Yola Review: Its strength is support
This website builder certainly lets its sunny South African and Californian roots shine through: the company has a very friendly appearance. Yola puts a lot of weight into its support by offering telephone support for new customers -- something you don't see with many providers.
Basically they seem to want to provide a simple, fool-proof option for beginners. In addition to the free plan there is Yola Bronze ($49.95 per year) or Yola Silver (USD $99.95 per year). One of the biggest drawbacks of the Bronze plan is that Yola's branding in the footer will not be removed.
A domain can be bought through Yola for $11.95 per year (.com domain). That means you pay quite a bit more than you would with their closest competitors, Weebly and Jimdo. Your own email account will set you back another $9.96 per year.
On the positive side they have partnered up with Ecwid to provide an online store, which is very powerful. The online store comes together with Yola Silver and is $19.95 per month.
We're here to tell you if Yola is worth it. But first, let's take a look inside the tool:
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| Editor | Yola's templates | Video tutorials |
Our Yola rating in detail
| Criterion | Rating | Comments |
| Ease of use |  |
The editor is intuitive and easy to use. It can be very slow, though. |
| Template choice and flexibility |  |
Yola's templates have a nice modern look and can also be customized to a certain degree. The new mobile website version looks pretty good but is only available on Silver plans. |
| Advertisement-free | Yes | Silver plan only. Yola Free and Bronze feature a pretty visible Yola ad in the footer. |
| Languages |  |
Currently available in EN, FR, EP, DE, IT and PT. No special feature to create multilingual sites. |
| Features | ||
| - Top-level domain (e.g. .com or .net) | Yes | You can point a domain you already own to Yola or buy a new one through Yola. Paid plans only. |
| - Depth of navigation | |
Two levels deep but this is only supported by their premium templates—if your site grows this will be a limitation. |
| - Widgets (small tools to add extra functionality) | |
Offers quite a range of widgets, most of them are integrations from third parties. It's also easy to integrate share buttons for social networks. |
| - Monetization | Yes | You can use their widget to integrate Google AdSense for example. |
| - e-Commerce | |
Yola features a powerful e-commerce widget which comes from Ecwid.com. Find our detailled review of the online store here. |
| - Search-engine optimization (SEO) |  |
Title, meta and description tags are all customizable at page level. URL text is always created from the respective menu item. |
| - Blog | |
Offers everything you need for a basic blog; comments can only be integrated with Disqus. |
| - Visitor statistics | |
Yola Silver features its own tracking tool, which only stores data up to 30 days, or you can use Google Analytics (recommended). |
| - Contact form | Yes | Offers a very flexible and easy-to-use contact form builder. |
| - Password protection | Yes | You can either protect the entire site or individual pages. |
| - Add HTML code | Yes | Allows you to add external widgets and other tools. |
| - Storage space | from 1 GB | Yola Silver offers 5 GB of storage. |
| - Forums | Yes | Direct integration with Tal.ki which allows you to easily add a forum. |
| Support | Email, phone and knowledge base | Support is one of Yola's strengths, however, after their recent updates we found a lot of links in the support section were not working anymore. |
| Fun factor | |
It's fun to work with the website builder as long as you don't expect complex things from it. |
| Overall rating | |
Fine for a simple and flat website due to its limited depth of navigation. The e-commerce widget makes it an interesting choice for creating a small online store. |
Conclusion:
We have mixed impressions of this website builder. On the one hand it is easy and fun to work with. On the other hand it is only suitable for very flat websites, due to structural limitations in its templates.
Its support was fast and reliable, so this product may be just right if you want to be able to talk to someone on the phone. For everyone else we would recommend one of Yola's more affordable competitors which offer better value overall.
Yola's new online store can certainly impress and if you are planning on getting involved in e-commerce now or in the future, this will be definitely something worth considering.
> Click here to try Yola for free
Updates
14 Mar 2013 - We added information about password protection.
12 Feb 2013 - Yola essentially renders the free plan useless by imposing a three page limit.
07 Mar 2012 - Review of Yola's online store added
11 Jan 2012 - Pricing updates, mobile website version
21 Jul 2011 - Complete update of the review
Last updated: 14 Mar 2013 | Robert Brandl
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