Having a website for your business nowadays is very important, whether you’re having an online shop, or just need a way to let people know what time you open and close.
To that end, Zyro is a great and simple website builder that doesn’t ask too much from you. Unlike Wix and Shopify, which tend to be slightly more complicated, Zyro is built around being incredibly simple and easy to use.
The setup process is very straightforward, and you don’t need any kind of web development knowledge to set yourself up quickly.
That being said, it does have a couple of downsides. The simplicity means you give up a lot of control, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and the drag-and-drop interface is good enough for most needs.
Not only that, but Zyro has some interesting extra features that you won’t find on other builders, suck as their AI writer which is . . . interesting.
Table of Contents:
Zyro Review
Key Specifications:
PROS
CONS
Innovative Features, Not Much Customization 📚
There’s a lot of competing website builders out there vying for your attention and your money, and sometimes it can be overwhelming.
As such, lets look at Zyro in terms of pros and cons, while going into each one a bit more to give you a good idea of what Zyro offers and if it's right for you.
Surprisingly, even though Zyro is somewhat new to the scene, it does an excellent job as one of the cheapest website builders and offers great value, especially for those who are building their first website.
More importantly, it adds a lot of interesting AI features that will absolutely make your life easier.
Zyro Pros and Cons
Great Site Performance 
Even though Zyro is a relatively new entrant into the website building scene, they actually do a really good job when it comes to website performance.
Speeds are roughly at the 120-140ms range, which is excellent, and they’ve had a 99.95% uptime in the past 3 months, which is similarly good news.
That being said, there is a miniscule difference in performance compared to the more established sites which do better.
Thankfully, the difference is marginal and won’t affect most people, and is to be expected when comparing Zyro to more established sites.
Another great thing included is Cloudflare protection. If you aren’t familiar with Cloudflare, it’s a service that helps prevent your site going down from Distributed Denial Service of Attacks (DDoS).
This is great due to the fact that not many services include Cloudflare protection as a default, rather as something optional.
Finally, due to their reactive design philosophy, any website you build with Zyro will work great on both desktop and mobile.
That being said, going from one theme to another has to be done manually, which can be very annoying if you have a lot of content.
Still, you aren’t spending a lot of resources on getting designs to work on mobile as well, and you can even go into a mobile view editor while on desktop, which is great.
Lots of Free Images
One thing that website developers and designers are always trying to get their hands on are great stock images to use for their content.
Well thankfully, Zyro has managed to deal with a lot of that hassle for you, as they’ve teamed up with Unsplash, which has a massive repository of images.
By integrating in this fashion, Zyro can make it much easier for you to include imagery in your content without having to spend a lot of time and resources searching for it.
All that being said, you can still absolutely upload your own images if you choose to.
Aside from the mountain of images is the 100 or so templates that Zyro comes with. Granted, that’s not a lot compared to the hundreds that Wordpress.com has, or the thousands if you do your own Wordpress Hosting and go with Wordpress.org.
Even so, the lack of choice isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially if you suffer a lot from trying to make design decisions, a streamlined approach is great.
Not only that, but actually setting up a template is relatively easy and pretty modular. You can just build it according to your needs using their drag-and-drop interface and you’ll have it done in a jiffy.
Plus, as we mentioned earlier, the site automatically makes the template work grate on mobile, although you still retain the option to adjust things for mobile viewers yourself.
AI Writer
One interesting feature which you probably won’t find on other website builders is Zyro’s AI writer. How it works is you select from one of 11 different general topics, then you click a specific sub-category, so say something like interior design.
You then click ‘generate’ and the AI creates the copy for your blog post or about page or what have you.
Now, keep in mind this isn’t going to be as good as copy that is created by a human being, and the truth is, you will absolutely have to go through it and tweak it on your own.
That means you’ll basically be copy editing the content generated by this AI, so keep that in mind.
Nonetheless, it’s an interesting addition, and for those who don’t need a ton of copy, or who don’t primarily rely on content for generating revenue, this is a nice little addition.
AI Heatmap
Another interesting AI feature is the AI heatmap.
Basically when visitors browse a website, their eyes are naturally drawn to different parts of the web page depending on a variety of different factors.
With Zyro’s AI heatmap, you upload an image of your site, and the AI does an estimation of the most looks at portions of any webpage you provide it.
This information is provided to you as a heatmap (ergo the name) and gives you a quick reference to what people’s eyes will be most focused on.
This can be an excellent feature to help you tweak your website to help draw the eye to the most important bits of information you have on any particular page.
Interestingly, the Zyro AI Heatmap is publicly available for anybody to use, so you don’t technically have to have a site with Zyro to use it. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting little addition that could be useful.
Not A Lot of Customization
Of course, simple design techniques are great, but they take out an absolute ton of customization.
When it comes to Zyro’s website building, you have 12 elements to play with: Text, Button, Stripe checkout, Image, Gallery, Video, Map, Instagram feed, Contact form, Subscribe, Social icons and you can even add an Embed code if you want more customization.
On the one hand, that’s really great if you’re a newbie to website development/design and want a really simple interface to deal with. On the other hand, if you have a more complex design concept in your head, you’re sadly going to be out of luck.
Also, this sort of applies to down the road as well, since you probably won’t be able to create your own UI/UX, even if you make enough money down the line to pay for one.
So unless Zyro plans to add some form of customized website building, which they very well might, this is a point that you’ll have to seriously consider. Again, this isn’t a deal breaker if you want something simple, just keep it in mind.
Can Be Buggy Sometimes
Of course, given that this is a newer platform, it does have its fair share of bugs. Thankfully, these aren’t major things, and mostly is just having to maybe upload something twice because it doesn’t work the first time.
Doesn’t happen all the time of course, but it is a niggle that gets in the way of an overall enjoyable experience.
All that being said, Zyro is updating the website regularly, and everything is applied automatically so you don’t have to do anything by yourself. As such, fixes come fast and bugs are dealt with relatively quickly with no input required from your end.
Zyro Pricing Plans
The first paid plan on the other hand is the ‘Basic’ coming in at £8.90/month and giving you surprisingly a lot. For starters the bandwidth gets bumped up to 3GBs, and storage gets bumped to 1GB, which is excellent.
You then have the removal of Zyro ads, the ability to add your own domain from a domain registrar, an SSL certificate and AI branding, which is similar to the writer AI from earlier.
Going up from ‘Basic’ you have ‘Unleashed’ which comes in at £10.90/month and mostly adds a few website tools. Bandwidth and storage becomes unlimited starting with this plan, and you get all the features from ‘Basic’.
They also provide you with a free domain, if you want to go that route. Finally, you get Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, some basic marketing and messenger live chat integration.
The first proper eCommerce plan is called . . . ‘eCommerce’ and is £19.90/month, somewhat expensive but well worth it.
Along with the above features you get a whole host of business tools like shipping and tax management, order tracking, inventory management, email notifications and the ability to accept online payments.
This plan also removes any commission Zyro would take, something that the lower plans don’t have sadly.
Finally, if you really want to get the best in terms of eCommerce, there’s the ‘eCommerce +’ plan that comes in at a whopping £25.90/month.
Most importantly it adds Facebook and Instagram shops, as well as on Amazon (for the US only). You also get abandoned cart recovery, which is very important, as well as the ability to have your site in multiple languages.
Overall, the pricing plans very similarly line up with how other website builders do it, and the lower package probably offers a bit more value than the competition.
Our Verdict ⚖️
While not as complex as something like Wix or Wordpress or even Shopify. Zyro is a great entry-level website builder and great for those who just want to get something up quickly and simply.
The design interface is simple, so you don’t need to have web development skills, and it does feature some great template design. In a sense, Zyro is closer to Squarespace and Weebly in terms of simplicity and straightforward website design.
That being said, if you have a web developer or designer background, or you have somebody ready to do that work for you, Zyro may be a bit too simple for your needs.
Given the lack of overall customization, you don’t get a lot of options to tweak the interface and look of the website.
As such, any specific design considerations might not be able to be implemented with Zyro. This isn’t a deal-breaker per se, but it’s certainly something to keep in mind moving forward.
Regardless, you do get some great site performance, the interesting AI writing tool, and the Unsplash integration which helps streamline adding images to your blog.
Then you add the great pricing structure, and at the end of the day you get the best website builder that is almost certainly going to make waves in the future.
