Monday 5 July 2021

Tilda review

If you want to create your website, you’ve got a ton of choice of website builders. They offer non-coders a way to build and launch their site. But, in order for them to make a name for themselves, they have to distinguish themselves and offer a special feature set.

The website builder Tilda’s specialty is to give you the ease of use while also not limiting your options. It strives to balance simplicity with simplicity so that it appeals to both pros and non-coders alike.

Tilda was founded in 2014 by Nikita Obukhov and has its headquarters in London, UK. It’s a general-purpose website builder so that you can build whatever you can think of: an online store, a blog, …

Pros and cons of Tilda

Tilda is offered on a monthly subscription basis and includes hosting. You build your site not only form elements but also from blocks that are predesigned by professional designers. Tilda is like a modules system for you to put together your site.

Pros

  • Forever free plan
  • No need to enter your credit card details for a paid plan
  • Easy to use
  • Beautiful, mobile-ready templates
  • You can export the source code – all the files needed so that you can host your site wherever you want
  • You can add custom HTML, CSS, and Javascript
  • Multi-lingual support
  • Solid blogging feature
  • Built-in CRM
  • Built-in email campaign builder
  • Fair pricing
  • You’re not tight down to only use their templates but can create your own from scratch
  • You can design your web pages in Tilda and integrate them with your site via an API or with the WordPress plugin with the top plan

Cons

  • No backup function
  • You have to install the SSL certificate yourself
  • Upgrading a plan means you need to buy the next higher up plan as Tilda doesn’t have an automatic upgrade
  • Not for larger projects

Who is Tilda for?

Since Tilda doesn’t require any coding or design skills and comes with a myriad of mobile-ready, attractive, and free templates, it’s a good way to start a website. It’s suitable both for people who want to build their own website fast (without knowing any code), as well as designers who are doing work for clients. It’s also a valuable tool to have in the toolbox for marketing teams and agencies.

How easy is Tilda to use?

If you build many websites, no matter if you’re a designer or a marketer, you often have to implement the same objects time and again. Knowing this, Tilda has designed its website builder to be a modular system. The blocks contain elements that are often used together like for example a contact form that contains input fields and a description paragraph.

Tilda’s website builder

It has a library of over 550 blocks. The library is constantly growing and the blocks are regularly updated. To help you find the needed block more easily, Tilda has grouped them into categories. The blocks are categorised by function (for example, about) or by meaning (for example, store, contacts, etc.). For the super impatient, the block library has a search function.

You’re not limited to use the predesigned blocks. You can add a custom HTML block and create your individual style with your custom CSS file. If you want to add a unique block with specific elements you can use Tilda’s Zero Block. It’s kind of like a graphic editor for your website.

When you sign up, even for a paid plan, you don’t need to enter your credit card details. A short onboarding is part of the sign-up process so that you can hit the ground running. The interface is not only beautifully designed but also intuitive. The options and controls are well-placed so that you can easily finish the task at hand.

Once you’ve completed your site, you can launch it with a free site provided by Tilda that follows the pattern of yourchosendomain.tilda.ws. Needless to say, you can connect at any time a domain to your site.

Design and templates

The templates are categorised by use cases. All of them are stylish and mobile-ready. You’re not forced to answer questions during the sign-up process and then stuck with the template that was recommended. If you’re in a hurry, choose a template that suits your project best and then customise it to your needs. Or, you can start with a blank state and create everything to your liking. The cool part is, you can then export all the files and use them on any hosting provider as you like.

Tilda templates are mobile ready

How easy is managing your ecommerce store with Tilda?

Interestingly, you can just add a payment system for individual products or services or create an online store. It all depends on the blocks you add to your page.

Tilda is great for creating the frontend of your store, but it doesn’t offer the full set of capabilities for running an online store. That is, you’ll be missing features such as inventory management. Although it’s not a fully-fledged online store, you still can offer promo-codes for your products.

Integrations

Tilda has no official plugin or integrations marketplace. Still, you can add third-party services. You can either add the block containing the integration (for example with Soundcloud) or you can add a custom HTML code block.

Tilda’s integrations are mostly for collecting and working with your audience’s email

Integrations for Tilda are first and foremost offered in the forms for capturing data and email addresses. The data captured via a form can be added to email marketing services, CRMs, or the the Swiss Army knife of automation among others. Social media integration is built-in.

What marketing tools does Tilda provide?

As an effective tool for marketers, Tilda not only covers the basics such as SEO and blogging. It also provides you with free SVG icons, a campaign URL builder so that you can track your ad campaigns, a colours library, and more.

SEO

Tilda lets you edit page titles and meta descriptions for each page. It then has an SEO assistant that helps you fix any errors. You can connect your site with

  • Google Analytics
  • Yandex Metrica
  • Facebook Pixel
  • VK Pixel

Blogging

You need to add the appropriate block to have a blog on your site. Then, to add new posts, you first need to create a feed. You have options to show an author and company photo, enable Google AMP, and select the language of your blog among others. You can add categories to your blog posts and schedule them.

CRM

When you have captured email addresses and more data of your audience, you’ll want to manage your contacts. Built-in is a customer relationship management tool, with which you can see and manage all your leads and contacts in one place. You can visualise your funnel right in your dashboard and create email campaigns.

Marketing emails

Email marketing is also built-in. The email marketing campaign tool works similarly to the website builder. Its campaign editor also works with blocks and then you can either use an external email service such as MailChimp or send it directly from within Tilda. The email campaign builder is included in the paid plans.

Payment options

The “usual suspects” PayPal and Stripe are available as payment gateway. But you also have the option of

  • Using 2Checkout
  • Accept cash on delivery
  • Accept bank transfer
  • Set up a custom payment gateway

Security

You can choose to install a free Let`s Encrypt SSL certificate to protect your site. Tilda doesn’t offer a backup function or integration with a backup service.

Customer support

Even when working with a tool as straightforward as Tilda, you may have one or another question. When you’re working on your site, you have in the lower right-hand corner the help icon. It will open the searchable help centre. If you didn’t find an answer, you can open a ticket. The support team usually answers within 2 hours on business days (Monday through Friday, from 10:00 to 18:00 UTC+3). On weekends, you can expect them to answer within 24 hours.

Pricing

Tilda offers 3 plans. On the free plan, you can’t try out the advanced features such as the online store. But, you can start with a 14 day free trial of all the paid plans. The business plan is when you want to export the code and build t websites.

Check out the current prices

Is Tilda the right solution for you?

With Tilda, you can build all kinds of websites without breaking out in a sweat in just a few hours. As such, it’s great

  • For startups
  • To build MVPs
  • Landing pages
  • Marketing pages

And, you have integrated an email marketing campaign with CRM. Most likely you have seen it coming: It’s not for larger projects.

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