Yola Website Builder Review

Yola is a common name mentioned by website builders because it provides a great and easy solution for people who want to build a website, but they don’t have the coding skills needed to do so.

With over 6 years of experience Yola has powered a lot of big sites, but more importantly, they have over 8 million users and a platform that is available in 6 languages.

Interested? Keep reading our Yola review further to find out if is something that will suit your needs.

Topics covered in this review:

- Summary: Overall rating – Pricing – Interface – Design / Themes – Customer support – Bonuses and promotion – Step by Step Tutorial

– Write your own review and comment

* If you want to read this review and tutorial as a PDF file, you can download it HERE.

Summary – Overall review

The good things about Yola:

Easy drag & drop builder – You simply need to drag the elements you need on your page, insert your desired content and arrange them how you want. That’s it!

Versatility – Yola allows you to use their platform in any way you need. Be it for a blog or even a shop, you have all the tools to build your project.

Widgets Variety – The variety of widgets on this website builder is like nothing else. There is a widget for almost every type of content and third party integrations with all of the most important sites.

Great Support – The best support from all the website builders we have reviewed until now. You can contact them through email, phone and a big knowledge base.

The Cons:

Overall Conclusion:
As you can see from the big discrepancy between the pros and cons, Yola is a great choice for beginners to build their website. But, the true beauty is how well it accomplishes both simplicity and functionality, which is difficult for most websites to do.

Awards:

Pricing

Yola offers you the possibility to choose from 3 different membership plans, depending on your needs and budget. Below I will quickly review them:

Yola Bronze – Besides the increased storage, you will also have the ability to create and manage up to 5 sites rather than only 2 (like you are allowed with the free plan).

Now you can add a custom domain to your website, and if you have any problems, you can make use of their premium phone and email support.

Yola Silver – This package has all the same features as Yola Bronze, but with more storage so you can make up to 25 sites and two great additions:

Premium Styles, CSS Editing & Footer Removal – Now you can really start creating a brand because you can remove the Yola banner and start using their premium themes, which are better looking and packet with more features.

Mobile Publishing – Allows you to publish and optimize your website for all the mobile devices

Facebook Publishing – An essential feature in this social media driven world that lets you connect your site with your Facebook page, and this way grow and engage your fan base.

Yola Gold – The main benefit of choosing this package is their SEO solution that scans your site and lets you know which errors you should fix for better rankings in search engines. An added bonus is the Yola Business Directory submission that will also help your SEO efforts.

As far as prices go, you can take a look yourself at the table below:

Interface

Yola is a true drag & drop website builder with simplicity as their main strength. This is due to the clean dashboard and the fact that everything is within arms reach. There is no need for preliminary documentation (except for our tutorial that you can find in this article) and most importantly, no coding skills whatsoever.

Start by choosing a theme, add your desired widgets, insert the content, hit the publish button and you will end up with a brand new and functional website.

Design / Themes

Even though they only have a little over 80 themes available for the Free plan and almost the same number for their Premium themes, the power comes from the ability to edit the website’s HTML and CSS source codes. This means that you can make any edits you want in order to create your own fully customized theme that will better suit your business.

Even if you don’t want to bother with these kind of technicalities, Yola allows you to customize every single element on your website and assign new fonts, colors or images. This means that it will be very hard to find another website that looks exactly like your own.

Customer support

Yola’s support is the best we’ve seen so far. They take pride in helping their customers, including the free members. This is shown with the big knowledge base pages that are free for everyone to use. They also have an open forum moderated by multiple employees, located at http://forum.yola.com/yola/.

Beside this resources, you can always request an answer by email or phone.

Bonuses and promotion

Here we will update all the Yola coupons that can help you with a discount when buying a premium membership. So be sure to visit this page from time to time to see what’s the latest Yola promo codes.

Save 20% off 1 Year of Yola Gold
Coupon code: GOLD20

Save 20% off 1 Year of Yola Silver
Coupon code: live20

Save 10% off your Custom Domain
Coupon code: welcomedomain10

Step by Step Tutorial To Create Your First Yola Website

Like with every website builder, the first thing you need to do is to create a new account. For this you have to go to www.yola.com and click the “Sign Up” button placed on the right side of the screen. The next thing you have to do is enter in your desired details.

On the second step you are required to enter your business name (or your name if you choose to build a blog or portfolio website) and the category that best suits your website. For this example I’ve chose the “Food & Restaurants” because my site will be about a coffee shop.

After you finish the above step, you will get redirected to a new page where you can add important details (if you have a physical store or the headquarters of your business).
If you don’t want to enter any info, then you can just click the “X” button and enter the dashboard.

When you will enter into your dashboard, you will see that you already have a default template loaded with a few widgets and pictures. This means that the first thing we need to do is to choose a new theme.

On the top left part of your dashboard you will see your control panel. Just click the “Style” tab and choose one of the free themes, because the premium ones are available only to paying members.

Underneath is the “Style Settings” sub-tab where you have more features that allow you to further customize the look of your website.

Style Designer – When you click this, a narrow window will appear where you can choose the font and color for every element in your website, like backgrounds, headers or navigation buttons.

Heading – Enter your website title or business name

Banner – Choose an image for your header from the available stock images, a set of pre-made Yola designs or just upload your own image.

Background – You can use a desired color or upload a customized picture.

Site CSS – Great for those that have good HTML/CSS skills because Yola allows you to access the source code to modify it how you want.

The last sub-tab is called “Fonts”, and it allows you to choose the font for your content.
Now that the design part is finished, I will start talking about the other important tabs and their features. And the first one is “Site”, and it’s important to take the time to check all the requirements.

Site Properties :

Favicon – You can upload your own favicon, which is a great feature for branding your business.

Language – Choose the website’s language (English is the default)

Business Location & Phone Number – Self explanatory. If you completed this info in the signup process, you can skip it.

Password Protection – You can set a password to certain pages so they will not available to everyone.

Delete Site – I don’t think you want to use this!

Publishing:

Publish Site – Self explanatory. But to be honest it’s easier to use the same button placed on your top right.

Mobile – Great feature to make a mobile version of your website. The only bad thing is that it is available only to the premium members.

Facebook Publishing – Lets you integrate your site and publish it as a new tab on your Facebook Page. Available only to premium members.

Content:

File Manager – Great option for managing all the attachments and photos you have uploaded on your website.

Site CSS -  Already talked about it on “Style Settings”.

Pages / Navigation – A page manager where you can drag & drop pages to organize them, make some subpages, create categories and so on.

Tracking:

Site Tracking Code – Allows you to insert the code for other third party trackers.

Google Analytics – Here you can add your Analytics code.

Google Webmaster – Add the website to your Google Webmaster account.

The Page Tab

Page Properties:

A few of these features have been discussed earlier, which is why I will focus only on the new ones.

Metadata – It’s very important to fill in the title and description details, as this will get higher rankings in search engines.

Save Page As – You can edit the name of your page and heading, password protect it or choose to display it or hide it in the website’s navigation.

Layout:

Here you can choose how your layout should look so it can better fit your requirements.

The Widgets Tab

This is a drag and drop website builder, which means that if you want to add content to your page, you simply start adding elements (here called widgets) and insert the content you want.

Yola makes it very easy for you to build a website because it offers a wide variety of widgets clearly structured in relevant categories.

The last 2 tabs (SEO and Online Store) are available only to the paying members.
At this point the only thing remaining is to click the “Publish” button, and this will bring a new window like the one below:

Here you will enter the name of your sub-domain, so be sure to write something that relates to your business. There is also the possibility to buy a custom domain if you want to invest in your brand.

This completes my Yola tutorial, and I hope it will help you in the process of creating the first website (if you choose to opt for this website builder). If you wonder how the end result might look like, see the live sample site i have done for this tutorial HERE.

In the event you have any questions, be sure to leave them in the comment form below and I will make sure to respond as quickly as possible.
* If you want to listen the short version of this review, be sure to check our Weebly podcast here.