Reviews and expert opinion Webador

Webador at a Glance

Should You Use Webador?

Webador doesn’t waste any time telling you what its main draw is: it’s a website builder that lets you create a functional website in under 10 minutes. Hassle-free and quick website building for anyone – it doesn’t get much better than that.

I won’t waste your time, Webador absolutely delivers. Thanks to its incredibly intuitive and responsive editor, you can build an entire website on your lunch break… so long as you temper your expectations.

Almost every builder has to strike a balance between providing every conceivable feature and keeping things easy to use, and Webador definitely leans towards simplicity. This makes Webador an outstanding builder if you’re looking to get a simple site online for cheap, but it won’t support loftier ambitions.

Still, if Webador is right for you, then it will really be right for you. The Webador editor is available in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish. Is it everything you need, or should you go for something more robust? Read on to find out.

Webador’s Templates Show How Far You Can Take It

The first thing you might notice about Webador’s template selection is the lack of categorization. Where other builders divide their templates into various categories depending on the purpose of the site, Webador just shows you its set of templates with no preamble.

This might seem like a bad thing at first, but there’s a very good reason for it. Every one of Webador’s 50+ mobile-friendly templates can work for several different purposes. You don’t have to take my word for it either. If you hover over any template, you’ll get the option to see a wide variety of published websites that are currently using that template.

It isn’t the most advanced editor in the world (more on that later), but the templates are there to give you an idea of the different moods and styles you can achieve. That said, you should keep in mind that each template comes with its own non-swappable header style.

I personally could’ve used a couple more business-oriented templates that showcased Webador’s e-commerce tools. But still, the great thing about Webador’s templates is that they give you the freedom to make them your own, so any template can become a business-oriented template as soon as you add some e-commerce sections.

Design and Customization

After you select the best template for you, Webador’s customization process is incredibly intuitive. To change the overall look of your site, all you have to do is click the “Design” tab on the top menu. There, you’ll be able to change the colors of your header, footer, background, and accent color. If you click on “text formatting” you’ll also be able to change the template’s font styles, sizes, and color.

Once you’re satisfied with your overall text styles, you can head back to the “Editor” tab. There, you’ll be able to access a modest – but not lackluster – collection of elements divided into five categories: Basic, Structure, Media, Interactive, and Extras. You can add any element to the body of your site by dragging it into place from the sidebar. Webador automatically places your elements onto a grid, which helps to ensure a decent level of visual clarity.

That said, the editing capabilities of Webador can feel limited. You don’t get much say over the settings for your header and footer, and the widget selection is smaller than what most other builders offer. Also, there aren’t many options to customize individual elements, like a built-in image editor, text effects, or animation features. You can definitely create something unique with Webador, but probably nothing mind-blowing.

Webador’s Toolset Is Reliable, but Not Very Extensive

Webador offers a nice selection of features for customization, e-commerce, and even some impressive media-sharing tools. However, the lack of more advanced features – and even some of the restrictions on the features that are there – hold back its full potential.

Still, considering that Webador’s aim is to create simple but effective sites, there are a couple of surprisingly in-depth features that place it above many other builders in the market.

Webador Offers Unique Elements to Customize Your Page

Besides the classic, indispensable elements like headings, buttons, and image options, Webador offers some interesting surprises to raise your site above the mundane.

If you want your audience to reach out, Webador’s got you covered. Whether you want to include a digital map of your physical location or even a rating system, Webador includes widgets to make direct communication easier. Some of the tools for visitor interaction included in the editor are:

• Ratings. You can add a five-star rating system anywhere on your page, which is a great way to engage with your audience or gauge their reaction to a particular product or service.
• Comments. This might not seem like much, but Webador lets you add a comments box anywhere, not just on blog entries. That means that you can add a section for visitor discussions wherever you like.
• Social buttons. Webador includes built-in icons to easily link your social media sites, as well as plenty of sharing tools to help spread the word around about your website.
• Digital maps. If you have a physical location, embedding an up-to-date map is vital to make sure potential clients always know where to find you.
• Custom forms. Webador includes a pretty solid form tool. You can customize your form’s questions, edit the field type (text, checkbox, multiple choice, etc.), and even tailor the confirmation message.

There’s also a variety of widgets for turning your site into a file-sharing, media-streaming hub, which include audio and video players, a document-sharing system, and even a good ol’ fashioned file download system (with a 200MB upload limit per file).

A Very Complete Set of E-commerce Tools

If you want to sell your products directly from your site, Webador includes plenty of features to help you do so. Not only are the e-commerce settings easy to use, they’re also surprisingly well-rounded. You can modify a product’s price, discount options, search engine optimization (SEO) settings, and even add special labels to announce when a product is on sale or trending.

On the e-commerce dashboard, Webador includes tools to track orders, add tax information, create checkout forms, manage custom discounts, and more. Even better, Webador doesn’t charge any transaction fees, which is a rare perk, even among dedicated e-commerce website builders.

Though Webador’s e-commerce features are quite impressive, I would still recommend choosing a dedicated e-commerce platform if you want to create a fully-fledged online store. If you want to sell a small range of products on the side, however, Webador’s e-commerce tools give you all the features you need to manage your sales directly from your site’s dashboard.

Webador Makes It Easy To Run and Manage a Blog

If you’re interested in blogging, Webador offers a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor that allows you to make visual changes and add custom elements to your blog posts as you edit. This system gives you a lot of flexibility and ensures that you can always craft unique blog posts.

To manage your posts, just add the blog widget anywhere on your site and click on the “manage blog” option. From there, you can change your blog’s SEO features, change post visibility, and quickly edit or delete entries.

Webador Is by Far One of the Most User-friendly Builders Out There

The interesting thing about Webador’s ease of use is that there isn’t much to talk about. Not because it’s hard to use, but exactly the opposite. From the moment you sign up to the moment you publish your site, every part of the site-building process is straightforward with Webador.

The user interface is wonderfully simple, the editor is highly responsive, and whenever you want to edit a section of your site, all you have to do is click on it. Even so, Webador goes the extra mile by providing a custom “Getting Started” walkthrough to make sure you always know exactly what to do next.

Webador Offers a Crash Course on Site Building Fundamentals

Webador provides a free help center filled with in-depth guides covering a wide variety of topics. Now, you might be asking yourself: if Webador is so easy to use, what do I need guides for? The answer is that Webador’s help center doesn’t just cover everything you need to know about the editor, it also delves into important website-building fundamentals.

The help center delves into a variety of topics, from design best practices to SEO optimization, and the tips it offers are applicable regardless of the builder you’re using. The articles are very well-written and make use of a variety of resources (such as images and video tutorials) to ensure that they’re clear and easy to follow.

Easy SEO Settings To Improve Your Traffic Rankings

Search engine optimization is crucial if you want to grow your traffic organically. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to take all the best SEO practices into account and apply them to your site.

Although Webador can’t apply the best SEO practices for you, what it can do is make it as easy as possible for you to apply them yourself. Webador makes it extremely easy to modify and update your website’s SEO settings. All you have to do is head to the editor, click on “Settings,” and select SEO. There, you’ll be able to modify individual page titles, meta descriptions, and toggle whether you want them to be indexed by Google search.

You can even edit the SEO characteristics of individual elements as you edit, ensuring you always have the final say over how you want every part of your site to be listed.

A Seamless Drag-and-Drop Editor

This might seem like a small thing, and it’s not something I’d usually pay much attention to, but the Webador editor is incredibly responsive. Any time I placed an element on the page, I could immediately see how it would fit into my site. During all my tests, I never experienced any loading times, nor did the editor ever feel sluggish.

It’s a small thing, but seeing your changes reflected in real time does a lot to flatten the learning curve, as you can tell immediately how each change affects the structure of your site and alters its “vibe.”

Webador places a lot of confidence in its ease of use. Maybe that’s why there’s only one real way to contact customer support, which is through an email ticket. To test the quality of assistance on offer, I emailed support with a couple of (really) basic questions.

I wanted to know two things: can you edit your site’s HTML directly, and can you use the video widget to embed videos from sources other than YouTube? I sent the ticket outside of normal working hours (Monday through Friday, 8:30-17:00 CET), so I didn’t get an immediate answer, but I was happy to see that I already had a response in my inbox by Monday at 9:00 (UTC).

The response itself was OK. It didn’t go above and beyond, but it answered my questions – and it came fast. Webador could stand to offer more support channels, but the quality of support you do get is decent enough.

However, for the self-learning type, I can’t recommend the help center enough. It has everything you need to build your site from start to finish.

One of the Cheapest Builders Out There, but Read the Small Print

If you take a look at Webador’s pricing page right now, you might find the numbers too good to be true. And well, they kinda are. Except for the free plan, every plan seems to be priced at just $1 per month. It sounds amazing, and it is, but remember that this price is only valid for the first three months of your plan.

After that period, you’ll have to start paying Webador’s actual monthly, yearly, or bi-yearly fees, which are… still honestly fantastic. Even after the initial discount is over, Webador is one of the most affordable builders I’ve seen.

Webador offers a forever-free plan, which gives you access to every single one of its design features, along with unlimited bandwidth, storage, and websites. The only catch is that your website will have a Webador subdomain. If you want to build a site and publish it under your own domain, the Lite plan gives you access to a free domain name for only $4.00 per month.

The Pro and Business plans remove all Webador advertising from your site and give you full access to every Lite feature plus the form widget, staff accounts, advanced reports, and more. They also allow you to connect an e-commerce shop to your site. The main difference between the two is that Pro limits the number of products you can add to your store to ten, while the Business plan allows you to add an unlimited number of products.

I recommend starting off with the free plan before you make any commitments, but if you feel like Webador is definitively the best builder for you, then make sure to sign up for the longest possible term. That way, you’ll end up paying less for your monthly service.