Readymag Review: Good for Some, but Not for Most 2026

Readymag at a Glance

Readymag Is Good for Visual Storytelling but Lacks Other Functionality

Readymag surprised me with its in-depth editing tools. It comes with more options for customization than most other builders offer, including an in-depth animations, layers, and elements system. I will say that Readymag isn’t very user friendly, and it takes a lot of experimentation to get used to its unique editor, but when you do, it offers more customization options than almost any other website builder we’ve tested, on par with builders like Wix Studio or Duda.

Unfortunately, outside of its editing tools, it lacks the advanced functionality that most users and business owners are looking for in a website builder. Readymag lacks dedicated blogging, email, or marketing features, and offers barebones tools for e-commerce, SEO, and lead generation. So if you want something beyond a pretty, editorial site, it won’t be for you.

It took me some time to get used to Readymag. It has a steep learning curve, and while some might see it as an online storytelling tool, I wouldn’t recommend it for much of anything else.

For professional business sites or more well-rounded options, you can I recommend you check out our expert list of the best website builders in 2026.

At the time of writing, Readymag offers 91 free templates and 36 paid ones (though more might be available at online marketplaces). However, that number could change at any time, as Readymag allows users to submit original templates. That means there’s always something new and different to choose from, and the number of templates is always growing.

It might sound like allowing for user-made templates would create a lot of variance in quality, but all user templates currently available, and I’ve personally checked them, are high-quality and unique, probably due to Readymag’s (if a little obtuse) selection process.

Besides price and creator (user-created or by Readymag), you can filter templates based on six categories: “Company website,” “Landing page,” “Presentation,” “Portfolio,” “Editorial,” or “Online store.”

All Readymag templates are mobile responsive. Overall, while the selection might not be huge, I appreciate a small but high-quality selection of templates more than I would a huge selection of mediocre options.

Design and Customization

Readymag offers a complex, drag-and-drop, layer-based editor for design and customization. Its wide variety of options for spacing, animations, and element settings are ideal for designers or other visual artists to create a completely unique website.

When I was checking other websites made with Readymag for inspiration, I was stunned by the variety of options and styles you could create. I saw everything from a retro-inspired portfolio (including pop-ups and animated cursors), to immersive journalistic experiences on international conflicts. Actually building one of these websites is a different matter altogether (more on that below), but you have more design freedom than I’ve come across with any other traditional website builder. Unfortunately, you need more than design freedom to run a website successfully.

On the flip side, Readymag also requires a lot more effort for things that traditional website builders do automatically. While templates are mobile-responsive out of the box, you will have to edit any changes to your mobile site manually. The interface can also get really slow if there are too many elements on your screen, making the editing process tedious and frustrating at times.

Readymag doesn’t offer many features outside of design options, and it only comes with barebones versions of the ones it does offer. For example, your e-commerce options are restricted to 10 physical products or less, and you can only accept payments through Stripe or Ecwid. Readymag doesn’t offer options for digital products, promotions, newsletters, or any e-commerce functionality outside of this. In fact, Readymag itself recommends that you integrate e-commerce through a third-party app.

Something similar happens when it comes to SEO too. You can add headings and meta descriptions to your pages, add alt text to images, and select whether you want search engines to index your site, but that’s it. Readymag doesn’t offer personalized SEO tools, additional SEO assistance, or local SEO settings, something small businesses absolutely need.

As it stands, Readymag might be a great showcase for a project if you redirect to it from another source, but your chances of getting found organically are minimal. SEO performance is further damaged by its abysmal performance (more on that below).

You cannot integrate a blog or build it inside the platform, as Readymag doesn’t offer any sort of content management system (CMS). You also get no tools for online marketing and very limited options to create visitor forms, which Readymag also recommends you incorporate with third-party integrations.

On the topic of third-party integrations, Readymag only offers a little over two dozen integrations with third-party apps and services like Stripe, Shopify, Ecwid, and Google Analytics – definitely not enough to compensate for the app’s lack of native tools.

If you’re looking to create a business site, you’ll need far more reliable tools and integrations. A tool like Wix offers far superior functionality while still giving you plenty of design freedom.

Performance

Instead of relying on a single site for performance, we measured the performance scores for 50 different Readymag sites chosen at random from its own “examples” section. All sites were tested using the same GTmetrix configuration with a San Francisco-based server.

The average time to fully load was over 12 seconds, over 4 times what’s recommended by search engines like Google. The average time to first byte (how long a site takes the browser to receive the first byte of data from the server) was 489 milliseconds, which is over twice the recommended time of 200 milliseconds. What’s more, there was a huge deviation in the results, with one site returning a time to first byte of over four and a half seconds.

The average LCP (Largest Contentful Paint: how long does it take for the largest part of an image or text block to render in the viewport) was over 4.8 seconds, which is way beyond the recommended 2.5 seconds.

On average, Readymag sites returned a performance score of 48%, with some results being as low as 9%.

Readymag isn’t particularly easy to use. Part of that is due to the fact that its editor breaks the design conventions of other web builders like Wix and Squarespace, but Readymag also does a very poor job of explaining how the editor works.

There’s a short walkthrough on the editor’s basic functions, which only helps to familiarize you with the tools you could probably figure out on your own anyway, and does little to teach you how Readymag’s more advanced systems work. It also didn’t help that in my experience, the introduction section constantly glitches, forcing you to start over.

The upside is that Readymag offers plenty of learning content in the form of YouTube videos, but even then, it doesn’t really provide a way to navigate them for first time users.

Once you get the hang of it, the editor becomes more manageable, and the YouTube tutorials can help a ton, but that’s like saying that assembling a tent in the dark becomes easier once you stop tripping over the poles.

If you’re looking for a website builder that’s easier to use and still provides high-quality design features, I recommend trying Squarespace instead.

Readymag has a whole help center available in English, and a more elusive help center (which is less available) in both Spanish and Russian. There is also customer support via email, which I duly contacted and was pleasantly surprised to receive a response within 30 minutes.

The response was far from exhaustive, but it did come quickly enough. However, what really saved the support score wasn’t anything Readymag itself offered, but its community.

The Readymag forum is incredibly active and filled with a small but attentive community eager to assist each other. Should it fall to the users to compensate for average support? Probably not, but they do.

Readymag offers three paid plans, a custom plan, and a free plan. On the free plan, you can create and publish a single site with up to ten pages, no e-commerce, and a Readymag subdomain.

The Personal plan lets you connect one custom domain to one site, add SSL encryption to your site, integrate analytics features, and create an e-commerce store with up to 10 products.

Both the Freelancer and Advanced plans offer the same functionality but increase the number of sites you can publish with a custom domain. Instead of restricting your bandwidth, Readymag changes how many visits your site can have in a month without displaying branding (10,000, 25,000, and 75,000 for each of the paid plans).

While the price of the Personal and Freelancer plans isn’t outrageous, you have to consider how limited they both are compared to similarly-priced plans from other builders like Wix or Squarespace. The Advanced plan, on the other side, would be outrageous even if Readymag offered outstanding functionality, which it doesn’t.

For less than the cost of the Personal plan, you can get Wix’s Light plan for $17.00 per month which offers unlimited bandwidth, a free custom domain for a year, and full access to more than 500 apps. Plus it’s easy to use, quick to get started and you can trust it to load your website quickly.