The Jimdo website builder is an e-commerce based, easy to use and free web builder. Jimdo is a strong candidate to choose from if you are looking to create an online store. Although the stronger features are tailored to e-commerce purposes, Jimdo will suit well any website that comes to your mind, like personal blogs or a portfolio.
Based in Germany, Jimdo supports more than 10 languages and have global presence. Jimdo claims that more than ten million websites were created using their platform.
Jimdo is one of the leading (top 5) website builders available today, and provide great user experience, support and out of the box website solutions. So if you are looking to save some cash and choose a website builder instead of a custom built website, Jimdo stands tall and could be your best choice.
That being said, Jimdo’s customer service is awesome (and multi-lingual) and they have a robust community that discuss all related topics on their forums. Free up your time and get rid of the headaches related to building a website from scratch by using this awesome website builder.
Jimdo’s Pros and Cons
PROS:
- Their free platform – When choosing the free plan, Jimdo provides you with more than enough options and tools to build a robust website, e-commerce or not. You would think that using the free platform will be time limited but it is actually not, and you can go on and use the service as you wish. Jimdo will not ask you for any credit card or other payment information, just add an email, choose a password and your’e done!
- The community forum – Post questions and concerns 24/7 and find answers from fellow Jimdo users and experts in no time. The large community is available in multiple languages for your convenience.
- The e-commerce platform for web stores – Jimdo provides excellent tools for e-commerce purposes; track inventory and orders, set email responses to clients, setting up discount codes and much more. You can use the great Tag system in order to display related items and cross-sell specific items. Overall, Jimdo is e-commerce oriented and stands taller than the competitors in the market in regards to online stores and commerce features.
CONS:
- The look, feel and amount of available pre-made templates – Compared to other website builders, Jimdo’s templates are relatively average. When using Jimdo’s free edition, the amount of available templates is low and you will need to sign up to Jimdo Pro in order to get more templates. However, Jimdo’s team are working on adding more templates to the available collection and have also added some cool features like the full background videos and slideshow options, which gives you the opportunity to change the look and feel of the webpage instantly (and make it look awesome too).
- The drag & drop feature – The website building tools are not exactly drag and drop like advertised, and different actions are needed in order to make your first pages, but do not let this fool you, Jimdo’s building tools are still very easy to use and pretty much self explanatory. They sure did a good job with that.
Jimdo is Great for
Small to medium size businesses or self employed looking to sell online. The e-commerce platform is just the right fit for any small to medium online store. If you’re running a more “heavier” project, try and push the limits on the free Jimdo edition prior to joining to the pro edition in order to manage expectations. If e-commerce is not your “thing” and you are looking for a personal or corporate website, Jimdo is still a very good option giving it’s free and very easy to use.
Ease of Use?
We already know the Jimdo is not a real Drag N’ Drop web builder, but the sidebar tools functions makes it extremely easy to setup your website in no time. Adding elements such as building blocks, text paragraphs, pictures and galleries is easy and intuitive, and the best things is that you see it change live on your screen. There is no need to save and refresh or go through other hops in order to see how your future website will look like, you see it on the spot in real time.
In conclusion, Jimdo is super user friendly and takes minutes to launch a site with.
Templates, Look & Feel
As for right now, Jimdo has more than 130 available templates for you to choose from (and the number keeps growing), but as mentioned in the Pros & Cons section, we still give them an average score on the ready designs.
Other website builder such as Wix and Squarespace offer professional templates and designer styled themes for you to choose from. We hope Jimdo will improve with time and start releasing these as well.
Another great plus for Jimdo is that they allow you to access an HTML and CSS editor, so if you know your way around with code, you can create completely different websites and customize your online store to the nail. Need more? you can find 3rd party templates and themes for Jimdo using a simple search on google. These range from free to premium templates and can take you back several dollars.
Mobile Display (Responsiveness)
With Jimdo you do not need to create a different mobile website to match your main web page, their mobile editor automatically fits your website into mobile display, making it responsive. If you wish, you can access and edit the CSS of the mobile display in order to change, add designs or re-order your mobile website.
Needless to say, your mobile site will be e commerce ready and will have a landing page (Mobile Express Page) which will direct your mobile visitors to the important pages of your site. Jimdo released an Iphone app which enables you to build your website (like from your desktop) from your mobile device. This is pretty unique and sets Jimdo apart from competitors in the website builders niche.
You can compare Jimdo’s app to the one Weebly has, but they are pretty much far apart. Weebly’s app will only let you to access statistics and post new pages to your website, while Jimdo’s app will give you the option to build your site from scratch, the same as you would do from your home computer.
Exporting and hosting options
You do not need to host any of your Jimdo websites (free or pro) as they will do it for you, meaning you will not need to pay a penny for hosting fees. Jimdo takes care of the hosting part including backups, security, upgrades and so on so you can focus on designing and adding great content to your website, blog or store. This is a huge advantage as you wouldn’t need to get your head around different hosting companies and procedures.
Currently, Jimdo does not offer the option to export your website to other hosting providers or website builders. This is clearly a disadvantage as if you choose to leave Jimdo one day and take the website with you, this will not be possible (except taking the content and re publishing it on a different platform or template).
Just to be clear, most website builders do not offer an export option, since the technology it takes to transform the code and making it adaptable to different website builders is just not there yet. However, Weebly and SquareSpace offer an export option. We recommend that you try Jimdo for free to see if it fits your needs. If so, you can always decide to commit or stay with the free plan forever. It’s important to understand that there is no pressure from the Jimdo team to upgrade at any given time.
What About Search Engine Optimization?
All the pages you create using Jimdo are automatically optimized for search engine visibility. In addition, you can modify the global SEO setting of the website if you are using the free plan, and additional options like the optimization of meta tags is available for the Jimdo Pro and above plans.
Furthermore, Jimdo provides many SEO tutorials on their website, and additional content can be found on their community forums.
Do not let the common argument that website builder pages perform poorly in SE rankings, many websites created by website builders are ranking high and on first pages of Google, Bing & Yahoo across the web. SEO is about content, links and other factors that are not related to the platform you are running your site on.
Pricing – What Will It Cost?
If you are intending to build an ecommerce shop, JimdoBusiness and JimdoPro are reasonably priced for the amount and quality of tools you are getting, which will ultimately reduce the time of hassles by automating orders and other tasks that would be required to do manually with other site builders.
If you would use other free or paid website builders that do not have an ecommerce solution, you will need to acquire and use a 3rd party shopping cart system to integrate with your site – which will cost money and will take time. Whether your are going to use the free or paid versions of Jimdo, the customer support is just great and you can see the team puts customer satisfaction as a top priority.
JimdoPro costs $7.50 per month ($90 per year) while JimdoBusiness costs $20 per month ($240) per year. Of course, like mentioned in this Jimdo review, the free option is free and always will be.
For Conclusion
If you are looking to open an e-commerce store for a small to mid sized business, or looking for simple, out of the box solution for some online presence, Jimdo is a great choice to choose from.
The platform enables you to quickly and easily build your website, the e-commerce elements are already integrated so you don’t need to use 3rd party integrations, the hosting is all done by Jimdo and you get to sign up for a free account. Besides, the customer service is great and the online community is large and growing, which means that Jimdo is here for good.
We recommend Jimdo’s website builder for personal use and online stores, especially because the service is free and there is a risk free upgrade. Try it out now!
