Zyro Website Builder – Review 2020
Building a website requires time, effort, and planning, but if you want to get a personal or lightweight business site online quickly and without much fuss, you should consider a website-building service like Zyro. Zyro not only lets you build attractive and functional pages, 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. That’s not to say that this website builder is a top-tier service yet, however; Zyro currently lacks vital e-commerce options and isn’t as feature-rich as Wix, our Editors’ Choice for website builders. If you need a simple website builder, however, Zyro can get the job done, and it doesn’t cost much, either.
Zyro’s Pricing Structure
Zyro has three service tiers. The most wallet-friendly option is the free, ad-supported package that includes a ridiculously scant 500MB of storage and monthly data transfers (Wix’s free version carries the same specs). Considering its limitations, this tier may be good for companies that simply want a website that displays operation hours, location information, and other basics. On the upside, you don’t need to input credit card information to begin building a site.
Moving up the ladder is the first premium account. This ad-free, $2.99-per month Basic plan ups the storage and monthly data transfers to 10GB, and includes integrations (more on that in a bit) and lets you use a custom domain. The other premium account, the $4.99-per-month Unleashed plan, boasts unlimited storage and monthly data transfers. All Zyro plans include SEO tools and an SSL certificate.
The prices are highly attractive for people on a budget, but if you want true website-building power and a full set of features, Editors’ Choice award-winning Wix, the top website builder we’ve tested, is the path to take. Wix has a comparable free plan, but its premium plans are superior. The $13-per-month entry-level Combo plan offers 3GB storage and 2GB of monthly data transfers. In addition, Wix’s top-tier $39-per-month VIP plan includes a shopping cart, e-commerce tools, 20GB of storage, a free domain name for one year, unlimited monthly data transfer, a professional logo, and priority support.
Getting Started With Zyro
Getting started is a simple affair. Zyro tasks you with creating a username and password and then selecting a site template. The templates come in many attractive, genre-based styles, such as Photography, Product Page, Startup Company, and Wedding Invitation. Zyro lets you preview how the template looks on desktop, tablet, or smartphone before you have to make a decision.
After you click Start Building to confirm the template selection, Zyro initiates a short, five-step website-builder walkthrough that highlights important UI areas. By default, your website receives a Zyro-based URL (think “shoes.zyrosite.com”), but there is an option to upgrade to a custom domain name. You can either transfer a previously purchased domain name or buy one from Zyro.
Website Design With Zyro
Zyro has 20 beautiful templates that serve as the anchor on your website-building journey. That’s a decent number, but Wix has hundreds. Weebly has more than 60 templates. If you want an expansive template variety, Wix is the website builder to choose.
Zyro’s templates adhere to the responsive design principle, meaning that your site will resize itself to look good on desktop or mobile screens. Like Wix, Zyro has a drawback not found in some competitors, such as Simvoly, Squarespace, and Weebly, that 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 have to create an entirely new site and transfer the content to it. That’s a drag for people who want update their site’s look occasionally.
What Zyro does well, however, is 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. A dedicated icon lets you quickly duplicate a section if, say, you need another photo row.
Zyro 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.
It’s equally simple to add text and SEO-friendly descriptions to uploaded images and resize photos by dragging their corners. Zyro 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. Unfortunately, Zyro lacks a dedicated blogging interface, so you can’t create, save, and schedule posts as you would using Wix. The other-wise excellent Gator also lacks blog-scheduling capabilities.
Zyro’s free 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 Dr. Frankenstein-like parts cobbling doesn’t compete with a flesh-and-blood designer, but it gets the job done on the cheap.
Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Hotjar, and Messenger Live Chat integrations (think of integrations as Zyro’s plug-ins) are available to paid subscribers. Those analytics and communication tools let you better understand site visitors. Unfortunately, Zyro lacks advanced commerce tools or even a code editor for pasting in, say, a PayPal button code.
Auto-save cements your changes every few seconds, so you needn’t worry about losing lots of work. You can save work, preview it, and then later publish the site updates.
Mobile Zyro
Zyro’s automatically generated responsive mobile sites look terrific on the 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, Zyro gives you the option of editing the mobile view if you’re not happy with what it produces automatically. Though Zyro 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 (Weebly and Jimdo boast this functionality). Zyro lacks mobile site-building apps.
Let the Bots Do the Job!
AI Writer is a tool that lets you create site copy without needing to write many words. Here’s how it works. You select one of 11 top-level topics, such as Music & Entertainment or Small Business, and then click a topic specific-category, such as Concert or Interior Design. 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. My one major criticism? There aren’t enough AI Writer categories; Zyro lacks anything that comes closing to fitting my technology- and gamer-centric page. Zyro also includes 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.
AI Heatmap is another cool tool that Zyro 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.
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 1 minute. The data reveal that Zyro was incredibly stable during the testing period. In fact, it didn’t go down once! You can count on Zyro to be a rock-solid foundation for your website.
Customer Support
You can reach Zyro’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 Zyro’s knowledge database for answers to your question. I found answers to two of my questions in the knowledge database.
Otherwise, you can key your words into the chat box proper; a bot typically fields the question and states that it may take hours for an answer to appear. That answer window isn’t at all ideal, but I performed this test during the CVOID-19 pandemic. As a result, the answer wait times may be far from typical. Zyro gives you the option to email your questions, too.
A Solid Website Builder
Zyro is a competent website-building service that offers a free tier, AI-powered tools, and a flexible, easy-to-use editor. Still, you can’t use to sell or blog, and its integrations and template selections are limited. If you want a website builder with more blogging and business-friendly flexibility, check out the Editors’ Choice award-winning Wix.
Zyro Website Builder Specs
Web Store | No |
Free Version Offered | Yes |
Blogging Tool | No |
Basic Image Editing | Yes |
Site Portability | No |
Site Membership | No |
Product Price Type | Direct |
Product Category | Web Site Hosting Services |