How to use Jimdo website builder: A step-by-step guide

Jimdo is a popular website builder that offers an intuitive platform where users can create high-quality websites without the need for advanced coding skills or experience.

Whether you’re a small business owner, a blogger, a freelancer or a personal user, in this article we’ll provide some tips on how you can get started with Jimdo.

An introduction to Jimdo

Jimdo is a website builder platform. Simply put, it’s a tool that you can use to build your website. It offers a range of features and options, allowing you to build any form of website – from an online advertising site for your restaurant to a fully functional online store.

Just like other website builders, Jimdo has been designed to be easy. You don’t need coding experience to build your new website. As you set up, you’ll even be able to automate a lot of the website-building process by answering a series of simple questions. Jimdo will take your answers and use them to automatically build a site for you to get started with.

If you’re not sure that Jimdo is the right choice for you, you can check out our best website builder page to compare other brands. Or, visit our full Jimdo website builder review for more information on this brand.

Jimdo website examples

Jimdo provides examples of real-life sites built using their platform that you can take a look at. The sites on display include a range of styles and represent several industries.

We’ve picked a few of our favourites from that list and included them below to get your creative juices flowing before you dive into the full guide below.

You can visit it’sher, womenletics or retropot to see the sites in action.

Step 1: Set up your Jimdo account and website

When you’re getting started with Jimdo, there are a few basic steps needed to get started.

Sign up – visit the Jimdo website and sign up for a new account. To do so, you’ll need to provide an email address and then create a password.
Choose a template – Jimdo offers a range of professional templates. You can browse through their options to select the design that suits your website goals best.

As you begin the sign up process, Jimdo will ask you a few questions to help you get started, shown in the images above.

The first question will ask if you’re creating a website for yourself or for a group of people, the next question asks whether you’re launching your website for business or personal use – you’re even able to choose somewhere in the middle, if you’re starting a website that might one day become a business, for example.

As the picture above shows, Jimdo will also ask you to define a few of the goals you have for your site. This might include promoting a physical business or getting online bookings. The goals that Jimdo suggests will depend on how you answered the earlier questions. Don’t worry though, you can make changes later on if you need to! This stage is just designed to simplify the set-up process.

During this set-up process, you’ll be asked a few more questions to help make your site a little more specific to your needs. This includes providing the industry you work in, as well as choosing what sort of colour scheme you want to choose. Once you’ve finished answering, the platform will automatically generate you a template to start using. We’ve included another image below of the ‘finished’ product at this stage.

Step 2: Customise your Jimdo website

As a website builder, Jimdo is designed to provide an easy-to-use experience that allows users to create customised sites without knowing how to code.

To get started with customisation, you can focus on:

Layout and design – Jimdo provides a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor that allows you to modify your website’s layout easily. You can add and arrange elements, including text, images, videos and other functions. Consider your audience
Branding – customise your website’s colours, fonts and logo to reflect your brand identity in the best possible way. Consistency and quality in branding your site are essential if you want to build a strong online presence.

In the image above, you can see some of the options Jimdo offers for customisation. Like other website builders, it offers an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor. You can simply click any element on your page and make changes to it.

You can also easily add new professionally-designed blocks to provide the functionality that you need.

Everything on the page can be edited if you like, including the images being used, headings, text and colour scheme. Even simple things, like the shape of the buttons used on your site, can be changed if you like.

In the image below, for example, a new block has been added to the top of the homepage. The colour scheme has also been changed and a new font applied. All of these changes can be made with a few clicks.

We recommend testing out as many variations as you can when you’re designing your site to make sure you’re as happy as you can be.

Step 3: Add content

Content is likely to be the bulk of your content in one way or another, whether you plan to write articles or publish primarily video content. Consider the various types of content, and how you should approach them.

Core pages and navigation – create and organise core pages on your website, such as the Home, About Us and Contact Us pages. These may not be updated often, but provide users with some of the essential information they might want. You should introduce clear navigation, through a top nav, for example, to make sure that the content you publish is easy to find.
Text, images and video – Jimdo’s text editor allows you to add engaging copy to your site easily. You can also use it to add images, videos and audio files that might be suitable for certain types of sites, or for certain topics.

In the image above, you can see the Jimdo new page builder. As part of the website builder, Jimdo offers professionally designed templates that you can choose from. Which of these you use will depend on the type of site you want to run. A restaurant website, for example, will probably need a page for their menu, whereas a photographer might want to promote their work in gallery pages.

Once you’ve picked this template you can begin making changes. This process works the same way as it did in the customisations step above. You can also easily navigate between your existing pages to make changes wherever you need to across the site, as pictured below.

When your site is first generated, Jimdo will also create a set of pages for you that you’ll likely need. The example above was a test for a restaurant website, so Jimdo automatically added ‘Contact’, ‘Menu’ and ‘Appointments’ pages.

With all content, whether you’re using Jimdo or another web builder, make sure that you keep your intended audience front of mind. You don’t want to spend hours creating content that ends up being irrelevant to the people you want to reach.

Step 4: Enhance your on-site functionality

Like other website builders, Jimdo provides a range of features and functions that enable you to produce more advanced on-site experiences.

Integrate e-commerce – Jimdo allows users to incorporate e-commerce features into their sites. With these features, you can sell products and services directly. You can set up an online store complete with product descriptions and images, and you can also manage your inventory with ease.
Forms and contact information – Jimdo also lets users implement contact forms that can enable communication between you and the people visiting your site. This can include on-site communication through comments, but might also include email address or phone number gathering so that you can reach out using other platforms.

Helpfully, Jimdo offers an easy-to-use tools called Smart Apps, pictured above. With this you can easily add new blocks to your website that are designed to connect to platforms like Airbnb and Calendly. This sort of tool helps you to easily add functionality to your site without the need for a lot of expertise or time.

Step 5: Optimise for search engines (SEO)

For a huge number of sites, search engine traffic is one of the primary drivers of on-site performance. That means that you may well want to focus on it.

SEO optimisation – improve the visibility of your content on search engines such as Google and Bing by using the right keywords in your content. Making sure that headlines and section headings are targetted and relevant can help to ensure that your site ranks well for the terms you’re targeting.
Technical performance – as well as making sure that individual pages are well optimised for search, you also want to make sure that your site performs well, technically. This means that you will want to make sure your site is mobile-responsive and fast. As a rule, website builders like Jimdo will offer these things as standard, but it’s worth making sure everything works as expected.

Some other website builders do offer SEO tools on their free plans. With Jimdo, you’ll need to pay. However, if you’re planning to be successful online then SEO should be vital part of your website strategy.

Step 6: Publish and monitor your Jimdo site

Before you actually launch your site, you should review the whole thing to make sure it looks and acts as you planned. It might be worth getting help from friends or family to have them check things too – you never know what you might have missed.

Helpfully, as you can see below, Jimdo offers a preview tool for both desktop and mobile so that you can check how your site looks for everyone, whatever device they use to access it.

Make sure to check both versions thoroughly. With so many users accessing the internet from smart devices, it’s absolutely essential that your website looks and operates as expected on every single size of screen.

From this point, you can go ahead and publish, though that doesn’t mean the work ends. It’s always worth working on your site for the long-term to make sure that the content stays fresh. Search engines consider freshness to be an important factor in modern website performance, so you don’t want to let your own domain fall behind the crowd.

Once you’ve published your site, you should also make sure to get tracking. Using analytics tools can help you to see what’s working and what isn’t. You can track trends and look out for signs that things could be doing better with a little work.

Free vs paid Jimdo plans

When you first start building your website – and following the steps above – you will be on Jimdo’s free ‘Play’ plan. If you aren’t getting the features you want, you can upgrade at any time to one of the paid plans, each of which offers additional options and tools.

The table below provides a quick comparison of the plans available from Jimdo.

Plan	Features	Cost
Play	Basic features jimdosite.com domain	£0/month
Start	Domain included Ad-free	£11/month
Grow	All Start plan features SEO tools Analytics Personalised support	£18/month
Grow Legal	All Start plan features Customised legal text GDPR-compliant Updates about legal changes	£23/month
Unlimited	All Grow plan features Unlimited storage Professional design analysis Premium support	£45/month

As you can see, the plans are priced according to the functionality they offer. In the list below we’ve provided a short summary of each plan to help you decide which is best for you.

Play – the free plan allows you to build a basic site with a jimdosite.com subdomain. You also get 500 MB of storage and 2GB of bandwidth.
Start – this upgraded plan includes a free domain, which means you don’t need to keep jimdosite in your website URL.
Grow – this upgraded plan includes all of the above, along with an advanced SEO feature that provides support for optimising your website for Google and other search engines. The Grow plan also offers visitor reporting that allows you to see how many visitors visit your site.
Grow legal – all of the above included, along with customer legal text, such as GDPR-compliant legal pages.
Unlimited – the most expensive plan also includes the widest range of features. It offers everything included in the plans above, as well as access to professional design analysis to help you get the most out of your website.

Bryn Glover

Bryn is the founder and editor of WebsiteJumpStart. He has worked in the digital field for over a decade and was editor for Startups.co.uk - the UK's leading small business website - and for NerdWallet UK before launching WebsiteJumpStart to help people and businesses get online with ease.

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