In the early days of the internet, you couldn’t build a website without lots of code. These days, dozens of easy website builders like Ucraft are ready to help you get your web presence online without coding. Ucraft lets you build a beautiful, modern, mobile-friendly site, and the recent Ucraft Next overhaul brings it further in line with rival services. However, its interface is less intuitive than that of competitors, and its free version is disappointingly limited. Ucraft has improved, but you’re still better off with one of our Editors’ Choice winners like the free Wix or the premium Duda.
How Much Does Ucraft Cost?
You get started with your Ucraft site by signing up for an account, which only requires a name, email (with verification), and password. You can start with a free account, which includes Ucraft branding, an SSL certificate, 24/7 support via web chat, and limited customization. Unlike Wix, Ucraft puts lots of limits on free site design options, and you can only create one per account. All Ucraft sites use free Google Cloud hosting.
Paid accounts start at $14 per month (paid monthly) for the Website level, which removes Ucraft branding, includes a custom domain name, lets you sell up to 5 products online, and offers all the service’s site customization options. The eCommerce Starter level ($21 per month) increases the product ceiling to 20 and adds more store features. The eCommerce Unlimited plan ($125 per month) features unlimited products, inventory locations, and page collection items.
Ucraft’s pricing is pretty much in the standard ballpark of site builder pricing. For comparison, Wix starts at $16 per month and goes up to $159 for its top business offering, while Squarespace charges $23 to $65.
(Credit: Ucraft/PCMag)
Web Design With Ucraft
As with just about every other DIY online site builder, you get started by selecting a template. The designs are stylish, many of which feature full-page images with little in the way of navigation. Once you choose a template, you need to decide on a domain for your site address. The free sites get domains in the form yoursitename.ucraft.ai. Ucraft promises users can one day generate their entire site with AI, but right now, the AI tool just generates descriptive text for the About page based on your prompt.
Starting our testing with a free account, we quickly found that most of the customization, including the visual editor, is not available to free accounts. That’s unfortunate; other services like Wix and Weebly offer nearly all design options aside from commerce and large storage and bandwidth options.
For paid sites, elements include all the usual suspects: Images, galleries, titles, paragraphs, videos, icons, logos, buttons, and social buttons. We like that there’s a search within the widgets, blocks, and overlays panel. Most elements let you add hover and load effects, like slide-ins and reveals. One helpful differentiator is Ucraft’s logo builder. Businesses without the resources for professional designers’ services will appreciate this tool.
(Credit: Ucraft/PCMag)
The interface takes a little getting used to. The elements are indeed drag-and-drop, but you’re limited as to how and where you can place them on the page. Everything snaps into predetermined spots on the grid, but we weren’t always sure exactly where an element may move to when dragging it. Look out for dividers to appear as you drag elements around to help guide you. It’s not as intuitive as other site builders. Separate from the building page is the Designer Tools page, where you adjust title fonts and change some layout options. The Layout options let you adjust the space between elements and blocks. Double-clicking on text lets you change the font, size, spacing, and color for the text and background.
You can upload multiple JPGs from your PC or choose from a decent, searchable selection of free stock photography. Ucraft helpfully saves all your uploaded photos so you can reuse them elsewhere on the site (but not on any other Ucraft sites you may have). Your options for video embedding are Vimeo and YouTube or upload an MP4 file.
There are now basic built-in photo editing tools to help you tweak things like the brightness, contrast, and color saturation of your images. You can crop and choose some load animations, as well as rotate and scale images. You also have decent image gallery tools.
Ucraft offers good options for adding pages to your site. You start doing so from the Dashboard’s Pages button. The overall template you chose determines what pages are initially included in your site. Of course, you can add to and delete these, but you may not see page types likeStoree when you add a page. You can, however, duplicate a template page of those types. Or just create and customize a totally blank page. You can also password-protect any page individually.
Ucraft’s templates also include blogging templates. The blog maker lets you save a post as a draft, schedule, apply tags, add categories, and assign multiple authors. You can also enable comments, but that requires a Disqus account. After you create a post, it appears on your Articles Dashboard page.
(Credit: Ucraft/PCMag)
Ucraft makes your site live by default as soon as you start editing it. We prefer builders that let you save a version before making it live, such as Wix. But you can set your site to Offline in Site Settings. The Settings page also lets you password-protect, set a favicon for, and cache your site. The last option only works for custom domains and should result in faster page loading, but you have to remember to clear the cache when you update the site. A versioning feature is tied to this caching; it lets you try different site content in your custom domain versus your Ucraft.com subdomain.
Making Money From Your Ucraft Site
Even free accounts can sell five physical products, but once you have a paid Ucraft account, you get full, robust e-commerce options. Some of the blocks you can add to any page are commerce-related—basically online catalog pages. You can customize the layout of these. But to actually change commerce options such as price, you need to go to the Dashboard’s eCommerce page. Here, you add products, set up payment gateways, and even enter shipping and tax options. Payment services include Square and PayPal, which is all you really need. Many sites also use Stripe, which powers Ucraft’s own Ucraft Pay service in the cheaper tiers.
You can bulk-update a group of selected products and import them via CSV, XCart, or LiteCommerce formats. Sharing your store on eBay, Facebook, and most other online marketplaces is easy, with built-in options. You can sell downloads and subscriptions, conduct email marketing campaigns, and create discount coupons for your products. Ucraft checks all the boxes for adding online selling to your site.
(Credit: Ucraft/PCMag)
If you’re trying to grow your audience, from fans to customers, Ucraft now offers a built-in analytics tool in the dashboard. Here, you can track the number of visitors to your site along with other key details like location, device used, and returning visitors. The analytics page also displays financial data, such as how much profit your store is making. The SEO tools tell you if your pages are optimized.
Mobile Site Building
One cool option that we haven’t seen in other site builders is the Visibility option that appears in the context menu for elements. With this, you can choose which device display types the element will appear on, so you could have an element that displays on tablets and smartphones but not desktop browsers.
On the other side of mobile is an app that lets you edit your site using your phone. Ucraft doesn’t offer this, and you can’t use a mobile web version of the builder. You can, however, use an app to manage your store and products from the road—as long as you have an eCommerce Starter ($21 per month) account or above. You even get advanced features like abandoned-cart emails to prospective buyers. It’s a very full and well-done e-commerce solution.
(Credit: Ucraft/PCMag)
Help and Performance
Linger on the Ucraft website a little, and the builder’s chatbot will start engaging you, asking if you need help. We found the people behind the help chat attentive and knowledgeable. It almost got to the point that we always felt someone was watching us build our site. There’s a help button in the lower-left corner of every screen. This takes you to a well-stocked support page with tutorials on often-needed topics like Getting Started, Designer Tools, and Logo creation.
For uptime testing, we use a monitoring service that checks if the site is online every 15 minutes. Our test Ucraft site showed no downtime over a one-week period, which is what you want to see.
Verdict: A Solid Option in a Big Crowd
Ucraft is a powerful website builder with some slick, modern design options. It lets you password-protect any page and collaborate with others in your site-building effort. Its online store builder offers everything a small online shop could want. And it now features improved image editing and built-in analytics. Nevertheless, performing many tasks in Ucraft isn’t as smooth and intuitive as in other providers, and its free tier isn’t very viable. Ucraft now keeps pace with the many other great site builder choices these days, but it still doesn’t stand out. We recommend taking a look at our Editors’ Choice site builders: Duda, for its excellent mobile options, and Wix, for its wealth of site-building extras and capable free tier.
The Bottom Line
Ucraft offers good-looking templates, mobile site customization, and good support, but it’s less intuitive than competitors and very limited for free users.
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About Michael Muchmore
Lead Software Analyst
PC hardware is nice, but it’s not much use without innovative software. I’ve been reviewing software for PCMag since 2008, and I still get a kick out of seeing what’s new in video and photo editing software, and how operating systems change over time. I was privileged to byline the cover story of the last print issue of PC Magazine, the Windows 7 review, and I’ve witnessed every Microsoft win and misstep up to the latest Windows 11.
Prior to my current role, I covered software and apps for ExtremeTech, and before that I headed up PCMag’s enterprise software team, but I’m happy to be back in the more accessible realm of consumer software. I’ve attended trade shows of Microsoft, Google, and Apple and written about all of them and their products.
I’m an avid bird photographer and traveler—I’ve been to 40 countries, many with great birds! Because I’m also a classical fan and former performer, I’ve reviewed streaming services that emphasize classical music.
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About Jordan Minor
Senior Analyst, Software
In 2013, I started my Ziff Davis career as an intern on PCMag’s Software team. Now, I’m an Analyst on the Apps and Gaming team, and I really just want to use my fancy Northwestern University journalism degree to write about video games. I host The Pop-Off, PCMag’s video game show. I was previously the Senior Editor for Geek.com. I’ve also written for The A.V. Club, Kotaku, and Paste Magazine. I’m the author of a video game history book, Video Game of the Year, and the reason why everything you know about Street Sharks is a lie.
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