Reviews and expert opinion Duda

Should You Use Duda?

Duda is pretty clear about its target audience. From the moment you land on the homepage, Duda lets you know that it’s the website builder for professional designers. Or at least that’s the idea. Duda’s in-depth design features, support for multiple websites, and branding options appeal to freelancers and agencies.

Does that mean you can’t use it to create your own site? Of course not! Thanks to its powerful design features and competitive prices, Duda is an ideal choice if you don’t mind putting in a little extra work.

The builder is available in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish. Is it the best builder for you, or should you go for something more streamlined? Keep reading to find out.

Duda Offers Hundreds of Good-Looking Templates

As you’d expect from a modern platform, Duda has a range of stunning website templates. There are over 120 mobile-responsive designs sorted into broad categories, including Business, Landing Pages, Events, Portfolios, and more.

One thing to note is that there are quite a few blank and semi-blank starter templates. This blank canvas approach helps designers make original designs for their clients, which makes sense, given that service providers are Duda’s primary target audience.

Duda has also added a couple of Flex-only templates recently. Though these templates look great, you can only edit them using Duda’s flex mode, a more advanced, pixel-perfect editor (more on that below). These templates look great and feel great to navigate, but I wouldn’t recommend them unless you have more experience in web design.

Design and Customization

High-quality templates don’t mean much if you can’t make them your own. The site editor needs to be good – and fortunately, it is. It’s a semi-standard editor that allows you to drag and drop content and widgets onto a page in a customizable, grid-based layout.

You don’t get total drag-and-drop freedom but a sensible mixof frameworks and customization options. Just put in your text, images, maps, forms, and raw HTML as you see fit, and off you go.

You can also add pre-made sets of elements called “sections” to your site. These sections allow you to quickly add segments for things like testimonials, contact information, and image galleries to an existing page. There are 21 categories for pre-made sections, as well as the option to create and save your own for future use.

If you want to make more sweeping changes, you can change global styles across your templates for text, colors, buttons, backgrounds, and site layouts. Sitewide styles make it easy to customize any template and align it with your branding.

Unfortunately, the font selection is a bit limited. Duda only supports 61 fonts in total, and any designer will tell you that’s not enough fonts. But then, maybe we’re just greedy!

Last but certainly not least, Duda supports RTL (right-to-left) languages by default. Arabic and Hebrew-speakers, rejoice.

Duda Has Everything an Agency Needs and Most of What a Single-Site Owner Wants

Duda claims to be the website builder for bigger clients, and it comes with the set of features to prove it. Its toolbox is filled with a solid, dependable, proven set of features to get your site(s) up and running.

Here are some of the primary features – I’ll get to the exciting stuff below.

• Amazon’s Web Services hosting and content delivery network (CDN) – That’s top-performance cloud hosting with no storage or bandwidth restrictions on any plan.
• Multi-language sites – Build websites for clients and customers in any part of the world.
• Built-in image library – Duda provides thousands of free stock images by default. Using stock images isn’t always ideal, but it gives you alternatives to work with.
• Website exports (on the Agency plan or higher) – Download a zip file of all your content, images, and scripts for any website.
• Instant websites (on the Custom plan) – Create sites instantly by pushing structured data to Duda’s site builder via API.
• Builder self-branding – Duda allows you to add your company’s branding to the editor’s backend. That way, you create brand recognition while your clients stay up-to-date with site edits.
• Simple editor for clients – You can give clients simplified tools to change aspects of their site without messing up the entire structure that you’ve already built.

There’s also a simple blog feature. It’s a bit bare-bones but serviceable for most people’s needs. You can add post metadata for SEO, tag posts to organize them, and schedule them to be published later. You can also import blog posts from elsewhere.

My favorite bit is that you can edit posts directly in the site editor for a true WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) experience.

Ultra-Precise Editing with Flex Mode

Duda’s drag-and-drop editor already gives you way better customization than many other website builders. But not content with “good enough,” Duda also offers a Flex mode for ultra-customizable editing.

Flex also lets you edit using layers, complex layouts, and gives you full control over your CSS code. That makes Duda one of the few website builders that actually lets you edit your site’s code after you add elements. Granted, Duda’s backend is already quite efficient, so you probably won’t have to drastically optimize your site, but it’s good to have the option.

Flex also provides exact editing of spacing between elements. You can edit using a variety of size units. That means that instead of providing the same-old pre-made responsiveness of other builders, Flex gives you full control over your site at any screen size.

Assign Teams and Roles

Given Duda’s focus on teams, it makes sense that multiple people can log in and collaborate on a site at once. But it’s more than just inviting someone in and giving them full access. You can do that, but you can also assign roles to your team.

For example, you give someone access to the design features, put another person in charge of blog content, and even assign a store manager. By separating the roles, you ensure team members don’t accidentally mess with other people’s work.

Extend Your Site with the App Store

I feel like no site builder is complete without a marketplace full of apps and add-ons to extend your site’s functionality. Duda offers nearly 40 third-party apps (e.g., PayPal, Agendize, Google Analytics), which should be enough to get the job done.

These apps let you manage everything from agendas, site search, analytics, Google Ads, CRM, and more – all on your website. Some are free, some are paid, and some have free trials. From what I’ve seen, they’re all useful.

Build Your E-commerce Business

Adding a store to your website takes no more than a couple of clicks, and it nicely integrates with your chosen site template. Here are some of Duda’s relevant e-commerce features:

• Coupons and gift cards to enhance your customer’s buying experience with personalized offers.
• Abandoned cart emails to give customers that little extra “push” they need to make a purchase.
• Delivery and pickup scheduler for that old-fashioned in-person business.
• More than 110 payment providers to handle your transactions
• Selling on other marketplaces, including Amazon, eBay, and Facebook.
• Integration with Square’s Point of Sale system for in-person payments.

The only downside to Duda’s e-commerce features is that they aren’t included in any plans by default. E-commerce is an add-on cost. It’s not expensive in the grand scheme of things, but it really should be a part of the more expensive plans.

If you decide that paying extra is worth it, the Standard e-commerce plan limits you to 100 products. The Advanced plan allows for 2500 products, and the Unlimited plan gives you an infinite number of products.

Duda’s User Experience Is Streamlined and Simple for Experienced Site Builders

The team-and-agency focus of this service means that there’s a bit of a learning curve. Though it offers some “getting started” resources, especially for extra features such as e-commerce and Flex, there’s very little hand-holding from the app itself.

That said, Duda does try to make your life easier with several handy things:

Duda University & Webinars

First up, Duda has a ton of educational material about the fundamentals of web design and how to use its site builder. There are entire courses under the umbrella of “Duda University.”

You might not get a P.H.D. from Duda, but the courses are helpful for beginners and experienced designers alike. I’d strongly recommend starting here.

Duda also offers a variety of webinars on various topics, such as legally protecting your clients, growing your business, integrating site search, and more.

Import Existing Content

You can import content from external websites and drag and drop it into your Duda site. So, if you have a massive site to move or even several, this makes it a lot easier.

I was able to import chunks of content directly onto Duda with the click of a button. All I needed was a URL – it really doesn’t get any easier than that.

Managed Services & Hands-On Assistance

If you’re willing to pay extra for the Custom plan, you can get Duda’s support team to migrate and set up your site. You also get access to one-on-one training instead of a pre-written course.

Another interesting thing is that you can get direct support and training for developers. If you have a programmer on your team and want to see what they can do with Duda’s API, why not have an expert show them around the system?

Knowledgeable Support Team, but Contact Can Be Frustrating.

Duda offers extensive support options, at least on the Agency plan and up. If you have signed up for the Agency plan, you can contact support through email, live chat, and phone (and, of course, that automated chatbot everyone offers but no one likes).

If you don’t have access to the Agency plan, your only option for in-person support is through the email ticket system. The good news: Email support is decent. I filed a ticket asking about integrating a podcast RSS feed or a live stream view into my site. Duda lets you mark the urgency of your query from ‘Low’ to ‘Urgent’. I selected the ‘Normal’ option and got an answer about six hours later.

It wasn’t the longest email in the world, but it didn’t have to be. The answer I received included all the relevant information I needed, and I can only assume that response times are way better if you mark your request as urgent.

Unfortunately, in my experience live chat and phone support aren’t as good. Both options are only available on a fixed schedule (Monday to Friday from 12:00 am to 5:00 pm PST), which is weird considering that the chatbot tells you to only use these channels for urgent matters. So, make sure to plan your emergencies ahead of time.

The quality of support was also underwhelming. I received a callback about an hour after I requested it, and though the representative did answer my questions, they were mostly dismissive and gave me only the most basic answers – nothing that I couldn’t have checked on the website myself.

The experience with live chat was quite similar. I submitted a request and waited for approximately two hours. The chatbot informed me that there were three people ahead of me in the queue. Although I didn’t mind waiting, my assigned representative abruptly ended the chat after only a few minutes of no response, possibly because they noticed my lack of engagement.

Maybe I am being a little harsh since they did answer all my questions, but Duda’s support team could stand to improve its bedside manner. Especially if it only offers help to clients paying $44.00 or more per month.

Duda’s Prices Are Pretty Competitive

Duda is fairly priced for what it offers. The plans start at $14.00 per month for the Basic plan, and you can check out the rest in the table below. Paying more gets you access to white-label features, team and client management, and more.

If you want, you can take Duda out for a test run with the 14-day free trial. Duda also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on all paid plans, which tells you a lot about the company’s confidence in its products.

Admittedly, the custom plans are a fair bit more expensive. But I would only recommend those to big agencies and teams that want to use Duda for pretty much everything.

If you really like Duda’s features, though, the basic one-website plan isn’t out of reach for an individual would-be website owner. But remember that no matter which plan you go for, e-commerce costs extra. That’s the only blemish on an otherwise decent pricing structure.