In this modern day of marketing, if you do not promote your products or services online, no one will know about your brand. So, how can you get more people to notice what you do? You need to build a website and in this review, we’ll find out if Yola meets your expectation in building an online presence for your business.
What Is Yola?
Yola, which means ‘hatch’ in Hindi, is a website builder and hosting service, founded by Vinny Lingham in 2007. Hailing all the way from Cape Town, the company currently serves more than 10 million users in the areas of small businesses, personal interest as well as non-profit organizations.
How Does It Work?
To get started with Yola, you need to select a template that goes well with your online niche. In your user interface, you’ll see a dashboard that has all the control panels and tools for editing. You can customize each detail by entering specific changes into the command boxes.
Like most simple website builders, Yola also comes with the drag-and-drop widgets which you can easily add images, videos and more. For more advanced use, you can optimize the website for SEO or even add an online store.
Here’s a quick peek behind the scene at Yola’s website builder.
How Much Does It Cost?
Yola offers one free and three types of paid plans. With the free account, you get to create;
- 2 free websites.
- 3 pages for each website.
- Content storage (images, videos, PDFs, etc.) up to 1 GB.
- Upload file size up to 5 MB.
With the paid plans (ranging from $4.17 to $16.66/month), you’ll benefit from a lot more features such as;
- Email support.
- Premium style templates.
- Mobile-responsive website.
- SEO support.
- Business directory listing.
Other external features that will incur additional fees are e-commerce tools at $10/month and personalized email address at $9.96/year.
For businesses that are looking to get a more professional look, Yola also offers a premium service that hires designers to create and publish websites, the way you want it to be. This package cost $499.95/ year and $99.95/year thereafter.
Whether you want a basic or advanced website, Yola certainly has plenty of options (and add-ons) for you to choose from.
What Do Most People Think About Yola?
Just like most website builders out there, Yola is recommended for its intuitive editing and designing. That means, even users with zero knowledge about website creation will not have any problem using it.
As far as SEO features in Yola are concerned, it has received some good ratings from several bloggers. While there are a few complaints about customer services, we shall not dwell too much on that topic since we are more interested in the quality of the gear here rather than the gossip.
So, Is Yola Worthy of Your Time?
Well, let’s see. If you are a new website creator, intuitive editing is certainly more attractive because it makes everything appear hassle-free. So, if you don’t want to deal with anything too complicated, Yola is a good platform to begin with.
However, having owned a business website for some time now, I can assure you that the website creation part is the least that you have to worry about. Getting more traffic to your site is far more important for brand and business recognition online.
For that reason, I think Yola fell behind due to these limitations.
- Three pages (in the free account) are way too minimal to create engaging content for your readers.
- Business blogging is done by integrating with Tumblr, an external application, instead of within the Yola site. So when viewers want to read your blog, they will leave your site for another site which is seen as outgoing traffic which isn’t beneficial for website ranking.
- Mobile-responsiveness is almost a necessity for websites these days, so it should not be limited to just paid plans.
- Likewise, creating a website without SEO is like having a fancy car with no gas. It would only sit there and serves no purpose whatsoever. Therefore, I think SEO feature should also be made available for the ranking benefits of all websites.
So obviously, the paid plans seem like a better option if you are thinking of building a business website.
But, is that all? Will having a business website sufficient for people to notice you online? How do you engage with your readers? How do you go about listing your business on Google? These are important for the success of any online business, but unfortunately, not every website builder will show you the step-by-step.
That’s why I recommend that you learn the basics of website building and online marketing first before dishing out hundreds of dollars for just a pretty looking site. At Wealthy Affiliate, you can actually master all these skills at the fraction of the price you pay at Yola.
Here are just some of the tools and support which you can benefit from WAU.
When you have a strong website foundation, you’ll have higher chances in achieving your business goals. If you want to learn more, simply follow the link above to see how you can get started.
Do you have any thoughts or questions about building an online presence for your business? Just leave your comment below and I’ll get back to you.
Hi Cathy,
It’s amazing how many online site builders there are. Most have editors that are easy to use and intuitive. Yola seems to be the same and it’s great that they have a free option, but what can you do with a three page website? I suppose people will start like that and then when they realize they need more pages they will sign up for a premium plan.
As you say it is important to get some training when you are creating an online business. To my knowledge, there is just one site builder that has complete training and that is the SiteRubix website builder. So for me, that is definitely the best place to start.
Exactly my point, Peter.
What kind of information can a website deliver with just 3 pages? Even with the free SiteRubix, you can create unlimited pages/posts. Limited content might get your site indexed at some point, but I doubt it will ever get any traffic. All the upgrading plan can also be quite confusing especially for beginners who don’t know what it takes to rank on Google.
Therefore, my advice would be to always start with WordPress and get lots of training on how to drive traffic the right way.
Yola sounds like a great website builder until you match it against Wealthy Affiliate’s WordPress offer.
Weebly is another site that provides free websites for the novice that I have used in the past. It is easy to use, very similar to Yola, but your comparison chart allows us to see the benefits of going with Wealthy Affiliate’s tools and training.
Hi Lin,
Weebly is also a drag-and-drop website builder, similar to Yola, but their free plan offers unlimited pages. Their monthly plan is slighter more pricey than Yola, but they are more or less the same thing.
There’s a good reason why Wealthy Affiliate uses WordPress; it’s far more optimized than all of these website builders and if you are looking to build an online presence for your business, this is the platform that you should start with.
Hi Cathy,
Sounds quite interesting but I must say that the free account is “garbage” in terms of content creation. I’ve been building my websites with WordPress for quite some time now and even a free WordPress blog gives you an unlimited amount of pages you can add.
This is crucial for any website because content is what ranks in search engines and it’s highly unlikely that Google, Bing and Yahoo will take any website with less than 10 pages and posts serious enough to even consider them in search results.
Thanks for sharing and I agree that you should get a basic training down first as you not only know how to create a good website then, but you also can determine what kind of website you need. The least you want is to find out that your current website provider is the wrong one for your needs.
Great to have you back on my blog, Nicole.
You definitely pointed out something very important that most beginners aren’t aware of. More pages = more contents = better ranking on Google. WordPress does a very good job at adding pages and posts, but that can also add onto the loading time. A good and reliable hosting, however, will have the capacity to rectify this. Hence, a WordPress site should always come with a powerful hosting such as the one you find with SiteRubix.
Hi Cathy,
Thanks for the reply and your website provides lots of information. It’s an invitation to come back to. 🙂
I fully agree with you. WordPress is highly recommended and when you top it off with fast and reliable hosting like SiteRubix web hosting, you’ll get the complete package for a successful online package.
I know a few people who use Yola. From what they’ve told me, it’s a good place for beginners who don’t know anything about building websites. However, they always tell me in a year or two they’ll move on to a better host. Sounds like a good place to start, but not a place people actually stay.
Hi Kinya,
Thank you for your comment. I think most people leave website builders because simple tools just can’t handle sophisticated marketing/designing task. To build a functional website, you need to be able to expand or the least, integrate with different online tools. So putting a restriction to these will only make more people move their website to WordPress which is more favorable.
I was looking to build my site with Yola until I read your post. Your comparison with Wealthy Affiliate has changed my mind. Yola does not provide enough support, training, and tools. Can I build my site for free with Wealthy Affiliate? What kind of training classes do they offer?
Hi Tony,
Thank you for your questions. At Wealthy Affiliate (WA), you can build a WordPress website for free with SiteRubix which provides you a subdomain. If you want a custom domain, you can also have it hosted at WA.
As for classes, they do offer;
1) Structured training program for online entrepreneurs (basic to advanced).
2) Structured training program for affiliate marketers.
3) Weekly live webinar on various online business topics.
All these classes are self-paced and are conducted by experienced internet marketers in WA. They are easy to follow and you can always post questions on the message boards to get feedback. If you need any other help, just look me up in the community and I am more than happy to give you a hand 🙂
Cheers!
Hello and thanks for this interesting article on Yola, which funnily enough a friend asked me if I knew about only yesterday. I said I hadn’t heard of them, but I have now! As you say, it’s one thing creating a website but quite another getting the traffic.
Without the visitors, most websites are pretty much redundant. So learning SEO is a vital part of any set up, and that’s where Yola appears to stumble.
Hi there Peter,
A website without SEO feature can’t really get any Google ranking these days, but it also shouldn’t be used as an up-sell. No matter how new a website is, it should be equipped with SEO features to have a fair chance of being indexed and be seen by visitors online.
Well Peter, I am glad that this article has added value to your knowledge about the web.
Hey Cathy.
While Yola seems like a good idea on the surface, it seems to me that you will end up spending a lot of money to get your website to perform the way you want it to. I checked out your recommended builder at Wealthy Affiliate and it sounds more like the route I am looking for. Thanks for the informative article.
Welcome to my blog Jeremy,
The cost for website builders can really add up because they tend to charge for every single thing. I guess that’s how they make money. That’s one of the advantage of using WordPress – you can add functions through plugins and widgets without having to pay for them (well, at least for the majority of them).
Well, I am glad that SiteRubix works out for you just fine.