Meet Maggie, PCMag'sSometimes, a single page is all you need. Strikingly, one of the many website builders I've tested over the years, is built around this premise. It specializes in creating attractive sites with multiple sections that scroll downward, and with free and paid tiers. Since our last review, Strikingly continues to push its AI tools for generating these scrolling sites even more easily. It's an intriguing idea, one that may appeal to bloggers and small businesses, but the few page customization options may prove limiting. For more advanced website-building tools, you should check out our Editors' Choice picks, Duda (for SaaS integration) and Wix (for free accounts).
After you create an account, Strikingly invites you to fill in a simple, three-box form that asks for your first name, email, and password. If that's too much, you can click the Facebook button to sign up using your social network credentials. You can get started for free, without entering a credit card number. Free accounts include a yoursitename.strikingly.com address, a "Create a Site With Strikingly" badge at the bottom of the website, a 5GB monthly data cap, and the ability to sell one product.
The Pro account ($20 per month, $16 per month if billed annually) includes unlimited monthly data transfers, the ability to sell 300 products and 100 pages, and a badgeless website. In addition, it lets you use third-party widgets and include mobile site actions such as allowing customers to call you or send you emails within the app—both of which are included with all Weebly and Wix accounts. The VIP account level ($59 per month, $49 per month if billed annually) adds priority phone support and unlimited products.
Committing to a year of paid service comes with a bonus: a year of domain name registration, similar to Squarespace's $19-per-month plan. After that, domain names cost $24.95 per year. Custom email addresses are an additional surcharge of $25 per year for any paid plan.
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Your next move is to choose a template. Strikingly has more than 200 choices, and you can see which templates are newly added to the catalog. They look fine, but the competition, including Duda and Wix, tends to have more template options available. Wix has more than 2,000 templates. Strikingly's template selector lets you narrow your choices to those suitable for business, creative, and personal sites.
You can either start editing right away or see a preview. The editor doesn't specifically show how the sample site looks on mobile, but you can resize your browser to get a good idea. We tested the Sleek template, which uses a sizable sidebar for navigation. Many Strikingly templates use scrolling effects and a top menu bar that elegantly reformats to a fixed position after you start scrolling down. You can change templates anytime, though certain layout options from your first template will carry over unless you change them.
Strikingly takes a fresh, perhaps even unique, approach to site design: It's the only one of the dozen or so site builders we've tested that uses a single-scrolling-page format. As mentioned above, all accounts now offer at least a few pages per site, but that's not really Strikingly's mission. The intention is to make the site-building process as easy as possible and ensure the design is attractive. For example, one cool feature is the ability to instantly build a personal website based on your LinkedIn account. However, this convenience often comes at the cost of customization and control.
The Editor Panel doesn't offer page elements like most other site-building services. Services like Duda and Wix let you choose the exact elements you want; for example, a button, an image, a text block. Instead, Strikingly lets you switch among and add sections, which show up as you scroll down a page. Within a section, you can add only those elements dictated by the theme.
For example, if you're working in your site's Portfolio section, each additional item within that section will have the same format. In effect, each section defines allowable element types and their exact design. This often consists of an image and text. Some sections offer a Change Layout button that cycles through a few options, such as swapping photos and text from left to right. Undo and redo arrows helpfully let you revert to earlier and later edit states. Still, you might bristle at the limited customization, with only two Blog section types and just a few layout changes available.
Oddly enough, a Make Your Own Section choice sits at the end of the Add Section. It works like some other website builders, letting you delete or add new elements above or below existing ones. When you add an element, you're given a menu with standard elements, such as Text, Image, Video, and Spacer. It's odd that this ability is hidden, rather than making it more front-and-center, but that's probably due to Strikingly's focus on simplicity. Options cloud the waters.
Your route to greater customization is through adding and removing Sections. Strikingly has about 30 section types, depending on which template you choose. Types include content in columns or rows, social feeds, blogs, galleries, and forms. You can also add third-party site widgets, such as SoundCloud playlists, Facebook comments, and PayPal buttons. Some apps—and even some Section types—require a Pro account.
You can change a template's background colors (now with an unlimited color picker), and you get a large font selection after tapping the tool panel's Styles button. Some of Strikingly's newer templates enable more customization, including transparency, padding, and width. Even these are somewhat limited compared with other site builders, though. For example, the width options are limited to Full, Section, and Centered, and the padding choices are just Small, Medium, and Large. On the upside, you can swap templates without rebuilding your site, unlike with Squarespace.
The Settings button provides many sitewide options, such as the site title, domain name, SEO descriptions, navigation, and privacy. The last option lets you password-protect pages or hide your site from search engines. A cool option adds multi-language support to your site, but it's limited to the VIP tier. Other paid-only options include mobile actions and custom code entry. Multiple pages for Pro users are simply multiple-sectioned Strikingly pages. Navigation and links are automatically added for them. Like most other website builders, Strikingly lets you drag page entries to change the navigation menu.
We like how Strikingly's toolbar includes a Save link and a Publish button. Some website builders, like Squarespace, immediately publish your edits. Once you hit Publish, you get a message box with the live site link and share buttons to send the site to Facebook or Twitter/X.
Strikingly also has a full AI-powered site builder. To start the process, you enter prompts such as your site's name and description, with optional advanced settings, such as whether the site should adopt a professional or funny language tone. Strikingly handles the rest, which aligns with the builder's focus on ease.
However, we don't recommend building sites this way, as the lack of human touch is an obvious detriment.
Like Wix, Strikingly lets you save images you upload to its online storage so you can use them elsewhere on your site. In comparison, Weebly requires you to upload the same photo for each place on your site where you want to use it.
True to Strikingly's approach, you can add photos only to sections designed for them. So on one site type, we couldn't add any images to the Who We Are section. The photo-adding dialog supports drag-and-drop to upload multiple files at once. You can easily add a content or gallery section, which accepts photos and videos. However, the video must be hosted elsewhere, like YouTube; you can't just upload your own AVIs, MOVs, or MPGs. Strikingly's stock photography library has more than 3 million images across categories like city, fashion, and food.
Strikingly lets you add a custom favicon, the tiny image next to the site title in the browser tab. The builder also includes stock button art for social media and other uses that you can add to your page, mostly in the modern flat design style. You can also access a library of icons and badges.
A basic image editor lets you crop and rotate an image, or change the brightness, saturation, and contrast. You can also add text or draw on top of an image. Gallery layout options are limited to a few choices, like square thumbnails versus rectangular ones. You can easily switch among these, too. A gallery button does a similar thing for color, switching from a black background to gray or white.
Strikingly automatically produces good-looking, functional mobile sites. These include touch-friendly menus that jump viewers between sections. You can also edit within the mobile view if you want. The simple fact that Strikingly websites can be one deep page is a plus for mobile—they don't have to contact the server repeatedly to fetch separate pages.
One drawback is that mobile actions—clicking to call a phone number or send an email—are only available in paid accounts, something that's not the case for competitors such as Weebly and Wix.
Strikingly's e-commerce-focused Simple Store is a well-made feature with inventory and order tracking. You can accept credit card payments using Stripe or PayPal. Pro users can create coupons, and all accounts receive automatic email notifications for each step of the purchasing process. Although you can write product descriptions, Strikingly lacks custom fields for things like size and color. It also does not integrate with FedEx or UPS to streamline shipping.
Pro account users can create product categories, embed full-featured Ecwid stores, send email marketing blasts using Mailchimp, and sell digital downloads. The Pro tier has a 2% transaction fee, which decreases to 0% with the VIP tier.
The blogging tool is perfectly capable of presenting your musings and thoughts in a clean, coherent manner. You can add the standard content types (text, images, videos, separators, link buttons, and quotations), but you can't wrap text around pictures.
Strikingly has its own comment feature with an approval system, so you no longer need a Disqus or OpenWeb plug-in. Your theme choice dictates your blog's design; you can't customize its appearance beyond basic settings like the background image, text size, color, and alignment. You can save drafts and set your post to publish later. Finally, blogs automatically get an RSS button, giving readers an easy way to subscribe.
The well-designed dashboard pages display tiles for each of your sites. There, you can start editing or see site stats. The latter choice opens a page highlighting your unique site views for the last week, month, and 90-day period. It also shows traffic sources and their country of origin. You even get a breakdown of mobile usage, the technologies used (operating system, browser), and visitor countries, similar to Weebly's stat offerings. That said, it's a bit limited compared with Squarespace's stats; for example, it doesn't show the search terms used to reach your pages.
Even free accounts can get chat help from any Strikingly page, via the big question mark button in the interface's lower-right-hand corner. In our experience, this chat help—called Happiness Officers—is quick, and it's available 24/7. You can also leave an email message with attached screenshots, or email [email protected] directly. However, callback phone support is only available to VIP account holders. Wix, on the other hand, provides phone support even to its free-tier users. Strikingly also has a thorough knowledge base, with multiple categories and video guides, ranging from questions about affiliate programs to third-party domains.
Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. If your site is down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services. Strikingly promises remarkably stable, 99.99% uptime performance.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Strikingly)
Strikingly Website Builder
- 5.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product
Read Our Editorial Mission Statement and Testing Methodologies.
We like a lot about Strikingly, particularly its ease of use and appealing site design. Those upsides come at the price of control and customization, though the company has made strides in offering more design flexibility. It also differs from other builders in emphasizing single-page, deep sites divided by content sections. You may find that Strikingly suits your needs perfectly, but if not, check out our website builder Editors' Choice picks, Duda and Wix, for more precise control over your home on the web.
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About Our Expert
My PCMag career began in 2013 as an intern. Now, I'm a senior writer, using the skills I acquired at Northwestern University to write about dating apps, meal kits, programming software, website builders, video streaming services, and video games. I was previously a senior editor at Geek.com and have written for The A.V. Club, Kotaku, and Paste Magazine. I'm the author of the gaming history book Video Game of the Year: A Year-by-Year Guide to the Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games from Every Year Since 1977, and the reason everything you know about Street Sharks is a lie.
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