Strikingly Review 2025: Websites Without Programming Experience?

“We believe in individuality” – that's how Strikingly's manifesto begins. With its beginner-friendly website builder, the company wants to help anyone make their digital design dreams come true. Too often, the only people capable of this are those “tech-savvy” enough.

We appreciate Strikingly's sentiment, but almost every website builder claims something similar. Below, we'll let you know if the platform does enough to stand out in the competitive builder market.

Strikingly targets complete beginners with no interest in web design or programming. This makes quick starters like IONOS, Hostinger, or Jimdo, its main competitors, but not really all-rounders like Wix or pro builders like Webflow.

The platform's interface is straightforward and beginner-friendly, even if we didn't find it as smooth as some of its competition.

Since building a basic website and hosting it on a Strikingly.com domain is free, sign up is super easy. Just input your name, email address, and create a password (or sign up with Facebook), and you can go from there.

Right after registration, you can get started on your website. First, you need to choose a template, which Strikingly categorizes into options like “Online Store,” “Business,” “Landing Page,” or “Personal.” You can also filter templates to show only one-page designs.

It's possible to preview any template, and then select it by clicking “Start Editing!”.

Once you've picked the right template, you'll enter the editor, where a short tutorial shows you around. Even without guidance, Strikingly's interface isn't difficult to get the hang of.

The editor is divided into several areas and features:

If you need help, you're never far from assistance thanks to the chat window and help center link in the bottom right of the editor's interface.

Every page of your Strikingly website is made up of several sections, which are filled with elements. It's a good idea to take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with your website's basic structure.

Strikingly's editor's interface is easy to understand, even for those with no prior web design experience. It makes creating new pages and sections fast and easy.

You can use Strikingly's mobile app to manage your website and store projects from anywhere. Use it to view stats and sales, or modify your website's content.

However, there's no drag-and-drop mode in the mobile app. Its interface is intended for simple changes, like quickly updating text and images.

For the most part, Strikingly's interface is intuitive. We never needed to spend a long time searching for a feature or setting, and it was easy to create and edit our website's pages.

With that said, there were a few issues. Since the navigation menu includes almost all important features, it's a bit too cluttered for our tastes. The back button and page preview feature should also be more prominent and moved to the top menu bar.

If you're familiar with other drag-and-drop builders, you might need to get used to not being able to create and move sections directly in the website preview window.

There were also some glitches and errors. For example, changes to button texts often weren't implemented. We were also annoyed that the support chat window kept popping up, with Strikingly's "Happiness Officer" bombarding us with automated upselling messages.

Website builders that cater to beginners usually limit design freedom to keep things as streamlined as possible. Strikingly is no exception: It doesn't offer many opportunities to customize templates and there are only a few elements available. In these cases, having a large selection of templates is crucial—and Strikingly doesn't disappoint.

Strikingly offers more than 180 templates in categories like "Business," "Startup," and "Portfolio." Quality varies, but with so many options, there's something for everyone—from clean, structured designs with lots of white space to vibrant, image-heavy ones with playful color palettes.

When looking closer though, most templates seem quite similar and only have minor variations, such as how their menus are positioned or their color palettes.

Because the template selection is so extensive, more detailed filtering options, such as by feature, would be helpful.

We do like that you can change templates at any time, with any content that you've already added automatically transferred to the new design.

Click the "Styles" button in the navigation menu to access Strikingly's global design settings. Changes you make here are applied to your entire website.

You get the following style options:

Strikingly does offer some options for global design changes, more than IONOS or GoDaddy. Unfortunately, most of these are quite limited in each category and not always logically implemented. The end result is that you don't get complete control over your website's global color scheme.

Of course, you can adjust font colors or backgrounds in the editor's preview area for individual sections and override global settings.

The layout button at the top right is especially important for this: Use it to choose from different predefined layouts for the section you're currently working in or switch to drag-and-drop mode to move content within your sections. However, this mode isn't available for all section types.

Even in drag-and-drop mode, you don't get total freedom. Instead, you'll move elements to positions marked by guidelines, where they then snap into place. This way, Strikingly ensures that your page's overall look remains consistent, but still means that you have less design freedom than you get from platforms like Wix.

If you want to unleash your creative spirit, Strikingly's drag-and-drop lite concept probably won't be very appealing. Since its options are limited, we prefer to stick with the builder's predefined layouts.

Strikingly's page and menu settings are limited. For example, you can't create pages with subpages or group pages together. How your navigation menu appears is determined by the template you select.

Starting with a Pro subscription, you'll get access to the Multi-Language feature, which allows you to create multilingual websites. The language versions are different subdomains, like en.experte.com or de.experte.com, which are linked in the language menu.

It's unfortunate that this feature is only available to Pro customers, but at least it makes creating multilingual websites easy.

Strikingly doesn't offer page templates, likely due to its focus on one-pagers. This means that you have to build each page section by section.

However, there's a good assortment of section templates that cover key features, from "About Us" areas to testimonials to contact forms.

You don't get as much choice as elsewhere: Some standard sections, like those for teams or FAQs, are completely missing, and others aren't flexible enough. The biggest issue is with the Portfolio section, since you can't specify how its entries are displayed or formatted. There also aren't any advanced or industry-specific content options like restaurant menus.

Here you can see which standard section templates Strikingly covers compared to other builders:

For sections that you've enabled drag-and-drop mode in, you can manually add elements by clicking the plus symbol that appears at the section's bottom.

Unfortunately, Strikingly again shows its lack of flexibility here, since you're limited to a handful of basic elements.

Here you can see what Strikingly offers in comparison to other providers:

Strikingly has a stock photo library featuring a fairly large selection of images. For example, when we searched for "robot", we got more than 1,000 results. However, finding high-quality images might take some time.

Strikingly also provides icons and badges. Unfortunately, there's no integration with commercial stock photo services.

There are a few image editing options too: You can crop, rotate, apply filters, and resize photos.

Strikingly doesn't offer a developer mode for adjusting your website's design via HTML or CSS. However, you can insert custom HTML code using element and section templates.

Strikingly is suitable for simple blogs and small shops and is surprisingly well-equipped for SEO. It also offers some handy marketing and team features. However, you won't get industry-specific tools for restaurants and event planning, or any extras that go beyond the builder's basics.

To add a blog to your Strikingly website, you first need to include the blog section template. You'll then be directed to a separate pane in the settings area of the main menu to manage your blog posts. Here, you can create new posts as well as view and edit published ones.

You can create different categories to help organize your blog posts. There's also a comments feature among the blog settings, and the ability to offer blog subscriptions, including an RSS feed.

Strikingly's blog editor is simple. You can add titles, subtitles, and a cover image, and incorporate images, videos, buttons, and dividers into your text. There's also an HTML element for integrating third-party apps or custom code.

While it would be nice to have drag-and-drop freedom in Strikingly's blog editor, the available formatting and content options are solid for a website builder.

Turning to SEO, Strikingly is relatively well-equipped. You can manually adjust page URLs, specify title tags and meta descriptions, and connect to Google Search Console (go to Settings > Services). XML sitemaps are automatically generated. You can also edit the robots.txt, and take advantage of 301 redirects too, if you'd like.

In Strikingly's marketing menu, there's an SEO checklist to help make your website more search engine-friendly.

Unfortunately, it isn't possible to set individual pages to noindex.

Here's a comparison of Strikingly's SEO features:

You'll add a shop to your Strikingly website as a new section. Shop management, just like blogging, happens in a separate "Store" area of the Settings pane. There, you'll manage your products and categories, along with all shop settings for shipping, taxes, and more.

When you add a new product, you can choose between physical products, services, and (with a Pro subscription) digital downloads. Apart from that, you'll input the usual details: product name, image, price, stock, and shipping options.

You can create product variants, like different sizes or colors, and all matching product combinations are generated automatically. Once made, it's possible to specify individual prices, upload unique images, adjust stock levels, and update weights for them.

Unfortunately, it's only possible to specify two product options per item. So if you already offer it in different color and size combinations, you can't add more options, like material.

Overall, the item options are somewhat limited. You can't add more than two dimensions or specify individual tax or shipping options for products. It is possible to create categories and group products together, but only if you're a Pro subscriber.

Payment options and preferred currency aren't managed in the "Store" pane, but in the "Settings" area of the menu. Stripe, PayPal, and Square, as well as offline payments, are all supported.

For shipping, you can create different regions and set flat rate pricing, or link it to order weight. In-person pickup is also possible. Unfortunately, there aren't any integrations with shipping companies for smoother order processing.

Strikingly's tax settings are also basic: You can set a flat tax rate for all orders in the store or add European VAT or US state sales tax rates. Other ecommerce solutions cater to a wider range of regions.

Strikingly also provides some tools for marketing your products and website. Starting with a Pro plan, you can allow star-based product reviews on product pages. Or, you can encourage customers to complete their purchase by showing a crossed-out price on a particular product's page.

Pro subscribers can also grab their visitors' attention with pop-ups for specific campaigns and create discount coupons. It isn't possible to offer discounts that aren't linked to the platform's coupon conditions.

Here's a comparison of Strikingly's ecommerce features:

Strikingly has many other features that we haven't mentioned yet or only briefly touched on:

Here's a summary of Strikingly's advanced features:

Strikingly's Help Center is filled with plenty of text and video guides divided into categories like “Edit Section,” “Templates & Styles,” and “Analytics & SEO.” Use the search bar at the top of the page to quickly find relevant articles.

The articles are easy to read and include screenshots and hyperlinks. Strikingly's video tutorials are a helpful resource for web design newcomers since they briefly introduce its editor's most basic features. Unfortunately, the video and audio quality leaves much to be desired, and compared to the engaging video courses we've seen elsewhere, Strikingly's tutorials are on the boring side.

Strikingly has an ideas forum where users can make suggestions that others then vote on. If you're missing a feature, bring it up here for discussion, and the Strikingly team might respond and introduce it.

You can request direct support from the Strikingly team via live chat or support ticket. In the live chat, we were always quickly connected to a (somewhat dystopically named) "Happiness Officer." They consistently helped us, sometimes with useful screenshots, but they usually had to look up the solution themselves first.

We received a response to our support ticket request in about ten minutes.

Strikingly offers a "forever" free plan, but it's severely limited. You'll only get 5 GB of monthly bandwidth and 500 MB of storage, and be able to create five pages and add one product to your online store. Plus, your website is published on an unattractive Strikingly subdomain.

There are three premium plans: Limited, Pro, and VIP. Each includes a free SSL certificate and a free domain for one year.

Here's an overview of Strikingly's current pricing:

It's also important to see how Strikingly's prices stack up against its competitors. Since plans and features vary greatly between providers, a direct comparison is tough. That's why we calculate the monthly practical costs for all platforms in our ranking according to two scenarios:

Price comparison 1: Basic website, ad-free, own domain possible

Strikingly's Pro plan, which drops the provider's branding and offers a free domain for the first year, is one of the priciest in our standard plan comparison:

Price comparison 2: Online store, ad-free, own domain possible

Ecommerce features are included in all Strikingly plans. However, since you can only add one product in the Limited plan, we also used its Pro plan for our ranking. Even then, it's quite affordable compared to the ecommerce plans of many competitors:

Unfortunately, Strikingly doesn't offer a money-back guarantee. But you can try the builder's basic features at no cost, for as long as you want.

Strikingly is a beginner-friendly website builder, perfect for creating one-pagers and small websites. You can use the platform's intuitive editor to quickly make, personalize, and fill your new digital project with content. Its blogging, ecommerce, and SEO features are more than enough for simple projects.

Strikingly isn't for advanced users or creating truly unique websites. Its design features are fairly basic, and layout adjustments are limited even in the (restricted) drag-and-drop mode. The selection of elements and section templates could also be larger.

So, Strikingly is worth checking out, just like the website builders from IONOS, GoDaddy, or Jimdo. Any of these offers an affordable platform for creating simple, professional websites that won't break the bank or take up too much of your time.

We created a demo page with Strikingly's builder which you can view here: Strikingly Demo Page

We use every builder in our comparison to create a demo page with the same content: A homepage with Hero, About Me, Services, Testimonial, Pricing, and FAQ sections, a portfolio page, a blog, and a contact page.

Most of these basic features are covered by Strikingly's section templates. However, there's no dedicated FAQ section, and the portfolio section isn't ideal for showcasing freelancer portfolios.

What do users think about Strikingly? We've gathered reviews from various aggregators and summarized the most common feedback for you:

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