Jimdo Review

Developed in Germany in 2007, Jimdo is an easy to use, drag & drop website builder enabling users to quickly build their own website, online store, or blog. To date, more than 20 million sites have been built with Jimdo – making it a household name in the crowded field of website builders.

Jimdo offers a large set of features, tools, and templates tailored to small business owners, freelancers, musicians, photographers, and artists wanting to showcase their products and/or services to an online audience. Its online store builder caters especially to entrepreneurs, online sellers, and growing businesses.

Jimdo offers two types of website builders – a traditional DIY website builder and a platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to build sites, fast. Jimdo Dolphin, as the AI-builder is called, combines AI technology with basic information about your business (answers you provide as well as your business’s current web presence) to create a professional looking website in a matter of minutes.

The following review focuses on Jimdo’s DIY website builder.

Templates

Each of Jimdo’s templates is professionally designed and highly customizable, offering a modern look & feel while being highly functional at the same time.

Jimdo offers 40 templates, with an option to choose from several variations of each of those templates, which means that the total number of templates ready to use runs in the several hundreds. The variations are a great option, offering another way to generate your own unique website design.

Jimdo’s templates are fit for every type of website or online store, but to make your selection easier they are categorized as follows:

• Business
• Personal
• Portfolio
• Store

Jimdo’s Template Filter enables you to narrow the search options based on preferences of how the header, navigation, content area, responsive features and sidebar should look.

If you prefer to build your website using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS code, you can do so by using the ‘Custom Template’ option.

Another option Jimdo offers, is to build a website according to a predefined layout. Predefined layouts are available for a number of different pages (home, about, contact, etc.).

The Editor

After choosing the ‘Build your own website from the ground up’ option, users will automatically be taken to Jimdo’s drag & drop editor to begin building their website.

Jimdo’s website editor is split into the following sections:

Design

Templates: choose from a different variation of your current template or change your template altogether.

Style: Manage colors, fonts and general styles for your site as a whole, or use the ‘Style by element’ feature to individualize each element on the page.

Background: Alter the color of your website’s background.

Custom Template: This advanced option enables you to access the HTML and CSS code of your site, to customize and implement your own design and content.

Additional elements that can be customized directly on the page within the what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor include:

Header: the site header is located at the top of your website, usually consisting of a company logo, along with the company name and a short, catchy title.

Navigation: change the text, style, and orientation (horizontal or vertical) of your navigation menu. The different navigation styles include: breadcrumbs, drop-down, slide-in, and normal.
Content Area: Add or remove text, links, images, video and more.

Sidebar: Available with certain templates – add elements such as quick links to important content, contact us/newsletter sign up, social media links, and more. Despite its name, the sidebar can also be located at the bottom of your site (above the footer).
Footer: add or remove footer links (links at the bottom of a website) and hide or show login links. When building an online store, you can place important links (to product pages, special offers, My Account, etc.) in this area.

Blog

Adding a blog to your Jimdo site is simple. Each new blog post is automatically given a title, date, author name, and a comment field. You can also add the following elements to customize your blog posts:

• Categories
• Date of blog post
• Preview image
• Blog summary
• Custom URLs
• Title tags and meta descriptions (good for SEO)
• Social media sharing options

Jimdo Mobile Apps

Jimdo Creator

With Jimdo’s free ‘Creator’ apps for iOS and Android, users can create a Jimdo website from scratch, edit an existing site, and monitor everything that’s going on on their website while on the go. The mobile functionalities include:

• Create pages, edit content and add images
• Write and publish blog posts
• Check site statistics
• Manage your online store

Jimdo Live Chat

The Jimdo Live Chat app for Android and iOS enables you to chat with customers on your website straight from your mobile device. Offer real-time and personalized support to turn your site visitors into your loyal customers.

Support

Jimdo’s insightful Support Center, offers various ways to learn how to use the website builder and to take full advantage of its features. There, find FAQs, submit a ticket and a multitude of information on accounts, blogging SEO, domains and more. You can find this information in the form of helpful videos, blog posts and how-to guides.

Search Engine Optimization

Jimdo’s website builder comes equipped with a variety of SEO tools. Although not as impressive an SEO toolset as those offered by Wix or Squarespace, Jimdo offers all the SEO basics, including:

• Submit your site to the Google Index
• Connect your site to Google Search Console
• Page titles and meta descriptions
• Custom URLs
• Robot meta tags (noindex, nofollow, and noarchive)

Hosting/Domain

With the purchase of any Jimdo plan, you will receive a free domain for the first year. If you’ve previously purchased a domain, you can connect that to your Jimdo site free of charge.

The following domain extensions are included in the ‘first year free’ domain offer:

.com, .net, .org, .info, .de, .at, .ch, .es, .it, .fr, .nl

After the first year, the renewal charge for a domain through Jimdo is $20/year.

All of Jimdo’s website plans include hosting services for free – storage and bandwidth space are explained per-plan in the Pricing section below.

Pricing/Plans

Jimdo offers four premium plans that range in price from $9 to $39 a month.

Below are the specs of each of Jimdo’s premium plans:

Jimdo also offers a free account that includes:

• A Jimdo subdomain (https://[sitename].jimdofree.com or https://{sitename].jimdosite.com) – depending if you create the site with the website builder, or with Jimdo’s AI tool.
• 500MB storage
• 2GB bandwidth
• 5 website pages
• HTTPS encryption

Here’s a rundown of the features in Jimdo’s most popular plan, ‘Grow’. For $15 a month, users can:

• Create password-protected areas
• Enjoy 15GB storage and 20GB bandwidth
• Access professional-looking templates
• Enable HTTPS encryption
• Create photo galleries
• Make contact forms
• Make files available for download
• Earn a free domain for a year

You can pay for your Jimdo account with a Visa, MasterCard, Amex or PayPal.

Integrations

Jimdo offers an abundance of integrations with a range of online tools to help you manage and grow your business. The following table lists some of Jimdo’s key integrations:

Future Considerations

One thing that sets Jimdo apart from most of its competitors is the option to change the website’s template whenever you want without losing important content.

You should, however, consider that Jimdo’s live support options are very limited. The company does not provide support by phone or live chat, which basically means it will likely take a few hours to receive a response, even for the most pressing of issues.