You have many choices when it comes time to select a website builder. There are the big guns in the space, such as PCMag Editors’ Choice picks Duda, Gator, and Wix, that dominate through price, flexibility, and functionality. In addition, there are up-and-comer services like Simvoly that differentiate themselves. Simvoly is a modern, capable, and user-friendly website builder, and the team behind it is aggressively adding new features. Simvoly has many tools that cater to professional-level customers, but the website builder still manages to deftly serve novices. It could use more e-commerce and widget options, though.
Pricing and Starting Up
You can try Simvoly for free without a credit card for 14 days, but there’s no permanent free account level like those offered by Duda, Weebly, and Wix, our Editors’ Choice picks. Simvoly’s entry-level Personal account offers one 20-page website site with 10GB traffic monthly, a single custom domain connection for $18 per month ($12 per month with an annual subscription), and 5GB of storage. It also offers a five-product store with up to 25 member accounts. The Business account level, which costs $36 per month ($29 per month with an annual subscription), grants you unlimited pages, 60GB of traffic, five admins, six domain connections, analytics, support, and up to 100 store products.
Upgrading to the Growth plan gets you 200GB of traffic, 21 domain connections, unlimited products and member accounts, and up to 21 admins, all for $69 per month ($59 per month, paid annually). The top level plan is Pro, which is for full-on commercial accounts. For $179 per month ($149 per month annually), you get three websites, unlimited domain connections, 400GB of traffic, 10 admins, and white label service. All plans boast zero-percent transaction fees, and marketing-centric features like A/B testing. Squarespace and Wix don’t charge you either, but in all three cases you still pay a per-transaction fee to the payment-processing service. You can get started building a site using Simvoly without even creating an account until later in the process.
Building Your Site
Simvoly gives you two choices at start of your website-building journey. You can choose a template, as you would in nearly every other site builder, or you can choose Magic Website Wizard. We’ll discuss the non-magical tool first, then provide a section on Magic Website.
Simvoly’s themes use responsive design for good mobile presentation. They’re clean-looking themes that are categorized into nine groups, including Arts, Fashion, Personal Photography, Restaurant, and Services. Online Store templates have their own section. You can preview the responsively designed themes as they’d appear on PCs, tablets, and mobile devices. After you choose a theme, you next need to create an online Simvoly account. This only requires an email, username, and password. The builder page opens pre-populated with content you customize for your site’s needs. To help you do this, a wizard takes you through the basics of adding pages and widgets and modifying overall site settings.
Web Design With Simvoly
Simvoly works just as we expect a modern site builder to work, letting you easily build and customize your pages with drag-and-drop functionality and mouse-over menus. A blue “+” icon in the top right lets you add new Pages to your sites, as does the first item in the floating left rail. The top big button on the left-side toolbar lets you manage and add site pages. When you add a page, you can see and set its URL, choose a template (Home, Contact, About, Blank), password-protect the page, and even specify a custom header. One limitation is that you can’t drag and drop page entries around to change the navigation. You can set any page as the home page, but there’s no nesting pages under others from the Pages menu. You can do this from the Website Settings panel, though adding subpages is less straightforward than in Wix and some other competing services.
As with Squarespace, Simvoly lets you add content in blocks that you access by clicking the on-hover Add Block “+” buttons within the editor. The next button in the left rail is Widgets. These aren’t third-party widgets, they include things like images, text areas, maps, code blocks, and even blank areas. These can be dragged and dropped nearly wherever you want on the editor space. You do have to mess with spacers and separators in order to place elements in the right spot. Whenever your mouse hovers over a block, you see Edit, Move, and Delete buttons. If you click on text, you get all your text-formatting options. You can easily divide your site into up to five columns, each with adjustable width. You can undo your last action, but there isn’t a full multiple-undo capability like that in Duda. A Simvoly contact told me that a History feature is in the works, however.
The next left rail item is Global Styling Settings, a single place to edit the colors, fonts, and sizes of all your content. Then there’s the Funnels item, which are marketing features allowing you to generate customer leads. Then there’s a general settings section, where you can set your Favicon, manage domains, and even add custom code if you’re a web designer.
Overall, Simvoly isn’t as flexible as PageCloud, with its fully WYSIWYG editor, but the ability to move columns gives it slightly more flexibility than a bigger service like Squarespace. There are no third-party widgets however, so if you’re looking for connections like Shopify, Mailchimp, or more, you’d need to look towards another service. Unlike Duda, GoDaddy Websites + Marketing, Squarespace 7.1, and Wix, Simvoly lets you easily switch themes.
Working With Images
Like the better site builders, Simvoly maintains an online repository of photos you’ve uploaded, so that you can reuse them elsewhere on your site. You can upload multiple images at once and create subfolders for organizing them. One missing feature is the ability to use images from online services, such as Flickr or Facebook. You can apply slick animations like slide in, fade in, and zoom to images. You can also resize images (relative to other columns alongside them) on the page by dragging their left or right edges.
One feature that many users will probably want is completely missing, however. There aren’t any kind of photo editing tools. None. You can’t even rotate an image or slightly change it with filters, only select whether or not you want it to stretch to fill the space you put it. Most services we’ve reviewed include an integrated online image editor, such as Aviary. It’s fine to expect people to use installed photo software, but simple stuff like cropping and rotating should be included. Simvoly contacts inform us that photo editing capability is on the company’s roadmap.
Gallery options include grids with text or carousels. You can add them either via drag-and-drop from the toolbar or from the “+” content button that appears when you hover over a content block. The latter offers more preset layout options. With either, you can change image padding and the number of images per row. There’s also a light-box check box, to let your site viewers see a full-window slideshow. This is just about everything most site builders could want.
Video is only via hosted links: Simvoly only hosts still images. Also, aside from some template’s sample photos, you don’t get a selection of stock photography.
Automatic Website Creation
Simvoly’s Magic Website Wizard is a tool that takes you through a few questions to generate a site automatically. You first choose a type such as Business, Personal, Photography, or Portfolio. More types are in development in addition to those four, including Blog/Magazine, Online Store, and Landing Page. After the main category selection, you enter a more specific site purpose. We first chose Business, and then, when entering the more specific type, suggestions dropped down. For example, we typed “cloth” and Sport Clothing and Apparel, Women’s Clothing, and Clothing and Apparel dropped down as suggestions.
Next, you choose how you want the main navigation to look—with the menu across the top or along a side. The wizard proposes a design template, and then it’s time to log in. After this, Simvoly takes you to the site builder interface described in the rest of this article. The Magic Website Wizard’s results are…pretty sparse, and it’s probably a better choice to just pick a template. Magic Website can be a nice little timesaver, but it pales in comparison to Wix’s impressive AI-powered ADI system. With Wix, you simply input your business or personal info, and presto, you get a surprisingly well-designed site. Jimdo’s similar Dolphin tool also takes public web info about your business to create a more targeted site. Zyro features impressive AI builder tools, too.
Site Settings and Options
On the Website Settings tab, you can choose whether you want your site to fill the full width of the browser or stay contained in a fixed box, for which you can choose a background color or image. You can also change the header site navigation menu, and upload a custom favicon, that tiny icon that appears in the browser tab.
Awkwardly, getting a custom domain, which is included with a subscription, requires contacting the Simvoly staff, rather than simply applying online. We also prefer builders to have us fill out a short form of the site or business details, such as name, address, phone number, and contact email. Not doing this is not a deal breaker, but it speeds up the building process. You can also hook up your Simvoly site to a domain you’ve previously registered with another website hosting service.
E-Commerce Options
Selling on Simvoly is easy and powerful. We’re impressed that the site builder lets you sell digital downloads without an account upgrade like some other services require. You can even sell site memberships and subscriptions. As with the blog, your Simvoly site by default includes a Store page, but you can delete it if you’re not selling anything. We ran into a few script errors when editing product description text, but this was an isolated incident that we didn’t see again in later testing.
You can add product variations, enter sale prices, and keep track of inventory with Simvoly’s store engine. And, of course, you can upload an image for every product—multiple images if you like. Product pages come with basic sections that make sense, but you can add any kind of content block you want. You get a few choices of layout and styling. In addition to the full-page shopping cart, there’s a mini-cart that can appear in the top right corner of the browser window.
The two best payment services—PayPal and Stripe—are integrated into the store along with several others. You can enter a bank account routing number so the lucre flows directly into your coffers. It’s also easy to set up shipping costs based on weight or price, but there’s no integration with FedEx, UPS, or USPS. Tax setup could use a little more work, too. As it is, you can add a tax based on the country, but that doesn’t help for the US, where each state has its own sales tax. Fortunately, you only have to collect tax on web sales in states where you have a physical presence, so small proprietors would normally just have to fill in one state’s sales tax rate.
Simvoly has integration with GetResponse and ActiveCampaign for email marketing, both of which PCMag’s Business team rates as Excellent, with four out of five stars. The service offers Mailchimp integration via an app, as well. There’s also now native support for Facebook Pixel ad campaigns, with the ability to track page views and shopping cart activity.
Blogging
Our clothing-site template came with a Blog page. You can only have one blog page per site, but you can add a blog block to any of your pages, using a content block. You get some attractive layout choices. Each post can have a large image to the left, and you can stack posts vertically, or use a trendy masonry-style layout, with elements offset like bricks in a wall, with or without a sidebar. It took a little while to find out how to add a Blog post to our site though; it was under the “News & Updates” page of our template.
Posts should have a photo, quote, or video to bring the reader in, but text-only posts are allowed. The interface gently encourages you to spice up your post with media. You can save a post as a draft for later publishing, or schedule it to publish at a later date or time. Posts must have tags, must fall into categories, and can have comments, which you can approve. Readers can enter their email address in a box on any of your blog pages to get email notifications about new posts.
Publishing
Before publishing your site, you can preview it by pressing a big button with an eye for an icon in the left rail. However, the builder is WYSIWYG, so you may not even need to do this. When you do preview the site, you can see how it looks on tablet and mobile screen sizes, as well as desktop. We don’t like that Simvoly publishes your site live as soon as you start working on it. We prefer the ability to preview and fine-tune before the site goes live. Even the ability to create an Under Construction page would be preferable.
Mobile Site Design
As with most site builders that use responsive page designs, Simvoly automatically spits out websites that look great in mobile browsers. There are buttons in the editor to see your site in desktop, mobile, or tablet views, and you can edit within any view. Simvoly also lets you hide certain sections in mobile and tablet views, which is quite useful. Our test site looked great on an iPhone, and it even included a hamburger menu for handheld operation.
Stats and SEO
Unlike many site builders that leave setting up traffic monitoring to you, Simvoly includes a decent set of site-visit stats on your Dashboard. You can see overall traffic by date range, top pages, and even what devices and browsers are being used to view your site. One thing you don’t get is a breakdown of user stats, such as geographic location or repeat visits. You can hook up a Google Analytics account if you want that level of detail. There isn’t much at all in the way of SEO help, though. You can, however, set the meta title and meta description for each page in its Settings dialog.
Good Customer Support
A question mark button always appears in the lower left corner of the site builder, should you have questions about site building with the service. That button takes you to a rich help library with illustrated walkthroughs of site-building procedures. If you get to a dead end in those resources, Simvoly prompts you to contact support staff through chat or email. Business and E-Commerce level plans get Priority Support, which means you get a response within six hours, though a company rep told us that they reply ASAP. We’ve always been able to get a quick response from Simvoly staff right on the service’s home page chat widget, which anyone visiting simvoly.com can use.
When we sent a request about how to connect a domain registered elsewhere with our Simvoly site at 12:36 p.m., we received an answer from Ivan at Simvoly in six minutes, at 12:42 p.m. The advice was on target, and our site was connected to our outside domain in short order.
Excellent Uptime
Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. If your site is down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services.
We used a website-monitoring tool to track our Simvoly-hosted test site’s uptime over a 14-day period. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings our website and sends an alert if it is unable to contact the site for at least 1 minute. The testing data reveals that Simvoly is remarkably stable; in fact, it didn’t go down once in the two-week testing period. So, you can trust Simvoly to act as a foundation for your website.
Easy, Attractive DIY Websites
Simvoly is far from being a household name in the website-building arena, but it deserves your attention if you’re a non-technical person looking to establish an easy, attractive web presence. It offers responsive-design themes that look good on both desktop and mobile browsers, provides decent selling tools, and has built-in site stats. As a fairly new offering, it still lacks a few niceties like photo editing, onsite domain registration, shipping integrations, and a gallery of third-party widgets, but there’s still a lot to like. Simvoly is highly recommended, but for more mature, fully fledged options in the site-building space, check out Editors’ Choice picks for web builders Duda (for SaaS integration), Gator (for e-commerce), and Wix (for free accounts).
For more on building top-notch websites, check out 10 Easy But Powerful SEO Tips to Boost Traffic to Your Website and The Best Courses for Learning How To Build Websites.
Mike Williams also contributed to this review.
