Jimdo website builder – Full Review

With more than 12 million websites, Jimdo is one of the reference software programs for creating a website. Created in 2007, the German startup is a great European success story. The recipe for success? Well thought out software that’s simple to use, with a free version and competitive prices. Qualities that put Jimdo among our Top 5 software programs for creating Internet sites!

Jimdo got a makeover on August 29, 2014, especially at the template level. It’s an occasion to do another comprehensive test of a vital software program that is great when you are looking for an easy way to create a showcase or e-commerce site.

If I had to choose 3 words for Jimdo, I’d choose simple, effective and complete,. Jimdo can respond to very different needs, from a personal site to an e-commerce site, or even an organization’s website. The variety of templates, the page editor and the numerous plugins allow you to do a lot of things very easily on your Internet site. For those who want to go a little further, Jimdo offers pretty useful advanced functions, multidimensional articles, integration of Google Analytics e-commerce tracking and even the possibility of creating your own template with an HTML/CSS editor. It still remains limited at the level of flexibility and functional depth. You can’t imagine using Jimdo if you need a customer area (WordPress or Joomla are better) or advanced management of types of content (use WordPress or Drupal instead).

Three subscription formulas are offered:

• Jimdo – Free: Website with a sub-domain of “my-site.jimdo.com.” Access to all of the templates and all of the functions. The main limits are the advertising at the foot of the page, the online boutique is limited to 5 articles, the absence of SEO settings and disk space that is limited to 500 MB.
• Jimdo Pro – € 60/year: 1 name in .fr, .com or another, 1 email account, 5 GB of storage, parameterization of meta-information and 15 articles in the online boutique.
• Jimdo Business – €180/year: 2 domains, 20 email accounts, unlimited disk space, unlimited number of articles and several additional options for SEO and E-Commerce.

This has been perhaps one of Jimdo’s principal weak spots, especially compared with Wix, whose templates are really great. Jimdo’s had a few templates (in particular with responsive design), which were different depending on which formula you chose, and above all very pretty. The template selector, below, isn’t very tempting …

The Jimdo team has done good work. The templates are much better-looking, richer and a great majority have responsive design, which is to say, they are adapted to any screen formats Luckily, one of Jimdo’s biggest strengths hasn’t changed: it is always possible to change the template at any time. In terms of variety, I counted thirty templates, somewhat different, but still rather limited. There are only 16 e-commerce templates, for example. I imagine that the Jimdo team will continue to add to them, and most importantly, it is possible to create a personalized template with your own HTML/CSS code. Jimdo refers to several agencies/freelancers, Jimdo experts who offer personalized templates (which cost between € 200 and € 500). It is notable that each template is available in 3 to 5 different versions, each one with its own color scheme.
Below is the new template selector with three versions of the first template.

Once you have chosen a template, you can personalize the graphic charter very easily by using the “Style” menu. So you just have to to click on an element for a comprehensive contextual interface to appear that allows you to modify the key design features of the object. Example below, after having clicked on a button.

Child’s play, which goes quickly. Jimdo’s developers have done great work; the tool for editing content is very fluid. All of the buttons react quickly and using it is really easy. After clicking on “Add a new element,” you are asked to choose the type of content.

Depending on the type of content, a contextual interface then appears that allows you to edit the content. Don’t trust the simplicity of the interface; a lot of options are available. That’s Jimdo’s main quality, succeeding in keeping the software program very simple while adding more functions little by little. For example, in the image opposite, there is an interface for editing text that looks very simple, perhaps too simple… The appearance is deceiving, just click on the “…” button for the additional options appear, especially the option to edit HTML code, which opens up a large variety of possibilities.

It has to be said that this isn’t Jimdo ‘s strong point. Competitors such as Wix or Weebly offers a little more flexibility in general, the structure imposed by the templates is pretty rigid, However Jimdo is offering more and more options for personalizing the structure of pages.

The first step, before creating content on your page, is creating the page and positioning it in your website’s hierarchy. The three-level depth of navigation can prove very useful for sites that are rich in content.
Each template has a zone for content where you can insert different elements and organize them. Jimdo offers a pretty well done column system for putting different blocks on the page. By clicking on an element, you can of course move it by dragging it and dropping it in the place you would like. Jimdo doesn’t differ from its competitors on the flexibility of editing pages, but all the basic needs are covered, and above all it’s simple and fast.

Even if Jimdo positions itself as a general CMS host, e-merchants are clearly the heart of the target audience. What Jimdo offers, the improvements and the marketing campaigns are geared towards e-merchants who are likely to spend more than an organization or a freelancer.
Jimdo has succeeded overall. In a few clicks, you can set up an online store. All of the classic functions (and minimum ones…) of an e-commerce back office are present.

Adding an article can be done from any page. From the “New element” menu that is above, you can choose “Article.” A new interface allows you to define all of the parameters of the article: description, category, multiple photo with or without zoom, price, quantity in stock and delivery time. The variation system is very simple to use, but it can is a little constraining for articles with several dimensions. To sell T-shirts in several colors in 3 different sizes, you need to create a T-shirt article by color, or create variants- “Red T-shirt- S,” “Red T-shirt- M,” “Red T-shirt – L”, “Blue T-shirt – S,” etc. – within the same article, but they will all appear on the same drop-down list.

The main problem when you look at this interface isn’t its lack of options, it’s the fact that adding an article is done on the page level. The catalog management isn’t very rich, but the use of tags allows for intelligent management of the hierarchy. Each article can have one or several tags. You can then add a “Catalog” element to list the articles that have the tag. In theory, you have to create one page per article, and then create a parent page that often corresponds to a category. To avoid spending hours modifying the organization of your catalog, it’s important to take the time to plan the hierarchy of the store before launching it. In general, when you want to offer several hundred products for sale, managing the catalog and developing product pages from the Jimdo Back Office can prove tedious.

To give you a more general survey, let’s quickly review the main e-commerce functions available :

• Product presentation: nothing to say, very well done, especially at the level of image management and zoom.
• Breakdown of articles: One dimension unfortunately
• Shopping cart management: the visitor can add several products over the course of a visit.
• Comments: Possible via an external plugin…
• Methods of payment: In addition to PayPal, the pro version of Jimdo offers payment by check, transfer, invoice, on delivery or on removal of the product. No BC that I know of…
• Discount codes: Fixed amount or percentage, with or without a minimum. Quite well done.
• Delivery costs: The costs can be defined by country (and not region), and they can be based on price or weight. Not very flexible but sufficient in 80% of cases.
• Emails/confirmation pages: Completely personalizable.
• Import/Export: Nothing at the level of the catalog, but happily it is possible to export orders.

First, and not least, the HTML/CSS code is generally very clear no matter the template and added elements. It’s an important element for facilitating the work of Google robots and optimizing slow loading times. However, it’s regrettable that the HTML 5 tags (section, article, sidebar, etc.) and micro formats/schemas are not used more (apparently micro formats are only used for product sheets).
When you look at the header code in more detail, it is reassuring to see that good basic practices are respected: language, title, favicon, canonical, etc.

<html lang="fr-FR"gt;<head/>
<meta charset="utf-8"/>
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"/>
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow, archive"/>
<titlegt;Accueil - Site de lafabriquedunet !</title>
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="//a2.jimstatic.com/s/img/favicon.ico"/>             
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Blog"/>
<href="http://lafabriquedunet.jimdo.com/rss/blog"/>
<link rel="canonical" href="http://lafabriquedunet.jimdo.com/"/>
</headgt;</html>

At the level of internal markup, and especially the use of H1/H2, each template uses its own markup. The major heading is generally an H1, and there is not always a preconfigured H2… For putting a different title markup in place, as far as I know, the only possibility is to create your own template…

Regarding SEO, not all Jimdo sites are equal. Depending on the formula chosen, you will have access access to more or fewer settings.

• Jimdo – Free: Almost nothing. It is only possible to modify the title and the meta-description of the homepage… And keywords are completely useless today, although that is always an option that might show up. Note that sitemap.xml and robots.txt are generated but not modifiable.
• Jimdo Pro – € 60 / year: The strict minimum. You can define the title and meta-description of each page simply by clicking on the SEO menu when you are on the target page. Of course, when there are several hundred pages, it’s not easy, but Jimdo has its limits. It is now possible to edit the sitemap to some extent.
• Jimdo Business – € 180/year: You can define the “noindex”, “nofollow,” or “noarchive” parameters at the level of each page. No “canonical” as far as I know, but it’s a parameter that could be very useful when you start to create lists of products.

It’s far from the flexibility that a plugin such as Yoast on WordPress can bring. Jimdo offers the minimum when it comes to parameters, which could be prohibitive for some people, but honestly, in 99% of cases, bady referenced sites don’t have a problem with parameters but rather with content and marketing.

For the test, I chose the Cote-Print.com site, an e-commerce site that sells lampshades and which is on the list of Jimdo’s official examples.
Loading time can vary from one connection to another, from one item to another, so how to objectively evaluate the performance of a website? Luckily, the engineers at Google have already thought about it, and that resulted in PageSpeed Insights. To put it simply, it’s an analysis tool, that provides a global performance rating out of 100, and recommends improvements.

Conclusion: it’s clearly not bad at all. These are numbers be the envy of a lot of webmasters on WordPress or Prestashop. Of course, it’s much easier in Jimdo’s case since the templates are very simple and the user has very little room to maneuver.
I had fun crawling the site with Screaming Frog (which I highly recommend to all webmasters). This allows us to notice several direct or indirect problems.
Example 1: There are 6 H2 titles for thirty pages… This means that the template cannot include H2 by default, and that the user is not given any. Maybe this function is not intuitive…

Example 2: There are 4 defined meta-descriptions; the other 25 pages have no meta-description. It’s not obvious how to define the meta-description for each page considering the way in which the function is offered on the interface. The use of meta-description patterns is a little lacking.

Not really Jimdo’s strong point, but the functional perimeter is still large. Editing a blog article is done in the same way as editing a page, which means that it’s simple and effective. It’s very useful for making an intelligent gateway between the product pages and the blog. Jimdo makes it easy to integrate “Blog” element into a page in the form of a list of articles called “Teaser.”

It’s pretty well done and rather flexible thanks to the use of categories. Articles can be arranged in categories and then inserting only the articles in one category. In terms of comments, the function is offered, but it’s basic. For going a little further, Jimdo is able to integrate Disqus.

These three tools benefit from native integration on all Jimdo accounts. The integration with Dropbox is particularly successful and practical. In a click, you can synchronize all your Jimdo content with your Dropbox account. For Google Analytics, and Twitter, nothing too exiting. You can insert a tracking code for following the results from Google Analytics results and link to your Twitter account to facilitate sharing.

Here we arrive at another one of Jimdo’s weak points, especially compared to Wix. Jimdo doesn’t offer that much of a marketplace of plugins. It is easy to add HTML widgets which leaves a lot of flexibility, Jimdo gives us additional ideas on this page, but on this point, Jimdo doesn’t make the user’s work as easy as it could be.

Luckily, there are still several settings that we haven’t discussed. Not that many to be honest… Jimdo isn’t the richest website creation software at the functional level, but it’s still not bad in modifiable things, especially for software that’s so easy to use. A small overview from the parameter view.

It’s not a function, but it’s still one of the biggest strong points of the software. It’s difficult to feel lost when you have a Jimdo site. The online help is very comprehensive, the French-language forum is active, and the agency or freelance Jimdo experts such as Olivier from ZeKoolWeb at numeroAbove ,all Jimdo’s client support is responsive. Note that the speed of the response to questions depends on the option chosen.

In conclusion, Jimdo is an excellent software program if you are looking for a site with relatively few pages, whether it’s a showcase site or an e-commerce site. All of the essential functions are there, the editor is very well done and the quality/price ratio is very good. Jimdo reaches its limits when it has to manage a lot of content or articles in an online boutique.