In the early days of the internet, you couldn’t build a website without lots and lots of code. These days, there are dozens of easy website builders like Ucraft ready to help you get your web presence online—without the need for coding. This service lets you build a beautiful, modern, mobile-friendly site, but its interface is less intuitive than competitors’ and it lacks basic photo editing and built-in traffic reporting.

There are two camps of site builder: Those that give you freedom of design (like Wix), and those that are highly restrictive in element placement (like Yahoo Small Business Websites) in an attempt to make mobile presentation easier. In the middle are services like Gator ($82.94 for Two-Year Starter Plan at HostGator)(Opens in a new window) and PageCloud, which try to strike a balance between these two approaches. Ucraft positions itself in this third camp, though truthfully it leans more towards the restrictive end.

Pricing and Starting Up

You get started with your Ucraft site by signing up for an account, which only requires a name, email (with verification), and password. You can start with a free account, which includes Ucraft branding, an SSL certificate, and limited customization. You can connect a domain name you own to a free account, which is unusual—most site builders only allow that for paid tiers. Unlike Wix, Ucraft puts lots of limits on free site design options, and you can only create one per account.

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Paid accounts start at $10 per month (paid annually) for the Pro Website level, which removes Ucraft branding, includes a custom domain name, lets you sell up to 50 products online, and offers all the service’s site customization options. It also adds 24/7 support via web chat. The Pro Shop level ($21 per month) increases product ceiling to 1,000 and adds more store features. Finally, the BigCommerce plan ($39 per month) lets you sell unlimited products and adds eBay, Facebook, and Yandex integrations. You can get a 14-day free trial of any of the paid plans, no credit card required. Be careful of this option, though: Once the 14-day trial expires, there’s no way to convert a site you’ve spent time building to a paid, permanent site account.

Ucraft’s pricing is pretty much in the standard ballpark of site builder pricing. For comparison, Wix starts at $13 per month and goes up to $39 for its top business offering; Squarespace ($12 Per Month (Billed Annually) – Personal Plan at Squarespace)(Opens in a new window) charges $12 to $40; but Gator is just $4.99 to $12.49, billed monthly, with discounts for longer terms.

Web Design With Ucraft

As with just about every other DIY online site builder, you get started by selecting a template. The designs are stylish, many of which feature full-page images with little in the way of navigation. For my test site, I chose Soul Kitchen for my test site. Once you choose a template, you need to decide on a domain for your site address. The free sites get domains in the form yoursitename.ucraft.net.

After that’s sorted out, you see the actual site builder, and a big Start Crafting button. The process is helpfully broken down into steps, with a percent completion shown in the Progress tab. Steps include Add Your Logo, Update Site Settings, Edit Your Content, and Play With Colors. A wordless video shows you how to edit your site by adding Blocks and Elements.

Customize the Template. Starting my testing with a free account (I always start here), I quickly found that most of the customization, including most blocks, is not available to free accounts. That’s unfortunate; other services like Wix and Weebly (Start for Free at Weebly)(Opens in a new window) offer nearly all design options aside from commerce and large storage and bandwidth options. On a couple attempts at creating free sites, I ended up with a blank white site, even after trying to change templates. I quickly moved on to testing the paid service.

Elements include all the usual suspects: Images, galleries, titles, paragraphs, videos, icons, logos, buttons, and social buttons. I like that there’s a search within the Elements panel. Most elements let you add hover and load effects, like slide-ins and reveals. One helpful differentiator is Ucraft’s logo builder. Businesses without the resources for professional designs services will appreciate this tool, but it’s pretty basic, with a smattering of text, icon, and shape options.

Placing Elements. The interface takes a little getting used to. The elements are indeed drag-and-drop, but you’re limited as to how and where you can place them on the page. For example, when I dragged a photo onto a page, it could only take up the full page width. And it’s not as intuitive as other site builders: At first I couldn’t figure out how to drag one image next to another. Then a help-chat rep explained to me that I actually could drag slowly until a vertical divider appeared. There’s no Element for this (vertical divider) as others offer, though.

Sometimes when I dragged a Block onto a page, I couldn’t see where it landed until I scrolled down. After dragging a button onto my site, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I could change an inserted block into a different block type and arrow through several types, which seems odd. I am, however, impressed that the site builder took over the mouse right-click function to give you site-editing options such as item alignment: Some services aren’t smart enough to do this, and instead just show the browser’s right-click commands.

Separate from the building page is the Designer Tools page, where you adjust title fonts (I only saw ten options), change some layout options (though I didn’t see multicolumn options), and design a form in UiKit. The Layout options let you adjust space between elements and blocks vertically, but not horizontally. A new Blank Space element that arrived during my review process also is limited to adding full-page width horizontal space. The only way to get multiple columns is to choose a preexisting one from the Block choices. There is no way to add or remove columns from those preexisting ones in the Block.

Text editing. Double-clicking on text lets you change the font (again, only 10 fonts were available for my site), color (a full color picker) for the text and background. You can choose a size using the HTML codes like P, H1, H2, and so on; or you can increase and decrease in EM measurements. The Undo button (or Ctrl-Z) lets you revert text operations, but doesn’t cover everything you do on the site builder. In fact, I could only get it to undo three operations, and when I moved to another element and made edits, I could no longer undo earlier changes to different elements.

Images and Video. I’ve already discussed placement of image elements, but where do you get the images in the first place? You can upload multiple JPGs from your PC or choose from a decent, searchable selection of free stock photography from Unsplash(Opens in a new window). Ucraft helpfully saves all your uploaded photos so you can reuse them elsewhere on the site (but not on any other Ucraft sites you may have). It doesn’t save videos: Your options for video embedding are Vimeo and YouTube, but not Facebook videos or OneDrive. You can’t upload video files and have Ucraft store them in your online repository, as you can with Wix.

There are no built-in photo editing tools to help you tweak things like the brightness, contrast, and color saturation of your images. You can crop and choose some load animations, but I am disappointed that you can’t rotate an image; one I uploaded from my iPhone appeared upside down in testing.

Gallery options are decent: You can choose grid or masonry layouts, number of column, padding, and blur. When the site viewer clicks on a gallery image, they get a slideshow view with a black background, which works well. You can add titles, tags, and the slide-in effects mentioned earlier.

Working With Pages. Ucraft offers good options for adding pages to your site. You start doing so from the Dashboard’s Pages button. There are choices for Main pages (Home, Shop, About) and Secondary pages (Privacy Policy, Terms), and System pages (404, sign in, offline). The tiles representing existing pages have plus signs to the side and below. If you click on this, you get options for blank page, anchor, and more (see screenshot).

The template you chose determines what pages are included in your site. Of course you can add to and delete these, but you don’t see page types like Blog or Store when you add a page. You can, however, duplicate a template page of those types. You can also password-protect any page individually.

Using the plus sign to add a page below an existing page places it below that page in the navigation. Most side builders let you drag and drop to move pages around in the nav. You can do this in Ucraft, but you have to drag the subpage right onto the page you want it to hang off, rather than below it.

Making Money From Your Site

Free accounts are restricted from any commerce at all. As with Weebly, even putting a single PayPal button on your site requires upgrading to a paid plan. Several site builders, including Duda and Strikingly, let you add a PayPal product to a free account.

Once you have a paid Ucraft account, you get full, robust ecommerce options. Some of the Blocks you can add to any page are commerce-related—basically online catalog pages. You can customize the layout of these. But to actually change commerce options such as price, you need to go to the Dashboard’s eCommerce page. Here you add products, set up payment gateways, and even enter shipping and tax options. Payment services include Square and PayPal, which is all you really need, though many sites use Stripe.

You can bulk-update a group of selected products, and import via CSV, XCart, or LiteCommerce formats. Sharing your store on eBay, Facebook and most other online marketplaces is easy, with built-in options.

You can sell downloads, conduct email marketing campaigns, and create discount coupons for your products. Ucraft checks all the boxes for adding online selling to your site.

Blogging

Blogging in Ucraft isn’t as straightforward as it is other site builders such as Gator, and it’s not available for free accounts. Most builders simply have you add a Blog page type, and then offer a dedicated blogging interface. With Ucraft, some templates do include a blog page. There’s no New Post button: You have to drag an Article element onto a Block, and then customize the dummy text using the Edit. Once you do this, you do land in a fairly standard blogging tool, though you have to delete a lot of dummy content.

You can save a post as a draft, schedule, apply tags, add categories, and assign multiple authors. You can also enable comments, but that requires a Disqus account. After you create a post, it appears in your Articles Dashboard page. Renaming that section “Blog Posts” would clarify a lot. Aside from that nomenclature and the initial post creation’s lack of intuitiveness, it’s a deep blogging service.

Publishing Your Site

Ucraft does something I not fond of in a site builder: It makes your site live by default as soon as you start editing it. I prefer builders that let you save a version before making it live, such as Gator and Wix. It seems odd that Ucraft would make my site live even though it’s telling me I’m only zero percent done with building it. I later discovered that you can set your site to Offline in Site Settings. But that option is buried in a group of 14 icons in the Dashboard. It should be an up-front choice—or, better yet, the default.

The Settings page also lets you password-protect, set a favicon for, and cache your site. The last option only works for custom domains, and should result in faster page loading, but you have to remember to clear the cache when you update the site. A versioning feature is tied to this caching; it lets you try different site content in your custom domain versus your Ucraft.com subdomain.

Mobile Site Building

One cool option that I haven’t seen in other site builders is the Visibility option that appears in the context menu for elements. With this, you can choose which device display types the element will appear on; so you could have an element that displays on tablets and smartphones but not on desktop browsers.

On the other site of mobile is an app that lets you edit your site using your phone. Ucraft doesn’t offer this, and you can’t use a mobile web version of the builder. You can, however, use an app to manage your store and products from the road—as long as you have a Pro Shop ($21 per month) account or above. You even get advanced features like abandoned-cart emails to prospective buyers. Coupons and email marketing campaigns are also available. It’s a very full and well-done ecommerce solution.

Stats and SEO

There’s no Dashboard entry for site-traffic stats. Nor is there a link to them on your My Sites page. That’s because there are no built-in traffic reporting tools in the service. You need to set up your own Facebook Pixel or Google Analytics accounts and add the tracking code to your site. Non-developer site builders just want a quick and easy way to see how their site traffic is doing, so they’ll prefer services like Duda and Weebly, which do all the traffic reporting legwork for you.

Ucraft offers an SEO section in the Dashboard. Unfortunately, as with most site builders, this is just a place to enter metatitles and meta descriptions for each page. You still need to register your site with search engines yourself, though Ucraft provides some help on how to do so.

Help and Performance

Linger on the Ucraft website a little, and the builder’s chatbot will start engaging you, asking if you need help. I found the people behind the help chat attentive and knowledgeable. It almost got to the point that I always felt someone was watching me build my site. There’s a help button in the lower-left corner of every screen. This takes you to a well-stocked support page with tutorials on often-needed topics like Getting Started, Designer Tools, and Logo creation.

I should note that occasionally during building with Ucraft, I encountered the site builder’s animated black loading dots for longer than I’d like. Sometimes I had to reload the builder page. For uptime testing, we use a monitoring service that checks if the site is online every 15 minutes. My test Ucraft site showed no downtime over a one-week period, which is what you want to see.

Another Face in the Site Builder Crowd

Ucraft is a powerful site builder with some slick, modern design options. It lets you password-protect any page and collaborate with others in your site building effort. Its online store builder offers everything a small online shop could want. Nevertheless, performing many tasks in Ucraft isn’t as smooth and intuitive as in other providers. Blogging is awkward, and there are no built-in traffic stats. With so many great site builder choices these days, Ucraft just doesn’t stand out. For our recommendations of your best options, take a look at our Editors’ Choice site builders: Duda, for its excellent mobile options, and Wix, for its wealth of site-building extras. Also worth a look is the highly rated Gator service, which combines design freedom with responsive site creation.