Sometimes you don’t have the time or patience to build a website from scratch. Thankfully, a website-building service like Zyro lets you create a personal or lightweight business site without much fuss. With Zyro, you can build attractive and functional pages, and create e-commerce shops, but it also has a few standout features—including a copy generator and a logo-building tool—that remove much of the need for professional assistance. Unfortunately, Zyro still doesn’t let you switch templates, and it isn’t quite as feature-rich as Duda, Gator, or Wix, our Editors’ Choice picks for website builders. Still, Zyro gets the job done, and it doesn’t cost much, either.
Zyro’s Plans and Prices
Zyro has several premium tiers. The $8.90-per-month Basic plan delivers 1GB of storage and 3GB of monthly data transfers. The tier also includes integrations (think of them as Zyro’s plug-ins), numerous templates, and the ability to use a custom domain. The other standard hosting account, the $10.90-per-month Unleashed plan, offers unlimited storage and monthly data transfers, as well as a free domain for one year, live chat, Google Analytics functionality, Facebook Pixel compatibility, and other useful features. All Zyro plans include SEO tools and an SSL certificate. Naturally, you can drive the monthly price down by signing up for one-year, two-year, or four-year terms. Zyro once offered a free, ad-supported tier, but that’s no longer an option.
When Zyro launched, the service lacked e-commerce plans. That’s no longer the case. In fact, Zyro now has two e-commerce packages: Ecommerce ($19.90 per month) and Ecommerce+ ($25.90 per month). Both plans include all Unleashed plan features, as well as order tracking, inventory management, the ability to accept online payments, the ability to sell gift cards, and other essential, business-centric features.
Ecommerce+ differs from Ecommerce in that it has an abandoned cart recovery feature, lets you sell unlimited products (Ecommerce caps your product catalog at 100 items), create a store that supports more than a dozen languages, and sell on the Amazon, Facebook, or Instagram platforms. Of course, you can lower the monthly price by signing up for an annual or multi-year plan.
Zyro’s plans are solid, but Editors’ Choice Wix has a wider range of business-friendly packages. For example, its Business Basic tier (starting at $23 per month) has 20GB of storage, unlimited monthly data transfers, shipping options, the ability to accept online payments, and a free SSL certificate. Wix’s multiple plans scale up to the top-tier, $500-per-month Enterprise plan that offers custom hosting solutions. For a full rundown of Wix’s various account types, check out the company’s premium account grid.
Building a Zyro Website
Getting started is a simple affair. Zyro tasks you with selecting a site template and creating an account. The templates come in many attractive, genre-based styles, such as Photography, Product Page, Startup Company, and Wedding Invitation. Zyro lets you preview how the template looks on desktop, tablet, or smartphone before you have to make a decision, which is a nice touch.
After you click Start Building to confirm the template selection, Zyro initiates a short, five-step website-builder walkthrough that highlights important UI areas. By default, your website receives a Zyro-based URL (think “shoes.zyrosite.com”), but there is an option to upgrade to a custom domain name. You can either transfer a previously purchased domain name or buy one from Zyro.
Zyro has more than 130 beautiful templates that serve as the anchor on your website-building journey. The templates are minimalist affairs that lean on clean, simple designs that you can change and shift around to suit your needs.
Zyro’s templates adhere to the responsive design principle, meaning that your site resizes itself to look good on desktop or mobile screens. Like Wix, Zyro has a drawback not found in some competitors, such as Simvoly, Squarespace, and Weebly, that also use strict responsive designs: You cannot switch templates once you’ve selected one. So, if you want to overhaul your website’s overall visual appearance in one step, you must create an entirely new site and transfer the content to it. That’s a drag if you occasionally want to overhaul your site’s look.
However, Zyro excels at site construction. Its drag-and-drop, grid-based interface is easy to use, and doesn’t get in the way as you add text, video, and other content. A dedicated icon lets you quickly duplicate a section if, say, you need another photo row. Zyro autosaves every few seconds, so you don’t have to worry about losing content should your cat knock your laptop off a table. A handy interface-wide Undo icon lets you quickly revert your site to a previous state.
It’s equally simple to add text and SEO-friendly descriptions to uploaded images and resize photos by dragging their corners. Zyro has a decent-size, royalty-free photo library, so you needn’t worry about where to obtain images for your site. You can only upload photos one at a time, but uploaded images are saved in a repository. Sadly, there are no photo editing options available; you simply have the option to have photos fit or fill a section. If you want to crop images or add filters, you have to do that outside of Zyro. That a shame as many website builders these days offer image editors.
Zyro’s free logo maker lets you pull shapes and icons from the company’s image library onto a canvas. There, you can apply text and tweak the image and word positioning. Once you’ve created a logo, the image can be saved and downloaded as a PNG file. Naturally, this Dr. Frankenstein-like parts cobbling doesn’t compete with a flesh-and-blood designer, but it gets the job done on the cheap.
In addition, you can leverage the Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Hotjar, and Messenger Live Chat analytics and communication tools to better understand your website visitors.
Mobile Design and Blogging
Zyro’s automatically generated responsive mobile sites look terrific on smaller devices. In fact, when you’re in the desktop site editor, you can click the mobile icon to switch to the mobile editing view.
Like Wix, Zyro gives you the option of editing the mobile view if you’re not happy with what it automatically produces. Though Zyro lets you tweak the interface color and enable gaps between grid items, it lacks some of Wix’s functionality. Wix, for example, lets you add a Mobile Action Bar, so that visitors can email or call you with a tap of a finger.
Wix also offers mobile apps that let you upload photos from your smartphone, though you can’t actually create and edit sites from the app (Weebly and Jimdo include this functionality). Zyro lacks mobile site-building apps.
Zyro’s simple blogging tool lets you craft posts, but it’s not nearly as robust or intuitive as Wix or WordPress‘ content management systems. People accustomed to using WordPress may find it odd that they must add individual text and image sections within a post, instead of simply typing words and plopping in images. Zyro could use a small explainer. Unfortunately, you cannot schedule posts, as you can using Wix. The otherwise excellent Gator also lacks blog-scheduling capabilities.
E-Commerce Features
Zyro’s e-commerce tools offer many money-making opportunities. With those options, you can create a store that supports one of more than a dozen languages, and have it generate automatic shipping estimates based on customers’ IP addresses, perform real-time shipment tracking, offer discounts, and enable favorites or wish lists. The store front’s WYSIWYG editor lets you create media-rich, HTML product descriptions, too.
Accepting payments is a big part of e-commerce, so Zyro gives you many ways to do just that. Customers can pay for goods using PayPal, Stripe, 2Checkout, and dozens of other options.
Let the Bots Do the Job
AI Writer is a cool tool that lets you create site copy without needing to write many words. Here’s how it works. You select one of 11 top-level topics, such as Music & Entertainment or Small Business, and then click a topic specific-category, such as Concert or Interior Design. After taking those steps, you decide if you’re crafting copy for either your site’s Personal/Bio or About pages. Clicking the Generate icon spits out a surprisingly legible paragraph you can tweak to your liking.
Our one major criticism? There aren’t enough AI Writer categories; Zyro lacks anything that comes closing to fitting my technology- and gamer-centric page. Zyro also includes Blog Title Generator, Business Name Generator, and Slogan Generator tools, too. These work in a similar fashion as AI Writer, in that you select topics and click an icon to generate a name or slogan. You can, of course, tweak them to your liking. They’re extremely useful during those moments when you cannot think of blog ideas, business names, or slogans on your own.
AI Heatmap is another cool tool that Zyro has in its bag of tricks. After you upload an image of your website to AI Heatmap, it predicts how visitors see and navigate your website, and what they focus on the most. This encourages you to arrange the elements of your website in a way that maximizes conversion, based on color-coded markers.
Excellent Uptime
Website uptime is a vital element of web hosting. If your site goes down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services. It’s in your best interest to find a reliable web host that can keep your site up and running. Otherwise, customers may go elsewhere—and they might never come back.
To evaluate reliability, we use a website-monitoring tool to track our test site’s uptime over a two-week period. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings the website and sends an email if it is unable to contact the site for at least 1 minute. The testing revealed that Zyro was incredibly stable during the observation period. In fact, it didn’t go down once. You can count on Zyro to be a rock-solid foundation for your website.
Customer Support
You can reach Zyro’s 24/7 customer support team by clicking the chat box icon located in the bottom-right section of the interface. Once you have the chat open, you can key a term into its integrated search field to scour Zyro’s knowledge database for answers to your question. We found answers to two of our questions in the knowledge database.
Otherwise, you can chat with the human representatives (not bots) that field the chat queries. Please note that you must be logged into a Zyro account to access the chat. Zyro gives you the option to email your questions, too. Zyro offers a 30-day, money-back guarantee with each plan.
A Solid Site Builder
Zyro has evolved into a high-quality website-building service that offers e-commerce, AI-powered tools, and a flexible, easy-to-use editor. Still, its integrations and template selections aren’t as deep as the competition’s offerings, and the free website option is no more. If you want a website builder with more blogging power and business-friendly flexibility, check out our Editors’ Choice picks. Wix offers a useful, free tier; Gator has strong e-commerce tools; and Duda integrates well with SaaS platforms.
