It feels like Webnode has to be around forever. That’s because the website building service appeared in 2008. It’s a drag-and-drop online service. Looking at its age, it’s a mature service where most of its bugs and flaws have been ironed out so that it works without a hitch. Following industry standards, Webnode is a freemium subscription-based service. It’s easy to use and requires zero coding skills.
Webnode was founded by Vit Vrba that is domiciled in Zug, Switzerland, and has a development and operations office in the Czech Republic. Hence, Webnode’s an international website builder that lets you create a multilingual site. It supports more than 20 languages and even offers support in them. This means Webnode enjoys worldwide success since people who are looking to set up localised websites or non-English speakers make it their default builder. make it their default builder.
- Pros and cons of Webnode
- Who is Webnode for?
- How easy is Webnode to use?
- Design and templates
- How easy is managing your ecommerce store with Webnode?
- Integrations
- What marketing tools does Webnode provide?
- Membership registration
- Monetising your website
- Payment options
- Security
- Customer support
- Pricing
- Is Webnode the right solution for you?
Pros and cons of Webnode
As an all-purpose website builder, you can create any type of site, from personal, to business, and ecommerce. Webnode also takes care of domain registration and hosting.
Pros
- Forever free plan
- Multi-lingual support
- Easy to use
- Redo, and undo when you’re editing your site
- Solid SEO toolset for ecommerce
- Membership registration for paid content
Cons
- Not for larger projects
- Not scalable
- Very limited third party-integration
- Basic blogging tool
- Limited marketing tools
Who is Webnode for?
Webnode is a simple website builder designed with the beginner in mind. You can create and launch your website in almost no time and you don’t need any coding skills. If you’re more technical, you’ll appreciate that Webnode lets you add HTML code to your page elements so that you can go beyond the built-in tools and options. If you’re building and managing your site in a team, you can invite your colleagues to work with you.
How easy is Webnode to use?
When you sign up, you’ll be asked if you want to create a website or an ecommerce site. You can pick any because after that you’ll choose a template and all your answer does is narrow down the selection of templates. You can always click on another template category and widen the choice. If you’ve chosen an ecommerce template, you’ll have to add your basic contact detail. Staying true to support many countries and languages, you can set your basic currency to all of the existing currencies (at least it looked like that to us).
Using the information you have given, Webnode generates a website including the most used pages (like About us, Contact us, etc) with the domain that is provided for free following the pattern of yourchosendomain.webcraft.com. Most people will find their way within minutes in the clean and easy to use editor. In the top navigation, you have undo and redo buttons as well as the options to manage your products and pages, general settings that you go to when you need to connect a domain or configure settings of your store among other things, and the publish option.
Design and templates
For a free website builder, Webnode provides a wide range of templates categorised into 8 categories. The templates are all mobile-ready so your site will look good on every screen size. Be sure to pick a template that you like and can work with, as you can only set the colours to what Webnode offers. The colours you’ll find will depend on what element you’ve chosen to work with. The freedom of using colours is restricted as a way to help you maintain a consistent design.
How easy is managing your ecommerce store with Webnode?
You can add and edit products to your site on the free plan, but in order to start selling, you need to subscribe either to Standard or Profi, one of the 2 highest premium plans. These will unlock the ecommerce feature set, giving you all you need to launch and manage an online store like shipping methods, discount codes, payment methods, tax configuration, and more.
If you didn’t select a template that was ecommerce-ready, fret not. You can still enable it by adding a page and selecting the page template “Online store”. You’ll order management and other options you’ll need to manage your store in the dashboard. Out of the box, Webnode gives SEO tools to add meta title, keywords, and description of each of your products.
Integrations
At the time of writing, there only 3 third-party integrations (Elfsight, Reservio, Lime Talk). You can always add custom HTML to each element of your page to customise and further extend your site.
What marketing tools does Webnode provide?
The tools provided for marketing your business are limited.
SEO
The SEO toolset not only covers products but also your pages and blog posts. You can customise meta titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, and for each page, and also for each of your products and blog posts. Webnode offers basic statistics for your store, but you can always connect your site to Google Analytics for more in-depth reporting.
Blogging
As with ecommerce, you can always add blogging later, if you’ve not chosen a template that supports blogging from the start. The blogging tool is easy to use and looks and behaves just like the main website editor. Don’t expect a fully-fledged blogging toolset, as you’re missing post categories, RSS, and other more advanced features. But you’ll be able to schedule a post, show social media buttons in your posts as well as Facebook comments.
Membership registration
If you want to set up a course where only members can view the course content, you can enable membership registration. This feature is only available on the Standard or Profi plans.
Monetising your website
You can earn not only by running an online store but also as a publisher – only available on the top 2 plans. All you have to do is to connect your AdSense account.
Payment options
Webnode offers the usual payment gateways – PayPal and Stripe and doesn’t charge a transaction fee on the paid plans.
Security
All websites built with Webnode are encrypted with an SSL certificate. There’s a backup and restore feature, but only if you’ve subscribed to the Standard or Profi plan.
Customer support
As you can use Webnode to build a multilingual or a localised site, the support itself is can also be had in one of the supported languages. You’ll only get premium support on a paid plan. You can always use the contact form and usually, you’ll get a response within 24 hours. While waiting for the answer, you can take a look at the knowledge base that is quite comprehensive, albeit with an outdated design.
Pricing
Webnode has 4 plans not counting the free one. A boon is that Webnode treats SSL as a matter of fact for running a website and includes its plans. The pricing on par with the likes of Squarespace or Wix.
If you plan on running an online store, be sure to select the highest or second plan.
Is Webnode the right solution for you?
Keeping in mind that Webnode is geared towards the beginner, the websites that can be built are on a smaller scale. If you’ve already built one or more websites, you’ll find the scope to customise your site limiting. Webnode provides a narrow range of options and features that it thinks its users might eventually want to use. We’d like to have seen more, for example adding a more robust third-party integration that allows its users to extend their website or email campaigns for ecommerce. If you can make do without these, you’ll have an effective tool that lets you quickly and without drama create a professional-looking website for any industry, even without the involvement of AI. Since it has a forever free plan, why not try it out?
Do you already work with Webnode? Tell us about your experience in the comments.
Original post here: Webnode review
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