Strikingly is an intuitive drag-and-drop website builder designed for beginners without prior web design or development experience. This no-code platform simplifies website creation, allowing anyone to launch their site with minimal effort.
With over a decade of market presence, Strikingly powers around 100,000 websites. But how does it measure up as a website builder?
I conducted a detailed review of Strikingly's features and services to assess its suitability for beginners and general users. My analysis focuses on key factors when selecting a website builder to evaluate its performance.
Strikingly Review: Features
Now, I believe you may have some doubts or issues revolving inside your mind. This is primarily because Strikingly isn't a popular website builder. And you might also think, why go for Strikingly when you have Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify?
Well, I agree with you. Strikingly cannot compete with such popular website builders. However, when you take a look at these features, you will understand choosing Strikingly isn't a bad choice either, especially given the super affordable pricing plans.
1. Ease of use
Due to their simplicity, many users prefer website builders over popular CMS platforms like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Unlike CMS platforms, which often require technical knowledge or design skills, website builders offer a more accessible, user-friendly experience. For my 2024 review of Strikingly, I’ve tested how easy it is to create a website without coding or technical expertise using this builder.
After registering an account with Strikingly, I created a website from scratch. The process was simple. Users can select a pre-designed template to jumpstart their project or begin with a blank page to create a fully custom design. For this review, I opted for one of Strikingly’s templates. Once installed, we began designing our website.
From my testing, I’ve found Strikingly’s editor highly intuitive. All controls are conveniently placed in a left-hand sidebar, providing easy access to pages, sections, and design tools. This layout allows users to switch between pages seamlessly, add or delete sections, and customize their site.
The editor organizes your website into sections, simplifying the structure and layout. Users can effortlessly edit, rearrange, delete, rename, or duplicate sections. Additionally, there’s a straightforward option to add new sections.
When adding sections, users can choose between pre-made designs or blank sections. Pre-made sections are fully customizable, allowing for personalized tweaks, while blank sections let users build their layouts from scratch by adding elements through the editor’s controls.
Beyond the editing features, navigating other essential parts of your website is equally straightforward. Users can directly access their online store, website styles, and audience pages from the editor screen.
A direct link to the site and account settings is also available, covering features like store management, blogging, audience membership, analytics, team collaboration, promotions, SEO tools, and third-party integrations.
2. Customizable design
Now that I’ve showcased Strikingly’s ease of use, evaluating its design flexibility is essential. This is important, given that Strikingly has more than 96,000 customers.
My analysis reveals that, despite its simplicity, Strikingly offers impressive design flexibility. As previously noted, it is a drag-and-drop website builder that allows users to create pages using either templates or a blank canvas.
Regardless of your option, Strikingly enables you to fully customize every aspect of your site to align with your vision. You can remove pre-made sections, redesign your web pages, or modify individual elements within a section.
If the layout of an imported template or section doesn’t meet your needs, Strikingly allows you to redesign it. For instance, you can switch between horizontal and vertical stacking of elements or even combine both.
Layouts can be rearranged effortlessly, and general styling attributes such as padding, content width, alignment, and shape can be adjusted. This level of customization extends to the header section and navigation as well.
Strikingly also provides tools to modify the site’s overall color scheme, fonts, text size, and animations, including page scrolling, background effects, and image hover animations.
Based on these capabilities, I believe Strikingly does not impose significant limitations on the type of website you can create. If none of the existing templates or sections align with your vision, the platform’s extensive customization options make it possible to tailor them to suit your preferences perfectly.
3. Eye-catching templates
The templates are some of the most eye-catching parts of Strikingly. While I’ve used various templates before, I should admit the functionality Strikingly templates provides. And believe me when I say this because I’ve used Wix, Shopify, Squarespace, Jimdo, GoDaddy, and more website builder templates.
While testing Strikingly, I explored its templates page and found that the builder offers over 200 options. These templates range from basic designs to modern, visually appealing ones that look like professional websites. Because of their polished designs, minimal adjustments are required, allowing you to launch your site more quickly.
Strikingly has at least one template for nearly every type of website imaginable. To make the selection process easier, the templates are organized into several categories: online store, small business, landing page, membership & courses, creatives, organizations & events, personal, and blog. You can filter templates by category to find the most relevant options effortlessly.
Once you’ve chosen a template, you might decide later that another one suits your needs better. While many website builders make switching templates nearly impossible, Strikingly allows you to change templates easily. When you switch, the new template's design replaces any unmodified sections of your site.
However, any custom sections or elements you’ve added remain intact, and you can delete them if they’re no longer needed. Your pages' overall styling will match the new template, giving your site a fresh look without losing your work.
4. Third-party integrations
I should really focus on this point. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: having a website builder isn’t enough unless you consider the third-party integrations and widgets.
It's reassuring to know that Strikingly offers excellent design flexibility. However, there are times when the built-in features of a website builder fall short, and integrating third-party tools becomes necessary. This makes it crucial to ensure that Strikingly supports such integrations if needed.
From my detailed review, I found that Strikingly does allow third-party integrations for its sites. Unfortunately, the number of supported integrations is limited, which was disappointing.
This limitation doesn’t mean you can’t add other third-party apps to your site. Strikingly imposes no restrictions on the number of integrations you can include. To add additional apps, you can embed them using custom HTML code. The only requirement is that the tools you want to integrate must work when embedded on a website. Otherwise, they can’t be used.
This approach, while functional, is disappointing because not all third-party apps offer manual embedding options. Comparatively, competitors like Wix stand out with a broader range of third-party integrations.
Wix supports over 300 web apps, enabling the creation of more advanced websites with superior functionalities, making it a stronger alternative to Strikingly.
5. Blogging
If you’re a blogger or planning to start a blog, you might wonder if Strikingly is a good choice for creating and managing one. The answer is both yes and no.
While reviewing Strikingly’s blogging capabilities, I found that while it isn’t exceptionally good, it’s not terrible either. Strikingly provides a decent tool that simplifies the blogging process. To create a blog, add a pre-made blog section with your preferred layout to your page. Once added, your blog posts will automatically populate within that section.
The blog post editor is well-equipped with all the essential tools to craft a blog post. You can add and format text, insert images and videos, and include custom HTML, spacers, and buttons, making it versatile enough for most basic blogging needs. Additionally, before publishing, you can preview your content to ensure it looks great on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices.
Strikingly also helps with blog organization by allowing you to set up to five categories per post. This feature improves navigation and helps retain visitors. You can customize options like comments, blog post orders, subscriptions, and RSS feeds.
However, the blogging tool lacks critical features, such as related posts, templates, and advanced comment settings. If you’re looking for a more comprehensive and feature-rich blogging platform, consider alternatives like Wix or Hostinger Site Builder, which offer more robust blogging tools.
6. SEO aspects
After reviewing Strikingly’s blogging tool, I next focused on its SEO capabilities—a critical factor in determining a website’s success. With most traffic coming from organic searches, optimizing a site for specific content and keywords is essential to stand out in a competitive market. Without proper SEO, your site risks being left behind.
From my analysis, Strikingly’s SEO features fall short in several areas. Here’s why.
The platform includes an SEO Checklist, which outlines tasks to help optimize your site. As you complete each task, it’s marked off with a checkmark and strikethrough, making progress easy to track. However, the SEO settings you can customize are limited.
For instance, you can only set meta descriptions and custom URLs when working on blog posts. While you can add image alt texts sitewide and define SEO titles for your homepage and other pages, more advanced options like social or featured images are restricted to the homepage.
Strikingly also lacks advanced SEO tools like schema markup and OpenGraph meta tags, which are vital for improving search visibility and enhancing social sharing. The one advanced feature it does include is Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which delivers a faster, mobile-optimized version of your site to improve rankings and user experience. If your content is strong, AMP can significantly boost SEO performance.
In my opinion, if achieving excellent SEO is your main goal, you might want to consider alternatives like Wix or Hostinger Website Builder, both of which offer more comprehensive tools to help you succeed.
7. eCommerce features
As part of my review of Strikingly services in 2024, I also examined whether it’s suitable for creating and managing an eCommerce website.
My findings revealed that while Strikingly offers a decent range of eCommerce features, it needs to catch up in several critical areas. For this reason, I wouldn’t recommend using Strikingly to build an eCommerce website for dropshipping, restaurants, POS systems, or print-on-demand services.
Additionally, if your online store involves shipping products to customers, there may be better choices than Strikingly. This is because the platform doesn’t integrate with shipping companies or apps, making it challenging to streamline your logistics.
8. Mobile application management
One of the standout features I discovered during my 2024 review of Strikingly is its mobile app management.
Strikingly offers a mobile app available for iOS and Android devices, and it’s incredibly versatile. Through the app, you can perform nearly every task you’d typically do on the Strikingly website, all from your phone or other mobile devices. You can easily create a website from scratch, manage orders, and track site analytics.
The app also allows you to edit and publish pages or blog posts directly from your phone, ensuring you can update your site on the go. Additionally, its notification feature lets you chat with your site visitors in real time, making engagement and communication seamless.
9. Customer support team
Customer support was another crucial area I tested during my 2024 review of Strikingly. Choosing a website builder with excellent customer support is essential because the success of your site can depend on how effectively they can assist you.
Since you’re using their platform, they should be the best source of guidance when issues arise or you need advice to improve your website.
My findings revealed that Strikingly offers customer support through live chat and phone calls (the latter is available only on the VIP plan). The live chat option is accessible to everyone, even those on the Free plan. From my experience, their live chat support is impressively fast—they respond within milliseconds and genuinely try to assist you.
However, I noticed that the Happiness Officers (as they call their support agents) were not always very knowledgeable. For instance, when I asked whether the builder supported POS or had that feature built-in, the officer didn't know the answer.
They promised to find out but took a few minutes to return, only to provide an irrelevant and incorrect response. At that point, I simply thanked them and ended the chat.
Strikingly pricing
If you remember correctly, I mentioned that one of the catchy things about Strikingly is its pricing structure. I mentioned it at the beginning of this article. Now, it's time to take a look into that.
Strikingly pricing structure
1. Free: $0
2. Limited: $12/month
3. Pro: $20/month
4. VIP: $59/month
I know what you're thinking. The monthly plan is quite expensive, especially when compared with Wix. But don't worry. When you choose a yearly plan, you will get massive discounts.
Ready to use Strikingly website builder?
Based on the results of my review, I can conclude that Strikingly is not a bad website builder overall. However, it’s important to recognize that it may not be the right fit for everyone.
If you find that some of its shortcomings are critical to your business or website needs, I would recommend exploring alternatives. In my opinion, the best alternatives to Strikingly are Wix, Hostinger Website Builder, and Squarespace. Depending on your specific requirements, these platforms offer more robust features and greater flexibility.