Jimdo is one of many website builders that have created a space for budding entrepreneurs and visionaries to create something special. Every idea needs a website and for every idea realized, there is a market.
It’s interesting to talk about website builders now because there has been a huge shift. Website builders not only create the perfect site. But a complete eCommerce solution now.
For example, Jimdo offers legal page documentation for your website. You can rely on them for GDPR-compliant-ready documents. This means you can lay some work off your back.
What exactly is Jimdo?
Jimdo is your one-stop shop for designing a website or online store. Jimdo was founded in Germany in 2007. The company claims that over 32 million websites have been built on its platform since then. Jimdo now employs 350 people and is headquartered in Hamburg.
You can use Jimdo to, depending on your plan—
It is a ‘hosted’ solution, which means it runs in your browser. No messy software to deal with on your own computer and no external hosting is required.
Although Jimdo isn’t the biggest fish in the ocean, it is reasonably large. It is a well-established company with a sizable user base. So basically, your website will be in safe hands, you will get frequent quality updates for web design, and no possible prospect of shutting down, killing your website along with it.
So, while Jimdo is a reasonably safe bet, is it a good one? Can it really be used to create a professional website?
Let’s get into the Pros first shall we?
It’s always great to have a free plan when you’re looking to test a service. Jimdo definitely has one and it has all the basic features to get just enough out of it.
A great way to describe Jimdo is its bold design. Things might seem quite simple on the surface. But the website has a smart underlying design direction.
As for features, Jimdo is packed with eCommerce features that sell themselves. If starting an eCommerce business is what you’re into, Jimdo could be your best.
First off the website builder is definitely the highlight. Jimdo has its website builder built right into its hosting service. You can access it from the sidebar.
Jimdo’s website builder uses a block system for adding an element. For example, if you have a sale going on your website and you’d like your visitors to know about it, you can add a block under your navbar and fill it with the right content.
The Design section of the website builder lets you edit the core visuals of your website. The options are not too many but they get the job done. You can edit the color palette. Then change how the buttons look, change fonts, and edit your site’s animation gimmicks.
The marketplace integration is another highlight from Jimdo. This feature automatically integrates with Google listings, Facebook Marketplace, Instagram, and many other platforms to start selling right away.
These tools come in handy when you do not want to deal with an entire branch of procedures. Procedures like signing up and uploading things could be time-crunching. This simple integration fills in all the blanks for you.
Jimdo also has a logo maker built into the hosting service. You can create logos for your website or export them for any external use.
The logo maker itself is easy to use and simple in function. There are 4 sections you can use to craft a logo that sits right with your vision. The choices are limited but allow you to nail down the best version instead of adding much confusion.
Lastly, Jimdo’s legal text generator can create an accurate privacy policy, imprint, and T&C pages that usually require a legally suave writer to understand and implement properly. However, their Trusted Shops Guarantee only avails for EU websites.
Jimdo is aptly feature-packed and could be rightly named as the marketing powerhouse. But loses a few points over its website builder’s template-dependent system.
Jimdo is not short on resources. Therefore, you can test out their services with a free account.
A free account that comes with HTTPS security, free domain, 500 MB storage. You can add up to 5 websites you can run on a 2 GB bandwidth. Not too bad, considering this plan is called ‘Play’, you can play around enough with these features.
The website initially made me accept a simple privacy policy prompt (excluding the daily tips & updates option). I managed to sign in in about less than a minute.
As you can see in the screenshot above, Jimdo has a simple setup page to configure its CMS for you. You can skip this section entirely to get to work on your own but I decided to follow the procedure to the end.
Steps 2 & 3 were pretty basic, mostly involving what kind of website I’m making and the name of the project. I thought up the most generic name that came to my mind. But Jimdo found a local business with my website’s name in London.
This geolocation feature in the setup process is kinda cool.
At last, the setup is done. The entire process has a total of 12 steps. Steps include selecting the theme and adding images from Instagram and Facebook. To be fair, the process is straightforward. It also feels great to have your entire website wrapped in a neat template.
What you see in the screenshot above is Jimdo’s Website Builder. Here you have plenty of options to edit your website as you see fit. However, the website cannot be made live as you will need a domain to do so (which Jimdo has options for).
This is Jimdo’s dashboard. Compared to some other versions I’ve seen, it is visually simplistic.
No graphs or detailed stats to look at on the front page. You can, however, go to Statistics from the sidebar. You can activate this feature and get access to your sales and visitor numbers once you make your site live.
Upon logging in, there are 2 options— Websites and Logos. The Logo Maker is also present here. Maybe you can use this feature as a separate service for any internal or external priorities.
Finally, the logout screen is nothing special. More core settings can be configured here. Your cookies registered email, and profile can be updated or left as is. Jimdo does pry on having a fleshed-out bio in this section of your account.
You can simply log out from the sidebar.
As a simple assessment, Jimdo is easy to use. But that does not tell much. You can navigate fairly easily with the sidebar alone. But some settings can be seen being doubled over right in their sidebar section. This works both for & against Jimdo’s favor.
So Jimdo has decent features. Newcomers can create their website with no issues period.
But the main fight always comes down to performance. Their website lacks any performance details. I had to do some digging by myself. However, Jimdo is no small player and has some mid-large businesses in its portfolio. So there is some merit there.
The above is the published demo website. Made completely with and running on Jimdo. I did not edit too many details and left the website as barebones as possible to get the best result possible. Even if you decide to add more content, the results couldn’t be too far off.
I have used pingdom to test my demo website’s performance before and Jimdo is no different.
The site scores a staggering A grade with 92 considering the additional content. The page is a bit on the heftier size but the performance seems to hold up. Load time could be better but with some extra tweaking, it could reach a favorable spot.
Some additional details reveal a better story.
The website builder seems to take care of a lot of mishaps in the back like no empty image tags, javascript being at the bottom of the script, DOM elements being kept minimum, and no HTTP errors.
But a lack of expired headers is increasing the number of HTTP requests the browser needs to deal with. This increases loading times. Again, nothing some minor tweaking couldn’t fix.
All in all, Jimdo has a decent performance. Not all perfect but the scope is better. Especially when it comes with so many features, there is bound to be some weight on performance.
Okay, so full disclosure: it took a while to find their contact page.
Turns out it was in the corner of the screen the whole time. This isn’t a con by any means but the way the sidebar is integrated into everything is. It makes sense to add the contact page right there but anyways.
So it’s not a page so much as a widget. But a widget is probably more flexible.
There are 2 ways you can reach for help—-
Yes, there is no Live Chat. Live Chat is something that is very popular among hosting services. It works with the nature of the hosting business. Things go wrong all the time and the need for assistance right away could be crucial.
Is it a deal breaker that Jimdo does not have Live Chat?
Not entirely. Live Chat is popular but not essential for a great service.
So it turns out it is an email service. You can select your topic heading and then a subheading. Then add any attachments if you want to be more specific, and simply send your query. Easy enough but seen before a dozen times.
Turns out they were away for the holidays. Who knew that I was working on a holiday!
However, their email system picked up on some keyword queries and delivered an answer. I followed the given steps, and it worked but partially.
I couldn’t find the right way to change the font color manually. The block color change automatically gives the right matching color to the fonts. This is convenient but probably not optimal for someone who wants to try something new.
Next up is the Jimdo Help Center. It is available right in the Need Help? pop-up at the bottom right corner.
This is your FAQ page for queries that can be read and learned without assistance. With a search bar, you can look at a certain topic or simply go through the topics. Topics are arranged in an introductory sequence which is quite intuitive.
Inside a query, there seem to be separate sub-queries within separate sections. For a newcomer, it could look like more work and uninviting but you can get used to it with enough time. I’ve seen many tacky-looking UIs but they barely get the job done.
A good FAQ section only needs to do one thing: answer your question as clearly as possible.
Jimdo definitely has its Help Center figured out. It is filled with questions that you might run into on a daily basis. The answer is written in simple language. It has important points mentioned at the end and a related articles section. It is functional but functional is what it all needs to be.
The customer support section is full of insights into Jimdo as a service. Even though they were away, I felt like I was not left on my own with a keyword-targeted query and a precise FAQ section.
It can’t be all sunshine and rainbows. Bad news needs to be dealt with and Jimdo is not an exception.
Let’s start with the big one: The website builder feels barebones.
Yes, the setup does end up doing most of the heavy lifting for you but leaves out so much as well. For example, the aforementioned font color issue. You cannot change it. Period.
It adjusts automatically from a given selection of block background colors but no other way to do so. Secondly, it works off of a heavy template system. This makes it feel like a template editor rather than a website builder. A template editor could be your thing but you lose features.
The second one is Performance.
My website test yielded good results for sure. But coming back to that page size issue, it could benefit from optimization. The website scores an outright F for expires headers. Again, nothing you couldn’t fix yourself but you could end up looking into it for a while.
The third issue is the website pre-setup.
I don’t know how much hand holding you might like but there is an issue with making things too simple sometimes. The setup goes over so many things that by the time you get to the dashboard, things feel a little too alien.
The setup goes over 12 steps in total with as little input as possible from you.
Jimdo’s theory is to make website creation more accessible or to put “the power of website creation in the hands of ordinary people,” allowing them to share their passions online.
The free plan offered by the Jimdo website builder arguably meets this goal – it’s a pretty fair offer that allows anyone to quickly start building their own website.
When it comes to paid plans, the main reason to use them is cost. The platform allows you to create a fully functional website for $9 per month. This is significantly cheaper than using some competing building solutions, such as GoDaddy or Squarespace.
Finally, if your budget is limited and your requirements are straightforward. Jimdo is well worth a look despite its shortcomings which are a bit hefty but in a fair comparison, don’t overwhelm the pros that make Jimdo an eCommerce powerhouse.
It’s ideal for small businesses that need a basic online presence. If you need an online shop but lack the budget, expertise, or time to deal with more complex systems, Jimdo is adequate.
So are you interested to look into Jimdo? What do you think of its market integration tools? Have you used Jimdo in the past and couldn’t comprehend it?
Whatever your thoughts may be, please let me know in the comments below.
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