Every business needs a website. It doesn’t always need to be fancy, but customers expect any business—from agencies to barbershops and everything in between—to have a web presence. If you’re struggling to whip up an effective website or online store, that’s where Jimdo comes in. It’s an incredibly simple site builder aimed at small business owners that want to spin up a great-looking home on the web in mere hours.
Jimdo Compared to the Best Website Builders
Jimdo isn’t the most robust website builder out there, but it does a good job with the basics and makes it incredibly easy for anyone to build a website. However, it doesn’t offer the same range of capability as some of our top picks for the best website building platforms. Check out a few alternatives below if Jimdo is too basic for your needs.
Squarespace offers some of the best-looking site templates you’ll find and deeper functionality, albeit with a slightly tougher learning curve. Get started on a 14-day free trial.
Wix is a versatile, well-rounded site building tool with strong ecommerce offerings and a wide array of integrations to enhance your website’s capabilities. Start on any Wix plan and scale up as your site grows.
Weebly has the best free website builder you’ll find, allowing you to build and launch your own website without paying a dime. Sign up for a free Weebly plan today.
WordPress is the workhorse of the web and WordPress.com lets you access the power of this site platform in a beginner-friendly drag-and-drop builder. Start today for free and upgrade as needed.
Jimdo: The Good and the Bad
Jimdo is great for building basic websites. That’s both the good and the bad of this site builder—while incredibly easy and fast to use, you’re going to be limited in terms of both design options and ways to take your site to the next level. Let’s delve into the virtues and flaws of Jimdo in detail.
What Jimdo Is Good At
If you’re looking for a website builder that contains all the essential features you expect and makes it as easy as possible to get started, Jimdo rises to the occasion. Everything is streamlined to create the quickest path to spinning up a new website, and you have access to other helpful tools to support your business’ new online presence.
Build a simple website in no time
In this fast, modern era of business, who has the time or technical skills to build a website from scratch? Jimdo is designed for busy folks who want a professional-looking website without having to learn web development or spend days messing around with design elements.
Create a site in just a couple of hours without having to touch any code. Jimdo offers dozens of templates to get your design off the ground quickly. Simply choose one you like, customize the colors and fonts to match your brand, add your logo and site content, and it’s ready to go live.
The Jimdo interface is incredibly easy on site-building beginners. You can seamlessly switch between editing pages and modifying the overall site design, plus it’s a cinch to add new pages and update content with the built-in CMS.
Since all Jimdo templates are mobile-responsive, your website will look fantastic on phones and tablets without you having to change any settings.
On top of that, Jimdo provides a free SSL certificate for security and a free custom domain for the first year (when you opt for any paid plan). Some competitors charge extra for these valuable features.
If you want a hassle-free way to create an appealing website for your small business, Jimdo is the way to go.
Capability to inject and edit code
Most Jimdo users are going to choose the easiest path for site creation, avoiding any coding in favor of its WYSIWYG builder.
But, if you have some coding capability, Jimdo allows you to leverage that skill for deeper customization of its templates.
Via HTML or CSS, you can edit the underlying code of each page of your Jimdo site. Start with one of the templates, then tweak it to your liking in the clean interface of the code editor. Transform a cookie-cutter template into something that’s truly your own.
Better yet, you can easily toggle between using the code editor and the visual editor. We found it convenient to make broad site changes by editing lines of code, then hopping back into the visual editor to hone the style and placement of elements like images and text boxes.
This is the way that Jimdo gives you full creative freedom and control over every aspect of site design and functionality. Not every Jimdo user will need or utilize this, but the ones that do will appreciate the level of customization this affords them.
AI-assisted onboarding
Jimdo starts your initial setup by asking if you prefer building your site using code or its visual editor. If you select the no-code website building option, you’ll benefit from an incredibly helpful onboarding process.
An AI-powered tool will ask you questions to make the process of designing and building your site even faster.
Start by answering whether the website is for yourself or your organization, then choose its purpose, whether it’s a personal blog, small business homepage, or online portfolio, among other options.
Assuming you opt for a small business site, you’ll then supply the AI wizard with your company name, industry, site goals, and other details. This helps the assistant start populating the site with relevant content. It will even connect to your social media profiles to gain additional context, if you’d like it to.
From there, the AI really goes to work, offering options for site style, color palettes, additional pages (like a “Contact Us” section or a terms and conditions page), and templates to define the rest of the design.
We found the suggestions supplied by Jimdo’s AI assistant to be quite appealing and relevant to our inputs.
Once you’ve worked through the questions and selected the starting template, you’re taken to the drag-and-drop editor to finish customizing and polishing your site. As we mentioned above, the builder sports a clean interface that makes it a breeze to put the final touches on your pages.
All in all, Jimdo’s AI onboarding wizard makes an already easy process even faster and more hands-off.
Connect your site to your social profiles
Successful business owners know that it’s not just about your website these days. Social media is important for connecting with customers, establishing a trustworthy presence, and building social proof of your value.
Jimdo makes it simple to sync your website with existing social profiles. During onboarding, the AI assistant will suggest linking your Facebook and Instagram accounts. Connecting them allows you to easily import content and information from those profiles to populate your new website, jumpstarting the creation process.
This platform looks for any opportunity to recommend social media integration when it can help. Even after your initial site build, you’ll get prompts to link and pull from your connected accounts when you’re building new pages, modifying existing content, or looking to add new visual elements.
Once your site is live, you can utilize Jimdo’s Business Listings feature to sync key information like your address, phone number, and business hours across multiple platforms, including Google Business. When you need to update any listing, you can push the changes to all connected platforms with just one click.
Image procurement and adjustment
Imagery is so important for engaging your website visitors. With Jimdo, you have several excellent options for effortlessly incorporating images into your site.
You can upload your own photos directly within Jimdo’s site editor. It provides handy tools to crop and rotate images, apply filters, adjust color and lighting, and more.
Jimdo also gives you access to a library of professional stock photos. You can browse categories that are relevant to your industry, removing the need to sift through images you’ll never use.
And, as we just covered, you also can directly import images from your connected social media accounts, like Facebook, Instagram, and Google Business.
Jimdo offers a lot of flexibility in terms of sourcing images and plenty of control over how they look on your site. You don’t need to be a designer to leverage visuals on your site effectively.
Built-in analytics
It’s essential to understand how people find and interact with your website. Within Jimdo’s dashboard, you can access data on total site visits, unique visitors, engagement, sources of site traffic, and your site’s top performing pages.
See trends in easy-to-understand graphs and charts. Learn where the bulk of your visitors are coming from to focus your content and marketing efforts accordingly. Highlight underperforming pages that need further work and optimization.
With the information Jimdo provides you, you can get a website started quickly and continually improve upon it over time, armed with actionable data.
If you opted to create an online store with Jimdo, you’ll get access to additional statistics like revenue, number of products sold, total orders, and popular products. This provides tremendous insight into your sales performance and can generate ideas for redesigning your site around what’s selling.
On top of its built-in reporting, Jimdo makes it easy to connect your site to Google Analytics and Instagram Insights to view your website traffic, audience demographics, followers, and more through an even wider lens.
Logo creator
Crafting the perfect logo from scratch can be tricky, especially if you don’t have graphic design skills. That’s why Jimdo offers an intuitive Logo Creator tool to help any small business establish the visual representation of their brand identity.
Within minutes, you can have a customized logo ready to use.
All you need to do is enter your business name to kick things off. Next, the Logo Creator gives you various starting points for the design, like a simple typographic layout or more intricate illustrated elements.
Choose one you like as a base before getting to the really fun part—tailoring this design to truly make it your own. Tweak image elements, rearrange text placement, experiment with different color palettes, modify fonts, and more.
Once finalized, you can download your logo as a PNG for use both on your website and elsewhere, either online or in print materials.
We found it surprisingly easy to create something that looked professional with minimal effort. This tool makes it easy for business owners to do their own logo design without spending a lot of time (or money) to get it right.
Simple ecommerce support
Jimdo offers plans for both standard websites and online stores. If you go the ecommerce route, you still get access to the same easy-to-use site builder, but you unlock a lot more capability.
Adding products is a breeze and Jimdo lets you set up product variants, discounts, return processes, and more. You get access to multiple payment options beyond credit cards (such as PayPal), a local pickup feature so nearby customers can order online and grab their orders from your physical storefront, and basic inventory and order management.
Best of all, Jimdo doesn’t charge any processing fees. You keep 100% of the revenue from your online sales, which is something that you won’t find with many other ecommerce platforms.
Jimdo also automatically generates the necessary legal text for your terms and conditions page, return policy, and privacy policy. There’s no need to start from scratch on these important details, which is a huge time-saver.
Jimdo’s Potential Drawbacks
This provider is great at giving users a clear, easy, and fast path to spinning up a new website. However, there are some issues with Jimdo accounts and the platform’s inherent limitations that you should carefully consider before committing to using it.
Hard to cancel
While using the free version of Jimdo, we came across concerning reports about the difficulty of canceling paid subscriptions. This seems to be a common pain point in user reviews we found during research.
Many users say Jimdo does not send advance renewal notices before your subscription is set to auto-renew. This makes it easy to miss your window for cancellation, which can lead to you getting billed for another year of service you don’t want.
And, once a plan has been renewed, Jimdo apparently does not offer refunds (full or partial) if you try to cancel immediately after the renewal date. You’re stuck paying for the full year, even if the renewal was unintentional.
Making matters worse, customers have reported poor experiences when contacting Jimdo’s support team to request cancellations. Response times are slow and agents seem unable or unwilling to help cancel accounts. Several user reviews expressed feeling trapped into paying for Jimdo against their wishes.
While Jimdo offers excellent site building capabilities, these concerning reports are red flags for small business owners. Caution seems warranted if you choose to use Jimdo’s paid tiers. Be sure to carefully monitor renewal dates and prepare for resistance if you need to cancel.
Limited, stale templates
When using Jimdo to create websites, one limitation we noticed was the relatively small number of templates available. In total, you’re looking at about 100 different options across various categories like business, portfolio, blog, and others.
While the library of templates covers the basics, the selection feels a bit thin compared to some competitors.
The template options feel a bit dated and tend to look and feel very similar. When experimenting with sites for different industries, we found it difficult to make each one feel distinct from each other. The templates dictate so much of the layout, styling, and branding that customization feels minimal.
If you know HTML and CSS, you can overcome these constraints by modifying the code or building your own Jimdo site from scratch.
But, most users are coming to Jimdo for the no-code editor. And that means they’ll have less freedom in customizing their sites to stand out from the rest of the crowd. As with many other basic site builders, that’s the unfortunate trade-off when choosing a fast and easy website creation platform.
Difficulty scaling up
Small businesses that want to create a simple site will be happy with Jimdo, at least at first. It lacks some key features needed for growth and scalability. That means ambitious businesses may quickly outgrow Jimdo.
The SEO capabilities included on Jimdo plans are fairly basic. The platform handles technical optimization like meta tags and sitemaps, but lacks tools for maximizing search visibility and ranking. This makes organic growth challenging.
Blogging functionality is also limited, as there’s no option for bringing multiple contributors into the platform. If you have a content marketing person on your team, for example, this makes it more difficult for them to update and add new content than it needs to be.
Embedding blog content on other website’s pages isn’t straightforward, either, making it tougher to promote your content far and wide.
On the ecommerce front, Jimdo ticks a lot of the essential boxes but misses out on key features for getting serious about online selling.
The built-in payment options are minimal, and integrating a preferred payment provider requires expensive upgrades. Larger product catalogs and advanced order management capabilities are difficult to handle natively in Jimdo, as well.
One more big issue, related to the first drawback about difficult cancellation, is that you can’t freely export content from Jimdo sites. This makes migrating to a new platform down the road incredibly challenging if you outgrow or become frustrated with Jimdo.
Jimdo Plans and Pricing
Jimdo offers two different forms of its site creation platform. There’s a traditional website builder for sites of any purpose with three different plans on offer and a dedicated couplet of plans for ecommerce sites. There’s also a very useful add-on that’s worth considering when you sign up for a Jimdo plan, which we’ll discuss separately.
Website
Jimdo offers three tiers for its standard site builder, including a free plan. Paid plans offer beneficial features and higher allotments for key resources.
It starts with the free-forever Play plan. For no expense at all, you get 500 MB of site storage and 2 GB of monthly bandwidth. On this plan, you get the core features of the Jimdo site builder:
- HTTPS security
- Mobile optimization
- Access to the image library
- Contact forms
There are a couple key limitations to be mindful of. For one thing, you’re only allowed up to five pages on your free Jimdo site. Another potential drawback is that this plan requires your site to use a Jimdo subdomain. You can’t connect it to a custom domain that’s easier for visitors to share and remember.
On top of that, the free Jimdo plan places ads on your website, which doesn’t leave a professional impression on visitors.
Paid plans remove a lot of those limitations. The Start plan ($9 per month) unlocks all of Jimdo’s features, including advanced SEO, site statistics, and the ability to connect a custom domain. Storage increases to 5 GB and monthly bandwidth expands to 10 GB on this plan. You also can create up to 10 pages on this plan.
For truly unfettered site-building capability, Jimdo’s Grow plan costs $14 per month and expands your allotments even further. You get 15 GB of storage to utilize, 20 GB of bandwidth per month, and the ability to create a whopping 50 pages on your website.
You’re also getting faster support from the team at Jimdo. Support requests and tickets tend to get a response within four hours on the Grow plan, instead of one to two business days for users of the Start plan.
New Jimdo users can always start on the free plan to initially build out their website, then upgrade to a paid tier when their needs expand or their site’s traffic grows.
Online Store
Jimdo has two dedicated plans for building online stores, with the higher-priced one unlocking a few key benefits.
Both options deliver a solid set of core ecommerce features, including:
- A free, custom domain name for one year
- HTTPS security
- Support for payments via credit card and PayPal
- No transaction fees
- Product variants
- Discounts
- Social selling
- All site features from the Grow plan for basic websites
The entry-level Business plan is $18 per month and gives you a site setup with 15 GB of storage and 20 GB of monthly bandwidth. You can have up to 50 pages on this ecommerce site and you can have up to 100 different products listed for sale on your online store.
But the VIP plan only costs a little bit more—$24 per month—and unlocks some really unique benefits.
For one, all restrictions are removed. Storage and bandwidth are functionally unlimited and you’re allowed to add as many pages to your ecommerce site as you want. That’s a huge bonus for online businesses with serious growth in mind.
In addition, you get a much higher level of assistance from Jimdo. Not only do you get priority support that will respond to requests and issues within an hour, but you also can tap into the minds of Jimdo’s design experts, who can analyze your online store design and provide you with feedback and pointers for optimizing it.
Better still, this is the only Jimdo plan that includes the Business Listings add-on free of charge. Let’s dissect what this extra tool from Jimdo can offer you and your website.
Business Listings
For any Jimdo plan that isn’t the VIP Online Store tier, users can add on the Business Listings feature for an extra $4 per month.
Business Listings enables you to connect and sync your Jimdo website with your existing online profiles, including Facebook, Instagram, and Google Business.
This makes it easy to push website updates like new products, hours, and locations across all your connected profiles instantly. You can update once in Jimdo, and the changes get automatically applied everywhere.
Business Listings also allows you to showcase social media content like Instagram photos and Facebook posts on your Jimdo site, bringing all of your brand’s digital properties together. Place social media buttons on your Jimdo site to drive traffic back to those profiles.
With this add-on, your site and social pages work together harmoniously. And online stores can leverage this tool to boost your social selling capabilities across all channels.
Final Thoughts
Jimdo is a solid site builder for small business owners who just need the basics in an easy-to-use platform. It represents one of the quickest paths to spinning up a new website, but it has plenty of limitations that keep it from rising to the level of some of its more notable competitors. Scaling can be difficult on this platform (as can canceling your monthly plan), but users with simple needs can benefit from the stress-free process of building on Jimdo.
