Introduction

Zyro is a website builder platform and hosting provider. It’s an all-in-one service aimed at helping small business owners succeed online. Zyro’s main goal is to make building a website quick, easy, and fun. At the same time, they provide the marketing, sales, and business tools to help professionals or business owners thrive.

Launched in Lithuania in 2019, Zyro is a very new company and the brainchild of Giedrius Zakaitis. In a recent interview, CEO at Zyro, Giedrius Zakaitis said something which really stuck a cord in my heart:

It’s clear that Zyro not only wants to help people create and launch their own websites. They want to help them succeed professionally as well. Zyro is a no-code platform, and you only need to be familiar with using modern graphic user interfaces to try it out.

What are Pros & Cons of Zyro?

Pros:

• Intuitive and Clean interface with no learning curve. It’s effortless to go from managing your websites to managing your store. Nothing feels overwhelming.
• For the most part, the website templates are modern, neat, and attractive. There is also a lot of variety to choose from with over 150 templates.
• The AI Tools make a lot of the challenging aspects of building and managing a website easier.
• The Store Manager is surprisingly feature-rich with powerful selling tools like discount engine, automated emails, analytics and insights, shipping, abandoned cart recovery, etc.
• Zyro’s documentation and help resources are really thorough with fantastic step-by-step guides and illustrative images.
• The Zyro Roadmap shows you the list of features in upcoming versions. Users can request new features and see the progress Zyro has made. This shows their commitment to improving the platform.
• All the tools you need to manage an online business are in one place. This even counts for your email marketing as well as selling on other channels, like Amazon or social media.

Cons:

• In most cases, the logos designed by the AI Logo Generator are too basic and not up to the mark. That being said, if you really don’t have the skills, time, or budget to make a professional log, it may be good enough.
• Some templates feel a bit empty or without a lot of detail. For example, we would have appreciated more pre-build navigation menus.
• Priority Support is Paid. In my experience, though, normal customer support was decent. The only catch is that they may sometimes take longer to reply, particularly on weekends.

Features

Zyro is a feature-rich platform with plenty of user-friendly tools to help you create better websites. While some features are plan-dependant, here are the most important ones you should know about:

Drag-and-drop editor

Zyro provides users with a simple, no-code, WYSIWYG website builder tool. This allows you to use a simple drag-and-drop interface to build your website pages. You don’t need any professional website development or design experience to use it. Zyro provides all the ready-made visual and interactive elements you need. All you need to do is drag them from the menu to the page, customize them, and add your own media/text.

eCommerce

We cover this in-depth later on. However, Zyro let’s anyone with a Business or Advanced Store plan sell products online, from anywhere. There are built-in tools for gift cards, shipping and tax management, abandoned cart recovery, online payments, etc. That’s everything you need for a full-fledged online store.

Mobile-ready

Out-of-the-box, all Zyro templates and websites are fully mobile responsive. You can also edit and preview the desktop and mobile versions of your site manually. The Zyro app even lets users manage their websites and online store from their mobile devices.

Marketing Integrations

Zyro integrates with a number of important marketing tools. For example, Facebook Messenger, Pixel, Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, and Hotjar. These help you manage customer relations, understand your traffic, and market yourself across the web.

AI Design & Business Tools

Using this relatively unique feature, you can let Zyro’s AI design tool create a website for you from scratch. The AI designer will ask you a bunch of questions about the type of website and your style preference. It will then automatically generate an appropriate design that’s unique from its other website templates.

Zyro also offers a number of other AI tools to help you create a better website. This includes an AI content writing tool as well as AI title, slogan, logo, and business name generators. You can even use the AI heatmap to optimize your UI.

Ease of Use

In their own words, below is Zyro’s “pyramid of website building.”

Everything about the Zyro platform is aimed at making it easy and straightforward for its users. A beautiful design and ease of use go hand in hand and are prioritized at the top of the table:

This goes both for the Zyro platform itself as well as the websites you can build with it. The Zyro dashboard and UI is extremely streamlined and intuitive. This makes it easy to pick up for complete beginners as well as to transition to if you’ve used another website builder.

Zyro also provides the out-of-the-box tools to make building a website easy. Also as you can see from templates, websites created using Zyro will be easy to use for your visitors from the get-go.

As the base of the pyramid, Zyro also offers speed, security, and stability. These are important for the success of any website today. However, it can be highly technical to optimize these aspects of your website yourself. By providing a platform where this is built-in, Zyro makes creating and maintaining your website so much easier.

The only thing we thought could be improved is that it’s quite cumbersome to change a website template.

Pricing

Unfortunately, Zyro doesn’t offer a free plan where you can publish and host your website live. However, you can create an account and play around with the website builder for free. They also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can try the full experience out risk-free.

Below, you can see a breakdown of its three pricing plans:

Keep in mind that the prices you see here are discounted for long-term subscribers. For example, at $2.90/month for 2 years, you’ll need to pay $68.99 upfront for the Website plan.

If you want to pay month-to-month, you’ll pay full price. You can also subscribe annually for $4.90/month, $6.90/month, or $18.90/month.

As you can see, all plans come with a free domain for 1 year and free email for 3 months. That’s about $12 in value for the domain and the email costs $2.90/month/address to renew.

24/7 customer support and marketing integrations also come standard. The biggest difference between the plans is the ecommerce capabilities.

With a business plan, you’ll be allowed to sell up to 100 products. However, you get advanced features, like omni-channel selling, 2,500 products, abandoned cart recovery, and product filters with Advanced Store.

Overall, Zyro’s plans are transparent, simple, and relatively affordable if you subscribe long-term. If you go month-to-month, it’s pretty much on-par with the competition. The only catch is that you can only build and host one website per plan.

How fast is the website created on Zyro?

Zyro promises to make your life easier by taking care of technicalities like optimizing performance. So, it was important for us to test this first-hand.

Here is the results from a GTmetrix performance report for a website hosted on Zyro:

As you can see, our Zyro website performed excellently across the board, getting an A grade. Not only is the page fast-loading with 99% for performance, but it’s also well-structured (98%).

Zyro also does a solid job of optimizing performance for core web vitals. Google uses these metrics to help determine a website’s search engine ranking.

Largest Contentful Paint measures how fast it takes the largest element on your page to load. And, cumulative layout shift measures how stable the page is while loading. As you can see, both leave no room for improvement.

Even the Time To Interactive and Total Block Time was good. Having your page quickly become interactive will improve the user experience and lead to fewer input errors. This is an especially important metric for an online store.

With this kind of performance out-of-the-box, Zyro certainly makes good on its promise.

How good are Zyro Templates?

One of Zyro’s top benefits is that it comes with 150+ ready-made templates. The templates look and feel professionally designed and come with all the images and content you see. You can base your website’s design off of one of these templates with just a few clicks.

So, you can start off with a really solid design without having any web design experience yourself.

Zyro’s website templates span nearly 20 different categories so they cover almost everything. You can find multiple templates for blogs, eCommerce, restaurants, business services, fashion, technology, and more.

You can immediately filter according to the type of website, such as an online store, portfolio, blog, or one page website.

The majority of the templates have clean and modern designs that are very user-friendly. Because most are straightforward, that also makes them easy to customize using the drag-and-drop builder.

However, Zyro aren’t afraid to get creative every now and then:

You can even start with the blank slate template if you want to design your site completely from scratch.

What’s more, all templates are responsive out-of-the-box.

E-commerce: Selling Online with Zyro

Zyro provides two plans that let you sell products online: Business and Advanced Store.

The Business plan is suitable for small and growing eCommerce businesses::

• Limit of 100 products.
• Accept online payments.
• 1% Processing fee.
• 20+ Payment options.

However, the features are somewhat basic with only the essentials. You only get customer order email notifications, order management, and inventory management.

The Advanced Store plan, on the other hand, can handle much larger eCommerce businesses:

• Up to 2,500 products.
• 0% Processing fee.
• 70+ Payment options.

Now, you can also benefit from advanced eCommerce features needed for a full-fledged online store. This includes:

• Abandoned cart recovery
• Discounts and gift cards
• Product filters and dimensions
• Omni-channel selling (Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Instagram)
• Multi-lingual website
• Sell subscriptions
• Customer groups
• Newsletter integrations and automated marketing emails
• Accept tips at checkout

As you can see, this allows you to sell a wider range of products. You can also boost sales by selling on other platforms and more effectively marketing to customers.

Now, let’s take a look at what the process of building an online store with Zyro looks like.

To-do list

Creating your first online store can be daunting. Luckily, Zyro guides you through the process with a handy to-do list. This makes sure that you build your online store step-by-step without missing anything crucial. It also gives you estimates of how long each step will take so that you can manage your time efficiently.

And, it will update your progress with each step you complete. This helps keeps you motivated and estimate how much longer it will take:

When you click on a step, like “Add your products or services,” it will take you to that dashboard. Unfortunately, there is no extra guidance to complete each individual step. However, Zyro is so intuitive that it’s pretty self-explanatory. As we show below, they also provide you with plenty of samples to stay on track.

Adding New Products or Services

Of course, your online store revolves around having something to sell. So, let’s cover this in a bit more detail.

Below, you can see what the product management page looks like. As you can see, Zyro creates a number of sample products to show you how it’s done:

Each sample product is fully filled out with all the details. This allows you to easily visualize how to create your own:

When you create your own products, Zyro also provides plenty of visual cues to help you. For example, they give you ideas of what type of product images to use:

This kind of attention to detail will really help to sway buyers by showing them all important aspects.

All the important product detail fields are in plain sight, like:

• Name
• SKU
• Weight
• Description
• Price
• Availability

You can even add handy little details like a “New,” “Free Shipping,” or “Limited Stock” ribbon with just a few clicks.

Marketing

Zyro provides a well-organized marketing dashboard to help you keep track of all your various campaigns. This is where you can launch key marketing actions, like:

• Setting up Google Ads.
• Promoting items on Facebook/social media.
• Improve your conversions by using abandoned cart recovery and promotions/discounts
• Set up your marketing email campaigns (automated emails, newsletters, subscriptions).
• Or, analyze your site’s traffic and performance using tools like Google Analytics and others.

Using all these tools may seem daunting, but Zyro makes it fairly simple. For example, you can enable Google Ads by clicking a single button. You’ll then be taken through a step-by-step wizard to set up your ads and budget:

Zyro’s automated emails are another powerful marketing feature. It’s also relatively easy to set up. Zyro helpfully breaks down your automated email campaigns according to their goals. For example, favorite product reminders, discount offers, abandoned cart recovery, or an order confirmation email with related products:

These automated emails help your business in a number of ways:

• Maintain customer contact on a regular basis.
• Create loyal customers through offers and personalization.
• Take advantage of more selling opportunities throughout your sales funnels.

You can create templates for each type of email and populate the content with dynamic fields. You can even preview the emails before they are sent out:

Discount Engine

No one can resist a good deal. The good news is that Zyro offers a pretty powerful discount engine to help you maximize sales.

You can create your own discount coupons:

You can specify the discount type (%, flat discount, free shipping), time period, code, and number of uses. These can be sent in your market emails or used in your website banners.

However, what’s really cool is that you can even create automated storewide discounts. So, for example, you can give all customers with an order value above a certain amount a discount. Or, based on customer demographics (age, gender, etc.). You can even combine the two criteria.

Like coupons, discounts can take the form of a flat amount, percentage, free shipping, or any combination:

App Market

Many of Zyro’s more advanced features or integrations can be found on the app market. There are both free and paid apps across a large number of categories:

Each app will have a thorough description with example images. You can install apps to your website with just a click:

Most offer handy tools for an online store. For example, dropshipping capabilities, more shipping options, accounting tools, or marketing features.

Payment Processors

One of Zyro’s most impressive eCommerce features is the fact that it supports over 100 payment processors:

This makes it easy to offer your customers secure and convenient payment options. All the most popular methods are there, like Visa and MasterCard, PayPal, Stripe, etc. You can even set up manual payment methods, like cash on delivery or bank transfers.

Omni-channel Selling

Zyro lets you integrate your store with other online marketplaces. This includes platforms, like Google Shopping, Amazon, and eBay:

Once you set it up, your external sales will be integrated with your Zyro store. Meaning you can still manage your store, inventory, orders, and finances from a single place.

The same goes for selling on Instagram or Facebook.You can also leverage Messenger to chat with customers about potential sales in real-time:

Help & Support

First of all, all Zyro users get access to 24/7 support from its live support team. Support is mostly provided using live chat, although you can contact them via email.

Aside from one-on-one support, Zyro also provides plenty of self-help resources. For example, FAQs, documentation full of step-by-step guides, and an informative blog.

Conveniently, Zyro’s live chat support is built right into the user dashboard. So, whether you’re managing websites or using the drag-and-drop builder, they are just a couple of clicks away. Another thing that’s pretty impressive is that support is available in English, French, Portuguese, and Lithuanian.

You can open the chat dialog by clicking the icon at the bottom of your screen:

Click “Send us a message” and choose your language of choice:

You can use the AI chat prompts to find a help article for your problem:

Or, you can select “Wait for live help” at any time. Usually, it will ask you to leave a message for a support rep.

The first time I contacted support on the weekend it took me about 30min to get a reply. The support agent was apologetic about the delay and overall very friendly and helpful. Devidas answered my question and sent me a lot of relevant help articles:

Inspiration

Summary

There are so many beginner-friendly website builders today. However, we feel that Zyro is still one of the best choices thanks to its great template library, AI tools, powerful eCommerce features, streamlined user interface, and intuitive drag-and-drop page builder. Not to mention that you don’t have to worry about making your website fast or mobile responsive.

It feels like anyone can launch a beautiful, modern website within minutes. And, if you ever do get stuck, you won’t feel lost thanks to all the help resources and 24/7 technical support.

If we had to make any negative remarks about Zyro, it’s that sometimes their tools are too basic. For example, most of the templates are great. But, they are not always as interactive or detailed as we’d like. The results from the AI Logo Maker and Design tools also sometimes fall short in terms of quality.

However, that’s also one of Zyro’s greatest strengths. It usually manages to maintain the perfect balance between powerful features and usability. Zyro is a fantastic option for anyone looking to build flexible websites, whether it’s a blog, portfolio, business site, or online store.

FAQs