Constant Contact Website Builder Review: An Easy Website Builder or Not Worth the Money?
Constant Contact is known to offer effective email marketing services. It’s evolved into a powerful tool that small and large businesses leverage to increase customer engagement and sales.
But did you know that Constant Contact is also seen as one of the best website builders and eCommerce platforms? It comes packed with unique features and eCommerce tools that are helpful.
Indeed there are dozens of website builders, and Constant Contact seems to be one of the best, as it offers a solution that can take your business to new heights of success.
We’ve reviewed it in detail to help you better understand how great and useful this website builder is. Keep reading to get into details.
Further Reading: The Best Website Builder in 2023
Constant Contact Website Builder: The Pros and Cons
Constant Contact is quite a new website builder that has been in the limelight after getting launched for all positive reasons. Whether you’ve come up with a fresh business idea or simply want to start a new website, Constant Contact can help you build a professional-looking site that loads fast.
One thing that will really impress you is its drag and drop option. Also, the easy-to-understand tools offered by this service provider won’t confuse you. But this is not; there’s more to the story.
If you are worried about the pricing and extra features, you will be happy to know that prices are affordable. This platform offers three pricing plans, among which the cheapest one is Website Builder.
This plan is available at $10, and it offers quite a few features. These include a blog, SSL certificate, inventory management, logo support, list-building tool, digital or physical products, coupons or discounts, unlimited storage, website analytics, and domain connection.
One thing to note here is that along with paying for the service plan, you also have to pay a 1.5% fee for transactions your customers make. With this plan, you won’t get access to email marketing.
- Here are a few things that you will like about Constant Contact.
- Easy-to-use: One thing that makes this website builder stand out in the crowd is its easy-to-use and understand interface. Like other website building service providers, this one does not confuse the users with its tricky features and tools. That means you can get the work done quickly.
- Access to Unsplash: If you want to make customizations, Constant Contact website builders let you do it by giving you access to Unsplash. There you can find several royalty-free images that you can use to make the website visually appealing.
- Good support: If you land on any issue while navigating through this website, freely reach out to the customer care team. The client support team will resolve your queries as soon as possible.
- ADI: While working with the Constant Contact website builder, you won’t feel overwhelmed. That’s because ADI has made it easy to get a site together. You can understand the available options and get a functioning site that runs fast.
- Free demo: If you choose the Constant Contact website builder, you will be happy to know it comes with a free demo. So, you can get a feel for the builder without needing to spend money.
- While this website builder is great, there are a few things that you might not like.
- Dull features: You can surely understand the available features, but some are not so advanced. That means you would not be able to make advanced settings.
- No image editing tools: One major turn-off is that this website builder does not involve any image editing tool.
Is Constant Contact Easy to Use?
Constant Contact is quite easy to use. In fact, it uses AI that can auto-generate websites for you. The best thing is that you get a chance to edit the generated website as per your preference.
Constant Contact even lets you integrate your site with tools such as MailChimp.
To start the process of website building, you need to understand what your website should be about. Then you can proceed towards picking a title and adding an image. At this stage, you can add a logo if you have one. But if you don’t have one, you can build it later.
To further customize your website, you need to choose a color scheme, navigation style, and font pairing. At last, you can finish the website building process by adding your contact details.
One thing that we really like about Constant Contact is that it is not too complicated. That means you won’t feel overwhelmed with too many choices.
Template Customization Features
After you have built a website as per your need, you can move to the template design and customization step. It is the stage where you can customize pre-existing template content with the images and information of your business.
Customizing Your Website
If you are not satisfied with the assigned design or if it doesn’t convey the message that you want it to, you can alter it. In fact, Constant Contact lets you do it in a pretty simple and neat way.
You will get an option to choose between 3-5 formats to create a block for each page. This way, Constant Contact ensures maximum flexibility and compliance with design best practices.
Mobile Responsiveness
Once you have created the website, you get a chance to view it from different devices like mobile, desktop, and tablet. Honestly, it’s an essential step because this is where you will make sure that your website is perfectly formatted on different screens.
Editing the desktop version of your website will look something like this:
You will also be able to easily edit the mobile version of your website:
If you found any issue with site formatting on any screen, you should make changes. But we don’t think that you might face issues because Constant Contact’s templates are generally mobile responsive.
Design Quality
Lastly, talking about the design quality of the websites, you might not find the quality impressive. We tried a couple of designs, and for the design flexibility, we couldn’t give Constant Contact more than 2.9/5.
Also, the offered color palette didn’t really match the industrial norms. While the designs were technically better, they were not visually appealing, making them less interesting.
You can, however, find impressive and modern-looking designs. But most of them look auto-generated, and you might not like them. This website builder also lets you add in-email features, so you can use the same interface to edit the email templates.
So, if you want to create a visually appealing website, you must consider other website builders like Squarespace or Duda. Also, if you want to use a website builder that lets you totally customize the website, you should use Wix. It comes with around 500 templates that you can use to create a better website.
How Good are Constant Contact’s Other Features?
Lately, the number of website builders has increased greatly. But not all of them are great. In order to become a remarkable website builder, it needs to nail the basics and offer something more.
As far as the app store with third-party plugins is concerned, Constant Contact doesn’t have its own. While it’s not a bad thing, you should choose Squarespace if you are interested in in-house apps.
While Constant Contact lacks in-house apps, it offers a lot on the surface. Although these features aren’t that robust, it’s great for the price that this website builder asks you to pay.
Blogging
If you are interested in blogging and want to create a page, it’s essential to know that the Constant Contact blog only comes in RSS feed format. What does that mean? It means that your posts will appear with the most recent items.
The drawback here is that you won’t be able to add the posts to categories, you can’t archive them, and lastly, users can’t comment on your blogs. So, if you want to earn money via your blogs, you must consider using some other website builder.
Related: How to Choose the Best Blogging Platform in 2022
SEO
Next comes SEO. Well, Constant Contact doesn’t really offer any support. If you’re looking to build a site that will rank high on SERPs, there are barely any features to help you do that. This website builder offers certain search engine optimization settings, like adding slug, description, and title. But that’s it.
If you want a powerful website builder to meet your SEO needs, you must choose Wix and its SEO Wiz.
Related: What is the best website builder for SEO?
eCommerce
As far as the eCommerce aspect of Constant Contact is concerned, it looks promising. That’s because it lets you sell physical products or digital downloads, depending on your preferences.
You can expect this website builder to take on tricky tasks like tax calculations, tracking, and integrated shipping. Also, this website builder comes with an easy-to-use analytics dashboard. Through this dashboard, you can get an idea of the year-on-year performance.
Constant Contact has a tutorial that you can watch to learn how to add the description. For the payment, this website builder has PayPal, which comes with a transaction fee.
In case you are using a free account, you can only set up 3 physical products. Also, the digital download is set up to be limited downloads. But you can add additional products and unlock more digital downloads if you get a paid plan.
Also, if you further want the Constant Contact platform to import a premade list of products or print shipping details for you, you would have to pay for it separately.
Related: Best E-commerce Website Builders Compared – 2022
How Much Does Constant Contact Cost?
Moving further to the plan, Constant Contact offers three different plans: A Business Plan at $20 per month, Starter Plan at $10 per month, and Free Plan. Note that the paid plans are billed annually.
Among these three plans, users usually prefer a free plan as it includes almost all the things that one needs to build a responsive website. But the downside of a free plan is that it does not include the below-mentioned features.
- The site will not be ad-free: While you can create a website using a free plan, the site won’t be ad-free. So, when your website goes live, it will have a CTA at the bottom and a Constant Contact banner.
- You can only sell three products: Another downside of the free plan is that it lets you sell only three products. That means if you want to sell more plans, you must choose the Starter Plan (for selling 10 products) or Business Plan (for selling unlimited products).
- You can’t have a custom domain name: You don’t get the freedom to pick a custom domain name with a free plan. Thus, you have to use an auto-generated version for your site, which has no edit option.
- You will not get phone support: You have to do it via chat or email if you want to contact customer care.
How Good is Constant Contact’s Help and Support?
Do you think that Constant Contact lives up to its name in terms of customer help and support? Here’s what we found out.
This website builder tries to offer support to its customers in three ways, i.e., phone and email, chat, and through the knowledge center. If you live in the UK, you can use the live chat feature, but it’s unavailable in the USA.
Knowledge Center
Constant Contact knowledge center has a collection of guides on different topics. It is to help the user easily carry out different tasks through this builder.
You will find the available guides and articles useful as they come with screenshots and videos. However, the formatting of these contents is not very friendly. Also, the guides are not grouped in any logical way, and the images are small. So, you might face difficulty in finding exactly what you want.
If you are looking to build a forum site, Constant Contact is not the right tool. You need to choose a more established and powerful website builder to build forums.
Overall, the knowledge center is pretty impressive, but if you compare them with other website builders, you might not find them that great.
Phone and Email Support
Next comes the phone and email. If you want to get help through email, you need to wait around 24-48 hours. And for phone calls, charges won’t be applied since it’s toll-free. But if you have a free plan, phone customer support is not available for you.
While the phone and email support is satisfactory, Constant Contact requires users to do certain work before getting in touch.
- Clear the Cookies and Cache
- Reset the internet router by unplugging it for 30 seconds
- Allow for around 48 hours after publishing for propaganda
- If possible, you must also test computers from a different network
It seems like a lot of work, but Constant Contact does this to ensure that the issue users are facing is not due to any glitchy setup.
Live Chat Support (Non-USA)
Image: Constant-Contact-Live-Chat-Support.png
If you live in the USA, the live chat option is not available for you.
Users outside the US can get live chat support by briefly summarizing the issue. After that, they need to wait to get connected with the agent. To resolve the query, the web advisor will send a verification code.
Constant Contact Website Builder Review: Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, Constant Contact offers enough features to create a website without much hassle. So, if you want to make a website with minimal effort and money, this website builder is the ideal choice.
Also, this website builder is an ideal option for people who want to advertise their business website beyond social media.
However, there are certain drawbacks. For instance, the design quality is not extremely impressive. That means if you want to have one of the most visually appealing websites in your niche, Constant Contact might not be the right option for you.
