Zyro is a new website building tool that comes with its own hosting. A brainchild of established brand Hostinger, it allows users to very quickly build and launch basic sites completely fuss-free. While it isn’t perfect by a long shot, Zyro has a lot of potential appeal to users who aren’t looking much past a basic digital presence. Learn more.
• October 29, 2020
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With the website building market hotter than a pizza out of the oven, many website builders have been popping up here and there. However, from my observation, many of them are competing for what one would assume to be an already niche market segment.
This is the time when a new player in the industry steps in and upsets the apple cart. Someone like Zyro, for example. Despite its claim to be an extremely powerful solution, a thorough review of Zyro finds that in reality, the key appeal lies in its close adherence to simplicity.
Pros of Zyro
Cons of Zyro
Zyro Plan & Pricing
Verdict
Not every website that goes online aims to be a digital behemoth, and for customers like those, Zyro offers a very unique opportunity for partnership with an ideal solutions provider. One that is easy to use, very reasonably priced, and offering just the right combination of tools.
Zyro is a rapid website development platform that is aimed at users with zero coding skills. In fact, there is not even a necessity for most of its target market to know anything about websites. As long as you’re familiar with graphic user interfaces, you can use Zyro.
Aside from the web development GUI, Zyro also offers associated tools which might come in handy. These include an AI content production script, AI heatmap for focus control assistance, and a large pool of images to use as resources.
Before we take a deeper dive into Zyro though, there’s something important that needs to be said. As I mentioned, Zyro is relatively new to market. This implies a couple of things – the first of which is of course, to expect a few bugs.
More importantly though, I’ve been observing them since launch and they have been adding new features and functionality at a breakneck speed. If you hop on board with them now, I recommend you do it quickly and send in your recommendations of things you’d like to see or experience.
With that, let’s begin.
Zyro’s performance with our test site was pretty good.
| US (W) | US (E) | London | Singapore | Sao Paulo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 147 ms | 85 ms | 90 ms | 168 ms | 201 ms |
| Bangalore | Sydney | Japan | Canada | Germany |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 117 ms | 213 ms | 174 ms | 95 ms | 108 ms |
Bitcatcha builds and maintains test sites for the hosts we review for maximum transparency in our reviews. In Zyro’s case, their servers performed quite well using our server speed checker, averaging 139.8 ms based on tests from ten locations around the world.
One small thing to note though is that although the A+ rating is good, the actual numbers could still be a little better. Still, it’s more than enough to give sites a strong enough speed to meet Google guidelines.
To demonstrate the point I made above, we can observe the number breakdowns on WebPageTest results.
Here, Zyro does show a bit of weakness in its Time to First Byte (TTFB) – but as a whole, they’re improving.
Paired with this performance is a surprisingly good level of reliability. The test site we maintain on Zyro manages to hold extended periods without a glitch.
Uptime since 10 July 2020
100%
* This counter is constantly self-updating
Over a 30-day sample we observed steady performance at above 99.9% availability.
Where most site builders allow users to integrate Content Distribution Network (CDN) services like Cloudflare, Zyro goes a step further and has Cloudflare active and working by default for all sites.
While this may not sound like much, it can make a major difference to new website owners who might not even be aware of what a CDN is (or that these exist). The inclusion could also play a part in the strong performance seen in Zyro hosted sites so far.
For those of you who might have struggled with setting up and adding SSL in the past, Zyro handles that for you. Unlike many hosting providers where you need to deal with different SSL and handling methods, your Zyro site is automatically covered with an SSL.
That is correct – with zero effort on your part. The SSL may sound like a small thing, but it is absolutely vital for any modern website. In fact, many search engines today actively penalize sites without SSL.
For those who might be concerned about having to build for mobile as well, Zyro has you covered there as well. All sites built with Zyro are automatically responsive for both desktop and mobile experiences.
This inclusion further highlights the Zyro intention to help newbies build websites easily. No more having to worry about different formats, just drag, drop, and Zyro will handle the rest.
When I first began my Zyro journey I approached it much the same as I had many website builders in the past. This led to me becoming supremely unhappy with them as I faced one obstacle after the next in my quest for the perfect site.
It was only after much deliberation that I realised that I needed to look at it with fresh eyes – and that was when the scales fell off my view on Zyro. The beauty of Zyro lies not in it offering everything you would need to build the perfect site, but just enough for you to quickly and easily establish a digital presence.
Zyro brings website builders back to the early days when most of them remembered that users who wanted to use them needed simplicity. Today, the market has gotten so overheated that players force themselves to bulk up with ever-increasing feature sets.
If you are new to websites and want a basic site for your company (or even yourself), this is a serious option to consider. Almost everything in Zyro is about simplicity and features that may seem missing are there for two reasons.
The first is that they aren’t likely features that very basic users would want, so they are omitted to keep things clean. The second is that ineffective use of those features would jeopardize Zyro’s promise of excellent site performance.
As the most obvious sign of this, their website builder interface offers only a handful of elements to use. The way these work is as easy as 1, 2, 3 – you drag and drop, resize, then edit. That’s essentially all there is to it.
To get you started, Zyro has a pool of ready made templates that you can use. These are designed to give you a general idea of what sites can look like, and then you can either use them ‘as is’ and personalize the content, or customize them as much as you wish.
With the way Zyro’s builder works, modifying existing templates is much easier compared to most other site builders since there are fewer elements and design concepts to be concerned about.
For maximum effectiveness, what I suggest users do is to take the templates with a pinch of salt. Don’t have it in your mind that these are just what you have to work with. Observe the range of templates to give you an idea of what might be possible in Zyro.
An example of this would be how some templates make use of partially overlapping images to give a more multi-dimensional feel to sites. If you can master concepts like that, you will be able to come up with some custom, stunning templates of your own.
As you can see from the following image, Zyro has a very useful grid system that helps with layouts. The grid blocks aren’t visible until you try and move an element, so it isn’t distracting at all.
Once you select something and try to move it, that’s when the grid boxes come into play and help you with placement such as alignment and resizing of the elements. No more worries about your different page elements being mis-aligned.
I love the way that however you try to manipulate the elements, they easily snap into place thanks to those boxes. The feeling is almost identical to the Windows interface snap and lock feature, albeit more natural.
Admittedly, adjusting the boundaries of elements and fitting them to grids can take a bit getting used to. Once you do though you will notice that this flexibility lets you do things much easier than many other site builders.
This feature is something that I really haven’t seen in any other website builder to date. Yet for many would-be website owners, having the ability to have generic content spun is a great idea.
As a writer at heart, I really had to swallow my tongue when I first encountered this feature. However, I realized quickly that not many small business owners would have a content writer on-hand to generate flawless copy for them.
Even if the content isn’t fantastic, AI Writer can easily be used to give budding site owners an idea of what might go into certain sections of their website. It’s also extremely simple to use. All you need to do is select from a few pre-set options and then click a button to automatically insert the generated text in.
Do be warned though that the text really is extremely generic. Great as a filler though.
Yet another critical area in which many website builders fall short is providing its users with an image pool to play with. I’ve even encountered some that wanted to charge extra for images and offered just a few stock images for free.
Zyro has itself tied in to Unsplash, so you can choose from a massive image bank of freebies that will work within the site builder itself. The idea to integrate with a site like Unsplash is simply inspired.
Of course, you can also choose to upload your own images to Zyro and use them on your own site. No matter your choice, you can resize, crop, and place images anywhere you want.
When Zyro was first brought to my attention, I was a bit perplexed since I felt that there were many areas which could be improved. However, what I realized next was that almost as quickly as I found them, issues were disappearing.
However, as I mentioned earlier, Zyro is undergoing rapid updates. New features are being constantly rolled out and I’ve been observing these over the past few months. They are going fast and furious at it.
This goes back around to what I mentioned about Zyro being suitable for new website owners who need to quickly and effortlessly roll out websites. First was their simple site builder interface, then the AI writer, and to complete the trifecta we have the logo and slogan makers.
I won’t try to blow sunshine at you and tell you it’s awesome – the logo maker is in fact, extremely basic. Yet it is one more integrated feature that could be invaluable to new site owners. The same goes for the slogan makers.
This is something that many other website building tools could do with, and Zyro has implemented it in such a way that’s perfect for their target audience.
When building a site, it can be helpful knowing where your visitors are likely to focus their attention based on your design. This can help you shift elements to where they need to be. That is what Zyro’s AI Heatmap tries to do.
While it isn’t part of the core Zyro sitebuilder, you can access this publicly available tool from their site. It works based on images, so to see how your site is, do a snapshot of the page and upload it to the AI Heatmap tool.
The resulting colour patches are temperatures – showing how well those areas perform as highlights.
For those who want slightly more advanced features, Zyro uses apps to integrate functionality. At the moment, there are only a handful including Google Tags Manager, Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Facebook Messenger, and Hotjar.
However, I have no doubt that Zyro will add more in due course.
For those who haven’t read our other site builder reviews like Wix, established eCommerce site builders tend to have their own payments processing system as a default. However, these are often limited to use in a handful of countries only.
Zyro doesn’t have a native payments processing system but it does support multiple payment methods for eCommerce. While this isn’t any different from others, at least there’s no illusion of having a 100% commission free payments system in place.
For a system like Zyro which claims to aim for simplicity, the domain name handling is a bit of an oddity. In normal cases, all you need to do (even if you bought the domain name separately from where you bought hosting), is to update the DNS servers.
In Zyro’s case, you have to go in and edit CNAME records. While this is not overly difficult, it does add an unnecessary level of complexity for non tech-savvy users. They will be required to mess about in an area not really suitable for newbies to be in.
Zyro doesn’t sell domain names directly so it will send you to Hostinger if you wish to buy a custom name.
When I said that Zyro is very basic, I really meant that. Drag & drop elements comprise five types of content – text, button, image, video, and map. There is literally nothing else. During the review process, I tried to put myself in the mindframe of someone using a system like this for the first time and that sort of worked for me.
However, this is the opportunity to point out that if you have very specific designs in mind for a website that you want, Zyro might not be the right choice for you. If you come in with a fresh mind and work with the tools you have, I can assure you of a quick, simple site.
When I first looked at Zyro, admittedly I felt a little unhappy. However, with the rates they’ve been doing upgrades I now feel that it is a usable system even though I notice a few bugs here and there.
For example, when trying to upload an image of your own, if you double click the image you want when the dialogue box opens, the upload fails and kicks you back to the image upload screen. Repeating the action the second time will be successful.
As I said, small, niggling little bugs that are more of an annoyance than anything major.
Zyro’s support system still needs major improvement – primarily on the two aspects that I’ll discuss below.
Contacting Zyro support was a bit unusual since they didn’t really have a live chat per se. It was more of a chatbot which would forward support requests or questions to their technical team. The response took a while to get back via email (in my case, around 12 hours).
Although to be fair, most support teams do take a little long – that normally doesn’t really apply for chat assistance. Having to wait half a day for an online support query is a bit off-putting.
That being said, you also need to be aware that although Zyro belongs to Hostinger, their support systems are almost entirely different. I tried speaking to Hostinger support about DNS changes for my Zyro site and they directed me to contact Zyro support (who take MUCH longer to respond).
Also unfortunately their knowledge base is quite skimpy. There are a handful of articles there which contain a few one or two line answers to basic questions. No in-depth guides or anything that’s really helpful, sadly.
In fact, their entire knowledge base looks like it was written as a quick FAQ based on their features rather than aimed at addressing any real issues, technical or otherwise.
While you can use Zyro for free, I absolutely recommend that you sign up for their BASIC plan, which gives you much more resources, allows you to use a custom domain name, includes app integrations, and removes ads from your site.
The cost of BASIC is only RM5.30/mo which to me feels like it is a great time to get on board with them. At this cost, the price is far lower than what Zyro offers right now. Once you factor in how quickly you’re getting new updates, it becomes serious value for money.
However, I seriously recommend that users look towards their UNLEASHED plan (at RM8.20/mo) since that is where you start to get unmetered resources. BASIC caps you at a bandwidth of 3GB per month, which is a good sandbox. But regular sites are better off not getting limited in this way.
The prices I’ve shown in the table above are based on a 12-month subscription. If you sign up for longer periods of time the discount increases upto 60%!
For those interested in building an online store, kick off your profits with the ECOMMERCE plan for only RM36.90 per month. At this price you will be hard pressed to find a competing platform.
Some of the more notable features that are included with Zyro are;
If you are new to websites and are looking to establish a basic digital presence, then Zyro can be the perfect tool for you. It offers a stress-free environment that very basic users can work with easily. In fact, sign up for their free plan and experiment before converting to a paid plan so you cna test out their system.
For more advanced users who know the specifics of how and what you want then Zyro might not be suitable. The environment in Zyro has a very specific goal – to let beginners easily build highly flexible sites – and it has accomplished that.
Perhaps that may change in future, but for the moment, Zyro is the ideal platform for real beginners.
Feel free to explore our list of Best Website Builder for other awesome alternatives!
Key Features
Recommended For
Server performance
A+
Overall rating
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