Strikingly Website Review – The Pros and Cons

Established in 2012, Strikingly is a fairly new website builder which is catered for personal use and small business setups. If you want something simple to start with, you’ll be very attracted to their features. But how good is it in terms of building your online presence? My Strikingly website review will show you what to expect.

How Does It Work?

Like most website builders, Strikingly is a click-and-command type of software. Its most unique feature is that it creates a long webpage that is divided into different segments such as homepage, gallery and sign-up form. You know, those fancy looking ones that roll different images as you scroll down the screen? Yes, something like a landing page, if you will. That’s what this software will do for you.

Although the design is still new, its popularity is surely picking up, especially for people who wants to engage in more visual elements for their websites.

How Much Does It Cost?

Strikingly offers 3 types of pricing plan which varies from monthly to yearly fees;

• With a free account, you get a subdomain, 5GB bandwidth and one product listing for your online store.
• With the limited account ($7 to $12/month), you can connect to two custom domains, get 50GB bandwidth and 5 product listings for each online store.
• In the third plan ($14 to $20/month), you can order up to three custom domains, get unlimited bandwidth and product listings as well as remove the Strikingly branding on your sites.

Each paid plans come with 14 days trial, but providing your credit card information will be required. Now, let’s get down to the nitty gritty and see what you may like (and not like) about this software.

The Pros

1) The theme collection is very neat, professional looking and don’t resemble one another, which give each of them a unique design. And, they are mobile responsive too.

2) I like that they have included some basic SEO settings (site description, site title, ALT text, etc.) to help websites become more visible to the search engines.

3) I also like that they provide an easy way to upload a favicon without having to go through FTP access. This does not necessarily improve your SEO, but it’s helpful for the user experience.

4) Besides using Google Console, you can also use their in-house analytics to view your traffic stats.

5) When it comes to visual engagement, they provide some really nice stock images from Unsplash which is well known for their beautiful pictures.

The Cons

As much as I like what Strikingly has to offer, there are certain areas that I think they could do better.

1) Their theme selection is very limited, probably less than 30. That’s not a lot of choices to cover for various business niches.

2) The domain renewal fee is priced at $24.95/year, which I think is slightly expensive for the industry.

3) The blog commenting system incorporates a third party service called Disqus. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but your readers will be required to sign into their Twitter or Facebook accounts every time they want to leave comments which is an extra step to take. Not everyone will like to reveal their social profiles and people can actually create fake identities that lead to trolling.

4) There’s a lack of SEO settings on individual blog posts which I think is crucial if you are using content for marketing. Blog articles should have an equal chance as homepages to become more visible on the search engines.

5) And like most online products, you will need to upgrade at some point in order to get access to more features. If you want to add more pages, products or use custom HTML codes, you’ll need to sign up for the paid plans. That’s a bit of an up-selling, if you asked me.

6) Lastly – this one is very important – if you decided to switch to other platforms, Strikingly doesn’t provide for exportation at this point of time. That means, whatever you have created and published cannot be transferred and you’ll have to build your content all over again when you start a new website.

So, Is Strikingly Worthy of Your Time?

For personal usage, this software is great, but for a business setup, I wouldn’t recommend it. Not with their limited features for now anyway. When starting an online business, besides staying within a budget frame, you also want to make sure that you are paying for a platform that can accommodate for customization and growth.

I started with WordPress by SiteRubix hosting from day one and it is one of the best investment that I’ve made for my business. Here are a few things that you should know about SiteRubix.

1) For one paid account, you can connect to 25 custom domains and 25 free websites.

2) Your domain purchase comes with WhoIs protection, email and technical support for as low as $13.99/year.

3) Since you are using the WordPress content management system, you can publish unlimited pages, posts and get access to HTML editing without the need to upgrade.

4) WordPress has more than 1000 free themes (aka as templates) to help with the framework of your website – whatever your business may be.

5) There’s a plugin called All in One SEO that specifically optimize homepage, blog and social settings for SEO and it’s free to use.

6) There’s no need to install a third party commenting system because the native commenting feature in WordPress is user-friendly and works just as great.

7) If you decide to switch to other platforms (which is very unlikely), WordPress has the exportation features that can help you through the process easily.

8) Unlike other hosting providers, SiteRubix is actually linked to a robust online community called Wealthy Affiliate that provides up-to-date training for anyone who wants to become an online entrepreneur. 

I hope this Strikingly website review has helped you understand about the basics of website building and offered better insights on what you really need in order to build a long term online presence. If you have any thoughts or questions, feel free to leave them in the comment area below and I’ll get back to you as soon.