Everyone is looking to bring their local business online these days, but not all are keen to learn the technical side of things. So I’ve scoured the internet for an easier solution and came across the Ukit website builder platform. How good is the set up and what can you achieve with their resources?
The following review will offer you some insights.
What Is Ukit?
Originating from Russia, Ukit is a website creating software that uses the drag-and-drop technology which allows you to build a website without any technical knowledge.
They offer more than 200 templates and a variety of features that I will get into shortly. Currently, their service is available in four different languages (English, Portuguese, Romanian, and Russian).
How To Set Things Up
After creating a user account, you need to select a design template, create a domain and proceed to enter your business details. By default, the Home, About, Blog and Contact Page are automatically generated and all you have to do is to add your own original content using the widgets and blocks on the editing dashboard.
Most of the commands are quite intuitive and you should be able to set things up within an hour or so. Nothing technically challenging as you can see from the video below.
How Much Does It Costs
Ukit has several pricing layers, but I’ll focus on the yearly fees. After all, I am sure you are interested in long term plans for your business. There are 3 types of packages to choose from – Premium, Premium Plus and Pro, but they do offer a 14-day trial that gives you full access to the Premium package.
- Premium – $4/month
- Premium Plus – $8/month
- Pro – $12/month
If you don’t have the time to build the website yourself, you can pay $50 to the team to create one that is tailored to your business needs. Now, let’s get into the details of what I like about this website builder.
The Pros
- I must say that the template designs are really stunning, almost as good as the ones on Squarespace. Most of their graphics cover full screen, which maximizes visual engagement with the readers. I love this concept and I think this would make a lot of businesses look extremely professional online.
- In addition, all the designs are mobile responsive so your website wouldn’t look odd on handheld devices.
- It’s a good thing to have a blog set up from the very beginning. This paves the foundation for a business to get good ranking on local search.
- Although they try to keep technical stuff to the minimum, Ukit does offer basic coding features that allows for more website customization.
- It conveniently connects you to Google Maps, Google Console and Google Analytics so that your website can be indexed as soon as you hit publish.
- It also integrates with Ecwid to help you run an online store and Live Chat if you want to provide spontaneous support to your customers.
The Cons
Out of the box, this platform is almost a perfect solution until I discover a few limitations.
- While the in-house domain fee is fairly reasonable – $14.85 for a .com TLD, the price doesn’t cover email forwarding and most importantly, WhoIs Protection. This is crucial because you don’t want your business information to leak and used for any fraudulent activities.
- Their website backups appear to take place on a weekly basis. I much prefer services that provide daily backups as I have had first hand experience of (almost) losing all my webfiles due to the lack of backup frequencies. This isn’t something that I would take for granted.
- Another thing that concerns me is the capability of exporting data from one platform to another. For example, if you want to move to other hosting services in the future, does Ukit provide this feature? If they don’t, then it’s even more important that you perform a daily backup (manual, if you must) otherwise, you’ll need to rebuild your website from zero all over again. Not a very smart plan, if you asked me.
So, Is Ukit Website Builder Worthy of Your Time?
Like anything else for beginners, such builder is appropriate for non-techie people or if you are looking to bootstrap your local business online.
However, if you are at the stage of expanding your business growth – listing more products or reaching out to a wider audience – I wouldn’t recommend the Ukit website builder since the exportation capability is unknown and not (yet) tested.
Even if you are thinking of using this platform to run an affiliate business, I would much prefer using WordPress because the blogging platform is far more superior (and reputable) than most website builders.
In fact, WordPress is THE platform that I would recommend to use for your local business set up. It’s not as straightforward as drag-and-drop builders, but it’s very capable of customization and growth according to your business needs.
If you are wondering how to do this, the training at Wealthy Affiliate will show you the step-by-step, in addition to the following tools and resources.
I hope you’ve found this review helpful and now know better about what type of platform to use for your business website. If you have any thoughts or questions, just write them in the comment below and I’d be happy to respond.
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Hello Cathy,
I enjoyed reading this review about Ukit. How long has the builder been in the market? Has it ever had any hosting issues and is there any reason why would someone choose Ukit instead of WordPress? I have not heard of the platform before, thus the many questions.
Thank you.
Hi there Veena,
I couldn’t trace the origin of Ukit so I can’t tell exactly when or where it came from. Not much hosting reviews were made about that platform either. The only thing that I could comment is that it’s beginner friendly as compared to WordPress. It’s an intuitive website builder hence less complex to manage. Hope this answers your questions.
Hi Cathy, thank you for pointing out the differences between website builders. It is great to learn about the pro’s and con’s and I do agree that daily backup is crucial in the busy life we live in. I see that Ukit is reasonable with their pricing. How many websites does one get for each price?
Hi there Pieter, all the plans listed only cater for one website on Ukit builder and only the highest plans allow you to customize the theme or add an online store. Hope this helps.
Hi Cathy,
I love the article on the Ukit Website Builder. I’m new to this website stuff. I’ve tried before but it gets too technical with no help. This seems to be just what I’m looking for. I just signed up for Ukit. Let’s see if I can build my own website.
I have heard of WordPress, Wix website builder and a few others but never Ukit. It’s nice to see there are other options out there for designing a website other then the more common ones but it seems like WordPress is still the way to go!
Besides the cons you have pointed out, do you think Ukit has more to offer then WordPress?
From a beginner’s standpoint, Ukit is probably an easier interface to navigate because most of the editing process is quite intuitive. But in terms of ranking for search, I couldn’t say for sure because the WordPress platform seems to dominate most of the results on the first page.
I’d never heard of Ukit, but it’s good to know more about the competition for WordPress (which is the service I use for my online businesses). I guess it could be good for people who need their businesses serviced in these different languages, and it’s cool that the graphics are almost as good as the ones on Squarespace. But the lack of daily backups alone would be enough to deter me.
Hi Cathy. The information you have is new to me, so I found it very informational as well as a possibility in the future. UKIT sounds like a good place to start for newbies who know nothing at all about building a website. It is great having info from all over the world, and utilizing the different ways of doing things.