Jimdo Review

Content management and interface

There are basically two modes:

• Dolphin – In ‘Dolphin’ mode, to create a website for you the system uses ‘AI’. It also includes a question-answer session and information from your social media.
• Creator – In ‘Creator’ mode, you are the creator of your own website from 40 templates provided by Jimdo. 

Building a website using Jimdo’s Dolphin design mode

Dolphin mode allows you to build a website just based on a few question answers and from the information it gathers from your social media. This takes less than 3 minutes and a basic website to which you can make some basic changes is formed.

Building a website using Jimdo’s Creator mode

The Creator mode has a lot of better options than the Dolphin one. It allows you to even choose from a variety of templates and moreover gives you access to important things. So surely, Creator mode is the better option.

Blogging functionality

Blogging is very much essential for a website. Jimdo covers the basics required reasonably well as we can schedule our posts, edit their URLs and even include social media sharing buttons on them. It can also be compatible with the Facebook commenting system. Due to certain features it is almost impossible to turn the Jimdo site to a professional publishing platform. All in All, it is very easy to start writing blogs on Jimdo unlike WordPress. But still, WordPress is still a better option because it is a dedicated blog writing site.

Managing your Jimdo site using a mobile app

You can also manage our site on the go. The main app allows us to build or even edit a Jimdo site on mobile.  You can stay in touch with customers using Jimdo Live Chat. Jimdo Analytic allows you to have an eye on Google Analytics data.

Import and export functionality

A key drawback of using Jimdo is that you can’t import or export. The lack of an import tool is not a big issue because mostly novices use it, so they won’t really import much. But lack of an export tool is a major drawback, because if you outgrow Jimdo and need to switch to another platform, you won’t be able to export your content easily and may have to manually enter a lot of content or product data into your new site.

Templates

Choice of templates

When we start building in Jimdo’s Creator mode we are provided with a choice of 40 templates to choose from. Its competitors provide a greater number of choices but still they aren’t as fast and feasible as Jimdo. Jimdo’s limited offer is good in a way that it doesn’t make us spoilt for choices and it allows to change templates without losing data unlike its competitors. Finally, one can even build his own templates if he knows how to code.

Quality of templates

Jimdo’s templates are probably not as good enough as compared to the quality of its competitors. But still the quality isn’t downright ridiculous or something. It surely provides us with a nice variety, and we can even self-create the templates in the design kit. All the sites created on Jimdo are mobile responsive, it means we can always have a look at them that how do they look on a smartphone.

E-commerce

If you are going for one of the expensive plans of Jimdo then you get access to e-commerce functionality. This will set up an online store for you where you can take care of all the details. When somebody places an order on our website store, we will get a notification on our site dashboard and even through email. Jimdo also puts a heading of “sold out” in front of an item that you have run out. Jimdo doesn’t provide its own payment gateway but helps in payments via PayPal and Stripe.

Other features that are very appealing for those who are planning to build an online store via Jimdo:

• It Provides Coupon codes and gift vouchers.
• There is integration for Facebook ad.
• It provides Google Tracking as well.

Some of the drawbacks are:

• You can only sell using one currency and that is Euros.
• It only lets you set only one tax rate and hence deprives you off a huge bunch of market.
• There is no abandoned cart saver which is highly disappointing.
• You can’t set up multiple staff accounts to manage your online store.
• You can’t create a buy now button for use on external websites or social media profiles.
• You cannot import or export product data.
• Selling digital products involves a very complex process.

All in all, we can surely say that this should not be viewed as a professional e-commerce solution. It is fine for those who have a small setup and are not expecting much orders but those who are expecting such orders need to switch to some other site. We can even embed the Jimdo site with some other one as well to increase the e-commerce functionality. This can open a lot more selling functionality for your Jimdo site.

Integrations

We cannot say that you can’t integrate your Jimdo site with other tools. As many third-party apps provide code snippets (or widgets) which can be added to a Jimdo site to provide additional functionality. This is fine for adding things like forms, calendars or maps to a Jimdo site but if you’re looking for deep integration between a Jimdo site and an accounting, CRM or dropshipping happycore likely to be not satisfied.

Data capture

Jimdo allows adding forms on the side-saddle to this the user can easily message or subscribe to the newsletter. We cannot provide the users with file uploading option and apart from this option a lot of other options are provided and to give even this option to the users a third-party inclusion is necessary. Form submissions are automatically emailed to an address that is specified by you. They are also saved in the back end of Jimdo.

Site metrics

Jimdo provides us with a basic reporting dashboard which allows us to get top line stats on our website. For more deep analysis, we can also use Google Analytics with Jimdo, and this can be done by adding Google’s code to the header of your site. You can then access Google Analytics data within your Jimdo dashboard, which is convenient, or simply use the full-blown version of Google Analytics.

SEO

Jimdo’s SEO features are excellent. On all Jimdo plans except the free one you can actually perform the following functions:

• We can use SEO-friendly headings.
• We can add Alt Text.
• We can create Google Friendly URLs
• We can add page title and meta description as well.
• We can even edit page URLs.
• We can create up to 301 redirects.

Apart from having all these benefits still we won’t be able to have any control over the speed of our hosting. But we can say that, it is surely part and parcel of the game and some things go your way and some don’t.

One of another drawback is that unlike competing platforms, you cannot create SEO plugins and this is something that is really harmful to the online traffic and lowers it.

Is Jimdo is best website builder for you?

Jimdo works on a simple philosophy, that is making the website creation easy as the company claims that they have put ‘the power of website creation in the hands of ordinary people’ to allow them to share their passions online. The free plan is quite a generous offer by the company, anybody can register and create a digital presence with their own personal website. It only needs few simple steps to follow and you can create an astonishing website for your personal use or to sell your products.

Anyone who want to create a website but not aware of codes and know the use of website creation can create website without any fuss and deliberation with Jimdo website builder.

Paid plans start for $9 a month, it is quite a low price for a fully functional website in USD 9 a month. This is quite economical if we talk about other website builders like Squarespace and Wix. In both Squarespace is the cheapest with lowers plan for USD 16 per month. And technically, you can get started with e-commerce more cheaply with Jimdo than a lot of other platforms too. The Jimdo $19 per month plan allows you to build an online store, which compares favorably to Squarespace ($26 per month), Shopify ($29 per month) and Bigcommerce ($29.95 per month).That said, the e-commerce functionality is considerably more basic than these products, especially as far as Shopify and Big commerce are concerned.

So, if your budget is low and your needs are basic, Jimdo is well worth a look. It’s well-suited to small businesses that require a simple online presence or shop, but don’t have the required budget, expertise or time to fight with more complex systems.

However, those with more advanced requirements will nearly always be better off using another website building platform. If you have serious e-commerce needs, dedicated online store builders such as Bigcommerce or Shopify are going to serve you better; and if you are serious about blogging or running an online publication WordPress is probably the best solution.

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