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Sometimes you don’t have the time or patience to build a website from scratch. Thankfully, a website builder lets you create a personal or lightweight business site without much fuss. With Hostinger Website Builder (formerly known as Zyro) you can build attractive and functional pages, and create e-commerce shops, but it also has a few standout features—including a copy generator and a logo-building tool—that remove much of the need for professional assistance. Unfortunately, Hostinger doesn’t let you switch templates, and it isn’t quite as feature-rich as Duda, Gator, or Wix, our Editors’ Choice picks for website builders. Still, Hostinger Website Builder gets the job done, is regularly improving, and doesn’t cost much money, either.
(Credit: Hostinger)
Hostinger Website Builder Plans and Prices
Zyro was always a Hostinger product. The rebrand to Hostinger Website Builder just makes that connection more apparent. The company says all of its efforts will go toward this website builder from now on. Hostinger Website Builder comes integrated into all existing Hostinger Web Hosting plans for no additional cost. If you’re used to Zyro don’t worry, as this is basically the same product.
Hostinger Website Builder has consolidated its plans into an all-in-one premium tier called Website Builder and Web Hosting. Hostinger offers frequent discounts, but the base price is $12.49 per month. The package covers both personal and e-commerce website building needs. Customers get a free domain, 100 email addresses, and can create up to 100 web sites. Bandwidth and storage are both unlimited, and you get unlimited free SSL certificates alongside your included web hosting.
Zyro initially launched without e-commerce features, but that’s not the case with Hostinger Website Builder. The store supports up to 500 products (digital or physical) and supports more than 20 payment options. You can manage your inventory and orders, as well as book clients and schedule appointments. Likewise, you can leverage integrated marketing features, such as Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel.
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This plan is solid, but Editors’ Choice pick Wix has a wider range of business-friendly packages. For example, its Business Basic tier (starting at $27 per month) has 50GB of storage, unlimited monthly data transfers, shipping options, the ability to accept online payments, and a free SSL certificate. Wix’s multiple plans scale up to the top-tier Enterprise level, starting at $500 per month, that offers custom hosting solutions. Wix even satisfies as a free website builder.
Building a Hostinger Website
Getting started is a simple affair. Hostinger tasks you with selecting a site template and creating an account. You can also start from scratch, or make a handful of choices and let the AI algorithm generate the rest. The templates come in many attractive, genre-based styles, such as Photography, Product Page, Startup Company, and Wedding Invitation. Hostinger lets you preview how the template looks on desktop, tablet, or smartphone before you have to make a decision, which is a nice touch.
After you click Start Building to confirm the template selection, Hostinger initiates a short, five-step website-builder walkthrough that highlights important UI areas. If you don’t want a default URL there is an option to upgrade to a custom domain name. You can either transfer a previously purchased domain name or buy one from Hostinger.
Hostinger has more than 130 beautiful templates that serve as the anchor on your website-building journey. That’s a lot of templates, but Wix has more than 800. Hostinger’s templates are minimalist affairs that lean on clean, simple designs that you can change and shift around to suit your needs. Select templates now feature more dynamic smart layout options, not bound by restrictive grids.
Hostinger’s templates adhere to the responsive design principle, meaning that your site resizes itself to look good on desktop or mobile screens. Like Wix, Hostinger has a drawback not found in some competitors, such as Simvoly, Squarespace, and Weebly, that also use strict responsive designs: You cannot switch templates once you’ve selected one. So, if you want to overhaul your website’s overall visual appearance in one step, you must create an entirely new site and transfer the content to it. That’s a drag if you want to overhaul your site’s look. You can move your site over to another Hostinger account, though.
(Credit: Hostinger)
Hostinger excels at site construction. Its drag-and-drop, grid-based interface is easy to use, and doesn’t get in the way as you add text, video, and other content. You can add maps, a contact form, or newsletter subscription functionality to your site. A dedicated icon lets you quickly duplicate a section if, say, you need another photo row. Hostinger autosaves every few seconds, so you don’t have to worry about losing content should your cat knock your laptop off a table. A handy interface-wide Undo icon lets you quickly revert your site to a previous state. Sites also support multiple languages.
It’s equally simple to add text and SEO-friendly descriptions to uploaded images and resize photos by dragging their corners. Hostinger has a decent-size, royalty-free photo library, so you needn’t worry about where to obtain images for your site. You can only upload photos one at a time, but uploaded images are saved in a repository. Hostinger has more photo editing options than it did in the past. Removing backgrounds, resizing, cropping and upscaling can really clean up existing images. That said, the editor is still pretty basic. If you want more robust photo editing options, you’ll have to wait for a future Hostinger update or do that outside of Hostinger. That is a shame, as many website builders these days offer image editors.
Hostinger’s free, mobile-friendly logo maker lets you pull shapes and icons from the company’s image library onto a canvas. There, you can apply text and tweak the image and word positioning. Once you’ve created a logo, the image can be saved and downloaded as a PNG file. Naturally, this Frankensteinian cobbling doesn’t compete with a flesh-and-blood designer, but it gets the job done on the cheap.
In addition, you can leverage the Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Hotjar, and Messenger Live Chat analytics and communication tools to better understand your website visitors.
Mobile Design and Blogging
Hostinger’s auto-generated responsive mobile sites look terrific on smaller devices. In fact, when you’re in the desktop site editor, you can click the mobile icon to switch to the mobile editing view.
Like Wix, Hostinger gives you the option of editing the mobile view if you’re not happy with what it automatically produces. Though Hostinger lets you tweak the interface color and enable gaps between grid items, it lacks some of Wix’s functionality. Wix, for example, lets you add a Mobile Action Bar, so that visitors can email or call you with a tap of a finger.
Wix also offers mobile apps that let you upload photos from your smartphone, though you can’t actually create and edit sites from the app (Jimdo and Weebly include this functionality). Hostinger lacks mobile site-building apps.
Hostinger’s simple blogging tool lets you craft posts. It’s not as robust or intuitive as Bluehost or Wix content management systems, but it has improved, with more categories and social sharing features. People accustomed to using WordPress may find it odd that they must add individual text and image sections within a post, instead of simply typing words and plopping in images. Still, the Editor Mode makes editing and navigating slightly more seamless. You can also schedule posts, as you can using Wix. The otherwise excellent Gator lacks blog-scheduling capabilities.
E-Commerce Features
Hostinger’s e-commerce tools offer many money-making opportunities. With those options, you can create a store that supports one of more than a dozen languages, and have it generate automatic shipping estimates based on customers’ IP addresses, perform real-time shipment tracking, offer discounts, and enable favorites or wish lists. The store front’s WYSIWYG editor lets you create media-rich, HTML product descriptions, too. Businesses can also let customers book appointments on their site.
Accepting payments is a big part of e-commerce, so Hostinger gives you many ways to do just that. Customers can pay for goods using PayPal, Stripe, 2Checkout, and dozens of other options. You can’t sell paid subscriptions, as you can with Duda, but customers can book appointments with your business through your site.
(Credit: Hostinger)
Let the Bots Do the Job
AI Writer is a cool tool that lets you create site copy without needing to write many words. Here’s how it works. You select one of 14 top-level topics, such as Music & Entertainment or Small Business, and then click a topic specific-category, such as Concert or Interior Design. Since our last review, Hostinger added a few more categories, including Gaming. After taking those steps, you decide if you’re crafting copy for either your site’s Personal/Bio or About pages. Clicking the Generate icon spits out a surprisingly legible paragraph you can tweak to your liking.
Hostinger includes Blog Title Generator, Business Name Generator, and Slogan Generator tools, too. These work in a similar fashion as AI Writer, in that you select topics and click an icon to generate a name or slogan. You can, of course, tweak them to your liking. They’re extremely useful during those moments when you cannot think of blog ideas, business names, or slogans on your own.
AI Heatmap is another cool tool that Hostinger has in its bag of tricks. After you upload an image of your website to AI Heatmap, it predicts how visitors see and navigate your website, and what they focus on the most. This encourages you to arrange the elements of your website in a way that maximizes conversion, based on color-coded markers.
(Credit: Hostinger)
Excellent Uptime
Website uptime is a vital element of web hosting. If your site goes down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services. It’s in your best interest to find a reliable web host that can keep your site up and running. Otherwise, customers may go elsewhere—and they might never come back.
To evaluate reliability, we use a website-monitoring tool to track our test site’s uptime over a two-week period. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings the website and sends an email if it is unable to contact the site for at least one minute. The testing revealed that Hostinger was incredibly stable during the observation period. In fact, it didn’t go down once. You can count on Hostinger to be a rock-solid foundation for your website.
Customer Support
You can reach Hostinger’s 24/7 customer support team by clicking the chat box icon located in the bottom-right section of the interface. Once you have the chat open, you can key a term into its integrated search field to scour Hostinger’s knowledge database for answers to your question. We found answers to two of our questions in the knowledge database.
Otherwise, you can chat with the human representatives (not bots) that field the chat queries. Please note that you must be logged into a Hostinger account to access the chat. Hostinger gives you the option to email your questions, too. Hostinger offers a 30-day, money-back guarantee with each plan.
5 Things You Need to Know About Web Hosting
No Longer Zyro, Still Not a Zero
Zyro steadily evolved into a high-quality website-building service thanks to its e-commerce, AI-powered tools, and a flexible, easy-to-use editor. Even with the new name, Hostinger Website Builder maintains that high quality. Still, its integrations and template selections aren’t as deep as the competition’s offerings, and the free website option is no more. Hostinger itself says it values ease of use over sophistication, and its steady improvements make it great for users who feel the same way. That said, if you want a website builder with more power and business-friendly flexibility, check out our Editors’ Choice picks. Wix offers a useful, free tier; Gator has strong e-commerce tools; and Duda integrates well with SaaS platforms.
For more on getting started building your site, read our primer, How to Build a Website. You should also check out 10 Easy But Powerful SEO Tips to Boost Traffic to Your Website.
Mike Williams also contributed to this review.
4.0
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Hostinger’s DIY website builder features an excellent interface and unique, powerful tools that give you a lot of control over your online presence. It lacks a free option, but the service is great for small businesses looking to set up shop online.
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Source link : https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/zyro-website-builder