Whether you’re an author, small business owner, or just a casual blogger, having your own website is essential to elevating your platform and connecting with your target audience.
But what if the thought of designing your own website feels like planning a trip to the moon? For the less tech-savvy, the idea can be very intimidating.
Fortunately, there are several tools on the market designed to make building a website a smooth, seamless endeavor.
Strikingly is one of those tools, and in this post we’ll show you how it can help you create beautiful, functional sites in minutes. We’ll also walk you through how much it costs, the features available to users, and some alternatives in case you have different needs.
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What Is Strikingly?
Strikingly is a website-building tool that allows users to quickly and easily create attractive websites, even if they have no web design experience.
Founded in 2012, Strikingly’s mission is to help close the knowledge gap by giving those who are less tech-savvy the power to create beautiful websites and share information to the masses.
Strikingly takes a mobile-first approach, creating websites that are optimized for viewing across all devices (including desktops, smartphones, and tablets) within minutes.
Who Is Strikingly For?
Strikingly is an ideal site-building option for anyone who needs to create a simple, minimalist site for personal, business, or even e-commerce uses. It’s especially ideal if you don’t have coding or web design knowledge.
- Personal Sites: If you’re a blogger or simply run a small personal site, Strikingly has all the basic features your blog might need, including analytics, RSS feed, categories, a search feature, and a comments section.
- Small Business Sites: Strikingly offers a number of templates ideal for small businesses, including those for sales pages, squeeze pages, and more.
- Small E-commerce Sites: If you’re looking to sell products online, Strikingly also has some great e-commerce templates and features, including a “Simple Store” feature that you can add to your site. Note that the limited version only allows you to sell five products on your site; this goes up to 300 with the Pro plan and 500 with the VIP plan. If you want more customization or a more complex page structure, you may want to consider a more heavyweight option.
Unique Features of Strikingly
Strikingly’s focus is on long-form one-paged sites, but their minimalist designs offer an intuitive user experience and still provide plenty of features, including:
- Easy-to-use editor: Strikingly boasts an intuitive drag-and-drop editor with 10 primary templates, which are narrowed down into categories such as business, portfolio, personal, and others. Each of these categories offers a wide range of themes.
- Excellent 24/7 Support: Unlike many other options, Strikingly provides 24/7 live chat support. In addition, its Knowledgebase also offers articles, videos, and screenshots that address FAQs. There’s even an idea forum where you can suggest new ideas to improve Strikingly, but if you have a specific issue or want to open a ticket you can email them directly.
Other Great Features
- Built-in analytics: Strikingly’s built-in analytics feature tracks your number of visitors, traffic sources, and country of origin for a clear, basic overview of your site’s traffic. For a more detailed analysis, Strikingly recommends adding Google Analytics and even offers a guide for installing it in their Help Center.
- Add in forms and contact pages: Even on the free version, Strikingly allows you to easily add in various forms and contact pages so you can keep in touch with your visitors.
- Built-in e-commerce tools: Although the number of items you can sell is limited, Strikingly makes it easy to add in the “Simple Store” feature and start selling products from your site.
- Social media integrator: Strikingly allows you to add a social feed section where you can link to your social media accounts. With the Pro plan, you can connect your site to your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, so your latest posts will show on your site. Strikingly automatically checks your feed for new posts every five minutes.
- Built-in HTTPS for added security: Strikingly enables Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) on all custom domains, so visitors can access your site over Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). This means the connection between you and your visitors is secure, which can help improve your site’s Google rankings.
- Domains: You can buy a domain name on any of Strikingly’s plans, including the free plan, which means you can secure your domain name before upgrading to a paid plan when you’re ready. And if you already have a domain, you can transfer it to Strikingly from another registrar. If you don’t want a custom domain or don’t want to upgrade for one, you can personalize your site’s URL for free, but it will end with “.strikingly.com.”
- Autosaves: Strikingly will autosave any edits you make to your site. However, is no backup feature, but you can easily make a copy of your site—just in case!
+ Pros +
- Very user-friendly: Strikingly’s interface is very user-friendly. The drag-and-drop editor makes it easy for anyone to start start building mobile-friendly websites right away.
- No web design experience required: Strikingly was designed to be accessible to everyone, regardless of their technical experience. The different templates and themes also make it easy to create a website that reflects your brand’s voice in minutes.
- Excellent customer support: Strikingly offers 24/7 support via live chat, so there’s always a “Happiness Officer” to answer your questions or offer technical support.
– Cons –
- Limited e-commerce features: While Strikingly offers you to sell a few items on most plans, it doesn’t have the features needed for a full-fledged online store. Strikingly can still be a good option if you intend to have items in your shop as an add-on, but probably isn’t ideal if your website’s main focus is e-commerce.
- Design options might be too basic for some needs: While the Pro plan allows you to add multiple pages, Strikingly’s main focus is creating simple, one-page sites. So if you want to customize your site extensively, create many different pages, or just play with more advanced web design features, you may want to try an alternative like WordPress.
- Not ideal for scaling a business: If you’re creating a site for your business, you most likely want your site’s growth to keep up with your business’s growth. If you want more customization, more e-commerce features, or just a more complex page structure at some point down the road, you’ll probably find Strikingly isn’t the best match.
Pricing
Strikingly offers several pricing options, and each tier adds certain features that may be beneficial to some users.
Free
Strikingly’s free plan comes with the following features:
- Unlimited free sites
- Strikingly.com domain
- 5 GB monthly bandwidth
- 500 MB total storage per site
- 1 product per site at the Simple Store
- Can invite collaborators
- 5% transaction fee
- 24/7 support
Limited: $8 per month (billed yearly)
- 2 limited sites
- Unlimited free sites
- Connect custom domain
- Free SSL for custom domain
- Free domain for a year
- 1 GB storage per site
- 50 GB bandwidth
- Sell up to 5 products using Simple Store
- 5% transaction fee
- 24/7 support
Pro: $11.20 per month (billed yearly)
- 3 pro sites
- Unlimited free sites
- Connect custom domain (free SSL)
- Free domain for a year
- 20 GB storage per site
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Sell up to 300 products
- Remove Strikingly branding
- Custom Forms
- Multiple pages
- Password protection
- Enable site memberships (including paid)
- Enable product reviews
- Pop-ups
- Site search
- Mobile action buttons
- Embed custom code
- Custom font upload
- 2% transaction fee
- 24/7 support
Strikingly Alternatives
Strikingly offers a combination of user-friendliness and all the basic features new website builders could need.
However, if your site requires more advanced features, or if you just want to check out other options, here are some solid alternatives:
Weebly (for straightforward website building)
Weebly is another website builder that makes it easy to design a functional site. Although it boasts more features than Strikingly, it’s still easy to use even if you have zero experience or technical skills. Check out their pricing here.
Shopify (for e-commerce)
If you’re looking building a website primarily for e-commerce, you may want to check out an alternative like Shopify, which offers many more features specific to e-commerce. Check out their pricing here.
WordPress (for all kinds of websites)
If you want to experiment with more freedom to customize your site, you can try building your own site with WordPress. It’s relatively straightforward for beginners, but you can introduce as many advanced features as you’d like with various plug-ins and plans. We’ve got a complete guide to help make that process easy too!
Building Your Own Website
Strikingly makes building a website straightforward and easy, even if you have very little technical skills. It can be a great tool for bloggers, small business owners, and even e-commerce sites.
If you’re curious about what Strikingly offers but still unsure if it’s right for you, try experimenting with the free plan. Once you’ve gotten the hang of it, you can always upgrade to enjoy the more advanced features.
Did you find this post helpful? Let us know in the comments below!
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As a blog writer for TCK Publishing, Kaelyn loves crafting fun and helpful content for writers, readers, and creative minds alike. She has a degree in International Affairs with a minor in Italian Studies, but her true passion has always been writing. Working remotely allows her to do even more of the things she loves, like traveling, cooking, and spending time with her family.
