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 that regard. However, Strikingly specializes in creating sites with multiple sections that scroll downward. It's an intriguing idea, one that may appeal to bloggers and small businesses, but you should check out our Editors' Choice picks, Duda (for SaaS integration) and Wix (for free accounts) for more advanced customization options.
(Credit: Strikingly)Getting Started and Pricing
Upon creating an account, Strikingly invites you to fill in a simple, three-box form that asks for your first name, email, and password. If that's too much, you can click the Facebook button to sign up using your information from the social network. You can get started for free, without entering a credit card number.
Free accounts include a yoursitename.strikingly.com address, a "Create a Site With Strikingly" badge at the bottom, a 5GB data throughput cap per month, and the ability to sell one product. For $12 per month ($8 per month billed annually), you jump to the Limited plan that lets you connect a registered domain, increase the monthly data transfers to 50GB, and sell five products. You can also create five pages per site, even with the free tier. Previously, only higher tiers let you create multi-page sites.
The $20-per-month Pro account ($16 per month if billed annually) offers unlimited monthly data transfers, increases the number of products you can sell to 300, and removes Strikingly's branding. Pro lets you add 100 pages per site. In addition, it lets you use third-party widgets and include mobile site actions like phoning or sending email—both of which are included with all Weebly and Wix accounts.
The VIP account level ($59 per month, $49 per month billed annually) adds priority phone support and unlimited products. Committing to a year of paid service comes with a bonus: a year of domain name registration, similar to Squarespace's $14-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 more than 100 choices, and you can see which templates are new. They look good, but the competition, including Duda and Wix, tends to have more template options available. In fact, Wix has more than 800 templates. Strikingly's template selector lets you narrow down your choices to those suitable for business, creative, and personal 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 tested the Sleek template, which uses a sizable sidebar 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 at any time, though certain layout options from your first template will carry over unless you change them.
One cool feature 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.
(Credit: Strikingly)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 site builders we've tested that uses a single-scrolling-page format. As mentioned above, all accounts now offer at least a few 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. Apparently, there's even some AI behind the scenes powering the process. However, 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. Services like Duda and Wix let you choose the exact elements you want; for example, a button, an image, a 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 add only those elements dictated by the theme.
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 limited customization; there are only two Blog section types, 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 30 section types, depending on which template you choose 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 and custom code entry. Multiple pages for Pro users are simply multiple-sectioned Strikingly pages. Navigation and links are automatically added for them. As with most other website builders, Strikingly lets you drag page entries to change the navigation menu.
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 lets 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 has drag-and-drop functionality for uploading multiple files at once. You can easily add a content or gallery section, which accepts photos and videos. However, the video must be hosted elsewhere—you can't just upload your own AVIs, MOVs, or MPGs. Strikingly's own stock photography library has more than 3 million images across categories like city, fashion, and food.
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. There is also a library of icons and badges at your disposal.
Strikingly includes a basic image editor that lets you crop and rotate an image, or change the brightness, saturation, and contrast. You can also add text or draw on top of an image. Gallery layout options are limited to a few choices, like square thumbnails versus rectangular ones. You can easily switch among these, too. 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 can be 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 Pro paid accounts, something that's not the case for competitors such as Weebly and Wix.
(Credit: Strikingly)E-commerce Options
Strikingly's e-commerce-focused 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. Although you can write product descriptions, Strikingly lacks custom fields for things like size and color. It also does not integrate with FedEx or UPS to streamline shipping.
Pro account users can create product categories, embed full-featured Ecwid stores, send marketing email blasts using Mailchimp, and sell digital downloads. The Limited tier has a 5% transaction fee that goes down to 2% in the Pro tier and 0% in the VIP tier.
Blogging and Site Stats
Strikingly's blogging tool is 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 has its own comment feature with an approval system, so you no longer need a Disqus plugin. Your blog's design is dictated by your theme choice, so there are no appearance customizations, aside from things like the background image, text size, color, and alignments. 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 display tiles for each of your sites. There, you can start editing or see site stats. The latter choice opens a page that highlights your unique site views for the last week, month, and 90-day period. It also shows traffic sources and their 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 interface's lower-right-hand corner. In our experience, this chat help—called Happiness Officers—is quick, and it's available 24/7. You can also leave an email message, 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. At another time, Happiness Officer Paulo responded in less than a minute. We like that he directly answered our question about connecting a third-party domain, 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 pinged our website and fired off an email if it was unable to contact the site for at least 1 minute. The testing data revealed that Strikingly is remarkably stable. In fact, it didn't go down once in the two-week testing period.
5 Things You Need to Know About Web HostingA Different Approach
There's a lot to like about Strikingly, particularly its ease of use and appealing site design. Those upsides come at the price of control and customization, though the company has made strides in offering more design flexibility. 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, Duda and Wix, for more precise control over your home on the web.
Mike Williams also contributed to this review.
