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25
Jul
2020

Full JotForm Review (2024): Should You Use This Online Form Builder?

☑︎ This review was last updated in May 2024

Ah, online forms! One of those things you don’t know you need – until you need it really badly.

JotForm is one of the most popular solutions for this situation… but since you’re reading this, you are probably also wondering:

“Building and managing online forms sounds like a hassle! A great tool should be simple to use but also meet my specific needs and requirements. Should I trust JotForm to do the job?”

Let’s find out together. In this detailed review, we will analyze JotForm from every possible angle and cover the most popular questions –

  • 👶Is JotForm easy to use for beginners?
  • 🔒Security and privacy – should you trust JotForm?
  • 💸Which pricing plan should you choose?
  • 🏆Is JotForm better than the alternatives?

Before we discuss the unique features that distinguish JotFrom from alternative services, let’s get a quick overview of the service itself:

What Is JotForm?

Forms are everywhere! Every time an organization needs some kind of input from a large number of people – be it customers, employees, supporters, students, etc. – it uses some sort of form to collect this information.

The main idea behind JotForm is to make the entire process as easy as possible: from actually building the forms, to managing the gathered data.

…And it’s not just about surveys – the range of possible uses for JotForm also includes the following popular scenarios:

  • Applying or registering for events, jobs, scholarships, memberships – even loans or housing. Simplicity 🎯 is key here, since there’s typically a lot of information to be collected from a single person in such cases.
  • Giving feedback or evaluation, which also includes filing complaints, leaving reviews or ratings, or voting on a decision. Clarity 🔮 is critically important here, as well as the ability to analyze the data to form insights.
  • Getting in touch with an organization (or public figure) in order to ask a question, offer cooperation or simply share an idea. Since this type of form is often used by strangers first-time visitors, privacy 👁️‍🗨️ and data protection become additional concerns.
  • Making a reservation, which can mean anything from booking a table or scheduling an appointment, to hiring various services, to vacation rentals. Getting started with this type of form is much easier via ready-made templates 📑 that include all the necessary fields and interactions.
  • Obtaining new business prospects, both online and offline; the latter also implies the ability to use the forms on a variety of devices 📱 such as smartphones and tablets.
  • Ordering a product or service online is one of the use cases you wouldn’t typically expect from an online form builder, but JotForm possesses sufficient security 🔑 and payment integrations to build surprisingly efficient checkout forms.

…and we haven’t even mentioned niche cases and special requirements, such as collecting sensitive health data from patients! (e.g. under HIPAA in the United States)

JotForm promises to solve each of those challenges – but does it actually deliver? Let’s see what’s so special about this tool.

Unique Features of JotForm

Of course, JotForm is not the only way to build online forms – so are there any specific advantages to using it?

Actually, there are quite a few:

  • Conditional logic makes it possible to “teach” your form to react to the user’s inputs, automatically adding, removing, hiding, skipping or changing fields in response to specific answers.

You can also use any field the respondent completes as an input for the rest of the form – e.g. to alter the labels or recalculate values of other fields!

This opens up almost limitless possibilities for making your forms even more effective, e.g. easily building highly personalized thank-you pages:

JotForm: conditional logic

And yes, conditional rules are present (to some extent) in most form builders, even Google Forms – but none comes even close to JotForm in terms of flexibility.

  • Apps and integrations library is what really makes JotForm exponentially more powerful, by connecting your forms with hundreds of third-party services.

This allows you to add various cool things to your forms (like signatures or additional verification), export form data into your favorite project management or analytics tools, and even securely collect payments without the need for expensive e-commerce solutions!

Speaking of security:

  • Data protection and privacy features ensure safety both for the creators and the respondents: JotForm uses 256-bit SSL certificates on all forms and lets you decide exactly who can fill in the form and who can see the results.

You can also choose to additionally encrypt all form responses with an RSA-2048 key before they are submitted to you, which acts as a double insurance against anyone trying to intercept your users’ data.

In order to enable encryption, you will need to go to your form’s settings and click on the brown “Show more options” button.

In addition to these security features, we should mention several abbreviations that might sound familiar to you. Here goes:

JotForm is fully compliant with GDPR (European data protection laws) and PCI (for payment processing) – and if you need to collect health-related information from your respondents, you can upgrade for HIPAA compliance.

  • Advanced publishing options give you full freedom when it comes to delivering your forms to your audience. Again, JotForm really raises the bar here, compared to other similar tools:

There are numerous ways you can publish a form created in JotForm – as a direct link, a social media post, or even a fillable PDF document –

JotForm publishing

You can also email the form directly to your respondents or embed it into your website – the specific code for each popular web platform like WordPress or Shopify is generated for you automatically.

  • PDF constructor is another unique feature of JotForm that lets you easily convert form responses into professional-looking PDF documents – ideal for generating invoices, proposals, tickets, certificates, etc.

The best part here is that you don’t need to start from scratch: there are hundreds of ready-made PDF templates at your disposal.

…Which brings us to the next aspect of JotForm:

  • Template library contains thousands of pre-made forms for just about every situation, grouped by type and industry. A huge time-saver!

To better understand the role of templates in JotForm, let’s take a closer look at how the form builder itself works:

Form Builder and Templates

Getting started with JotForm is super simple: you can create a new account by filling in your name, email, username, and password – or even faster via the Facebook or Google sign-up:

Create a Free Account at JotForm ›

It takes about 30 seconds in total, and we’re ready to begin! Let’s click on the big green “Create Form” button and explore our options –

There are 3 ways to create a form: starting from a blank canvas, using a template, or importing an existing one (from a website, your JotForm account, or a PDF document).

In day-to-day situations you will most likely be using templates – they save so much time! – but for the sake of introduction it might be better to start with a clean slate 📖

The form builder has a simple interface that conceals a surprisingly rich array of tools and powerful features:

JotForm builder

You can add new fields and other elements by clicking on the dark-grey rounded button on the left on the screen [1] which opens an entire panel of various things you can use in your form.

Apart from the basic elements and payment gateways, take note of the third tab which contains a huge number of more advanced blocks, like automatic geolocation or taking a photo of the respondent.

If you click on an existing field, a circular cog button will appear [2] that opens the field settings panel. Here, you can change the label, size, and position of the field, as well as marking it as required.

The third important panel is for the overall form design – it’s opened by the blue paint-roll button [3] in the top right corner of the interface.

To be frank, this part of JotForm’s builder was the biggest positive surprise for us; the variety of options is far beyond anything we’ve seen in other form builders:

  • You can choose colors and backgrounds for every individual part of the form – or click on the button at the bottom to activate the advanced designer interface with a mind-blowing amount of additional granular settings.
  • You can adjust the form’s fonts, size, and position – and even add your own CSS code if you’re familiar with web development languages.
  • OR you can simply choose a ready-made visual template for your form! There are both free and premium themes available in JotForm’s store.

…While we’re still in the form builder, have you noticed the JotForm banner at the bottom of the screen? [4] It will appear on all forms published using the free account.

In order to remove the banner from your forms, you’ll need a subscription. How does it work? And is it worth the money? Here’s the gist:

JotForm Pricing

The nice thing about JotForm is that it’s a so-called freemium service – in other words, it has both a free and a paid version.

This means you can start building and using your forms without any financial commitments, and later upgrade if JotForm proves to be useful for your project.

What we particularly like about JotForm is that there is absolutely no difference in features between the free and the paid plans: you only need to pay for additional usage limits and for removing the branding below the forms.

With this in mind, the logic behind JotForm’s subscription plans is quite straightforward:

JotForm plan Free Bronze Silver Gold
Monthly cost $0 $24 $29 $79
Form limit 5 25 100 ∞
Responses per month 100 1,000 10,000 100,000
Available space 100 MB 10 GB 100 GB 1 TB
JotForm banners yes no no no

As you can see from our summary table above, JotForm scales together with your needs – while not putting any limits on the functionality.

Another thing worth noting is a 50% discount for registered non-profits and educational institutions, which is something you won’t find at other online form providers 🎓

Finally, JotForm offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on any paid plan, which means you can ask for a full refund during the first month, by contacting the support team using the contact form or via email (they reply 24/7).

Neat! By now we pretty much have all the information we need to answer our main question:

Should You Use JotForm?

There’s no doubt – JotForm is by far the most advanced form builder service we’ve laid our hands on (and we at Satori Webmaster Academy have tried them all).

Long-time readers of our blog will know that we especially like products which manage to stay simple and intuitive while packing powerful features that are good enough to satisfy even the most expert users

– JotForm is one such product. Its online builder is easy to use for beginners, but gradually reveals a huge variety of options and capabilities as you get to know it better.

Every single feature is available in the free version of the service, which means you don’t have to pay anything until you’re really sure JotForm is the right toolkit for your needs:

Start using JotForm for Free ›

We initially expected JotForm to be a complicated tool for the more demanding cases – now we’re using it across the board, even for the simplest, text-only forms (bye-bye, Google Forms!)

Regardless of whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or a part of a big team, JotForm makes it surprisingly easy to forget that online forms used to be a difficult and tedious task.

***

We hope this review was helpful and answered more questions than it created! Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments section below – let’s help each other make a sensible choice 💬

17
Mar
2020

Das ultimative -Review 2024 – nur ein weiterer Homepage-Baukasten?

☑︎ Dieses Review wurde zuletzt aktualisiert im May 2024

UPDATE: wir haben zu den verschiedenen Preisoptionen von Webflow eine detaillierte visuelle Erklärung hinzugefügt. Du kannst sie in der entsprechenden Sektion weiter unten finden; Wir hoffen, ihr findet das genauso interessant wie wir, als wir sie zusammengestellt haben 🤓

***

Du bist wahrscheinlich hier, weil du dich fragst: „Sollte ich Zeit investieren, mit dieser neuen App umgehen zu lernen?“ In unserem detaillierten Review wirst du alles erfahren, was du wissen musst, um eine Entscheidung zu treffen.

Dadurch, dass wir jede der vielen Komponenten aus Webflows Angebot wie Designer, CMS, Hosting, eCommerce, etc. auseinandernehmen, werden wir am Ende herausfinden können, ob es ein Tool ist, das sich lohnt, sowie einige der drückenden Fragen derer beantworten, die bereits ein Auge auf Webflow geworfen haben:

  • 📐Ist Webflow benutzerfreundlich – und wer sollte es nutzen?
  • 💰Wie funktionieren die Preisoptionen wirklich?!
  • 🔌Ist Webflow kompatibel mit anderen Werkzeugen?
  • 🏆Solltest du Webflow traditionelleren Tools vorziehen?

Der Eckpfeiler der Philosophie von Webflow lautet „cleveres Weglassen von Code“ – dieses Werkzeug wurde speziell für Leute entwickelt, die eine Website erstellen und dabei den Quellcode der Seite am liebsten nicht anfassen möchten, aber dennoch mit aufgeräumtem, gut geschriebenem Code arbeiten möchten und dabei nicht an eine einzige Veröffentlichungsplattform gebunden sein wollen.

Teste Webflow kostenfrei ›

Hier gibt es gute Neuigkeiten für die, die mehr von der visuellen Sorte sind, denn eine solche Herangehensweise könnte Designer dazu ermutigen ihre Vorstellungen direkt im Web Wirklichkeit werden zu lassen und so eventuell sogar Grafikprogramme wie Photoshop oder Sketch zu überspringen.

Ob das nun die einzige Anwendungsart von Webflow ist und ob das in der Praxis auch tatsächlich so gut funktioniert, werden wir im Folgenden genauer unter die Lupe nehmen:

Blitz: Oft gestellte Fragen

Doch bevor wir richtig eintauchen, hier noch eine Zusammenstellung der am häufigsten gestellten Fragen, die uns bezüglich Webflow erreicht haben – mit knackigen Antworten, die euch auf die relevanten Teile dieses Reviews weiterleiten:

— Was ist Webflow? 🤔

Im Grunde handelt es sich bei Webflow um ein Online Toolkit für das Erstellen und Betreiben von Webseiten. Ein strahlender Hybrid aus traditionellen Website-Erstellern wie Wix, klassischen Content Management Systemen wie WordPress und dem tatsächlich „von Hand“ programmieren der Onlinepräsenz.

Schon verwirrt? Der Leitfaden, den du gerade liest, wurde mit dem Ziel erstellt, dass die Verwirrung aufgelöst wird! Und der beste Weg, um damit anzufangen, ist sich die Hauptbestandteile des Webflow-Toolkits anzusehen, darunter den Website-Designer, CMS, und Veröffentlichung/Hosting.

— Wie viel kostet Webflow? 💳

Das ist tatsächlich eine sehr gute Frage und vielleicht die, die am schwierigsten zu beantworten ist. Aber anstatt jetzt eine große Rede zu schwingen, haben wir uns dazu entschieden eine Grafik zusammenzustellen. Du kannst sie dir in der Sektion zu der Preisgestaltung ansehen, indem du diesem Link im Text folgst.

Kurz gesagt gibt es zwei Preis-Ebenen bei Webflow: Abonnements für einen ganzen Account oder Abonnements für Webseiten. Erstere bestimmt, wie viele Teammitglieder Webflow verwenden können und außerdem für wie viele Projekte; die Website-Abos hingegen sind tauglicher für höheren Traffic und eCommerce.

— Ist Webflow einfach zu benutzen? 🙉

Naja, die Antwort wird dich vermutlich nicht überraschen, denn sie lautet: „Wenn du erstmal weißt wie es geht, geht die Verwendung sehr gut von der Hand”. Ja, die Lernkurve ist etwas steiler, als es beispielsweise bei Wix oder Squarespace der Fall ist, aber als Lohn für die Mühen profitierst du von einem viel flexibleren, anpassbaren und machtvolleren Werkzeug.

Aber darauf werden wir in den kommenden drei Kapiteln noch genauer eingehen, die sich spezifisch mit der Hauptfunktion von Webflow befassen:

Webflow Website-Designer

Webflows Angebot besteht aus drei Hauptkomponenten: das von Programmiersprache freie, visuelle Webdesign-Tool, das Content Management System (CMS) und das Hosting. Ersteres ist wohl zweifellos die „Flaggschiff-Funktion“ des Service. In diesem Abschnitt nehmen wir den Webflow Website-Designer genauer unter die Lupe.

Was ein bisschen wie eine Photoshop-Oberfläche aussieht ist tatsächlich mehr ein HTML/CSS Automatisierungswerkzeug, bei dem der Anwender frei nach Belieben Elemente hinzufügen, positionieren und verändern kann, während das zugrundeliegende System automatisch das Markup und den ganzen anderen nötigen Code generiert. Das Interface ist relativ Komplex und es dauert etwas, bis man sich daran gewöhnt. Dennoch ist es zweifellos einer der mächtigsten und vielseitigsten Website-Ersteller, der heutzutage existiert.

Lasst uns das gleich zu Beginn klarstellen: du kannst nicht einfach eine Form auf eine Art leere Leinwand malen. Statt irgendwie naiv eine Website aus dem Boden zu stampfen, verheimlicht Webflow nicht, dass hinter jedem Element richtig echtes Programmieren und Code steckt, und auch, dass dieser Code zunehmend unübersichtlich wird, wenn man nicht mit in Betracht zieht, wie HTML und CSS arbeiten und funktionieren.

In anderen Worten: um in die Mitte der Website einen Kreis zu malen, musst du ein neues <div> Element (einen „Container“ oder eine „Sektion“ in Webflow-Termini) hinzufügen, seine Position als „festgesetzt“ definieren und seine Oben-Rechts-Unten-Links-Position als 0 bestimmen – das ist das echte Leben, Freunde!

Ja, die Arbeitsoberfläche von Webflow bietet echte CSS-Eigenschaften. Um also die Möglichkeiten dieses Tools voll auskosten zu können, solltest du dich mit HTML/CSS auskennen. Solltest du allerdings beim Anmeldevorgang einen Haken in das Kästchen mit „Ich kann mit Code nicht umgehen“ setzen, automatisiert Webflow einen Großteil des Editors für dich. Es kümmert sich beispielsweise um Media Breakpoints, um ein passendes Verhalten der Website zu gewährleisten (wie das Erstellen von entsprechendem Code für die Darstellung der Seite auf Smartphone oder Tablet).

Mit Media Breakpoints und Geräteansichten in Webflow arbeiten

Es ist wohl unnötig zu sagen, dass es unmöglich ist, jedes CSS-Feature in den Editor zu quetschen. Aus diesem Grund vereinfacht Webflow die unnötigsten und am seltensten verwendeten Parameter und macht das Ganze benutzerfreundlicher: angefangen bei einem Angebot vordefinierter Optionen, bis hin zum Möglichen an- und ausschalten der Anzeige von „fortgeschrittenen“ Features und einer direkteren, detaillierteren Kontrolle und Steuerung der Vorgänge.

Es ist möglich mit einer komplett leeren Umgebung zu starten, oder aber eine der verfügbaren Vorlagen zu wählen, von denen einige sogar bereits eine startklare Seitenstruktur mitbringen. In der Webflow-Bibliothek gibt es über 30 kostenlose und 100 Premium-Vorlagen. Der Hauptunterschied zwischen diesen beiden Kategorien ist das Level an Details, sowie beinhaltete Boni wie Styles und Bilder. Die kostenpflichtigen Vorlagen liegen bei 40$ bis 80$ und sind Kreationen der Webflow-Community, also von professionellen Designern und Entwicklern außerhalb des Unternehmens kreiert.

Aus oben genannten Gründen empfiehlt sich der Beginn mit einer leeren „Leinwand“ eher für diejenigen, die bereits einiges an praktischer Erfahrung mit HTML/CSS mitbringen und kein Problem damit haben die diversen Bausteine von Null an aufzubauen. Wenn du vorher noch nie programmiert hast oder dich einfach zunächst etwas mit dem Webflow-Baukasten bekannt machen möchtest, ist es sehr zu empfehlen erst einmal ein bisschen an den zur Verfügung stehenden Vorlagen herumzuspielen.

Abgesehen von statischen Inhalten, sind auch Animationen ein essentieller Bestandteil des Webflow Design-Tools, was das gewisse Extra an Interaktivität auf die Website bringt, aber mit traditionellen Tools auch nicht besonders angenehm zu implementieren und zu testen ist. Zu aller erst kannst du Übergänge und Transformationen zu jedem Element direkt hinzufügen, indem du die Eigenschaften des Elements über das rechte Seitenmenü bearbeitest. Das ist übrigens enorm zeitsparend, da das Schreiben der meisten dieser CSS-Regeln von Hand äußerst nervig ist und die meisten Entwickler ohnehin andere Tools nutzen, die das automatisieren würden.

Der richtige Spaß beginnt dann mit der „Interaktionen“-Schaltfläche, die vom Reiter mit dem Blitzsymbol am oberen Ende des rechten Seitenmenüs aus erreichbar ist: dort kannst du Animationen abhängig vom Status der Seite oder der Interaktionen des Nutzers (beispielsweise wenn mit der Maus über ein Element gefahren oder geklickt wird) einfügen. Im Prinzip handelt es sich um ein Automatisierungstool für Java Script, das dir potenziell 80 – 90 % deiner normalen JS File für eine Standard-Website ersetzen kann, seien es Menü-Animationen, das Einfliegen von Elementen, das Anzeigen von Informationen beim herüberfahren mit der Maus und was nicht sonst noch alles.

Eine Spritztour mit dem Webflow Site-Designer ›

Die übrigen Reiter des Seitenmenüs beinhalten den Navigator (einen HTML-Baum) und den Style Manager (CSS-Hierarchie), welches sehr nützliche Werkzeuge sind, um den Überblick zu behalten, aber im Vergleich zu den oben betrachteten Panels eher wenig Mehrwert bieten.

Insgesamt hat das Webflow-Team es geschafft, ein sehr umfassendes, automatisiertes Programmier-Toolkit zu erschaffen, das als semi-visueller Editor fungiert. Das Maß, zu dem es den Prozess des Erstellens einer Website mit aufgeräumtem Code vereinfacht, wird von jedem begrüßt werden, der schonmal versucht hat, eine komplette Website von Hand zu programmieren.

Content Management System

Abgesehen vom On-Site Editing, also der Möglichkeit jeglichen Text oder Medien direkt auf der Webseite, die du designst, bearbeiten zu können, erlaubt das Webflow CMS auch benutzerdefinierte Inhaltsarten (Blogeinträge, Projekte, Teammitglieder, etc.) in komplett personalisierbaren Bereichen, die die Lebensqualität derer, die große Web-Projekte mit komplexen Strukturen organisieren, stark verbessern können.

Dies geschieht in Form von CMS-Sammlungen, die vom Reiter mit dem Stapelsymbol auf der linken Seite der Ansicht des Haupteditors aus erreichbar sind. Nachdem du eine Sammlung erstellt hast, wobei es sich im Prinzip um eine bestimmte Art Inhalt handelt, kannst du Bereiche festlegen und Items hinzufügen, die dann sowohl als individuelle Seiten, als auch als Listen/Raster auf bestehenden statischen Seiten verwendet werden können. Zum Beispiel kannst du so eine „Teammitglieder“-Sammlung hinzufügen, um eine Seite zu erstellen, auf der die Mitglieder deines Unternehmens, ihre Bilder, Namen, Beschreibungen und Links zu Social Media etc. aufgelistet werden.

Abgesehen vom CMS-Back-End gibt es da auch noch den Webflow Editor, der es erlaubt, neue Inhalte eines bereits existierenden Typs auf einer bereits veröffentlichten Website hinzuzufügen. Das ist sowohl für den Ersteller der Website und seine Mitarbeiter, sowie seine Kunden nützlich, denn das bedeutet, dass du eine voll funktionsfähige Website bekommst, die zum einen modifizierbare, statische Seiten beinhaltet, als auch dynamische Inhalte wie Blogeinträge, Portfolio-Projekte etc., und das alles ohne irgendwelche Plugins zu installieren.

Der Fakt, dass es verschiedene Inhaltstypen anbietet, von denen Blogeinträge nur eine Option sind, bedeutet, dass Webflow WordPress und andere Open-Source-Systeme wie Drupal zum Frühstück verspeist, was CMS-Flexibilität angeht. Die andere Seite der Medaille ist allerdings, dass es etwas Zeit braucht, eh man sich eingearbeitet hat. Doch in der Hinsicht kann die Webflow-Universität (die wir später noch genauer betrachten) dafür sorgen, dass die Lernkurve so steil wie möglich verläuft.

Man bekommt fast das Gefühl, dass Webflow danach strebt, das managen von Inhalten so übergangslos wie möglich zu gestalten, um dem Website-Designer nicht zu sehr die Show zu stehlen (was ja an sich auch keine schlechte Sache ist, wenn man bedenkt, dass es sich dabei ja in erste Linie um die eigentliche Kernkompetenz handelt).So oder so ist Webflows CMS aber noch immer viel flexibler und vielseitiger als der Kern von WordPress oder aktuell bekannten Website-Erstellern wie Wix.

Veröffentlichung und Hosting

Deine Kreation auf einer Live-URL zu veröffentlich ist mit Webflow auch ganz einfach: ein Klick auf den entsprechenden Knopf am oberen Bildschirmrand des Designers klappt ein Menü mit möglichen Veröffentlichungsoptionen auf, darunter eine Subdomain der „Webflow.com“-Domain (normalerweise für Testzwecke empfohlen) und eine benutzerdefinierte Domain. Mit dem nächsten Klick kannst du deine Website dann auf einem dieser Wege (oder auch auf beiden) veröffentlichen, ohne dir über etwaige Details Gedanken machen zu müssen – alles andere wird automatisch im Hintergrund erledigt.

Webflow’s Hosting-Services folgen der Devise „fange gratis an zu bauen, hol dir Hosting zur Veröffentlichung“: du kannst einen Prototypen (bis zu zwei statische Seiten) in der Staging-Umgebung designen, also genauer gesagt auf einer „webflow.com“-Subdomain, und diesen Prototyp dann mit deinem eigenen Domain-Namen verbinden (nicht mit inbegriffen), indem du einen von Webflows Abonnement-Plänen wählst. Diese beginnen beim Basis-Abo, das mit 12$ pro Monat* zu Buche schlägt und ein monatliches Besucherlimit von 25.000 vorgibt, und dann geht es weiter mit der Business-Version, die 36$* pro Monat kostet, mehr Features bietet und ein monatliches Besucherlimit von 1 Millionen vorgibt (* die Abrechnung erfolgt jährlich).

Neben dem Fakt, dass es sich um eine integrierte Lösung handelt, hat das Hosting mit Webflow einige Vorteile auf Lager, die am Ende des Tages einen echten Leistungsunterschied für deine Webseite und den Arbeitsablauf für dich als Webmaster ausmachen:

  • Da es auf der gut verteilten Infrastruktur einiger der größten Cloud-Anbieter der Welt basiert (Amazon Cloudfront und Fastly), kann es nahtlos mit deinen Traffic-Bedürfnissen skalieren, sodass du nicht jedes Mal manuell ein Upgrade deines Hosting-Servers vornehmen musst
  • Ein eingebautes Content Delivery Network (CDN) stellt ohne zusätzliche Kosten sicher, dass deine Website von dem deinen Besuchern geographisch am nächsten liegenden Knotenpunkt bedient wird, egal wo sie sich gerade aufhalten
  • Die fortschrittliche, verteilte Infrastruktur bedeutet auch schnellere Ladezeiten und eine Erreichbarkeit deiner Website von bis zu 100 %, ganz unabhängig von Besuchsspitzen oder sogar bösartigen Angriffen
  • Ein eingebautes SSL-Zertifikat (secure sockets layer) versichert ohne zusätzliche Kosten, dass deine Website von Anfang an die modernen Sicherheitsstandards einhält, ganz ohne zusätzliches Einrichten oder Verlängerung einer Laufzeit

Lässt man alle oben genannten Faktoren Revue passieren, kommt man zum Schluss, dass Webflows Hosting eine skalierbare und ohne weiteres anwendungsbereite Hosting-Lösung mit eingebautem CDN ist und preislich mit den besten Lösungen wie Digital Ocean oder anderen Website-Baukästen, die selbst gemanaged werden, auf einer Ebene liegt. Das Preis-Leistungs-Verhältnis dieses Online-Arbeitsbereiches reiht sich in die anderen tollen Features ein, die er auf Lager hat, und wird so zu einer Rundum-Lösung für Webmaster. Außerdem spart man so potentiell viele Hunderte Euro pro Jahr für CDN, SSL und andere Extras, die sonst separat gekauft werden müssten.

Webflow eCommerce

Eine der neusten (und am sehnlichsten erwarteten) Neuerungen von Webflow ist die eCommerce-Version, die ihrem Toolkit umfassende Möglichkeiten für das Online-Shopping hinzufügt.

Es handelt sich um ein komplett separates Abonnement, welches alles Nötige mitbringt wenn man sich mit seinem Projekt dem Verkauf von Dingen im Internet widmen möchte – einschließlich Produkt- und Inventarmanagement, anpassbare Warenkörbe, Bezahlen und andere Möglichkeiten zum Verkaufsabschluss, komplette Kontrolle über Kunden-Mails, sowie ein selbstgehosteter Bezahlvorgang.

Der Hauptzweck und Vorteil von Webflow eCommerce ist wohl die Möglichkeit den eigenen Online-Shop bis ins kleinste Detail auf die eigenen Bedürfnisse und Wünsche anpassen zu können, ob es sich nun um die Produktpräsentation oder die visuelle Gestaltung des Bezahlvorgangs handelt oder wie eine Kaufbenachrichtigung aussehen soll.

Das steht im direkten Kontrast zu dem aktuellen Status Quo im Bereich eCommerce-Websitebau mit Software wie Shopify, Wix, oder sogar dem WooCommerce + WordPress-Bundle, bei dem man doch einiges an Zeit und Mühe investieren (und außerdem gut programmieren können muss), um eine solche Kontrolle bis ins kleinste Detail zu erhalten.

Andere Funktionen, auf die wir uns momentan noch freuen können, sind ein Coupon-/Rabattsystem, sowie Möglichkeiten für Abonnements und digitale bzw. herunterladbare Produkte.

Auf lange Sicht plant das Webflow-Team eine Menge noch fortgeschrittenerer Funktionen zu seinem eCommerce-Angebot hinzuzufügen, darunter die Erinnerung an Käufe, die vom Kunden nicht ganz zu Ende gebracht wurden, die Unterstützung von mehreren Währungen, Integration von Amazon, sowie Kundenkonten.

Wie du siehst ist die aktuelle Version, obwohl sie sich technisch gesehen nicht mehr in der Betaphase befindet, immer noch in Arbeit und bei weitem noch nicht abgeschlossen – wenn du also vorhast einen superkomplexen Online-Shop auf die Beine zu stellen, steckt Webflow eCommerce vielleicht doch noch ein bisschen zu sehr in den Kinderschuhen, um das in vollem Umfang und ins kleinste Detail umsetzen zu können.

Wenn allerdings erst einmal alle der geplanten Funktionen implementiert sind, wird Webflow eCommerce ein ernstzunehmender Mitbewerber für so spezialisierte Anbieter wie Shopify und Instacart sein und dabei auch noch den ganzen Rattenschwanz von weiteren Tools wie dem Webflow Builder, CMS, und Hosting mitbringen, sodass man quasi für alles gerüstet ist. Das ist mal eine Ansage.

Webflow Preisgestaltung

In Bezug auf die Preisgestaltung von Webflow ist es zunächst einmal wichtig zu wissen, dass es zwei verschiedene Premiumsysteme gibt: eines für deinen ganzen Account und eines für individuelle Projekte (sprich für eine bestimmte Website, die du baust).

Wenn du beginnst mit Webflow zu arbeiten, wird letzteres wahrscheinlich aktueller und relevanter für dich sein, also starten wir mit den Preisen pro Projekt, wobei es sich im Prinzip um Cloud-Hosting für jede deiner Websites handelt: es gibt einen begrenzten, kostenlosen Plan, der es dir erlaubt bis zu zwei Seiten auf einer „webflow.io“-Subdomain zu veröffentlichen, sowie verschiedene kostenpflichtige Pläne zum Veröffentlichen deiner eigenen personalisierten Domain.

Das Basis-Abo kostet dich pro Monat 12$ (jährliche Abrechnung), schaltet automatisches SSL frei, CDN, sowie eine benutzerdefinierte Domain-Veröffentlichung, die einfach einzurichten und noch einfacher in der Praxis zu verwenden ist. Das CMS-Abo, das pro Monat 16$ kostet (jährliche Abrechnung), lässt dich nicht nur statische Seiten veröffentlichen, sondern auch Items, die vom Content Management System erschaffen wurden (Blogbeiträge, Projekte, etc.). Das Business-Abo, das pro Monat mit 36$ bepreist ist und ebenfalls jährlich abgerechnet wird, ist im Prinzip eine hochskalierte Version des vorherigen Abonnements für größere Websites mit signifikantem Traffic.

Dann gibt es da noch die Abonnements, die mit einem Account verbunden sind und die die Anzahl aktiver Projekte und andere Parameter beschränken: während das kostenlose Account-Abonnement die Arbeit an zwei Websites und kostenloses Staging umfasst, beinhaltet das Lite-Abo (mit 16$ pro Monat und jährlicher Abrechnung) 10 Projekte und Tools zum Code-Export, es lässt dich also von Webflow generierten Code auf jeder anderen Plattform deiner Wahl verwenden. Das Pro-Abo ($35 pro Monat, jährlich abgerechnet) fügt dem Paket noch White Labeling und eine Passwortschutzoption für die Website hinzu – geeignet für die, die regelmäßig an ausgewachsenen Projekten für Kunden anderer Firmen arbeiten.

Da das Ganze zugegebenermaßen etwas kompliziert ist, haben wir dieses Diagramm zusammengestellt, das alle Preis- und Abo-Varianten von Webflow auf visuelle Art nochmal übersichtlich erklärt:

Webflow pricing

Wenn du Webflows Preisübersicht besuchst, kann das ein verwirrendes Erlebnis werden. Die Art wie sie die Abos gruppieren ist etwas eigenwillig, denn es geht danach ob du eine Website brauchst, mehrere Seiten oder als Teil eines Teams arbeitest. Im Grunde bekommst du bei der „Ich brauche nur eine Seite“-Option pures Hosting (also das „pro Projekt“-Abo, über das wir vorhin sprachen). Die anderen beiden werden dir entsprechend ein Lite-Abo für 16$ oder das Pro-/Team-Abo für 35$ anbieten, sowie ein personalisiertes Angebot für große Teams. Darüber hinaus gibt es dann noch die zwei spezifischen Account-Abos, die wir ebenfalls weiter oben bereits durchgesprochen haben, und selbstverständlich reihen sich die kostenlose und benutzerdefinierte Version auch noch mit ein.

Jedes Account-Abo kann mit jedem Hosting-Abo kombiniert werden, sogar die kostenlosen Varianten. Das bedeutet du kannst die kostenlose Account-Variante nutzen und nur für die Veröffentlichung eines bestimmten Projekts auf deiner persönlichen Domain zahlen. Oder auch einen bezahltes Account-Abo nutzen und das kostenlose Hosting in Anspruch nehmen, für ein schnelles arbeiten mit Prototypen.

Bei allen Premium-Abonnements kannst du zwischen einer monatlichen oder jährlichen Abrechnung wählen. Letztere lockt mit einem Rabatt von 20 %, was mit der Zeit zu einer signifikanten Ersparnis werden kann, besonders bei den umfangreicheren Abos.

Möglichkeiten zur Zusammenarbeit

Als wir über die Preise gesprochen haben, haben wir auch die Team-Abonnements bereits kurz angeschnitten, aber aufgrund der Zielgruppe von Webflow verdient dieses Thema noch eine gesonderte Erwähnung.

Solltest du mit mindestens einer anderen Person zusammen an Web-Projekten arbeiten, lohnt es sich auf jeden Fall einen Blick auf das Team-Angebot von Webflow zu werfen. Im Grunde handelt es sich dabei um dasselbe Inhaltspaket wie beim individuellen Pro-Abo, aber für 35$ pro Monat pro Person (jährlich abgerechnet) erhältst du hier noch weitere Modi zur Zusammenarbeit und zusätzliche Features.

Während die visuelle Umgebung des Designers momentan leider keine Zusammenarbeit in Echtzeit erlaubt, können alle Teammitglieder auf alle Teile deiner Webflow-Projekte zu jeder Zeit zugreifen. Das ist besonders für Teams mit Arbeitsteilung nützlich, wenn eine Person für das Design und eine andere für den Inhalt zuständig ist.

Abgesehen von einem geteilten Zugriff und geteilten Ressourcen, hat Webflow für Teams noch ein besonderes Dashboard für deine Gruppe auf Lager, das alle Aspekte eurer Zusammenarbeit in einer einzigen Oberfläche zusammenfasst. Größere Teams können sich für personalisierte Abo-Optionen auch mit Webflow in Verbindung setzen, sowie Preisnachlässe für Hosting-Upgrades aushandeln.

Insgesamt kann man daraus schließen, dass Webflow sorgfältig an die Bedürfnisse von sowohl Freiberuflern/Einzelpersonen gedacht hat, als auch an die recht große potenzielle Kundengruppe von mittleren bis großen Teams und Agenturen – eine nette kleine Kirsche auf dem bereits schmackhaften Kuchen aus Features und Möglichkeiten.

Vor- und Nachteile von Webflow

Lasst uns als kleine Auffrischung unseres Gedächtnisses noch mal die Vorteile und nicht so starken Seiten von Webflows Angebot in einer kleinen Liste zusammenfassen und sie mit anderen, ähnlichen Website-Baukästen und bekannten Content Management Systemen vergleichen:

  • Professionelles Echtzeit-Webdesign-Tool mit eingebauter Mobilfreundlichkeit, die nahtlos aufgeräumten, exportierbaren Code generiert während du an der Seite arbeitest
  • Erschaffe dein eigenes Design, indem du eine der Dutzenden Vorlagen (ob kostenlos oder Premium) bearbeitest, ein graphisches Drahtmodell nutzt oder komplett bei Null mit einer nackten Leinwand beginnst
  • Fortgeschrittene CSS- und JS-Manager erlauben es dir volle Kontrolle über Stile und Animationen zu haben und ermöglichen ein einfaches Management der ganzen Seite
  • Schnelle und einfache Veröffentlichung mit nur zwei Klicks in eine Staging-Umgebung und/oder auf deine eigene personalisierte Domain, alles direkt aus dem Webflow-Designer
  • Ein integriertes CMS mit flexiblem, benutzerdefiniertem Erstellen von Inhaltstypen, was zum Erstellen von jeglichem statischen oder dynamischen Inhalt verwendet werden kann wie beispielsweise Blogeinträge und einzelne Seiten bis hin zu Projekten, Reviews, Teammitgliedern, etc.
  • Fortschrittliches verteiltes Hosting, das von großen Namen wie Amazon Cloudfront betrieben wird und eine maximale Seitenladegeschwindigkeit und minimale Downtime für deine Besucher sicherstellt
  • Integriertes Content Delivery-Netzwerk (CDN) ohne zusätzliche Kosten, das sowohl für Geschwindigkeit aber auch für die Sicherheit deiner Website sorgt, da die Inhalte von geographisch optimalen Standorten verteilt werden, was für zusätzliche Sicherheit sorgt
  • Eingebautes SSL-Zertifikat ohne zusätzliche Kosten (normalerweise liegen die Ausgaben dafür pro Jahr bei $50-$100), das dafür sorgt, dass deine Website immer direkt den aktuellsten Sicherheitsstandards für das Web entspricht
  • Eine relativ steile Lernkurve für die, die sich vorher noch nie näher mit diesem Gebiet beschäftigt haben
  • Verwirrende Preisstruktur mit separaten Angeboten für Accounts und einzelne Projekte – es dauert etwas, bis man da durchsteigt
  • Das Interface des Website-Builders ist noch nicht zu 100 % kompatibel mit Firefox und Edge. Jetzt aber mal im Ernst, Webflow! Das macht über ein Viertel aller installierten Browser aus… reißt euch mal zusammen!
  • Mit dem eCommerce-Paket, das noch in der Beta steckt, bedürfen die Möglichkeiten was Online-Shops angeht noch etwas Zuneigung seitens der Entwickler. Wenn hier aber noch etwas Arbeit reingesteckt und kleine Verbesserungen vorgenommen werden, hat auch dieser Bereich Potenzial wirklich herausragend zu werden

Sollte ich Webflow verwenden?

Nach der Analyse der verschiedenen Funktionen kann man zu dem Schluss kommen, dass es Webflows Bestreben ist ein wahrlich fortschrittliches und umfassendes Toolkit für Webmaster anzubieten, die sowohl Flexibilität als auch Effizienz schätzen. Die kombinierten Kräfte des Designers, dem Editor/CMS, Hosting, und (jetzt auch) eCommerce sind auf einem Level mit den besten benutzerdefinierten Web Development-Angeboten, aber die initiale Investition an Geld und die Vorbereitungszeit ist hier viel geringer und auch eine langfristige Unterstützung des Angebots sowie eine einfachere Lösung von eventuell auftretenden Problemen ist hier gesichert.

Teste Webflow kostenlos ›

In einer Welt, die von simplistischen Website-Baukästen und unhandlichen open-source CMS dominiert wird, ist Webflow eine Art Hybrid-Lösung, die besonders gut für die geeignet ist, die bereit sind eine gewisse Zeit aufzuwenden, um sich an die machtvollen Funktionen heranzutasten und sie zu erlernen, um den Mix aus persönlichem Können und Automatisierung voll auskosten zu können.

Deine Meinung?

Vielen Dank, dass du dir die Zeit genommen hast unsere Analyse von Webflow zu lesen! Findest du unser Review nützlich? Möchtest du dem etwas hinzufügen oder bist du mit gewissen Punkten nicht einverstanden? Lass uns das in den Kommentaren weiter unten diskutieren:

12
Sep
2018

Niagahoster Review: The Best Hosting in Indonesia? + Promo Code 50% Off

If you’re reading this then you’re probably deciding whether to get a hosting account with Niagahoster (sometimes also spelled Niaga Hoster). You might have heard good (or bad) opinions about it, but there are so many other hosting providers out there that it’s hard to make the final choice!

I’m not even speaking about which particular hosting plan to choose (Niagahoster offers 4 of them) and which additional services to buy if you want a stable and effective website.

This is why we’ve created this detailed guide.

Over the past 9 years, our team have tried and tested countless hosting providers, including Niagahoster, to be able to tell with confidence whether it is worth your money. By the end of this review, we will answer the following questions together:

  • 🏆Is Niagahoster better than other hosting companies?
  • 👉Which hosting plan should you choose at Niagahoster?
  • 🔍What is the difference between shared hosting and VPS?
  • 🔨Niagahoster’s website builder – should you use it?

As an added bonus, at the bottom of this page I will share with you a hidden way to save 50% (that’s right, an entire HALF) on your Niagahoster order, in case you decide to create an account with them. We will use our exclusive promo code to achieve this..

But first, we need to understand the primary factors which influence the quality of hosting and determine whether Niagahost is really worth its reputation.

The Quality of Hosting and Why It Is Important

From the first glance, all hosting providers look the same and offer the same service. What make one great and another less so is the invisible stuff: the hardware, the software, and the support you get.

Let’s look “under the hood” and see if Niagahoster is a Ferrari or more like Opel.

Firstly, let’s ask a more basic question: what is a hosting? In order to answer it, we need to introduce the concept of server:

In essence, a server is a specialized computer managed by the hosting company. It stores your website and shows it to anyone who wants to visit your web address, 24/7.

Simply put, a hosting is simply a collection of servers! This means that to understand if a hosting company is good or bad, we need to look at the quality of its servers and other infrastructure.

Our research suggests that Niagahoster is one of the first in Indonesia to offer Tier-4 datacenter servers to its clients. Previously, such hardware was only available to large corporations and popular web services, but thanks to Niagahoster it became affordable to ordinary people like you and me.

What is a Tier-4 datacenter, you might ask?

The name comes from the international standards developed by the Uptime Institute in the United States: all datacenters are subdivided into four tiers based on their quality, with 4th being the most secure and efficient tier.

Technical jargon aside, the main difference between a Tier-4 datacenter and a lower-rank one is complete redundancy. This means that all systems and networks have spare duplicates, so everything continues to work even if all active components fail.

While this sounds like an overkill at first, when you consider that your website

Thanks to its advanced infrastructure, Niagahoster is able to guarantee 99.9% uptime to its clients. This means that the company is legally obliged to keep your website available for at least 99.9% of the time.

The actual uptime reported by Niagahoster is even higher, closer to 99.999%. How high is that? This figure implies that during a year, your website might be unavailable for no more than 5.3 minutes!

This is quite good even by standards of large multinational companies – and it’s available to anyone for a fraction of the cost at Niagahoster.

How can Niagahoster afford to offer such quality at such low prices? The answer is simple:

It’s the largest hosting company in Indonesia, which allows it to scale its operations while staying profitable, where others would go bankrupt very quickly.

Apart from the datacenter quality, it is important to look at the individual servers. In the case of Niahahoster, each server is a IIX (Indonesian Internet eXchange) compliant machine with 32 Gb or RAM and 1Gbps network speeds. In other words, lots of power!

Each server is protected by BitNinja – an all-in-one security system against spam and malicious attacks, headquartered in Europe.

This combination of power, security and competitive prices is what seems to make Niagahoster so attractive – and has helped the company to gather millions of clients since its start in 2013, becoming the top-1 hosting provider in Indonesia.

Now that we understand the level of quality, let’s examine Niaga Hoster’s offer and see which hosting plan is the most sensible choice:

Niagahoster’s Offer Under a Microscope: Which Plan to Choose?

Essentially there are two different types of hosting offered by Niagahoster – shared hosting and cloud VPS (virtual private hosting), each with several possible configurations which determine the final price.

Before looking at the plans, we need to understand the difference between shared and VPS hosting, and for that let’s recall from earlier that hosting is provided on servers – powerful, always-on computers optimized for storing and serving websites to the public.

There are many ways in which a hosting server can be configured – this is where the various types of hosting come from. We’ve made a table to summarize the key distinguishing features for shared and VPS hosting:

Shared hosting Cloud VPS
Ease of use Easy for beginners Requires technical knowledge
Flexibility Several fixed configurations Very flexible – can change any detail at any time
Resource allocation Each server shared by many websites You get a guaranteed resource allocation across several servers
Price level Low-medium Medium-high

If we take housing for analogy, a shared hosting is like sharing an apartment with several other people – it’s a bit crowded and sometimes the bathroom can be occupied for too long, but the rent is quite low!

In the same comparison, a VPS hosting can be thought of as having a “golden member” status at a luxury hotel chain: you have an entire suite for yourself, and you can move freely between rooms and even different branches of the hotel chain. But it’s also much more expensive and requires some technical knowledge.

From the above, it should be clear that shared hosting is ideal for beginners who just want to test their online project without spending too much money. A virtual private server is great for developers and programmers who know what they’re doing :)

Armed with this knowledge, let’s now look at the available shared hosting plans to see which one is worth your money.

Niagahoster offers four plans for shared hosting clients, differing by the available computing resources and other features. To make things simpler for you, we will look only at the most important differences

  • The cheapest plan is called Baby; it does not include domain registration (you will need to pay separately for it, approximately Rp 110,000 per year). It also limits the number of email accounts to 1 and the storage capacity for your website’s files to 500 Mb.
  • The Student plan includes a free domain name as well as unlimited disk space and email accounts. It also allows adding more than one domain (purchased separately) if you decide you want to host more than one online project in the future.
  • The Personal plan has everything from the Student plan, plus you get automatic spam protection as well as private nameserver, which can be useful if you decide to switch to another hosting in the future (more flexibility for your online project).
  • The Business plan is very similar to the Personal plan, with only one major difference: a personal IP address. This can be useful if you are running a large website, but in most cases it’s frankly not worth the extra money.

To summarize, the Student and Personal plans at Niagahoster currently offer the best combination of power and affordability. We recommend one of these to most individuals and small businesses who wish to create their own website.

While the Personal plan costs more than the Student plan, at the end of this review we will show you a secret way to get Personal for almost the same price as Student, i.e. at a big discount.

Before we do that, we will summarize the advantages and disadvantages of using Niagahoster and formulate our verdict: is it worth your money?

Pros and Cons of Niagahoster

The following list has been compiled based on our own experience with Niagahost, following detailed testing and research. We are happy to share it with you today, so that you can make a more informed decision:

  • Niagahoster’s servers are located in an Indonesia-based datacenter, which means extra-high loading speed for your website (compared with US or European hosting).
  • High service stability (over 99.9%) is guaranteed by advanced equipment used by Niagahoster as well as special anti-failure measures maintained in its datacenter.
  • 2 free domains with any Personal or Business hosting purchase, allowing you to save extra money on registering a domain separately (typically costs around Rp 110,000 each).
  • Free SSL security forever via Let’s Encrypt, for any shared hosting plan. You can also purchase enterprise-grade SSL certificates by Comodo at additional price.
  • Easy setup for your hosting account and fast WordPress installation from within your hosting admin panel.
  • Powerful admin panel provided by cPanel, the most widely used hosting management system in the world.
  • Instant backups of your entire hosting account for added security – this way you will always have a copy of your data to restore if something bad happens.
  • Large knowledgebase with detailed guides on each aspect of hosting – from initial set-up for beginners to VPS management for professional developers.
  • Friendly and fast support via live chat, email, contact form, or by phone. The Niagahoster team responds quickly and helps solve any problems you might have.
  • Mediocre website builder with a narrow selection of themes that look visually outdated. We recommend installing WordPress and using any of the thousands free templates available on WP official repository, such as the multi-purpose Bento theme.

BONUS: Secret 50% Off Niagahoster Promo Code

Alright, since we’ve already determined that Niagahoster is definitely worth considering as your primary hosting provider, this section will provide an exclusive discount code for a 50% discount on a Personal or Business plan. Please note that that 50% value includes the discount that is already provided by Niagahost itself. Let’s begin!

  1. Visit the official Niagahoster website by clicking on the red button below. The website will open in a new browser tab so that you can still see this guide.

    Get 50% off Niagahoster ›

  2. Scroll down the Niagahoster website to the table which contains the four hosting plans. Click “Select now” on the “Personal” or “Business” plan (we recommend “Personal”, as it costs less while still containing all essential features.
  3. On the next page, choose the duration of the hosting package (we recommend 1 year, but you can also use 6 months if you feel it’s enough for you). After that click “Next”.
  4. You get a free domain with this plan! On the next page, choose the desired domain name and extension and click “Add to cart”. You can also register a second domain (e.g. you can have the same name with .co.id and .online extensions in order to secure your brand name), or skip this step.
  5. After choosing the domain names you will reach the page with your order details. Just click “Next” – the options offered here are quite useless.
  6. Click on the button to create a new account, which will finally bring you to the checkout page where you can apply our promo code.
  7. Scroll down to the bottom of the checkout page until you see the “Promo Code” section. Enter the following code into the box and click the grey “Apply” button twice (this is important):

    SALE50
  8. After you click twice you will notice changes on the right side of the page where your order price is being displayed:

  9. Congratulations! You’ve just saved some money on your Niagahoster purchase! You can now proceed to fill in the required information on the checkout page and make the payment.

Our Verdict / Let’s Discuss Niagahoster!

To summarize, our research and tests seem to indicate that Niaga Hoster is one of the best (if not the best) hosting companies in Indonesia. This is achieved by using a Tier-4 datacenter with top-quality infrastructure, located in Indonesia instead of overseas.

Add to this professional-grade software, fast support, as well as very reasonable prices (plus our exclusive discount code 😉) – and you get a premium hosting service for a fraction of the cost.

Do you still have unanswered questions about Niagahoster? Or maybe you’d like to share your unique experience with this company? In any case, we will be happy to see you join the discussion in the comments section below this text.

01
Dec
2017

Getting Started with WordPress: Setting Up Your First WP Website

Contents

What Is WordPress?

It powers a quarter of the Internet. It is by far the most popular way of creating and maintaining a website. It is free for anyone to use and modify in any way they want. But what is WordPress?

Simply put, WordPress is a piece of software that allows creating and maintaining websites. WP is often defined as a content management system (CMS) because it helps put together the structure onto which content like text, images, forms, videos, etc, can be added.

There are three parts of the WordPress ecosystem: the CMS itself, often called WordPress Core, as well as templates that allow changing how a WP-based website looks and plugins that help with the functional parts such as social sharing, contact forms, selling online, search engine optimization, etc.

Summing up, WordPress allows performing the following tasks:

  • Establishing a website on a given domain and hosting – adding pages and managing general settings related to publishing, commenting, and other aspects of site’s operations.
  • Determining how the website looks like by using third-party (or your own custom) templates; such themes are interchangeable and can be activated and deactivated with a click of a button.
  • Adding new functionality to a website by installing third-party extensions called plugins. Just like with themes, there are both free and premium WordPress plugins available on the Web.
  • Adding and managing users with various roles – from guests and authors with limited access to features and settings to administrators with full privileges.

What WordPress doesn’t do on its own:

  • It doesn’t provide domain names – those need to be registered separately; you can head over to our in-depth guide on choosing a domain name whenever you feel like learning more about this topic.
  • If doesn’t offer hosting – instead, it needs a hosting itself in order to store the website’s files and data (content). More about choosing a hosting provider – in our definitive guide.
  • It doesn’t create content – only provides the visuals and functionality for the underlying website; the content is added by the owner of the website and other contributing users.

Should You Use WP?

Before going into practical details, let’s zoom out for a moment and ask whether WordPress is a good candidate for a specific online project. This is a sensible question because there are numerous alternatives which might be more suited for certain situations.

The most important thing to remember here is that WordPress needs a hosting to “live” on – which leaves ample room for other site-building products to compete with it. The most popular type are site builders: integrated solutions which include both the hosting and the drag-and-drop interface for constructing pages and adding content. The flip side – you need to pay every month for such a bundle, and the prices are often higher than a standard hosting would cost in case of using the free WordPress CMS.

Site builders are useful to those who don’t want to spend an absolute minimum time learning how to use the product, who need a website as quickly as possible or who just want to test a particular idea – in this case it might be reasonable to consider the all-in-one option; just be aware of the fact that monthly payments can stack up to hefty sums in the long term. You can read more about the best website builders and use a free wizard to help you choose the right one in our in-depth guide on this topic.

In most other cases, however, you would be better off sticking with WordPress as your primary site engine, for several reasons:

  • You can get most additional features for free because of the vast community of developers who make plugins and themes for WP
  • Since it is the most popular CMS on the Web, it receives the most attention – this means regular updates and new features (again, for free)
  • So many people use WordPress that you can be almost 100% certain that if you have a question, it has already been covered by someone; even if not, you can always ask on the official forums or on communities like StackExchange.
  • Once you learn how to use it, WordPress is can be scaled easily to grow your website or launch multiple new ones. Large sites like BBC and TechCrunch use WP as their CMS.

Installing WordPress

Alright, now we understand what WP is, what it does, and whether it’s a good fit for the online project at hand. Let’s look at the practical side and go through the setup steps to arrive at a fully functional, customization-ready WordPress website.

There is more than one way to install WordPress, and your particular sequence of actions will depend on your choice of hosting provider and personal preferences. We’ll start with the simplest one and look at the alternative methods afterwards.

Method 1: Semi-automatic Install from Hosting Control Panel

Many large hosting providers offer handy modules in their admin panels that allow quickly installing a fresh WordPress in just a few clicks. In most cases it can be found as a WP logo among the other icons on the hosting control panel; here’s how it looks on Bluehost, for example:

After clicking on the icon, the wizard will ask you to fill in several fields, the most important of them being admin username, password, and email. Avoid using “admin” as the username since this obvious choice greatly increases the chances of being targeted by hackers wanting to break into your administrative account (the password should also not be “password” but something much less guessable, self-evidently). It is also important to indicate your real mailbox that is being regularly checked because WP will send all critical notifications to it.

One more setting worth mentioning is the path that will be used by the WordPress system: it can either be the root of your hosting’s directory tree – or a folder inside the root. The second option is not necessary, but is typically more advisable if there’s a possibility that you will be adding more WP sites to your hosting account in the future – using separate folders for each WordPress instance will keep your file structure cleaner and more manageable.

In other words, if you’re asked for the WP path you might leave it blank (if you’re sure you’ll not use other WP installs on your hosting) – or indicate a clearly identifiable folder name, e.g. one that corresponds to your project’s name (small letters, no special characters).

After completing the form, you can proceed with the installation, sit back and wait until the process is completed. You will be shown the data for your new WordPress website (and most probably receive a copy as an email).

If you’ve chosen a specific path for the WP folder in the previous step, you will also need to make sure that your domain points to that folder as its primary destination; this can be done by accessing the domain settings section in your hosting control panel.

Method 2: Manual Installation

In case your existing hosting provider does not offer a one-click WordPress install module, you can always do it “by hand”, it will take you 5-10 minutes, not 1 as in the previous case, but will still be one of the easiest ways to get your very own website up and running from scratch. Plus – you will learn to use tools and techniques that will surely come in handy later on when you’re managing your website. There are five steps to follow:

  1. Download the WordPress core in the form of a .zip archive from their official repository (never use any other links for that as they might contain corrupted files): https://wordpress.org/latest.zip
  2. Create a new database using your hosting admin panel (you can name it any way you like) and add a new database user with all privileges for that database.
  3. Rename the “wordpress” folder with the modified wp-config.php file to whatever you like (the name of your online project, for example) and upload it into the root of your hosting’s folder tree using an FTP client such as the free FileZilla (here’s a detailed guide on using this tool). In case you want WordPress in your hosting’s root directory, you’ll need to upload the contents of the “wordpress” folder.
  4. Point your domain name to the folder with WordPress on your server; this can be done in the hosting’s admin panel by modifying the domain name settings. In case you’ve chosen to upload the WP files into the root directory, your domain will most probably point to your WP install automatically.
  5. Go to your website’s URL in your browser; if steps 1-5 were performed correctly, you will see a form asking you for database details. Input the database name, username and password you created in step 2 and click on Submit. The final form will appear, asking for the website’s admin account details (use a strong password and change the username to something other than “admin” to increase the security of your website).

Voila! You’re all set. Now you can access your new website’s admin panel by appending /wp-admin to your URL, e.g. http://example.com/wp-admin. To log in, use the admin data you’ve set up in step 2 of the first installation method or step 5 of the second method.

Essential WP Settings

Now that WordPress is up and running, let’s look at some of the settings that you might want to adjust right away. You can change them at any time later on, but going through the following list after the installation can help make your website more manageable.

  • Settings → General admin section: fill in the Site Title and Tagline fields with information relevant to your online project; these fields are used by many themes and get indexed by the search engines. While you’re here, make sure that the Membership, Timezone, Date Format, Time Format and Week Starts On settings are according to your preferences.
  • Settings → Discussion admin section: you might want to tick the Allow people to post comments on new articles checkbox and untick the Allow link notifications from other blogs checkboxes in the Default Article Settings. Most webmasters activate the Comment must be manually approved checkbox in the Before a Comment Appears section, since having it off means any visitor can write anything on your website and it will instantly be live – which is, of course, not something you’d want on yours. Enabling threaded (nested) comments in the Other Comments Settings section will make comment replies branch down in a tree pattern and is useful if you want to facilitate as much discussion as possible. Apart from that, check the Email Me Whenever section and set the checkboxes according to your preferences.
  • Settings → Permalinks admin section: the most human-friendly URLs are usually generated by the Post Name option – choosing that one will enable new posts to automatically create permalinks based on their titles.

You can adjust other settings according to your preferences as well, but the ones above are important to go through after a fresh WordPress installation. Apart from that, there’s also high probability that you’ll have sample content in the Posts and Pages admin sections (often titled “Sample Page”, “Hello World”, etc – to prevent it from popping up in the navigation and blogroll, you might want to remove all of it right away and experiment with your own content instead.

Adding Themes and Plugins

Now that we’ve got the basics set up, it’s time to think about the appearance and functionality of your new website. ¬¬For this, we’ll need to add some WP extensions – themes and plugins. It can be argued that the real power of WordPress lies in its virtually unlimited flexibility thanks to such third-party modules, so let’s get started!

Themes are primarily responsible for how a WordPress website looks, yet lately there’s been a trend towards including all kinds of additional features and even integrating plugin-like bits into premium WP templates, especially on marketplaces like ThemeForest. We will not go into details in this guide in order to stay on the topic, and because we’ve got an entire piece dedicated to choosing the right WordPress theme. You can also check out our own free multi-purpose theme called Bento.

Plugins add new functionality to a WordPress website, allowing you and the visitors to perform new actions such as send contact requests, share your pages on social media, sell stuff online, and much, much more. There are thousands of free and premium plugins developed specifically for WordPress, so you’re unlikely to feel any lack of choice whatsoever; in this article, we will list some of the most popular and high-quality WP plugins which can be useful on most websites. All of them are absolutely free to use and are actively maintained by their authors:

  • All in One SEO is helpful for setting the meta tags for search engines to be able to index your website properly and display it in search results for correct keywords. Apart from that, it offers a wide range of other settings which you’ll find quite useful as you grow your online project.
  • Akismet is the creation of Automattic, the collective behind WordPress itself; it’s an essential tool for any website with comments allowed from visitors: Akismet autonomously filters out comment spam, greatly reducing the moderation burden.
  • Contact Form 7 does exactly what its name implies – enables creating simple yet powerful contact forms on any page of your website. You might need to also install and setup WP Mail SMTP plugin in order for your website to be able to send email notifications to you about new incoming contact requests.
  • Google Analytics Dashboard plugin allows inserting the GA tracking code into your website without the need for altering the source code of your theme. It also adds an Analytics interface right inside the WordPress admin panel.

Next: Choosing a Theme

All set up! We are now ready to dig a little deeper into WordPress themes and find the one that’s a perfect match for your particular online project. Head over to our guide on choosing a WP template for more.

In case you’ve got questions about WordPress installation and initial setup, don’t hesitate to hit us in the comment section below – let’s discuss!

07
Aug
2017

In Search of the Best Site Builder for 2024: Wix vs Squarespace vs Weebly

☑︎ this guide has been updated in: May 2024

Before we dive in, here’s something for those who don’t want to spend time on our in-depth review and comparative analysis of the most popular website builders:

TL;DR – Site Builder Choice Wizard

We’ve created a simple interactive wizard-thing which can help choose the right site-building tool in a couple of seconds – just go through several simple questions and check out the resulting recommendation –

In case you’d like to learn more about the similarities and differences between the most popular brands such as Wix, Weebly, Squarespace and others, as well as compare features and offers side by side, continue reading for more site builder goodness:

Why Does the Choice Matter?

You need to create a website, and you need it now. Instead of spending days to understand DIY-style content management systems like WordPress or Drupal, which do not include many important bits like hosting or domains and require getting used to, you’ve (understandably) decided to go for an all-in-one solution: website builder software.

The benefits are obvious: in a single account, you get everything you need to start a full-sledged online project – from a domain name to a built-in visual content composer to integrated e-commerce capabilities. You’re also happy to know that they offer dedicated support, in contrast to peer-driven public forums which are not always responsive, helpful and to the point.

However, once you set your sights on the website builder option, you quickly realize that now you’re facing a problem of choice: out of the numerous available builders, how do you pick the one that’s just right for your project – and not overpriced at the same time? This is where this guide comes in: we’ve conducted a comprehensive analysis of the largest and most popular website building services along various important dimensions, such as ease of use, reliability, versatility, pricing structure, and much more. Our analysis is based on observations from using real accounts in each of the services, in order to avoid superficial statements and pure guesswork.

We’ll first present our results in a condensed format, as a table of the most important comparative features, then discuss each of the brands in more detail; after that we will present one-on-one comparisons in case you’re stuck with choosing between two particular brands, and finally provide practical recommendations for making the actual choice based on your project’s needs and resources. Let’s get started!

Comparison Table

The table below contains certain important features of each of the three most popular website building services; we intentionally did not include such items as “presence of an ad-free version” or “possibility to add your own domain name” because those have been industry standards for quite a while now and are naturally offered by all major site builder brands. In other words, the table only focuses on real distinguishing features that vary from product to product – to help you make a more informed decision afterwards:

Website Builder Wix Squarespace Weebly
Year founded 2006 2004 2006
Free version yes no yes
Storage space (free) 500 MB N/A 500 MB
Extensions yes no yes
Backups yes no yes
Capabilities:
templates yes yes yes
start from scratch yes no no
analytics yes yes yes
SEO tools yes yes yes
e-commerce yes yes yes
multilingual yes yes via an app
email yes yes yes
Cheapest plan with:
adding own domains $5 $12 $8
ad-free website $10 $12 $8
online shop $17 $26 $8
Google Ads credit $10 $18 $8

While evaluating the dimensions which cannot be directly expressed as numbers or yes/no answers, such as “SEO toolbox” or “choice of templates”, we’ve aimed at being as objective as possible and using hard data where appropriate; still, those measures should be viewed on a relative scale used only to simplify comparison between the brands.

Now let’s dive deeper and look at each of the website builders separately, critically evaluating its pros and cons with respect to competition; after that we will compare each pair one on one to finally reveal the most worthy solutions.

Wix: the Veteran That Still Got It

Wix website builder, the most popular one on the market (based on self-claimed usage figures), has been around for more than a decade, which, in the fast-paced website creation market, is a lot. Surely enough to prove that their product is worth something. From its humble beginnings as a brainchild of three friends on the Israeli seaside, the company has grown to serve millions of users in 190+ countries and get listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

Wix is a classic example of a website builder that uses a freemium service model: the basic features, like the visual “what you see is what you get” type editor, as well as access to the template library and the app market, are free for anyone. For those wishing to test their online presence this is perfectly sufficient for a full-fledged website, with zero coding or design skills required – however, if you want to use the features which are essential for any self-respecting web project, such as using your own custom domain name instead of using a subdomain of wix.com (i.e. example.wix.com) and removing the ads, you’ll need to purchase one of the paid plans.

When it comes to Wix pricing, there are five premium plans, ranging from the basic ““Connect Domain” ($5 per month with yearly subscription), which essentially only allows connecting a proper domain name like example.com instead of the awkward username.wixsite.com/sitename, to the feature-packed “VIP” ($25 per month). More useful and value-for-money, however, is the “Combo” plan ($10 per month), which allows both linking a domain AND removing the ads – the two minimum ingredients to make your website stop looking unprofessional.

“Combo” is a good place to start if you’re serious about your online endeavor, yet if it gains traction, sooner or later you’ll most probably need to upgrade to the mid-priced “Unlimited” plan ($14 per month), to remove the visitor traffic limitation: the 2 Gb included in the former will only enable a couple thousand visits per month, based on the average web page size today. On the positive side, at the time when you’re in that situation your website will be well worth the upgrade.

It seems that Wix realizes that, being one of the older website builders, it needs to keep pace with the ever-advancing state of the art in website design and management – one example of this is the WIX ADI, or Artificial Design Intelligence. If you look closely, it’s just a more user-friendly and slightly stripped-down wizard which takes your data and mixes it into a template (which, of course, you can easily do with the standard Wix editor as well) – but it’s still arguably a step in the right direction and an indication that the company is not afraid to experiment and take on new challenges.

It will still be some time before Wix (or any other “AI web builder”) is able to create a ready-to-use website for you without you even taking part in the process, but even the current state of the primary Wix product is as close as it gets to an easy and seamless website-building experience.

Create a free website with Wix ›

Advantages of Wix:
  • The widest choice of visual templates on the market
  • Own domain plan competitively priced
  • Large extensions market with both free and premium addons
  • Machine learning powered helper for quick prototyping
  • The free plan never expires
Weaker sides:
  • Not possible to switch to another template after you choose one

Weebly: Simplicity and Value for Money

Founded as a Silicon Valley startup by three university students, Weebly has managed to grow into one of the most popular website builders in the world during its 10-year history. Over the years, the tool has changed almost constantly to keep up with the developing standards and trends, both in terms of design and features. One of the primary distinguishing traits of Weebly is its more intense focus on marketing, giving users an all-round solution to their website needs (creating – managing – promoting).

After creating an account by filling three simple fields (quite an onboarding!), Weebly asks you right away whether you need an online store or just a website – this will affect how the builder’s functionality is presented, but you can of course always activate the online store features afterwards. Still, this is a rather noteworthy detail since it hints that Weebly puts a significant focus on e-commerce compared with competing tools.

Indeed, their online shop plans start from $8 per month, which can be considered an aggressive pricing policy compared to other site builders: it’s twice as low as the cheapest Wix plan with e-commerce, and three (!) times less expensive than the Squarespace offer. For this price, you’re getting full online store capability, including specialized templates, inventory tracking, secure checkout, coupons, abandoned cart retargeting, and many more features. The choice of payment methods is also a pleasant surprise – Weebly currently allows you to accept transactions via Square, Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.net, which is significantly better than e.g. Squarespace.

The built-in marketing suite mentioned earlier is another example of Weebly taking a more diversified approach to the site builder experience: not only can you create email campaigns for the email lists captured with your website’s forms, you can also segment your audience, manage the acquired leads, and even create Facebook ads right inside the same interface after connecting your Facebook account.

Price-wise, Weebly can be considered one of the most affordable solutions among the market leaders: its cheapest plan that includes a custom domain costs $8 per month (with annual billing), which is more than the comparable Wix plan, until you consider that the former also includes $100 AdWords credit and removes all Weebly branding and ads – and you’ll have to upgrade to a $10 per month Wix plan to match those.

In summary, Weebly offers a great toolkit for anyone who values ease of use and doesn’t like to overpay (which is, supposedly, most of the people?) and at the same time those who dig the idea of having their website and most of their online marketing on the same convenient platform. The e-commerce solution is also worth considering, not only as a competitor of Wix or Squarespace, but also, more generally, as a worthy competitor even to such specialized suites as Shopify.

Create a free website with Weebly ›

Advantages of Weebly:
  • Competitive pricing for all categories of users
  • App market for additional functionality
  • Wide choice of payment options for online stores
  • Can change theme after creating the website
  • The free plan never expires
  • Integrated marketing capabilities
Weaker sides:
  • Template styling capabilities are rather basic

Squarespace: Minimalist to the Core

As one of the oldest website builders that are still thriving up to this day, Squarespace seems to know the secret to satisfying website owners around the world – be it sleek design, simplicity, or easy-to-understand pricing. Founded in 2004, this service has been steadily growing its user base (and fandom) ever since, having received numerous accolades as well as making it at #8 in last year’s Forbes Cloud 100 List.

Anyone signing up with Squarespace will get a full toolkit for creating and managing their website: from a free domain name and hosting, to a publishing engine and analytics suite. Most of these might not be as feature-rich or advanced as you might get by seeking services from separate, specialized providers – but the genius of Squarespace is exactly in stripping all that is less necessary and leaving in only the essentials, thereby making your entire website-building experience as smooth and seamless as possible. Less cognitive strain, more minimalism – that could be the motto of Squarespace.

Unlike most other website builders, this one does not offer a free version: you can try the service for 2 weeks (without entering your card details), but after that it’s pay to play. You can choose between two pricing plans: Personal, which will set you back $12 per month if billed annually ($16 for monthly billing) – and Business, which costs $18 per month ($26 with monthly billing). Most small online projects will do just fine with the Personal plan, as the only significant difference compared to the Business version are limitations on the number of static pages (20) and contributors (2), as well as a Gmail-powered branded email account (which in principle you can set up on your own).

The recently added e-commerce options are seen widely as a response to the growing number of competitive offers with built-in e-commerce capabilities; the Basic plan is priced at $26 per month ($30 with monthly billing) and includes everything from the above-mentioned Business plan, as well as all essentials for running an online store: order and inventory management, taxes, accounting, etc. The Advanced e-commerce plan ($40 per month or $46 with monthly billing) offers some nifty features, such as abandoned cart auto-recovery, checkouts on your own domain, as well as automatic discounts. Since all of these features are potentially significant money or time savers, it is sensible to switch to the Advanced plan as soon as you see at least some sales.

Squarespace is an example of a closed-ecosystem site builder – there is no extension community or an app marketplace; everything you need is built into the system, removing the need to search for, install and configure additional modules. While that is good news for the usability aspect, it also means that anyone requiring a specific new feature will need to rely solely on the discretion of the site builder itself to implement it.

Squarespace can be called a design-centric CMS: while other web builders have arrived at the importance of clean, streamlined, clutter-free visuals in the process of their evolution, Squarespace has embraced these guiding principles from day one. And at that time, it really, really did help stand out from the competition.

Nowadays, as the largest competitors have caught up with the design part and sometimes outstripped Squarespace in the features dimension, there’s not that much left to justify its premium pricing policy. Nevertheless, it’s still a beautiful website builder with timely minimalist templates and a wonderfully simple user interface – and as a creative type, do you really need anything else?

Create a website with Squarespace ›

Advantages of Squarespace:
  • Beautifully designed, minimalist templates
  • Advanced Style Editor with a vast choice of options
Weaker sides:
  • Free trial expires after 14 days
  • No extensions or apps
  • Only available in two languages
  • Higher transaction fees for the e-commerce

Head-to-Head Matchups

Each product described above can easily be called a full-fledged web presence management system in its own right. In other words, there is no sense in using two or three simultaneously, since their feature profiles largely overlap; with this in mind, the problem of choice becomes even more challenging once we take into account the fact that migrating between these platforms is almost impossible unless everything is transferred “by hand”, i.e. the entire website is re-created from scratch in the new platform.

So now that we’ve had a detailed look at each of the website builders, it’s time to compare them one on one to make sense of the available choices. Between the three of them, Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly form three pairs that can be contrasted in terms of available options, user experience, design quality, ecosystem size, and the general value for money. Let’s get started:

Wix vs Weebly

While being equally powerful site building toolkits, Weebly and Wix each have their individual differentiating points which can help choose among the two.

While Weebly’s focus on simplicity ensures a steep learning curve (i.e. fast learning) for any user of its drag-and-drop website editor, Wix offers more freedom for design-oriented users though more granular controls for each website element (fonts, colours, etc), while also allowing to start from a blank template and work your way up to a fully fleshed out website all by yourself if you don’t feel like using a pre-made template.

Wix also has a slight advantage in terms of the variety of templates and apps it offers, yet Weebly is very close with just marginally less choice in each of these categories. Given the sheer number of available alternatives in each cases (200+ apps and dozens of templates), the differences do not have a significant effect on the user experience or website’s capabilities whether you’re using Wix or Weebly.

Weebly, on the other hand, can boast a more comprehensive marketing toolkit built right into the platform: apart from emails and leads, at also allows segmenting your audience and creating targeted social media ads.

Both e-commerce solutions are quite potent and integrate beautifully into your website, while third-party apps and marketing tools can help boost sales and recover abandoning customers. It’s safe to say that this aspect is a close tie for Wix and Weebly.

In terms of price points, Weebly is slightly more competitive in this pair, since it offers a cheaper ad-free plan and more affordable advanced plans. There’s also the $100 Google AdWords credit bonus if you sign up for any of Weebly’s paid plans – Wix gives away the same coupon only starting with its second premium plan.

Winner: TIE (more details below)

Weebly vs Squarespace

As one of the more experienced market players, Squarespace has had plenty of time to perfect its design and layout engine, and it shows: the site-building part of the experience is superb, and can be said to surpass that of Weebly, which focuses more on simplicity and affordability.

The latter does win in terms of template variety, though – Weebly users can choose from hundreds of pre-designed layouts, and can switch between the themes after adding content to the website, which is not possible in Squarespace.

Weebly’s focus on marketing means more options for promoting your website right from the interface of your site builder, while Squarespace tends to concentrate on design and visuals. Some of the marketing features that are unique to Weebly in the context of this comparison are manual and automated mass email campaigns as well as Facebook ad engine that lets you create FB campaigns right inside the Weebly admin panel, tying them to the behaviour of your website’s visitors.

In addition to that, Weebly has a free version with no expiry date, and is priced considerably more affordably for almost any comparable feature set. The price advantage is especially evident for the e-commerce solutions, with Weebly’s being three times less expensive than the one from Squarespace.

Winner: WEEBLY

Wix vs Squarespace

If there’s one area where Squarespace can be considered almost unbeatable, it’s style and design: both the templates and the interface are sleek, minimalist, and well thought-though. It can be ideal for those who are planning to place a heavy emphasis on graphics and imagery, since most templates devote a significant part of their layout to photos. The pitfall here, though, is that your finished website won’t look nearly as sleek as the template demos if you don’t have access to extremely high-quality photography, or if you aren’t used to matching colours and shades.

Wix, on the other hand, wins in terms of template variety (almost twice as many available) as well as the editing capabilities: the sole fact that you can start from a blank canvas in Wix makes it a more flexible tool for a lot of potential users.

Another feature which is offered by Wix and is not currently present in Squarespace is site backups, which usually tends to stay underrated until one experiences a blackout or loses their website for one or another reason.

There’s also the App Market in Wix, an integrated extension marketplace allowing users to get free and paid plugins developed both in-house and by third parties. This creates an entire ecosystem around the core website builder, expanding the range of things your Wix-built website can do. While Squarespace does offer several pluggable modules with additional features, it’s nowhere near the diversity offered by Wix’s App Market.

Price-wise, Wix has the upper hand, both because all of its plans are less expensive than the comparable Squarespace plans, and because its free version, despite containing ads, does not expire after two weeks – there’s no time pressure to get everything ready for launch, and you can even stay on the free plan with Wix indefinitely, if you’re okay with the ads.

Winner: WIX

Other Notable Site Builders

There are many more website building toolkits on the market, of course – in this guide, we’ve focused on the most popular ones so far. However, it would be wrong not to mention other significant brands that offer good value for money along with some unique features and designs:

Zyro: the AI-Powered Site Builder

While the old guard like Wix are starting to flirt with Artificial Intelligence tech, newer brands like Zyro are fully invested in these trends, making then an integral part of their toolkit.

For example, every Zyro client can take advantage of the built-in Content Generator, which instantaneously creates unique paragraphs of text on a given topic (that actually make sense!). This seemingly magic widget is based on Open AI‘s latest language-processing models and can serve as a really quick way of seeding your website with initial content.

Zyro’s infrastructure is provided by Hostinger, one of the largest web hosting companies in the world (30M+ clients in 170 countries); for all Zyro-based websites, this implies stability and speed – both important for visitor satisfaction and search engine rankings.

In summary, Zyro is an interesting option for those who seek simplicity and value for money. It ticks all the boxes for a great site builder, while boasting extremely competitive pricing.

Site123: The No-Nonsense Builder

While some site builders keep increasing in complexity, others choose a different path – the one which focuses on speed and ease of use. This is exactly what Site123 does, with some impressive results. Let’s have a closer look.

The main difference between Site123 and other solutions described in this review is the central role of templates in the site building process: once you sign up and choose the website’s function, the system automatically generates a template and hands it over to you for customization.

It should be noted that Site123’s visual editor is not drag-and-drop: you are able to personalize each element, yet the process reminds more of the famous WordPress Customizer than other notable site builders. This doesn’t mean it’s less convenient, though: in fact, as your space of potential choices gets smartly limited to the most likely options, the cognitive strain of customizing your first website is significantly reduced.

Apart from the visuals, you can also add plugins, most of which require the Premium version to function (more on this later) – the only one that works out of the box is the Google Analytics tracking code. The premium integrations include several more analytics suites, live chats, social sharing and marketing automation.

Another notable feature of Site123 that helps it stand out is the multilingual option: you can easily choose the primary locale for your website as well as add any number of additional language versions with just a click. Definitely less clunky that most other site builders which focus on a single language for your website (I’m looking at you, Squarespace!).

Site123’s aim at simplicity is also clearly seen in its pricing strategy: just two plans – Free and Premium, the latter including all traditionally paid features such as the ability to deploy on your own custom domain instead of a subdomain of Site123, more bandwidth, no branding, and e-commerce functionality. The Premium version costs $9.80 per month, which is on par with the best value-for-money offers in the industry. Upgrading is a simple feat – clicking on the respective golden button at the bottom of your site editor’s left panel will initiate the payment sequence.

Overall, Site123 is a laid-back alternative for those seeking to minimize their site-building efforts through template-based customization. The premium plan includes all the features one would need for a fully functional small business / personal website, at a very reasonable price.

Jimdo: Simple, Stylish, Affordable

This is an interesting example of a site builder that started out as a classical hosting: the company had its first significant clientele back in 2009 when they accepted the former users of Yahoo’s discontinued GeoCities hosting service. Over time, Jimdo has aimed at providing the full spectrum of features a website owner needs, focusing more and more on the website building experience. The service currently hosts more than 20 million websites around the world.

Jimdo uses a freemium model similar to Wix and Weebly: there’s a permanently free version which displays branded ads and allows using a subdomain of the form example.jimdo.com for your website. The Pro and Business versions allow removing the ads and choosing your own custom domain name, which is already included in the price. It is worth noting that the basic e-commerce features are available starting with the Pro version, which, at $7.50, makes it the most affordable online store functionality among all existing website builders (cheaper even than Weebly).

The biggest advantages of Jimdo are its simplicity and pricing. The learning curve is extremely steep even for new users who have never seen a site builder before, while the $7.50 per month Pro plan includes all features that are usually priced considerably higher by other competing services like Wix and Squarespace.

When comparing Jimdo vs Wix, the templating system grabs attention: the former has made it very easy to not only choose a design from the pre-built library, but also edit the code of your template with a few clicks. In case of Jimdo vs Squarespace, the most important consideration is pricing: such features as adding own domain name, ad-free experience, and online sales are almost two times less expensive with the former. As for Jimdo vs Weebly, the former is still priced slightly more competitively – despite the difference being just $0.50, it can accrue to sizeable sums over time, e.g. the annual saving with Jimdo would be $6.

Sitebuilder: The Cheapest Option

When it comes to Sitebuilder.com, which is another tool closely resembling Wix, the most important aspect is its cost: it’s currently the most competitively priced website building tool out there. There is a (permanently) free and 3 primary premium plans, with the fourth, Personal, being a nice little marketing trick by Sitebuilder designed to make the more feature-rich AND cheaper Pro plan more attractive – which means we will disregard it for the purpose of clarity.

The free plan does not have an expiration term but is limited to 5 pages, which makes it less useful for any serious online project – it’s more like an advanced trial of the toolkit. The gem here is the Pro version: at $4.99 per month (billed annually) it offers a free domain name, free email and (more importantly) an ad-free experience, which means that in the Sitebuilder vs Wix comparison it is clearly a winner in terms of pricing. Even Weebly’s ad-free plan cannot compete with Sitebuilder’s Pro version: the annual savings on the former would be over $36.

In terms of features and usability, Sitebuilder.com is quite similar to Wix and Weebly; while the company boasts “over 10,000 templates” on its official homepage, the real amount is closer to 210+ when you are actually choosing one for your website inside your account. This discrepancy is most likely due to the fact that the company considers each template option and setting as a separate template, which, to our mind, is slightly misleading, to say the least; in any case, there’s plenty of templates to choose from, even given the two hundred real alternatives in the template library.

SEO settings and Analytics become available in the Pro version as well, while the e-commerce options are activated by upgrading to the eponymous plan (priced at $11.99 per month). This makes Sitebuilder one of the most affordable online shop toolkits from our comparison as well, beaten only by Weebly.

Overall, Sitebuilder.com is a rather powerful toolkit with a pleasant user experience and extremely competitive pricing for the first year of use.

uKit – the Up-and-Coming Contestant

Having evolved from uCoz, a free hosting with an integrated site builder, uKit is the modern iteration of that decade-old project. The new version offers extended features and options, including an online store and an automated tool that keeps track of the website’s “marketing-readiness”.

The visual builder has everything one could need for creating a clean-looking custom website: after choosing from over 300 available templates, the user can quickly define the structure, set up various elements, and tweak the design. There are no plugins or third-party apps to extend the functionality at the moment, yet all basic needs, including an online shop, are covered.

uKit does not offer a free version, only a 14-day trial (no credit card required) – after that you will need to choose one of its paid plans to continue managing the website. Pricing is extremely competitive, with the most affordable plan (uKit Premium) costing only $4 per month with annual billing. It is worth noting that, unlike with most other similar products, pricing here depends on the billing period, not unlike web hosting platforms: for example, the Premium+ plan can cost from $10 in the case of monthly payments to as low as $7 with biyearly billing.

In case you don’t want to allocate extra time for your website’s design or simply would like to have a professional do it for you, there’s a possibility to order a custom website from the uKit team for a $50 flat fee.

The combination of easy to use, basic functionality and aggressive pricing makes uKit a close competitor to Weebly and Jimdo. In a uKit vs Wix comparison the latter comes out a clear winner in terms of available features and design variety, yet the former offers an interesting alternative for the price-conscious cases without overly complex needs.

GoCentral – a Site Builder from the Domain Behemoth

Another worthy mention is GoCentral, offered by (surprise!) GoDaddy – one of the largest domain name registrars and hosting companies in the world. A site builder was arguably a very logical step in their path towards vertical integration which started with upselling hosting with domain names. In this case, we see a drag-and-drop visual composer bundled with a hosting, rather than the other way around found in all other site builders discussed in this review.

The slogans of the GoCentral, “Anyone can make a website now”, and “Build a better website in less than an hour” sound fair when applied to their product: the user interface is so simple it can be learned in minutes. All extras have been sacrificed in the name of ease of use – which allows putting together a basic website really quickly. There are 8 templates to choose from (by simply clicking through them you can preview each design instantly), each customized using color palettes. Each individual element, like buttons, images and text, can of course be edited on its own as well.

The best part of it all is pricing: the Personal plan costs only $5.99 per month and includes all necessary basics – significantly less expensive than even the most competitive classical site builder. Scaling up, there are Business ($9.99) and Business Plus ($14.99) plans, each unlocking more features like SSL, PayPal integration, and email marketing. The Online Store plan ($29.99) enables creating a fully functional ecommerce website, yet looks hardly competitive compared to similar offers from Wix, Weebly, or even Squarespace.

Overall, GoCentral might suit those who need a basic website quickly and with minimum hassle; the parent brand’s extensive hosting experience provides an additional guarantee of maximum uptime for the website.

Alright, we’ve now looked at the other widely used as well as up-and-coming site builders and compared them with Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace. At this point in time, however, you might be asking:

What About WordPress?

Indeed, while reading this analysis you might have had a reasonable question – how does this popular site engine stack up against these website builders? You might even have used WP before and experienced its simplicity firsthand. The difficulty in comparing WP with any of the discussed brands like Wix or Weebly is that it is based on a different philosophy: a free, open system which can be used out of the box, but most of the time requires numerous external additions (domain, hosting, themes, plugins) to realize its full potential.

Since WordPress core is free, it does not include a domain and a hosting – those will need to be purchased separately. And while it is possible to find hosting offers from respectable providers which include domains for as low as $3.95 per month (see Bluehost’s Basic plan), a certain amount of time and effort will need to be invested from your side to set things up – install WordPress on the hosting, configure the WP admin panel, find and install the necessary plugins and a suitable theme. This is why, when comparing, it is important to take into account the fact that a typical site builder is a fully integrated system, entirely created (and supported) by the same team, which allows for maximum compatibility and a smoother experience, whereas WordPress is an open-source project with voluntary (read – unpaid) contributors and community support.

Wix vs WordPress

As the most popular site builder, Wix gets compared with WP more often than its competitors. In terms of user experience and learning curve, Wix wins as an integrated solution to site-building: to get a first draft of a website in Wix, you’ll need 5-10 minutes, while setting up WordPress properly will take at least several days, based on our clients’ experience. The one aspect where WP outperforms Wix is the choice of visual templates and functional extensions: the WordPress ecosystem contains thousands of themes and plugins to choose from; the catch here, however, is that Wix strictly controls the quality of each of its add-ons and maintains a uniform level of aesthetics throughout its template library, while in case of WordPres the quality varies a lot (and we mean a Lot!) since anyone can contribute their own.

Weebly vs WordPress

Weebly comes closest to WP in terms of price competitiveness: with its $8 per month plans, this site builder offers the most sensible trade-off between cost and quality. The possibility to change templates after adding content to a website is also a feature that allows Weebly to compete successfully with the fee CMS giant. What really sets Weebly apart, though, is its e-commerce capabilities, which allow turning it into a fully functional online shop in a matter of minutes – while WordPress will require you to install several additional plugins, make sure your chosen WP theme is compatible with those plugins, and then spend some more time setting everything up.

Squarespace vs WordPress

For the lovers of sleek design, Squarespace is the solution that trumps WP any time: in order to get a theme that is at least closely as good-looking as Squarespace, you will need to turn to the premium WP theme markets – the free themes just won’t cut it. And a premium theme might set you back anywhere from $30 to $80 – and you will still need to pay for the hosting. However, it should be noted that WP themes are getting better, and as more and more designers take interest in the platform, the overall visual standards are rising steadily, even for the free WordPres themes; and, given the fact that even a premium theme is a one-off payment, Squarespace might need to up its game if it wants to stay competitive in the future.

Another aspect where the community vs organization philosophy is easily noticeable is user support: while in Wix or Weebly you can approach the support team directly and expect a fast and precise answer (after all, you’re paying for the product), in case of WordPress you are left with public forums where users like you answer each other’s questions – which obviously is less efficient when solving specific and time-sensitive issues. In other words, while WordPress has a vast knowledge base in the form of Q/A forum threads, your questions get answered by other users – who are obviously less motivated to help or reply faster.

Which One Should You Choose?

As we’ve seen above, each of the website builders has both stronger and weaker sides, and is able to carve out a niche on the market for itself thanks to specific features that appeal to certain user groups. This is therefore also a good starting point for deciding which site builder will best suit your needs: if you’re looking for a quick test of your idea and don’t care if the website will display ads, Weebly is the recommended solution – it allows you to go online very rapidly and change templates at the click of a button. If you have a very specific design in mind and would like granular control over every visual element of the website, go for Wix. If you’d like to start designing your website from a blank canvas, Wix is again your go-to solution. If you’re planning to sell products online, then Weebly might offer some of the best combination of pricing and features.

The Best Free Website Builder

Since most of the site builders we’ve discussed in this guide have free versions, one might raise a logical question: which of them is the best tool for creating a free website?

It should be noted right away that you won’t be able to avoid ads or choose your own domain using any of the free plans, making such a website only a temporary option for any online project with serious intentions – yet as a proof of concept this might be indispensable; later on, as you see traction, you can always upgrade to a more comprehensive plan with no ads and more features.

Moreover, since site builders like Squarespace and GoCentral do not offer permanently free versions (instead, they have free trials which expire after a fixed period), they will not be considered for the title of the best free website builder. The candidates will thus include: Wix, Weebly, and Jimdo.

Website Builder Wix Weebly Jimdo
Permanently free version yes yes yes
Available in free version:
Visitor statistics no yes no
Email marketing tools no yes no
Bandwidth limit 1 Gb – 2 Gb
Online store no no yes

Based on the availability of various features in the free version, Weebly stands out as the most flexible and feature-rich free website builder: unlike Wix and Jimdo, it doesn’t hide such useful items as visitor statistics and email marketing behind the paywall, while also imposing no limitations on the incoming bandwidth (Wix, for example, has a 1 Gb ceiling on the free plan).

Jimdo deserves an honorable mention as well, though, as a runner-up in our challenge – its 2 Gb traffic cap is quite enough for most new websites, and the online e-commerce capabilities in the free version are unique among other site builders.

WINNER: Weebly

The Easiest Website Builder

Creating a website might be a much easier task nowadays, thanks to the existence of the website building toolkits we’ve analysed in this review, yet user friendliness is still an important factor in how quickly you can master a particular site building tool. When talking about ease of use, it is worth looking at several broad areas: the onboarding process (i.e. creating an account and finding relevant information on the official website), the account admin panel, as well as the builder interface itself.

In terms of first-user experience, every major website builder’s homepage is quite well optimized: there’s a navigation menu with all necessary items such as pricing and features, as well as clearly distinguishable registration buttons on every page. Clicking on the latter opens a sign-up form which needs to be filled out; Jimdo is worth mentioning as the site builder having the simplest one (2 fields, while e.g. Weebly has 3 and Wix has 4, and Squarespace has 5).

As for the admin panel and the real-time website constructor, Jimdo doesn’t fare as well, though – the internal admin navigation tends to be either hidden or layered, while the editor tends to over-simplify things, hiding as much functionality as possible behind hovers and clicks. The real leader in these areas is Wix, which offers a logically organized and navigable admin panel, as well as a truly visual site editor with convenient settings overlays for each element and a host of quick links on the left side of the screen.

WINNER: Wix

The Best Website Builder for Photographers

Another common question we’re getting is about the most suitable site builder for photography professionals – the specifics of this niche dictates certain must-haves, including, foremost, image presentation and management capabilities, as well as e-commerce for licensing and appointment bookings.

We should start with a suitable theme, though; from the most popular website builders, only Weebly does not offer specialized templates for photography websites, while Squarespace includes 10+ and Wix has more than 30. While themes from other categories can also be used, of course, the existence of pre-made designs tailored specifically to photographers can be a big plus for those who wish to go online as quickly as possible and with minimum hassle.

Once you’ve chosen your template, the issue of presenting and arranging your images comes into play; this is being addressed by specialized content blocks, such as galleries and carousels. Each major website builder offers gallery and slideshow tools that help create customized blocks in no time, yet Wix is worth a mention here as the one having over 40 different kinds of image representation formats, including 3D galleries – not even counting the specialized third-party apps you can install from the Wix App Market.

Regarding additional functionality, each site builder can boast a set of e-commerce features, which might be interesting to photographers who desire to sell their work online, yet Wix, again, goes several steps further by also including a booking engine for those who’d like to enable their prospective clients to make appointments right on the web page.

Overall, all three major site builder offer decent levels of support for photographer websites, Wix seems to consistently outperform in each considered dimension – its killer combination of template variety, image management options, as well as additional capabilities is a package that’s difficult to beat.

WINNER: Wix

Best Restaurant Website Builder

By popular demand, here’s a discussion of which site builder is best suited for a foodservice/catering web presence. Apart from the usual things like ease of use, content management, and image features, there are several specialized items that a restaurant website should be able to handle; the most important are arguably the menu and the table booking engine – the former facilitates research and aligns customer expectations about the restaurant’s offer, while the latter allows increasing efficiency and securing a more stable customer flow.

Out of the largest site builders, Wix and Squarespace currently offer the above features, taking different approaches to their integration: while Squarespace has the “menu” block built directly into its Layout Engine and the “calendar” content type available with any template as a core CMS feature, Wix has specialized extensions in its App Market which perform these functions: Wix Reservations, Wix Restaurant Orders, and Wix Menus. The plugin approach allows Wix to pack more relevant niche features into each of the above items, making it more versatile and user-friendly at the same time while still allowing its use with any chosen template.

Speaking of templates, both Squarespace and Wix have pre-designed specialized themes for the foodservice industry, covering everything from coffeeshops to restaurants and bars. Squarespace’s library counts 15 of those, while Wix offers more than 40.

Many restaurants and cafes tend to offer parts of their menu or their special ingredients to the public in the form of packaged goods, which is where the e-commerce functionality comes in. While most website builders offer the possibility to set up an online shop, out of our pair of close contenders Wix has a pricing advantage.

Just like foodservice business itself, this site builder niche has some of the toughest competition, and it can be said with confidence that both Wix and Squarespace are very high on our shortlist. However, due to the more versatile set of specialized features (available through the extension store) and niche templates we will go with Wix on this one.

WINNER: Wix

Apart from these niche analyses, you can try out our handy Website Builder Choice Wizard in the beginning of this review – just answer several simple questions, and the system will magically produce a recommendation tailored to your specific preferences.

Share Your Thoughts!

Got hands-on experience with any of the mentioned website builders that you’d like to share? Still have doubts about which one to choose? Want to recommend additions and improvements to this analysis? Don’t hesitate to drop us a line in the comments section below:

26
Jun
2017

How to Choose a WordPress Theme for Your Website

If you’re running a WordPress blog or a company website, its design is largely determined by the theme you are using. In this article, we will discuss what a theme actually is, why you need it, and how to make the right choice that will make you a happy website owner.

What is a Theme?

Let’s start with the basics: a website template is a set of visual styles and page layouts that users can upload/install to their websites and customize up to their needs. A stand-alone template includes HTML and CSS3 files, and often some JavaScript; even though adding content is up to the template user, some bundles also include pre-made images, audio and video.

Website templates are usually created for a specific website engine, or CMS (content management system): a Joomla template won’t work for WordPress, and a template that is meant for Wix will is usually not portable to Drupal or Ghost. Summarizing the above, a WordPress theme is a web template made specifically for WordPress-powered websites.

If you’ve already tried looking for a WP theme, you’ve surely noticed that scarcity is definitely not a problem: rather, one can quickly get overwhelmed by the sheer variety of hundreds and thousands of template options all over the web. To help you choose, we’ve compiled a list of the most important factors to consider; before we get to that, however, let’s quickly answer the question:

Why Do You Need a Theme?

To understand the implications of using a website template, let’s look at the alternatives. First of all, you may hire a freelancer (or an agency) and order a custom website design – this is a suitable option if have several thousand dollars to spare, as high-quality, personalized web design is not a cheap product these days. Moreover, you will need to choose a knowledgeable developer to implement the design, or you’ll end up with a product of poor quality that might be ridden with bugs and security glitches.

If you don’t feel like paying that much for your website, you may think of creating your website yourself. This is a viable option if you already know the basics of web design and development, yet if you’re new to both of these fields AND you need a website now, this option may be ruled out with easy heart.

The third way to launch your website is by using a content management system (CMS) and a template. As you might have probably guessed, this option combines the speed of the first approach with the low cost of the second option:

  • Using a website template is a good solution for small businesses, even if you’re on a budget. The template’s average price is $40 – $80, which is way less than for a custom design from an agency.
  • Website templates help you save massive amounts of time as you don’t have to start from scratch with your designs. Templates not only come with pre-made layouts and styles, but also frequently with sample data that contains diverse content, pre-made for you by template developers. Using sample data, you can simply change the text and images to the ones you need.
  • With many templates, you save on acquiring paid plugins as authors tend to equip their themes with premium plugins, such as sliders or content builders, at no additional cost.
  • High-quality website templates are usually well-documented and many of them come with customer support so help you solve any configuration issues.
  • You can easily check which theme an established website is using with the help of our WordPress detector.

Things to Take into Account When Choosing a WP Theme

To fully reap the advantages listed above, it is worth while keeping certain things in mind while choosing the right WordPress template for your future website:

  1. Who is behind the theme? To end up with a high-quality template that is built with valid, well-structured code, you are better off searching for it on the websites of the leading template providers, such as ThemeForest, TemplateMonster, or Elegant Themes. By doing so, you can be sure that you’ll get a product free of security vulnerabilities, glitches and bugs. Moreover, due to the severe competition, well-established template providers are motivated to deliver designs that follow the latest trends and bring you the most powerful features.
  2. Does the theme look modern? If you want your website to be taken seriously, you’ll need a theme that looks current and professionally designed. Some of the most prominent features of modern web design include clean, clear lines, plenty of white space, bold, easily readable typography, absence of obtrusive, noisy or too detail-rich elements. It is also a given nowadays that a website looks good on all types of screens, from large HD monitors to the smallest smartphones – so be sure to check out how the theme looks and behaves on various devices.
  3. Does the visual style match your needs? Your website’s design and content should go hand in hand – depending on what you’re offering and who your target audience is, you might want to adjust your requirements. For examples, if the site is meant to showcase your creative works, a more minimalist and bold theme with an emphasis on imagery could be suitable, while a more text-focused theme is a good fit with an information-heavy website, such as a blog or a news portal.
  4. Do you need a niche template? Keep your specific needs in mind when looking for a specialized theme – be it fashion, photography, car repair, sports, education, consulting or food industry, you’ll be able to find a number of options that offer niche-specific features and design elements.

    Niche templates include features that provide for specific needs of your visitors and clients. For example, you’ll find an extended real estate search plugin in a real estate template, an appointment booking plugin in a healthcare or beauty salon template, a timetable plugin in education or sports template, etc.

  5. Does it load fast? Load speed is one of the most important visitor retention factors for any web page – so make sure the theme you’ve chosen does not take too long to fully render a page. Among the factors that most commonly influence website speed are the scripts, stylesheets, and other files loaded by the theme and bundled plugins. You can check a theme’s demo page in Pingdom’s Speed Test or using the GTMetrix engine to make sure everything is running smoothly.

    It’s an additional bonus if your chosen template comes with an animated pre-loader which clearly indicates to your guests that the page is in the process of being loaded. Be mindful, however, that it’s not a substitute for lean, optimized code, as Google and other search engines will still prefer pages which load faster.

  6. Does it include a content builder? Most theme users prefer creating pages using content builders nowadays; a content builder is a visual system that offers pre-designed elements as drag-and-drop blocks for your content. Such a tool helps you add varied content (such as tabs, dividers, counters, progress bars, timelines, blurbs, diagrams, tables, etc.), as well as create and reuse entire custom layouts.

    It’s not a big deal if your chosen theme doesn’t include a page builder out of the box, though – you can always purchase and install one by your own, e.g. the Visual Composer, one of the most popular plugins from the CodeCanyon marketplace.

  7. Is it search engine optimized? Look for a template that is built in accordance with recommendations of major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. You use free tools such as the SEO Site Checkup to perform an SEO audit of the chosen theme’s demo website or other existing pages that use the theme.

    Despite the fact that there are numerous specialized (free) SEO plugins for WordPress out there, it’s always a plus if a theme allows at least defining meta titles and descriptions for individual pages, as this alone might even be enough to avoid using yet another third-party plugin that would potentially slow down your website.

  8. Is it compatible with major plugins? It’s also worth checking whether a template is compatible with popular WordPress plugins such as WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, BuddyPress, bbPress, etc. Most good themes will offer pre-built features and styling for the most widely used plugins, while the best theme authors will also offer their help in ensuring that a given less popular plugin also plays nicely with the theme.

Premium or Free?

The web is a pretty competitive and largely frictionless market – which means that in most cases, you truly get what you pay for; even if what you paid was zero dollars. Having said that, it would be unjust to claim that only premium WP themes are worth your while: there are numerous free templates that offer most (if not all) of the important features of paid ones (you can check out our free Bento theme for example).

With the free themes getting more and more advanced, it can be argued that the real value of premium templates stems from three thigs these days: pre-built layouts, more detailed documentation, and faster, dedicated support. The former saves you massive amounts of time by allowing to start from entire websites pre-designed on top of a specific theme and just fill them with your content; the latter will come handy if you’re on a tight schedule.

Overall, it all boils down to your personal requirements: in case you’re okay with getting into the nuts and bolts of it, and do not have significant time constraints, a free theme might be a good fit; if, though, you value top quality visuals, abundance of options and quick support, going for a paid theme might be a sensible idea.

Over to You!

Have questions about any of the above tips? Still can’t choose between two or more WP themes after reading this? Drop us a line in the comments section below, we’ll be happy to help!

26
May
2017

7 Amazing Examples of Salient WordPress Theme Based Websites in 2024

Salient is one of the top-10 ThemeForest best-selling themes of all time, created by an elite author ThemeNectar. First available in April 2013, the theme was a breakthrough in terms of design, giving rise to a plethora of later imitators. Salient has since accumulated 60,000+ happy users and evolved into a full-fledged website building environment, preserving and updating its distinct visual style.

We remember our team’s initial reaction on seeing Salient for the first time: “whoa! Now these guys sure know how to design!”. Cracking it open, we saw clean, rather efficient code, adding to our respect towards the theme’s creators. Salient is distinctly minimalist, but not excessively so; this allows using it to create crisp and clean websites which still retain their individual touch.

Take Salient for a spin ›

The Salient theme is choke-full of features and settings, the most prominent additions of the last years being the internal templating system, which complements the existing drag-and-drop content builder (already a standard in premium WP themes) by allowing to use entire pre-designed page blocks or even entire layouts easily and quickly.

The ThemeNectar team is doing a great job in terms of providing timely and friendly support for the item. During our review we’ve created several “test tickets”, ranging from newbie questions to customization to developer-level inquiries; each was answered within 2 working days (most of them much faster), and none of the underlying issues was left unsolved.

Let’s See What This Baby Can Do

We won’t overwhelm you with dozens of Salient-based websites – instead, let’s look at 7 noteworthy real-life examples of the theme in action, hand-picked by our design and development team:

1. Senz

The creators of the original storm umbrella with the easily recognizable tilt, Senz use Salient for their official website. It makes extensive use of the theme’s WooCommerce compatibility to render and manage a complex online shop.

The front page slider is worth a separate mention: it features both beautiful static-image backgrounds as well as animated backgrounds and built-in animations for text elements to make it more dynamic. The front page itself is organized into several blocks using the theme’s visual content builder, ranging from product grids to full-width call-to-action sections, making it anything but boring.

2. Design Garden

This gorgeously-designed website is a learning platform created by Sabina Radeva, an Oxford, UK, based designer and illustrator. Sabina uses the Easy Digital Downloads plugin ecosystem to offer online courses to her Design Garden visitors, which blends in well with Salient.

The entire website is sprinkled with Sabina’s lovely illustrations; the theme does not stand in the way, letting the author express her talents while providing that minimalist touch to everything from navigation to the blog feed.

3. Manifesto

Let’s head to Canada and check out Manifesto Festival’s homepage for a change. This annual hip-hop culture event has been brightening Toronto’s youth scene for over a decade, and its unique essence has been successfully captured by the website’s style. Using basic colors (red, black, white), contrasting elements, bold typography and large elements, the page conveys the feeling of authenticity and freedom of expression.

The front page makes use of full-width image grids as well as clever call to action button placement to simultaneously maximize its “wow!” effect and visitor conversions. The previous years’ Manifesto editions are also worth checking out from the top menu, all those pages are also built with Salient’s visual composer.

4. Lion’s Share Digital

The Austin, TX based web design and development agency’s ambitions are reflected in their telling name. The Lion’s Share website is there to express their drive for growth and service excellency. Salient readily offers the necessary elements: large, basic fonts; colourful, full-width sections, plenty of room for imagery.

This is a great example of Salient’s full-screen header in action: on entering the website, we are immersed into an epic video presenting the brand. The rest of the page is comprised of visual composer elements tailored to give it a dynamic and colourful vibe.

5. StorNext

If you’re starting to get an impression that Salient is only good for design-focused web pages, think again. Here’s StorNext, a specialized provider of highly distributed file storage system solutions. A good example of a no-nonsense website by IT specialists, for IT specialists:

Content is king here, and Salient successfully helps the right things stand out. The website integrates a plethora of plugins, including a client-facing live chat, which works flawlessly with the theme. Another interesting thing to mention here: the StorNext website has been specifically tailored to closely resemble its parent company’s page, quantum.com – showing how easily Salient morphs and flexes to fit any design requirements.

6. Mota

Another high-tech company on our list, Mota is a hardware maker: they produce a range of cool gadgets, focusing on drones and wearables. In this case, Salient needed to support a website with a large and complicated structure, which it handles pretty well with the built-in MegaMenus.

The theme’s visual style fits perfectly with the company’s image: a future-facing manufacturer of highly advanced electronic devices. The individual product pages deserve a special mention: there’s an example of Salient’s custom visual content builder in its full glory; parallaxed images, subtle animations, specs and FAQ sections – all come together to create professional-looking and functional product presentations.

7. Gravual

Last but not least, one of our personal favourites, Gravual, is a tiny design boutique based in Antwerp, Belgium. The entire thing breathes minimalism and style, and scales extra-neatly on smartphone screens thanks to Salient’s smart grids.

This one’s a good example of Salient’s single-page capabilities: the entire website is essentially presented on the front page, with separate sections branching off where and when needed. The site’s also available in Dutch, showcasing the theme’s multilingual functions.

Your Examples?

Building a website on Salient or know any other noteworthy examples? Drop a line in the comment section below, we’ll consider including it in the list!

16
May
2017

The Ultimate Review 2024 – a Worthy Tool or Yet Another Site Builder?

☑︎ This review was last updated in May 2024

UPDATE: we’ve added a detailed visual explanation of Webflow’s pricing plans, you can see it in the respective section below; we hope you’ll geek out as much as we did when creating it 🤓

…Alright, let’s get straight to the point: you’re probably here because you’re also wondering –

Is it really worth it? Should I even bother spending the extra time in order to learn how to use Webflow?

This in-depth review will (hopefully) help you decide. We’ve been testing and using Webflow since 2016, so we do know a thing or two about the platform.

By untangling the various components of Webflow’s offer, including Designer, CMS, Hosting, and eCommerce – we will find out whether it’s really a tool worth using, or just another site builder with some fancy bits.

In the process, we will cover the most important questions for anyone considering Webflow:

  • 📐Is Webflow user-friendly – and who’s the intended user?
  • 💰How do their pricing plans really work, really?!
  • 🔌What about compatibility with other popular technologies?
  • 🏆Should you choose Webflow over more traditional tools?

The cornerstone principle of the Webflow philosophy is “smart codelessness” – this means creating beautiful websites without ever touching the source code – while still working with clean, well-written code:

Try Webflow for Free ›

This is good news for the visual types out there, since such approach empowers designers to unleash their imagination directly onto the web, possibly even skipping the graphics suites such as Sketch or Figma.

Is this the only use case of Webflow? Does this concept actually work in practice? We’ll find out soon. But first:

Blitz: Frequently Asked Questions

Before we dive in, here’s a compilation of the most popular questions we receive about Webflow – with brief answers containing references to the relevant sections of this review:

— What is Webflow? 🤔

In essence, Webflow is an online toolkit for creating and running websites, a glorious hybrid between traditional site builders like Wix, classical content management systems like WordPress, and actually coding your website by hand.

Confused yet? The current guide has been created with the intention to fix just that! The best place to start is to look at main parts of the Webflow toolkit, including its Site Designer, CMS, and deployment/hosting.

— How much is Webflow? 💳

This one’s a doozy! In fact, it’s probably the most difficult question to answer about Webflow – so instead of using a lot of words, we’ve decided to put together a graph. You can check it out in the Pricing section using this in-text link.

In short, there are two layers of pricing in Webflow – account plans and site plans, first of which determine how many people from your team can use Webflow and for how many projects; site plans, in turn, unlock higher traffic and ecommerce capabilities.

— Is Webflow easy to use? 🙉

Well, the answer will probably not surprise you, because it’s: “once you’ve learned it, the user experience is quite fluid”. Yes, there’s a steeper learning curve than, say, with Wix or Squarespace, but the reward is a much more flexible, customizable, and powerful tool.

We will discuss this matter in much more detail in the following three sections, which deal specifically with Webflow’s core components:

Webflow Site Designer

There are three main components to Webflow’s offer: the code-less, visual web design tool, the content management system (CMS), and the hosting – the first one arguably being the flagship feature of the service. In this section, we’ll take a deeper look at the Webflow Site Designer.

What looks somewhat like a Photoshop window is actually more of a HTML/CSS automation tool, where the user is free to add, position and style elements as they please, while the underlying system automatically generates the markup and all other necessary code. The interface is rather complex and takes some time to get used to, yet it’s undeniably one of the most powerful and versatile real-time website builders in existence today.

Let’s make it clear right from the start: you won’t be able to simply draw a shape in the middle of the canvas: instead of offering a naive way of slapping together a visual of a web page, Webflow keeps it real by acknowledging that there’s always actual code behind each element, and that such code gets exponentially messy if you don’t consider the way HTML and CSS work.

In other words, to draw a square in the middle of the page you’ll need to add a new <div> element (a “container” or a “section” in Webflow terms), set its positioning to “fixed” and its top-right-bottom-left positions to 0 – this is real life, kids!

Yes, the Webflow builder panel consists of actual CSS properties, so in order to fully appreciate the power of this tool, one should be familiar with HTML/CSS. However, if you mark the “I don’t write code” option during the sign-up process, Webflow will automate a significant part of the builder for you, for example handling the media breakpoints to ensure responsive behaviour (i.e. generate tablet- and mobile-friendly code for your page on the fly).

Working with media breakpoints and device views in Webflow

Needless to say, it wouldn’t be possible to cram every single CSS feature into the Designer – which is why Webflow simplifies most less-useful or less-frequently used parameters and makes the wording more user-friendly: from providing pre-defined options, to introducing toggles that show or hide “advanced” features and more granular control.

It is possible to start from a blank canvas or use any of the pre-made templates, some of which even come with ready-made site structure. There are over 30 free and 100 premium templates in the Webflow library, with the key difference between these two groups being the level of detail as well as included assets like styles and images. The paid themes range from $40 to $80 and are the creations of the Webflow community, i.e. professional designers and developers outside of the company.

For the reasons outlined above, starting from a blank canvas is mostly recommended for those who already possess at least some practical experience with HTML/CSS and are comfortable arranging the building blocks from scratch. If you haven’t coded before and also if you have but want to familiarize yourself with Webflow’s toolkit first, tweaking a pre-made template is highly advisable.

Apart from static content, animations are an essential part of the Webflow design tool, adding an extra layer of interactivity to the resulting websites which can be daunting to achieve and test using more traditional tools. Firstly, you can add transitions and transforms directly to any element using the same right sidebar with element properties – which is a real time-saver as most of such CSS rules are tedious to write by hand and many developers use one or another auto-generation tool in any case.

The real fun stuff starts in the “Interactions” panel, accessible from the tab with the lightning icon at the top of the right sidebar: there you can add animations based on the page’s state or the user’s interactions with a specific element (e.g. hover, click). Essentially it’s a Javascript automation tool, which can potentially replace 80-90% of your ordinary JS file for a standard website – menu animations, element fly-in-outs, hover states, and what not.

Take Webflow Site Designer for a Spin ›

The remaining sidebar tabs contain the Navigator (a HTML tree) and the Style Manager (CSS hierarchy) which are useful as overview tools but add less value compared with the panels discussed above.

Overall, the Webflow team have managed to create a very comprehensive coding automation toolkit which works as a semi-visual editor; the degree to which it simplifies the process of creating attractive web pages with clean code will be appreciated by anyone who has ever tried writing their website by hand.

Content Management System

Apart from on-site editing, i.e. the possibility to change any text or media right on the page you’re designing, Webflow CMS allows manually defining custom content types (blog posts, projects, team members, etc) with fully customizable fields, which can greatly improve the life of those who manage larger web projects with complex structures.

This comes in the form of CMS Collections, accessible from the tab with a stack icon on the left side of the main editor view. After creating a collection, which is essentially a specific content type, you can set the fields and add items – to be used both as individual pages or as lists / grids on existing static pages; for example, you can add a “team members” collection to create a page showing your company’s people’s photos, names, descriptions, social links, etc.

Apart from the CMS back-end, there’s also the Webflow Editor, which allows adding new content of the existing type on a published website – useful both to the creators of the website and their collaborators, as well as to their clients. What this means is that you get a fully functional website with both editable static pages and dynamic content like blog posts, portfolio projects, etc, without the need to install any plugins.

The fact that it offers multiple content types, of which blog posts are just one option, means that Webflow eats WordPress and other open-source systems like Drupal for breakfast when it comes to CMS flexibility. The flip side – it will take some time to get used to; however, the Webflow University (which we’ll discuss in detail below) can help here.

One thing that doesn’t seem to be a part of Webflow’s CMS system from the get-go is localization – creating a multilingual website on Webflow used to be a real headache before third-party extensions (most notably Weglot) came along.

One might get a feeling that Webflow strives to make the content management part as seamless as possible, in order not to steal the spotlight from the Site Designer – which is not a bad thing, considering its primary value proposition. In any case, Webflow’s CMS is still much more flexible and diverse than that of WordPress core or popular site builders like Wix.

Deployment and Hosting

Publishing your creation to a live URL is a breeze in Webflow: clicking the corresponding button on top of the Designer screen will call a drop-down of available deployment options, which include a subdomain of the webflow.com domain (typically recommended for testing purposes) and a custom domain. With the next click you can publish to any or both of these locations without having to worry about the details – everything else is processed in the background, automatically.

Webflow’s hosting services follow its “start building for free, add hosting to go live” principle: you can design a prototype (up to 2 static pages) in their staging environment, i.e. on a webflow.com subdomain, and then connect your own domain name (not included) by upgrading to one of Webflow’s hosting plans. The latter range from the basic, $12 per month* option with a 25k monthly visit limit, to the $36 per month* business version with more features and a 1m monthly visit limit (* with annual billing).

In addition to being an integrated solution, there are several advantages to Webflow Hosting that can really make a difference for your website’s performance and your webmaster workflow:

  • Since it is based on the distributed infrastructures on some of the largest cloud providers in the world (Amazon Cloudfront and Fastly), it can scale seamlessly with your traffic demands, removing the need to manually upgrade your hosting server
  • A built-in content delivery network (CDN) at no additional cost ensures that your website gets served from the node that is geographically close to your visitors, no matter where they are located
  • The advanced distributed infrastructure means fast loading times and close to 100% uptime for your website, regardless of traffic spikes or even malicious attacks
  • A built-in SSL (secure sockets layer) certificate at no additional cost ensures that your website complies with the modern security standards out of the box – no setup or prolongation required

Considering the above factors, Webflow Hosting is a scalable, ready-to-use hosting with a built-in CDN, priced on par with the best self-managed solutions like Digital Ocean as well as traditional website builders. Its value-for-money is a great complement to the other capabilities of this online suite, making it a full-cycle solution for web creators and potentially letting you save hundreds of dollars per year on CDN, SSL and other extras which otherwise need to be purchased separately.

Webflow eCommerce

One of the most recent (and most awaited) additions to Webflow is the eCommerce version, which brings full online shopping capabilities to the toolkit.

It comes with a new set of pricing plans offering all the essentials for projects which sell things online – including product and inventory management, custom carts, checkout, and other endpoints, full control over customer emails, as well as self-hosted checkout.

The main value proposition of Webflow eCommerce is the possibility to fully customize your online store’s every detail, from product grids and payment pages to how the purchase notifications look like.

This can be contrasted with the current state of affairs in the e-commerce website building software like Shopify, Wix, or even the WooCommerce + WordPress bundle, where one needs to exert considerable effort (and be skilled in coding) to achieve such granular control.

Other features that we can look forward to at the moment are coupon/discount capabilities as well as subscriptions and digital/downloadable products.

In the longer term, Webflow team is planning to add a host of more advanced features to its eCommerce plans, including abandoned order recovery, multi-currency support, Amazon integration, as well as customer accounts.

As you can see, the current release, although technically not beta anymore, is still a work in progress – so if you’re looking to create a complicated online store, Webflow eCommerce is still a bit too basic for such advanced applications.

If all of the promised features get implemented though, Webflow eCommerce will become a full-fledged competitor to such specialized solutions as Shopify and Instacart, with the whole shebang of Webflow builder, CMS, and hosting to back it up.

Webflow Pricing

With regards to paid plans, it is important to understand that Webflow has two different systems of premium tiers: one for your overall account and one for each individual project (i.e. websites you build).

When you begin working with Webflow, the latter will probably be more important and topical, so we’ll start with project-level pricing, which is basically cloud hosting for each of your websites:

First, there’s the forever-free option which lets you use all the features of Webflow and deploy on a name.webflow.com subdomain. If you want to use a normal domain (which you probably will, eventually), several paid options are available:

The Basic plan will cost you $12 per month (annual billing), unlocking automatic SSL, CDN, as well as custom domain deployment which is easy to set up and even easier to use. The CMS plan, at $16 per month (billed annually) will allow you to deploy not only static pages but also items created by the content management system (blog posts, projects, etc). The Business plan, priced at $36/mo with yearly billing, is mostly a scaled-up version of the previous plan, suitable for larger websites with significant traffic.

Then there are account plans, which set the maximum allowed number of active projects and other professional parameters: while the free Starter account plan allows you to work on 2 websites and use free staging, the Lite plan (at $16 per month with annual billing) includes 10 projects and code export tools, letting you use the Webflow-generated code on any other platform of your choice. The Pro plan ($35 per month, billed annually) adds white labelling and site password protection options – suitable for those who regularly work on full-fledged projects for third-party clients.

To help make sense of all this, we’ve created this diagram explaining all of Webflow’s pricing plans in a more visual way:

Webflow pricing

When you visit Webflow’s Pricing page, it can get a bit confusing because of the way they group plans based on whether you need one site, many sites, or work as part of a team – essentially, the “I just need one site” option will offer you pure hosting (i.e. the per-project plans we discussed earlier) while the other two will collectively offer a Lite plan for $16 and a Pro/Team plan for $35, as well as a Custom plan for large teams. This still adds up to just two specific account-level plans described above, apart from the free and the custom version.

Any account plan can be combined with any hosting plan, including free ones, e.g. you can be on a Starter account plan and only pay for deploying a particular project on your custom domain – or use a paid account plan and free hosting for rapid prototyping.

You can choose between monthly and annual billing cycles for all premium plans, the latter coming at a 20% discount, which can add up to significant savings over time, especially for the more advanced plans.

Collaboration Options

We’ve mentioned the team plan briefly in the previous section when we talked about pricing, but given the target users of Webflow it just as well deserves its own discussion.

If you work together with at least one more other person on web projects, it is definitely worth considering the Webflow Teams plan. It is essentially the same as the Pro individual plan, but it also adds more collaboration modes and features for the $35 per person per month you pay (annual billing).

While the visual Designer environment does not currently support real-time collaboration, all parts of your Webflow projects can be accessed and edited by any team member at any time. This is especially useful for cross-functional teams, where e.g. one person is responsible for design and another for the content.

Apart from shared access and assets, Webflow Teams also adds a specialized team dashboard which brings all your collaboration aspects into a single, unified UI. Larger teams can also contact Webflow for custom pricing offers for the Enterprise plan, as well as discounts for the hosting upgrades.

Overall, all of the above implies that Webflow has carefully considered the needs of not only its freelance/individual clients, but also the broader group of small/medium teams and agencies – a nice little cherry on top of its already magnificent cake of features and possibilities.

Pros and Cons of Webflow

To recap, let’s list the advantages and the not-so-strong sides of Webflow’s user offer, as compared to other similar website builders and popular content management systems:

  • Pro-grade real-time web design tool with built-in mobile friendliness that seamlessly generates clean, exportable code as you create
  • Create your design by editing one of dozens of free and premium templates, working with a wireframe or starting from blank canvas
  • Advanced CSS and JS managers allowing for both granular control over styles and animations as well as easy site-wide management
  • Fast and easy two-click deployment to a staging environment and/or your custom domain right from the Webflow Designer
  • An integrated CMS with a flexible custom content type constructor which can be used to create any type of static or dynamic content, from pages and blog posts to projects, reviews, team members, etc
  • Advanced distributed hosting powered by the big names such as Amazon Cloudfront ensures maximum page load speed and minimum downtime for your visitors
  • Integrated content delivery network (CDN) at no additional cost ensures both speed and security for your website as the content gets served from the optimal geographic locations and benefits from the added security of the CDN layer
  • Built-in SSL certificate at no additional cost (usual expenses $50-$100 per year) to ensure compliance with current web safety standards out of the box
  • A rather steep learning curve expected from those who have never dealt with web development previously
  • Limited multilingual capabilities out of the box (easily fixed with extensions such as Weglot, though)
  • Convoluted pricing structure with separate schemes for account and site level – takes time to comprehend
  • The website builder interface is still not 100% compatible with Firefox and Edge. Seriously, Webflow, that’s almost a quarter of all installed browsers.. get your act together!
  • With the Webflow’s e-commerce kit still in active development, online shop capabilities require additional polish and minor improvements to be called an outstanding feature

Webflow vs WordPress

Before comparing Webflow with the most popular content management system in the world, we first need to make an important distinction: there are two separate “types” of WordPress available: the free, open-source, self-hosted, community-driven wordpress.org, and the paid version on wordpress.com with integrated hosting and dedicated support. While they both use pretty much the same codebase, there are significant differences in most other areas. For the purposes of this review, we will consider wordpress.org since it is the (by far) more popular WP flavour.

Despite all the differences, at their core both Webflow and WordPress have been created for making websites – however, each approaches this task with a different philosophy. While they both feature a content management system and a rendering engine (without which it is impossible to create a website at all), WordPress goes the way of modularity, while Webflow aims at making the entire experience as integrated and seamless and possible.

What this means is that WordPress is famous for offering thousands of free and premium plugins as well as visual templates (themes), making it almost infinitely flexible and customizable. The flip side of this abundance, though, is the problem of choice as well as a high proportion of poorly made and insecure extensions.

Webflow, on the other hand, is not as versatile, but can help achieve almost any conceivable setup and feature by providing built-in capabilities. Some of them are even beyond what wordpress.org can offer, e.g. integrated hosting with custom domains and two-click deployment, built-in SSL certificates for added security, or a fast CDN. Compared to a WordPress + third party hosting bundle, this is a much smoother experience.

Ease of use Medium/hard Easy/medium
Extensions Dozens Thousands
Integrated hosting Yes No
Automatic deployment Yes No
Custom content types Yes Via plugins
Content builder Powerful built-in Content Designer Free built-in Gutenberg or paid plugins
eCommerce options Still being actively built Abundant, via e.g. free WooCommerce
Community Relatively small Huge but dispersed
Support Dedicated in-house team By fellow enthusiasts

Where Webflow really shines, though, is the visual builder (Webflow Designer) – there’s little point to even trying to describe how vastly superior it is to any WP content builder plugin (such as WPBakery’s Visual Composer available from ThemeForest), let alone the core WordPress capabilities via the ambiguously-successful Gutenberg.

Another important advantage of Webflow is support and education: being run by a dedicated company rather than a loose community of volunteers, it can afford to offer a customer support guarantee WordPress will never be able to provide, by definition. Webflow’s knowledge base is consistent and easy to digest, as opposed to a rather patchy one in case of wordpress.org.

Overall, while WordPress might be a more advisable idea for complete beginners, Webflow looks like a more well-rounded solution for anyone who is serious about creating websites and values smooth workflows and seamless experiences.

The all-in-one structure lets you forget about the unnecessary details and focus on what really matters – designing and developing beautiful, solid web pages.

Alright… that was lot of information to take in! So what’s the bottom line? In other words –

Should I Use Webflow?

After analyzing its various features, one can conclude that Webflow strives to be an advanced integrated toolkit for web creators who value both flexibility and efficiency.

The combined power of its Designer, Editor/CMS, Hosting, and (now also) eCommerce offers, is on par with the best custom web development setups, while requiring much less upfront costs and setup time as well as ensuring constant support and issue resolution.

Try Webflow for Free ›

In a product landscape dominated by simplistic site builders and clunky open-source CMS’es, Webflow is a hybrid solution especially well-suited for those who are prepared to spend a certain amount of time getting used to its powerful features for the sake of a unique mix of capability and automation.

Your Opinion?

Thank you for taking your time to read our analysis of Webflow! Have you found this review helpful? Got something to add or disagree with certain points? Let’s discuss in the comment section below:

10
Feb
2022

The Definitive Review – Should You Use This Hosting in 2024?

There are old, time-tested hosting providers; there are popular ones, with millions of clients; there are those which constantly evolve and reinvent themselves…

And then there’s a small group of hosting companies at the intersection of all three categories –

SiteGround is firmly in that cohort.

In this detailed review, we will examine this host under a magnifying glass to uncover answers to the most popular questions:

  • 🦄What’s special about SiteGround?
  • 💳How to choose a suitable hosting plan?
  • 👎Are there any drawbacks to using SiteGround?
  • 🎯Who should use SiteGround and Why?

Let’s start by looking at the things that you probably won’t find anywhere else – things that make SiteGround unique:

What’s Special About SiteGround

Seriously, though?

SiteGround focuses on WordPress as well as other popular content management systems and site builders, there are several pricing plans depending on your needs, 24/7 support…

Sounds familiar.

What really sets SiteGround apart are its technological solutions, custom-built by its technical team; more specifically:

  • A set of measures to maximize your website’s ⚡ speed, which we will discuss separately in the next chapter,
  • State-of-the-art 🔐 security features to prevent and mitigate any potential attacks, analyzed in detail in this section,
  • Some of the best 💵 prices among hosting providers of its caliber, especially when we factor in the large first-period discounts,
  • Powerful 🛠️ client tools for convenient collaboration, testing, and migrations, built in-house by the SiteGround team (we’ll talk about this one right here!).

As we just mentioned, SiteGround users get more than just a server – there’s an entire array of administrative tools to make your life easier:

  • The flexible user system allows access to other team members, clients, or third-party experts to help you run your web projects,
  • You can create test copies of your live website in one click, and transfer any changes back to the original – again, in a single click,
  • Freelancers and agencies will like the white label feature, which allows you to provide hosting services to clients under your own brand.

All the tools above function on top of a solid hardware and software infrastructure for maximum performance and stability:

Infrastructure and Speed

Here’s a surprising fact: SiteGround, one of the largest hosts in the world, doesn’t own any actual physical servers!

Instead, it uses Google Cloud for its key infrastructure…

Yes, you understood correctly – when you’re hosting with SiteGround, your website is stored on Google’s servers.

This is not something unusual in our day and age –

– in fact, most modern hosting providers, both big and small, focus on the value-adding services 🚀 and outsource the actual hardware to the few companies like Google and Amazon that have huge scale advantages but don’t provide user-friendly interfaces.

SiteGround clients can choose between several regions when creating a new website, including Europe, United States, Asia, and Australia:

The blue dots on the map represent the 150+ locations of the Cloudflare CDN network, included on every SiteGround plan –

Your website automatically loads from the CDN node that is the closest to each particular visitor, bringing serious improvements in speed.

To further improve page loading, SiteGround websites run on uniquely optimized software (PHP, MySQL, Brotli compression, etc.), which results in some of the fastest response times in the industry:

– this is the main reason why SiteGround has held top positions in HRank ratings for years ⚡

Finally, each website comes with a unique, pre-installed WordPress plugin, that allows you to easily control the server settings and adjust the caching parameters.

Speaking of WP plugins…

Security at SiteGround

There is another WordPress plugin made by the SiteGround team to work specifically with client sites:

SiteGround Security helps prevent the most common threats and attacks on your website, as well as react quickly in case of an attack, e.g. by logging out all users and resetting passwords.

It’s not the only WP security plugin in existence, of course – but it’s still nice to have all the various features in a single place, fully integrated with your hosting provider.

On the server level, three key measures help ensure maximum security for every SiteGround client:

  • Firewall and an AI-based filter for automatically protecting against attacks and hacks 🦺
  • Daily backups in several independent server centers in different geographical locations ensure that your website can be restored after any disaster 💽
  • Monitoring systems that check each server’s status and performance every 0.5 seconds, 24/7 🔍

At this point, you might argue that every premium web host has these features – and you’d be right.

There’s just one nuance:

SiteGround manages to offer all that goodness for a price that is closer to “mainstream” hosting providers:

SiteGround Plans and Pricing

At first glance, it looks a bit confusing: four different types of hosting, each having several pricing plans…

But take a closer look, and you’ll notice that the plans in the Web, Shared, and WooCommerce hosting types are actually identical!

That’s because all of them are essentially the same kind of shared hosting, with three pricing tiers for different client needs.

With that in mind, let’s forget about hosting types and focus on discussing each pricing plan in more detail:

  • StartUp is quite straightforward – you get one website and enough server resources to handle decent traffic. Unless you are migrating with a large project, it’s always worth starting with this plan and then deciding if you need to upgrade.
  • The GrowBig plan allows you to create unlimited websites, which means it’s suitable for those who run several projects or have high visitor traffic (over 20,000 per month).
  • Finally, on the cheekily named GoGeek plan you get even more computing resources, as well as the white label solution that allows you to offer web hosting to your own clients – great for agencies and freelancers.

As we mentioned earlier, the best part of SiteGround’s offer is the fact that all the professional-grade features are available at very reasonable prices –

For example, here’s a price comparison for premium hosting providers which use Google Cloud as their infrastructure platform:

The dashed line indicates the full price that applies after the first billing period at SiteGround – even that is way below the alternatives, and we’re not even considering the heavily discounted introductory pricing (i.e. the solid dark column).

There are four billing cycles available at SiteGround, with monthly being the most expensive and hence the least useful –

You can always opt for a (discounted) longer billing cycle and use the 30-day money-back guarantee if needed.

While you will end up paying less per month on average with the 3-year option, the largest first-period discount 🤑 is available for the 1-year billing cycle, where the amount spent right now is much lower:

Get a 69% discount on SiteGround

One more thing worth mentioning is cancellation: with SiteGround, it’s as easy as clicking on a button in your hosting admin panel, no need to contact support.

When you cancel, you can choose to continue using your websites until the end of the current billing period or to remove everything right away.

Pros and Cons of SiteGround

Before we move on to the final verdict on SiteGround, let’s summarize this hosting provider’s stronger and weaker sides:

  • You get premium-grade features and tools at a much lower price than most other managed WordPress hosts
  • Optimized software stack built on top of the Google Cloud infrastructure ensures consistently smooth and speedy functioning of your websites
  • Every account gets a slew of security features for threat prevention and mitigation, including firewall, live monitoring, and automatic backups
  • Cloudflare CDN is included at no additional cost with every SiteGround account, improving both speed and security
  • There are no visitor limits on any of the plans, as opposed to most other premium hosting providers
  • Powerful tools for collaboration and client management, making life easier for freelancers and agencies
  • Security, optimization, and migration plugins for WordPress built by the SiteGround team to work seamlessly with the hosting
  • 24/7 customer support via live chat, both for potential and existing clients
  • The cloud hosting offer at SiteGround is less attractive than its managed WordPress solutions, being up to 2x more expensive than e.g. comparable Digital Ocean machines
  • Resource availability may be limited for websites or accounts that regularly use up too much of a server’s computing power
  • The tool for creating a test/development copy of your website is not available on the StartUp plan

And now for the bottom line:

Verdict: Is SiteGround Worth It?

20 years in business and millions of clients – can a hosting provider get any more credible than that? 👓 Let’s see:

Throughout its existence SiteGround has clearly tried to maintain its status as the “affordable premium” host, combining professional quality with competitive prices.

As a matter of fact, it’s somewhat easier to define who should NOT use SiteGround as opposed to everyone else (who should) –

  • If your budget is substantial and you’re looking for the most advanced Google Cloud based hosting for a large project, take a look at Kinsta instead,
  • If you are part of a developer team that needs scalable cloud hosting with full control over all server settings, a self-service solution like Digital Ocean is probably best for you.

Apart from that –

Whether you just need a website for your organization or you make websites for your own clients, SiteGround has everything you need and more, built on a rock-solid technical foundation 💎 as well as years of expertise 🏆 and reputation.

Get a 69% discount on SiteGround

Have an opinion on SiteGround or a personal experience you’d like to share? Head over to the comments section – let’s help each other make better decisions!

22
Jan
2020

The Ultimate HostGator Review 2024: Should You Trust the Friendly Reptile?

HostGator has been around for so long that we’ve all gotten thoroughly used to the friendly blue crocodile with a broad toothy smile.

But is it really safe to be friends with it?

Let’s find out! In this in-depth review, we will take a thorough look at HostGator, analyze its background, offers, pricing, support – and come up with an answer to the following question: should you choose HostGator over other hosting providers?

In the course of our journey, you will find out how their mascot Snappy used to look like in 2D, as well as other (arguably more relevant) things you need to know about HostGator:

  • 👥Who owns HostGator and why is that important?
  • 🧭Which hosting plan should you choose, if any?
  • 🐊Is HostGator better than other large providers?
  • 💵Can you save money on your HostGator order?

Regarding that last one – near the end of this review we provide an exclusive discount code that can be used to decrease your bill for certain HostGator products, if you do decide to give it a try.

One small note before we jump in: if you were searching for keywords like host gator or gator host and found this review – this is indeed the same company, so you’re in the right place 😉

With that out of the way, let’s examine our specimen carefully, from the head to the tip of its tail: grab a magnifying glass and a ruler, and don’t forget to keep your hands out of its jaws even when it’s sedated – just in case!

The Head: What Is HostGator?

As its name suggests, HostGator is a web hosting company. This means it provides services that enable you to create and manage websites. Here’s a fun fact:

According to W3Techs, almost 2% of websites in the world use HostGator as their hosting provider (out of W3T’s sample of top 10 million websites).

That’s a lot of websites!

In fact, the above data places HostGator firmly in the top-10 of the global hosting industry.

However, any big company must start with a single client; and for ‘Gator that happened in 2002, when a university student from Florida named Brent Oxley decided he wanted to become an Internet entrepreneur.

HostGator history

From “Lacoste” to 3D – the evolution of HostGator’s mascot

The venture grew aggressively for a decade, until it was sold to another company in 2012. And that company was none other than… the Endurance International Group (EIG)!

Now, why did I introduce it in such a theatric way?

Because Endurance is an active and unique player in the hosting market, and hence a frequent hero of our reviews:

EIG positions itself as an “integrated provider of all things necessary for small and medium businesses to build their web presence”. More specifically though, according to their latest annual report more than of 50 its 77 (!) brands offer the same service – web hosting.

In other words, Endurance is a company which specializes on buying up existing web hosts and extracting maximum money from their brands.

Alright, you might say – but does it really affect HostGator clients in any tangible way?

Of course! In fact, in all kinds of good and bad ways:

  • Stability and reliability: as one of the leading names in the brand portfolio of a large multinational corporation, HostGator has very low risk of closing down abruptly or declaring bankruptcy.
  • Operational efficiency: everything about HostGator has been optimized and then optimized again, based on the parent company’s deep industry experience from its massive portfolio of hosting brands.
  • Focus on money extraction: EIG buys existing businesses, and it usually pays a LOT in such deals. This means it must focus relentlessly on getting that money back as profits. Anything that doesn’t directly lead to higher returns on investment doesn’t seem to bother Endurance and its subsidiaries too much.
  • Conveyor-like approach: since none of the brands in Endurance’s portfolio has been grown from scratch, you’re not dealing with a founder’s vision, a unique idea or value proposition – just one of 50+ very similar brands that present slightly different facades while using the same back-end.

It’s of course up to you to decide whether the benefits of being a part of the Endurance Group outweigh the potential disadvantages.

Their business strategy is not “good” or “bad” per se – it’s just that, a strategy. However, it is worth keeping in mind the likely implications: for example, that there’s no motivation for brands like HostGator to offer exceptional quality – just optimized sales techniques and good-enough infrastructure.

We’ll look closer at these and other details of HostGator’s offer in the next part of our review:

The Body: Products and Plans

Alright, it’s time for the meaty parts!

HostGator’s product line consists of a dozen different items, but in this review we are going to focus on their flagship offer: shared hosting, i.e. what they refer to simply as “web hosting” in their main navigation menu.

(at the end of this section, we will still provide a brief overview of other products, as well as explain why they’re not worth discussing in detail here)

Before we continue – what’s a “shared” hosting, just in case?

As its name suggests, shared hosting implies that the resources of each specialized computer, or server, are divided between several clients.

This means less computing power for your website in particular, but it also means significantly lower costs compared to other types of hosting, while still being provided with sufficient autonomy and performance.

This tradeoff seems worth it for most online projects, because the vast majority of websites on the Internet are using shared hosting nowadays.

When it comes to shared hosting, HostGator clients can choose between three plans (four in some countries):

HostGator shared hosting

The main difference between the cheapest plan and the medium-priced plan is the ability to set up more than 1 domain, so if you are looking to create a single website, you should go for the cheapest option. You can always upgrade afterwards if you decide to expand your online empire 👑

The more expensive plan(s) don’t really offer much value compared to the middle plan, that is – you end up paying 50-90% more for a couple of additional features that aren’t really worth it unless you don’t care about the budget and just prefer the best stuff whenever you make purchases.

This implies that, in most cases, for those who need several websites the middle plan is the optimal choice. While the difference with the top plan seems small when expressed on a monthly basis, it can compound to a lot of extra costs over the years.

Here are some of the things we appreciated about HostGator’s web hosting plans, as well as some of the things we didn’t particularly like:

  • Frequent discounts and special offers make HostGator’s shared hosting one of the most affordable on the web, especially if you pay for 2 or 3 years in advance.
  • Possibility to use a coupon during the checkout is something found in only a few web hosts. In the case of HostGator, you can refer to the last part of our review for just such a code; it’s not a big deal in terms of the size of the discount, but if you do end up choosing ‘Gator as your provider, it’s nice to know there’s a chance to save some extra money.
  • Free SSL certificate included by default; having a secure connection (and a https:// in your web address instead of http://) is considered an absolute must nowadays; among other things, SSL affects your site’s rankings by the Google search algorithm.
  • Free domain for 1 year if you choose any of the annual billing cycles. This is just a nice touch that lets you save a little extra during the purchase. Do keep in mind though that anything you buy at a discount will renew at the regular price. About that:
  • Renewal prices are higher than the initial price tags, so your next period’s hosting bill will be higher by as much as 60%. At least HostGator has the decency to communicate these standard rates clearly on its checkout page, as opposed to some other less scrupulous hosting providers.
  • Pre-selected extras during the checkout process (in some regions) is a slightly annoying technique which forces you to pay close attention in order not to accidentally pay for something you don’t really need, like a “hacker protection” add-on (WordPress has great free security plugins).

What’s that? Oh, right, we promised to explain why we skipped other HostGator products!

These include several advanced types of hosting as well as a site builder – and both can be better understood through the context of HostGator’s status as a part of the Endurance Group.

Apart from shared hosting, the ‘Gator offers cloud, managed WordPress, VPS, dedicated, and even Windows-based hosting packages. They all have one thing in common though:

– none of them is HostGator’s focus area or primary expertise.

The vast majority of its clients are on shared hosting, and that’s what HostGator was doing from the start, long before it was integrated into Endurance.

Here’s a simple rule you might follow:

If you’re not sure which type of hosting you need, you probably need shared hosting, and HostGator is a good candidate.

The reverse is also true most of the time:

If you know for sure that you need something other than shared hosting, you probably don’t want to use HostGator. E.g. if you need cloud, try Digital Ocean or a similar specialized provider.

As for the “Gator Website Builder”, it’s simply a rebranded version of another tool from Endurance’s portfolio (the creatively named Site Builder).

They use a clever system of varying prices and discounts to make it look even more distinct, but if you do the math both tools will cost you exactly the same in the end.

This means that if you subscribe to the Gator Website Builder you’re essentially buying from a completely different brand. Which is not “bad” by itself, but warrants a separate review at the very least (spoiler: there are much better site-building tools than Site Builder, e.g. Weebly).

To sum up…

  • Products: HostGator is a smart choice if you want to create one or more websites and have no special requirements (like a dedicated server or cloud infrastructure);
  • Plans: choose between the cheapest and the second-cheapest shared hosting plans, depending on how many websites you need;
  • Pricing: take advantage of lower prices by opting for longer billing cycles, but don’t forget that your next bill will be somewhat higher.

Next, let’s look at some of the less obvious but still very important characteristics of HostGator that you might encounter in the long run –

The Tail: Reliability and Support

Websites are usually long-term projects. This means that when you’re choosing a hosting company, you’re making a choice for many years.

It is thus essential to think beyond the immediate discounts and consider things that may make a difference over time – like service stability and customer support.

The most informative way to gauge the reliability of a given hosting provider (and compare it to others) is to measure two things:

  • uptime, or the percentage of time an average server is up and running, and hence your website is available to the public;
  • response time, i.e. how long your visitors have to wait for the first reply for incoming connections.

According to independent data by Hrank, uptime across HostGator’s servers was around 99.96% for the past 6 months; this is well inside its 99.9% uptime guarantee limit:

HostGator uptime

HostGator uptime data according to Hrank

If we look at the daily data, we can spot certain days with less than 99% uptime, i.e. with more than 15 minutes of downtime per day – however, such behaviour is normal as long as the overall figures are good enough.

Average response time for HostGator hovers at around 1100 milliseconds, or 1.1 seconds – which is not particularly impressive for an international hosting provider.

Your website’s speed will still depend much more on your choice of WordPress plugins and the size of images you use, but it’s worth keeping in mind that the server itself will still add some extra time on top of that.

If you strongly prefer to minimize server response time above all else, you can check out e.g. Hostinger for better server speed in most regions (it has its own weaker points though, so read the review carefully before making a decision!)

***

When it comes to customer support, HostGator offers everything you might need as a hosting user, most importantly 24/7/365 live chat and phone support as well as an extensive library of helpful articles.

HostGator chat

By far the most convenient way of getting in touch with the ‘Gator people is via the chat, and after trying it on several occasions we had no complaints:

  • The support team has a friendly attitude; replies tend to be quick and to the point. Most of our inquiries were solved within minutes from starting a chat.
  • The answers we got were typically detailed enough to be helpful, while short enough to be readable.
  • The 24/7 tag is not an empty promise – our chats saw responses within 1-2 minutes even in the middle of the night.

To sum up, HostGator’s clients can expect their websites to stay online for >99.9% of the time, while maintaining reasonable (though not exceptional) connection speed.

The support team is significantly more proficient and helpful compared to some of the smaller Endurance brands like PureHost or Netfirms; no negative comments in this area.

***

Now that we’ve examined the beast from head to tail, we can see clearly that there are both advantages and weak sides in using HostGator.

Which side of the argument is more compelling though?

Pros and Cons of HostGator

To find out, it wouldn’t hurt to summarize our findings – this will help us come up with a clear verdict in the final part of our review:

  • HostGator are specialists in shared web hosting with a lot of experience, resulting from a massive client base and a decades-long track record.
  • There are few, if any, hosting providers that can match HostGator in terms of pricing; you can be sure to find large discounts and special offers most of the time, especially if you opt for longer billing cycles.
  • You can get a free domain name with your hosting order; keep in mind that the domain will renew at its normal price after 1 year.
  • The average server uptime is comfortably over the 99.9% figure mentioned in HostGator’s service guarantee. This is a standard level for shared hosting and implies less than an hour of total expected downtime per month.
  • Since 2012 HostGator is a part of Endurance Group, a large multinational holding, which makes it a much more stable hosting provider than most of its competitors.
  • You can get 24/7/365 support using HostGator’s live chat, both if you have an existing account or just considering to become a client. The support team is knowledgeable and friendly.
  • In fact, thanks to a large archive of educational and help articles you won’t even need to use the chat that often.
  • The owner of HostGator, the Endurance Group, is focused on extracting cash flows from acquired hosting providers, which might imply less motivation for HostGator to innovate and go that extra mile for its clients.
  • Server response time, which influences your website’s loading speed, is alright but not great for a hosting provider of this magnitude.
  • When buying HostGator services one should always keep in mind that the special prices listed on their website are valid for the first billing cycle only.

Exclusive HostGator Coupon (Checked in May 2024)

Before we move on to the conclusion, here’s a quick way to save some extra money on a HostGator purchase if you choose a short billing cycle (12 months or shorter).

During the checkout, locate section 5. on the page and enter the following code instead of the pre-filled one, then click on “Validate” and check if your final price gets reduced.

Or just click the following link to apply the code automatically to the 12-month shared hosting plan:

Apply HostGator Discount ›

The coupon code affects both the hosting package and the extras, providing a discount ranging from 10% to 25% compared to the default code.

SATORI

IMPORTANT! To reiterate, this coupon is only valid for 1, 3, 6, and 12 month billing cycles! For two- or three-year options you are better off with the HostGator’s own coupon that is applied by default.

Alright, now for to the conclusion –

Final Verdict: Should You Use HostGator in 2024?

After a closer look at HostGator’s background, products, plans, support, and technical characteristics, can we recommend this provider?

For most online projects (probably including yours), shared web hosting from ‘Gator is indeed a suitable option, offering great value for money together with reliability and support ensured by one of the largest industry players 😎

In particular:

  • For a single website, choose the cheapest shared hosting plan, it has everything you’ll need.
  • If you need more than one website, go for the second-cheapest plan and consider longer billing cycles (2 or 3 years) for better prices.

On the other hand, if you’re a professional web developer and you know that you specifically need a more advanced type of hosting (like cloud or dedicated), take a look at the specialized providers such as Digital Ocean.

***

Do you still have any questions about HostGator? Or maybe willing to share your first-hand experience? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below, let’s help each other make more informed decisions!

Affiliate disclosure: we may receive commission for purchases made after following some of the links in this article. This does not affect the price you pay in any way. In fact, if you found this review helpful please consider using our links to support our project 🌱

30
Aug
2019

Renderforest Review: a One-Stop-Shop Media Creator for Your Online Business in 2024

Are you in search of an easy tool that can help you create professional-looking logos, promo videos, animations, and slideshows? Didn’t even know such tools existed?

In any case, if you’re considering or already managing a website, there’s no way you can avoid the need of producing brand-related images and videos for your project.

So, today we’re going to review a popular online media editing platform called Renderforest. The tool is getting positive reviews on Trustpilot, as well as social networks – which means it’s high time we figured out:

  • 🎓Can you use Renderforest if you have no prior experience?
  • 💡Which RF tools offer the best value for online projects?
  • 🔧How does their site builder compare to established brands?
  • 💵Which pricing plan should you choose at Renderforest?
  • 👍What do the 10 million existing clients like about RF?

This review will examine the various features of Renderforest to arrive at the final verdict: whether it’s worth using RF for your next online project.

First things first though –

What Is Renderforest?

As you’re probably guessed by this point, RF is an all-in-one tool that lets you create videos, logos, intro videos, slideshows, infographics, and animations.

And it all happens on a single platform – fully browser-based and requiring no subscriptions to start.

The whole idea of Renderforest is empowering anyone to create quality media for their business quickly and rather effortlessly (or at least with a much shallower learning curve than Photoshop or Pinnacle).

The tool has a pretty simple user-interface, making even novices capable of using it without any prior training.

Another thing that makes this tool unique from its competitors is the sheer choice of templates, meaning you can start immediately, working up from the existing samples.

Renderforest in numbers

Moreover, as the platform is cloud-based, the entire editing process is performed online. Neat, but not too exciting in our day and age.

To understand what makes Renderforest stand out from alternative tools, let’s analyze the parts of its toolkit one by one:

The Logo Wizardry

A logo is not merely an image; beyond this, it is a unique identity of your brand that helps you get recognition. A well-crafted logo makes a strong first impression and draws the attention of your potential customers.

In other words, a good logo conveys a slew of messages: your brand is trustworthy, professional, and offers quality services.

And yes, nowadays there are plenty of tools available online to create an eye-pleasing logo. However, not all tools are equal in terms of quality and user-friendliness.

Renderforest Logo Maker

Speaking of Renderforest, the tool claims to help you create a professional looking logo within a few minutes. The company says they use Machine learning algorithms that help them deliver the best design options to users (to be frank, we didn’t see anything that a purely algorithmic tool like LogoDesign.net could not do).

Let’s see how it goes.

The few simple steps to create a logo with Renderforest are quite straightforward:

  1. Go to their Logo Maker, and write down the name of your brand and then hit the “Create My Logo” button.
  2. The next step will ask you for a few lines about your brand – this does not influence your results, but will help generate more lifelike imagery and mockups.
  3. Next, you can select among six general stylistic directions for your logo, like “minimalist”, “flat”, or “watercolor”.
  4. Now you can edit the different elements of your logo, including the font, the icon, and the layout. If you don’t like what you see, you may click on “Create from blank” option to do it yourself.
  5. The last step will let you choose the download option – the free version is low-quality, but still works perfectly fine for a pitch or team discussion. For production logos, a plan with high-definition rendering is of course recommended.

Voila! It’s so smooth it almost looks like wizardry (and technically it is, because it’s a logo-making wizard, get it?).

Does it use machine learning? Unlikely, since we’ve gotten the same suggestions from using very different.

Does it mean it’s no good? Au contraire, the tool is definitely a great help for those who don’t own an expensive Adobe subscription or want to pay hefty sums to graphic designers.

Is their video maker up to the standard?

Creating Videos with Renderforest

Yes, at RF you can easily create a high-quality video without knowing a thing about (or paying for) professional editing software.

To start with, there are free video templates that help you create intro videos and product explainer videos.

If you want to give your video marketing a unique touch, you may use their 3D explainer video toolkit that has over a thousand of animated scenes. You may sort these scenes by options like “Most Popular”, “Trending,” or “Newest.”

Similar to logo creation, the steps to video creation are quite simple. You need to choose a template, edit your project online, download it, and hit the publish button. Your video is now ready to use!

Renderforest has a stock gallery of commercial videos that you can easily remix and edit without going through any complicated interfaces.

Renderforest video templates

Apart from this, they have more 195.000 high definition royalty-free stock footage that you can use to make your video more professional and appealing.

And of course don’t forget a sound library for those finishing touches to your new video – btw this option allows you to upload your own music as well.

Renderforest as a Site Builder

Alright, you’ve got your cool new logos and videos, now for something to use then on…

Along with the media, Renderforest enables you to design a full-fledged website with the help of their page builder.

The tool is mostly geared towards landing pages, but you can also use it to construct an entire website if you wish – directly in your browser without any coding skills:

  • Renderforest has more than 100 ready-to-use templates for every conceivable purpose, from business and marketing to beauty and photography.
  • The visual editor is simple and minimalist, letting you focus on the essentials. You can make your site live within a few hours without any professional assistance.
  • Not sure this needs to be mentioned nowadays, but the templates are of course fully responsive, that means your website will function properly on all mobile devices, laptops, and desktops.
  • You can create multiple pages and bind them into a navigation menu for a full-blown website. The CMS/structure features are quite basic at Renderforest, so if you really need different content types and all such, WordPress is the preferred option.

Once you’re done, you can publish the website onto an RF subdomain for free or choose the paid plan for a custom domain name, branded email, more storage, and no ads (which is the only option you should consider for live websites that wish to look anything close to professional).

Sounds easy? Because it is! Nothing terribly advanced, so if you’re a professional web developer/designer, you shouldn’t be reading this :)

For everyone else, Renderforest offers a refreshingly simple and stripped-down (in a good sense) version of a visual site builder that lets you get online fast – and finally have somewhere to put that new fancy logo we generated earlier!

Plans and Pricing

Since RenderForest offers several different products, you are able to choose between a bundled option and individual tools. The respective toggle can be found on top of their official pricing page.

The former is suitable for those who intend to use the service on a regular basis: the Free plan offers unlimited low-quality videos and logos, while the progressively more pricey Amateur, Pro, and Popular plans unlock access to HQ media as well as the website builder.

Renderforest plans

The per-product plans are made for those who wish to use RF only once or twice – otherwise it becomes more lucrative to use the abovementioned subscription option.

The logo and video creation tools each has 4 plans, with the free version leaving a watermark on your video or rendering a low-fidelity PNG logo. The paid options allow you to remove the watermark and increase the quality of the render per your desired parameters.

The Website Maker is also a freemium model, with the paid plan giving you more storage and allowing to publish your site on a custom domain instead of the Renderforest subdomain.

User Satisfaction and Support

What about support, though? After all, regardless of the number of neat features, users will be looking for software that fulfils their needs, and that includes getting help and solving issues when they arise.

Support is available via the phone, by email, or using the contact form on the official RF website. There’s no live chat at the moment, but all the mentioned options are typically more than enough for most of your support needs.

Response time is short, and the team does their best to be as helpful and friendly as possible. In any case, with the tools that are that simple, you are unlikely to encounter too many questions or issues while using the product.

Having helped create over 10 million videos and logos, Renderforest can now boast being a part of G2’s list of the World’s top 100 software companies.

G2 is a global ranking platform that uses proprietary algorithms to assign scores to tech companies based on various customer satisfaction metrics from user reviews, social networks, and other online sources.

Being present on their top-100 list is an indicator of persistently high user opinions about the company and their products.

Should You Use Renderforest?

Time for the final verdict: who should use Renderforest, and is it worth opening your wallet for the paid features?

To recap, RF is a freemium online tool that lets users create videos for YouTube audiences, music visualizations, presentations, corporate slideshows, and other branded media.

The main advantages of Renderforest are definitely simplicity and cost savings: it gives you the freedom to create without asking for hours of training or subscription fees.

Big-budget online projects and advanced webmasters who know how to use tools like Figma and Resolve are unlikely to find anything they haven’t seen before.

For the rest of us bootstrappers and daredevils, Renderforest is a convenient all-in-one platform for fast, easy, and inexpensive media prototyping that definitely deserves a try.

***

Have you already used Renderforest? Any thoughts or questions? Hit us in the comments section below, let’s discuss!