipping. Pro account users can create product categories, embed full-featured Ecwid stores, and send marketing email blasts using Mailchimp.
Blogging and Site Stats
We were wondering how the service would handle blogging with its sectioned single-page design, and the answer is that it does so fairly well. Strikingly blogs actually do appear on a separate page. The blogging tool is fine, perfectly capable of presenting your musings and thoughts in a clean, coherent manner. You can add the standard content types: text, images, videos, separators, link buttons, and quotations, but you can’t wrap text around pictures.
Strikingly now has its own comment feature with an approval system, so you no longer need a Disqus plugin. The design of your blog is dictated by your theme choice, so there are no appearance customizations, aside from things like background image, text size, color, and alignment. You can save drafts and set your post to publish at a later date. Finally, blogs automatically get an RSS button, giving readers an easy way to subscribe.
The well-designed Dashboard pages shows tiles for each of your sites, from which you can start editing or see stats. The latter choice opens a new page showing your unique site views for the last week, month, and 90-day period. It also shows you traffic sources and country of origin. You even get a breakdown of mobile usage, technology used (operating system, browser), and visitor countries, similar to Weebly’s stat offerings. That said, it’s a bit limited compared with Squarespace’s stats, and doesn’t show search terms used to get to your pages.
Customer Service
Even free Strikingly accounts can get chat help from any Strikingly page, via the big question mark button in the lower-right-hand corner of the interface. In our experience, this chat help—called Happiness Officers—is quick and well informed, and it’s available 24/7. You can also leave an email message on a web form, complete with attached screenshots, or directly email support@strikingly.com. However, callback phone support is only available to VIP accounts, which costs $49 per month. Wix offers phone support even to its free users. Strikingly also sports a thorough knowledge base, with multiple categories and video guides, ranging from questions about affiliate programs to third-party domains.
A Happiness Officer piped up in a few minutes after we asked a question. A chat message on Strikingly’s Facebook page got a much faster response at the same time. On another try a few minutes later, Happiness Officer Paulo responded in less than a minute. We like that he answered our question about connecting a third-party domain directly, rather than just pointing us to a FAQ.
Superb 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 HostGator-hosted test site’s uptime over a 14-day period. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings our website and fires off an email 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 didn’t go down once in the two-week testing period. In short, Strikingly is stable and dependable.
A Different Approach
There’s a lot to like about Strikingly, particularly its ease of use and its appealing site design for both desktop and mobile browsers. Both of those plusses come at the price of control and customization, though the company has made some strides in offering more customizability. Strikingly also differs from other builders in emphasizing single-page, deep sites divided by content sections. You may find that Strikingly suits your needs perfectly, but if not, check out our website builder Editors’ Choice picks, Gator, Duda, and Wix, for more precise control over your or home on the web.
For tips on getting started building your site, you can read our primer, How to Build a Website. 10 Easy But Powerful SEO Tips to Boost Traffic to Your Website will help bring eyes to your site.
