Simvoly Website Builder

You have many choices when it comes time to select a website builder . There are the big guns in the space, such as our Editors' Choice winners Duda and Wix , that dominate through price, flexibility, and functionality. Up-and-comer services like Simvoly are smaller but still may serve your hosting needs. Simvoly is a modern, capable, and user-friendly website builder. Even better, it has many tools that cater to professional-level customers, but manages to deftly serve novices. It could use more e-commerce and widget options, though.

Plans and Prices

You can try Simvoly for free without a credit card for 14 days. However, the service lacks a dedicated free tier like Duda and Wix. Simvoly's entry-level Starter plan lets you build one website and comes with 20GB of monthly data transfers, an AI assistant, and a custom domain for $18 per month ($12 per month with an annual subscription). With it, you can sell memberships, but full e-commerce functionality costs an additional $19 per month.

The Business plan, which costs $36 per month ($29 per month with an annual subscription), grants unlimited webpages, 60GB of monthly data transfers, two admins, six domains, analytics, and up to 100 store products.

Upgrading to the Premium plan gets you 100GB of monthly data transfers, 11 domains, and unlimited products and member accounts, all for $49 per month ($39 per month with an annual subscription).

Elite, the top-level plan, is for full-on commercial accounts. For $97 per month ($79 per month with an annual subscription), you can build five websites, create unlimited domains, and enjoy 200GB of monthly data transfers. If you want to get into the reseller game, check out Simvoly's white label services. They start at $59 per month (for two websites, five hosted videos, and a shared 100GB monthly data transfer pool) and top out at $497 per month (for unlimited websites, unlimited hosted videos, and a shared 1TB monthly data transfer pool). They also include marketing Funnels (more on those in a bit).

Except for the Starter tier, all plans include A/B testing and other marketing-centric features. Even better, they lack transaction fees. With Squarespace and Wix, you pay a standard per-transaction fee to the payment-processing service middleman, although subscribing to a higher tier may eliminate that penalty thanks to fully integrated e-commerce tools.

Building Your Website

Simvoly has two options for starting your website-building journey. You can choose a template (as you would in nearly every other site builder) or use the Magic Website Wizard. We'll discuss the non-magical tool first.

Simvoly's themes use responsive design for flexible mobile presentation. They're clean-looking themes categorized into nine groups, including Arts, Fashion, Personal Photography, Restaurant, and Services. Online Store templates have their own section. You can preview the responsively designed themes as they appear on PCs, phones , and tablets . After you choose a theme, you then create an online Simvoly account. This only requires an email, username, and password. The builder page opens with customizable, pre-populated content. To help you do this, a wizard walks you through the basics of adding pages and widgets and modifying overall site settings.

Simvoly works as a modern website builder should, letting you easily build and customize your pages with drag-and-drop functionality and mouse-over menus. A blue plus-sign icon in the top right lets you add new Pages to your sites, as does the first item in the floating left rail. The top big button on the left-side toolbar allows you to manage and add site pages. When you add a page, you can see and set its URL, choose a template (Home, Contact, About, Blank), password-protect the page, and specify a custom header. One limitation is that you can't drag and drop page entries to change the navigation. You can set any page as the home page, but there are no nesting pages under others from the Pages menu. You can do this from the Website Settings panel, though adding subpages is less straightforward than in Wix and some other competing services.

As with Squarespace, Simvoly lets you add content in blocks you access by clicking the on-hover Add Block "+" buttons within the editor. The next button over is Widgets. It lets you add images, text areas, maps, code blocks, and even blank areas. You can drag and drop these sections to multiple places in the editor space. Whenever your mouse hovers over a block, Edit, Move, and Delete buttons appear. If you click on text, you get all your text formatting options. You can easily divide your site into up to five columns, each with an adjustable width. You can undo your last action, but there isn't a full multiple-undo capability like that in Duda. You'll just have to rely on backups.

The next left rail item is Global Styling Settings, a single place to edit your content's colors, fonts, and sizes. Then there's Funnels, which are marketing features allowing you to generate customer leads. There's also a general settings section, where you can set your favicon, manage domains, and add custom code if you're a web designer.

Overall, Simvoly isn't as flexible as PageCloud 's full WYSIWYG editor, but the ability to move columns makes it slightly more flexible than what Squarespace offers. However, Simvoly lacks third-party widgets, such as ones for Mailchimp or Shopify . Your only workaround is embedding custom code. Unlike Duda, GoDaddy Websites + Marketing , Squarespace, and Wix, Simvoly lets you easily switch themes.

Using the Website Settings tab, you can choose whether your site should fill the full width of the browser or stay contained in a fixed box. You can also change the header site navigation menu and upload a custom favicon, that tiny icon that appears in the browser tab.

Awkwardly, getting a custom domain requires contacting the Simvoly staff, rather than simply applying online. We also prefer website builders that let us fill out a short form for business details, such as name, address, phone number, and contact email. Not having a form isn't a deal breaker, but its inclusion speeds up the building process. You can also hook up your Simvoly site to a domain you've previously registered with another  website hosting service .

The Magic Website Wizard

Simvoly's  Magic Website Wizard  is a beta tool that asks you a few questions to automatically generate a website. You first choose a type, such as Business, Personal, Photography, or Portfolio. Besides those four, more types are in development, including Blog/Magazine, Online Store, and Landing Page. After the main category selection, you enter a more specific site purpose. We chose a category, which prompted more suggestions. For example, we typed "cloth," which caused Sport Clothing and Apparel, Women's Clothing, and Clothing and Apparel to appear as suggestions.

Next, you choose how you want the main navigation to look—with the menu across the top or along a side. The wizard proposes a design template, and then you log in. The Magic Website Wizard's results are pretty sparse. One suggestion for our coffee-themed website was just a single column with a few links on an otherwise blank and clearly unfinished page. It's probably better to just pick a template because they're already fleshed out and have some theming for you to build off of and pour content into.

Magic Website can be a nice timesaver, but tools like this feel increasingly standard in today's convenient site builders. Hostinger features impressive AI builder tools , for example. Simvoly now has AI generative text tools, powered by ChatGPT , so you can get AI assistance as you continue building your website. However, we still recommend opting for a human touch , not AI, when building your site. Real people produce fewer cookie-cutter results.

Blogging and Working With Images

The fashion template came with a blog page. You can only have one blog page per site, but you can add a blog block to any of your pages using a content block. You get some attractive layout choices. Each post can have a large image to the left, and you can stack posts vertically, or use a trendy masonry-style layout, with elements offset like bricks in a wall, with or without a sidebar. It took a little while to find out how to add a blog post to our site, though; it was under the "News & Updates" page of our template.

Posts should have a photo, quote, or video to bring the reader in, but text-only posts are allowed. The interface gently encourages you to spice up your post with media. You can save a post as a draft for later publishing, or schedule it to publish at a later date or time. Posts must have tags, must fall into categories, and can have comments, which you can approve. Readers can enter their email address in a box on any of your blog pages to get email notifications about new posts.

Like the better site builders, Simvoly maintains an online repository of photos you've uploaded, so that you can reuse them elsewhere on your site. You can upload multiple images at once and create subfolders for organizing them. One missing feature is the ability to use images from online services, such as Facebook or Flickr. You can apply slick animations, too, like slide in, fade in, and zoom. You can also resize images (relative to other columns alongside them) on the page by dragging their left or right edges.

One feature that many users will probably want is completely missing, however. There aren't any kind of  photo editing tools . None. You can't even rotate an image or slightly change it with filters—only select whether you want it to stretch to fill the space you put it in. Most services we've reviewed include an integrated online image editor, such as Aviary. It's fine to expect people to use installed photo software, but simple stuff like cropping and rotating should be included. Simvoly contacts inform us that photo editing capability is on the company's roadmap.

Gallery options include grids with text or carousels. You can add them either via drag-and-drop from the toolbar or from the "+" content button that appears when you hover over a content block. The latter offers more preset layout options. With either, you can change image padding and the number of images per row. There's also a lightbox check box to let your site viewers see a full-window slideshow

Video is only via hosted links: Simvoly only hosts still images. Also, aside from some templates' sample photos, you don't get a selection of stock photography.

Publishing Content

You can preview your site before publishing it. However, the builder is WYSIWYG, so you may not even need to do this. When you preview the site, you can see how it looks on desktop and mobile devices. We don't like that Simvoly publishes your site live as soon as you start working on it. Anyone can visit the URL and see the page even in its earliest form. We prefer the ability to preview and fine-tune before the site goes live, so the public's first impression isn't an unpolished page. This could be fixed with a manual publishing option, but even the ability to create an Under Construction page would be preferable to the current setup.

Building Mobile-Friendly Sites and Measuring Site Traffic

As with most site builders that use responsive page designs, Simvoly automatically creates websites that look great in mobile browsers. The editor has buttons to view your site in desktop, mobile, or tablet views, and you can edit within any view. Simvoly also lets you hide certain sections in mobile and tablet views, which is quite useful. Our test site looked great on an iPhone , and it included a hamburger menu for handheld operation.

Unlike many site builders that leave setting up traffic monitoring to you, Simvoly includes a decent set of site-visit stats on your dashboard. You can see overall traffic by date range, top pages, and even what devices and browsers are being used to view your site. One thing you don't get is a breakdown of user stats, such as geographic location or repeat visits. You can hook up a Google Analytics account if you want that level of detail. There isn't much at all in the way of SEO help, though. You can, however, set the meta title and meta description for each page in its Settings dialog.

How to Make Money With Simvoly

Selling products is easy. We're impressed that the site builder lets you sell digital downloads without an account upgrade like some other services require. You can even sell site memberships and subscriptions. As with the blog, your Simvoly site includes a store page, but you can delete it if you're not selling anything. We ran into a few script errors when editing product description text, but this was an isolated incident that we didn't see again in later testing.

You can add product variations, enter sale prices, and keep track of inventory with Simvoly's store engine. And, of course, you can upload an image for every product—multiple images if you like. Product pages come with basic sections that make sense, but you can add any kind of content block you want. You get a few choices of layout and styling. In addition to the full-page  shopping cart , there's a mini-cart that can appear in the top right corner of the browser window.

The two best payment services— PayPal and Stripe—are integrated into the store along with several others. You can enter a bank account routing number so the lucre flows directly into your coffers. It's also easy to set up shipping costs based on weight or price, but there's no integration with FedEx, UPS, or USPS. Tax setup could use a little more work, too. As it is, you can add a tax based on the country, but that doesn't help for the US, where each state has its own sales tax. Fortunately, you only have to collect tax on web sales in states where you have a physical presence, so small proprietors would normally just have to fill in one state's sales tax rate.

Simvoly has integration with  GetResponse  for email marketing . The service offers Mailchimp integration via an app, as well. There's also native support for Meta Pixel ad campaigns, with the ability to track page views and shopping cart activity.

Customer Support and Uptime Promise

A question mark button always appears in the lower left corner of the site builder, should you have questions about site building with the service. That button takes you to a rich help library with illustrated walkthroughs of site-building procedures. If you get to a dead end in those resources, Simvoly prompts you to contact support staff through chat or email. Business and E-Commerce level plans get Priority Support, which means you get a response within six hours, though a company rep told us that they reply ASAP. We've always been able to get a quick response from Simvoly staff right on the service's home page chat widget, which anyone visiting simvoly.com can use.

When we sent a request about connecting a domain registered elsewhere, a Simvoly customer support representative answered in under two minutes. The advice was on target, and our site was connected to our outside domain quickly.

Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. If your site is down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services. Simvoly is remarkably stable, promising 99.9% uptime. So, you can trust Simvoly to act as a foundation for your website.