Duda, an easy but capable website builder, was founded by a couple of programmers who foresaw the enormous impact that the original iPhone would have on web browsing.
Thus, the product produces sites that change to fit both large desktop monitors and small mobile screens.
Web store capabilities make Duda a full website commerce solution, too, and its site-builder interface makes DIY site building easy.
Note that Duda has changed its main URL to duda.co from dudamobile.com since our last update of this review.
Pricing Options
Like Weebly and Wix ($14 Per Month for Combo Plan at Wix) , Duda lets you create an online presence for free.
Duda doesn't limit the number of free sites or pages you can create, however, nor the bandwidth of those free sites—that's quite generous.
Unlike site builders such as Weebly, Duda even lets free accounts sell up to 10 products, though free sites include Duda ads.
The service's paid tiers are Basic ($14.25 per month), and Pro (starting at $9.75 per site per month plus a $249 annual platform fee).
The premium accounts add email support, custom domains, site backup, and deeper site analytics.
They also add Duda's InSite personalization feature—more on this below.
If you just want to convert an existing site for mobile viewing, you pay $7.20 per month, which includes a 10-product store.
Enterprise accounts add management and training services for negotiated pricing.
Start Building Your Site
To start a new site, you choose one of 94 attractive, modern templates, sorted into categories such as Business, Portfolio, and Restaurant.
When you click a template thumbnail, a panel shows you how its look changes for phone and tablet viewing.
You can even see how the template looks on all three device types—desktop, smartphone, and tablet—at once.
That's better than what many site builders do.
Strikingly, for example, only shows one preview, though you can shrink the browser window to see how it will look on smaller screens.
Once you choose a template for your Duda site and start customizing, you can't switch templates later, as you can with Squarespace ($12 Per Month (Billed Annually) - Personal Plan at Squarespace) or Simvoly.
This is because Duda sites, though they fit the search engines' criteria for mobile presentation, aren't responsive in the strictest sense, meaning they don't stretch and compress all elements as you resize the browser window.
Duda uses the term responsive when describing sites it builds—not incorrectly—to mean that the presentation reformats based on whether you're viewing it in a desktop browser, tablet, or smartphone.
Duda's approach, however, means you get a lot more control over your site design and can tweak it to look different on mobile.
Next, you build your own site using the selected template, which is prepopulated with dummy content, by replacing that with your own assets.
You can pull images and so on directly from an existing site or a Facebook page.
For testing, I started with the Toy Store template.
The site builder interface features an intuitive left sidebar, in which you find tools for managing and designing your site.
These let you customize your theme colors, text, and navigation, as well as adding and managing pages and site settings from choices on the left panel.
An arrow lets you collapse this sidebar for a full view of the page, which can be helpful.
Also helpful are Undo and Redo buttons that work no matter what you're doing on the site.
Ctrl-Z works, too.
Furthermore, you can always get help by clicking a chat bubble icon at the bottom right—very handy.
The basic page elements—images, text boxes, buttons, dividers—appear when you click the Widgets button.
This was a bit confusing at first for me, since I usually think of widgets as third-party goodies rather than these basic site elements.
You drag the elements onto your webpage as with Weebly and other competitors.
You can only drop elements in allowed areas, but it's not hard to add columns or change spacing to customize the layout to your taste.
In fact, I love how you can choose Add Row or Add Column right from a page's Row button, which appears when you hover over any section.
Third-party items such as Facebook and Disqus comment modules are included in the Widgets group, but Duda lacks a large catalog of third-party integrations like those found in Wix.
Duda also integrates with services like Yelp, vCita online scheduling, OpenTable, and PayPal.
The newest widget integration is with Yext, which embeds structured schema data into your website, making it easier for other sites to machine-read.
In particular, it helps search engines parse your site.
Duda lets you easily incorporate social sharing buttons, including Facebook Likes, comments, and albums; a Twitter feed; and a WordPress feed.
When I added the Click-to-Call feature to my test site, it merely displayed my number, which smartphones display as a link that opens the phone dialer.
Along the top is an ever-present toolbar that lets you switch pages, undo your last edit, save your work, preview your site, publish your site, and view your site in the three different screen sizes.
The toolbar also offers access to your Dashboard page, from which you can access all the sites you manage or are building through Duda, start new ones, and connect them to a personal domain.
Note that the latter requires a paid account.
Duda offers specific integrated help for using a custom domain obtained from the major domain name registrars.
If you don't choose a custom domain, Duda assigns your site a URL such as mysite4036.dudaone.com; you can pick another prefix if it's not already taken.
If you've built some pages but aren't ready to publish, you can save your edits for later publication.
Duda doesn't, however, let you schedule publication at a specific date and time, as Weebly does.
Whenever you hover over any item on your site, you see a button offering relevant edit options.
I also really like the builder's right-click support, which provides an easy way to edit, align, or remove content.
You can fairly easily move elements around the page and resize them, though, as with most mobile-friendly site builders, your choices of where to move items is limited.
For a paragraph object, the context menu lets you pull content from another site, edit the text, format it, and hide it on a selected device type.
The last ability is only available in paid accounts.
Clicking a page navigation link in the site designer takes you to that page on your site; you don't have to select it from a page menu as in some other site builders, though there's also a dropdown menu for switching among your pages.
Every option dialog for every Duda site element includes a Settings tab that lets you edit spacing in pixels, the CSS code, and—for premium accounts—the actual HTML code for the element.
But it's not just standard HTML.
While the code looks fairly simple and standard, you need to familiarize yourself with the proprietary DMLE (DudaMobile Markup Language Extension) to work with it effectively.
Duda also lets you use SSL for free on your whole site, so users see HTTPS in the browser address bar.
This is more important with the arrival of GDPR, and Duda offers all the tools you need to stay compliant with that privacy regulation for your European site visitors.
You can activate a cookie notification, implement a privacy policy, enable opt-in consent for contact forms, and offer a way to delete personal data.
In the end, building a site with Duda is a pleasure: The interface is mostly quick, unlike some builders (I'm thinking of 1&1 MyWebsite in particular) that take forever and a day to load modules.
As with most such services, moving objects around can be finicky, but in my testing of Duda I always managed to get the result I wanted in the end.
Managing and Adding Pages
The Manage Pages panel is simple and clear, with SEO and navigation options available under a gear icon.
It also lets you import images and site info from an existing site.
To add a new page to my site, you simply tap the +New page button.
There's a selection of 10 page types to choose from, including Blank, URL, About, Contact, Photo Gallery, List, and Complex Page.
Pages can be password-protected via the gear Settings menu.
Hovering over a page type's thumbnail shows its layout on the three device sizes.
Duda has a very serviceable blogging tool.
This lets you save and preview posts that you can format and add images to taste.
Though it does keep track of your customers (see Making Money, below), Duda trails competitors like Wix in terms of site membership and email marketing.
Working With Images
To add images on your site, you can either choose from the stock photography included, drag and drop photos from computer folders, or import them from online sources like Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, or Dropbox.
The included stock photography selection has improved since my last test, turning up plenty of clothing rack shots when I searched for "thrift shop," for example.
You can even enter an image's URL or perform a web image search to find the picture you want.
Uploading multiple images at once? Not a problem, regardless of whether it's a whole folder or multiple selected images within a folder.
You can crop, resize, and even open an embedded version of Aviary for some online photo editing and effects.
I was able to add a clickable link and tooltip and to change the Alt text in the image-editing dialog in testing.
If you need more control, a gear icon gives access to CSS and HTML code.
When adding a photo gallery, you can choose either square or original aspect ratios and a background color, but you don't get the selection of slideshow styles offered in Weebly.
My test site's photo gallery was attractive, despite this limitation, and I appreciate that it allows full-screen viewing.
I also like that, once you add an associated Facebook page, any public images from that appear in the Duda images manager.
The Manage Images option didn't let me edit my uploaded photos, even to rotate or crop them, which would really be great.
But that's not much of a problem, since you have access to the full-featured Aviary online photo editor any time you click on an image on your pages.
Those tools are, however, only available for images you've already added to a page.
One plus is that the original image and the edited one are both saved in the Manage Images area.
Mobile Site Design
Duda offers separate site-builder views for desktop, tablet, and smartphone designs.
Wix and Weebly only offer the first two, and GoDaddy GoCentral doesn't offer mobile customization at all, instead restricting its templates to designs that work well on mobile as well as desktop.
My test Duda site looked as good and felt just as comfortable to navigate on an iPhone as it did in a PC web browser.
A cool option lets you hide any image on a device of your choice—desktop, tablet, or phone.
Some content doesn't work well in the smaller formats, so this is a valuable option.
On the other side of mobile development is the ability to actually build or edit your site on a mobile device.
Duda doesn't offer a mobile app for site building like Weebly and Yola do.
Instead, like GoCentral, it offers a mobile web version of the site builder.
This features a touch-friendly design with a menu bar for adding and editing widgets.
This also lets you add photos to your site right from the tablet.
Getting Social
With Duda you can add social buttons that link to your accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and so on.
As with Weebly, you get a selection of monochrome or color buttons in different size choices.
An older-style Share bar also lets you add buttons, but these aren't customizable in the way the buttons are, offering no choice of button designs or even which social networks are included.
You're better off sticking with the Social Icons option.
You can also include an on-page Twitter feed, a Facebook Like button, and Facebook comments.
Making Money
Duda includes a full sales system with shopping carts and checkout pages like those you get with Weebly, Wix, and Squarespace.
You can also plug PayPal buy buttons on any site page and add printable coupons for site visitors.
Any Duda user, even with a free account, can add a 10-page web store to their sites.
The process is slick, clear, and guided.
When you click Add a Store, Duda builds a new page for your site with a demo catalog, and it displays a Help box explaining how to set it up.
A tooltip tour explains your store page, shopping cart, search, and store management features.
There's a whole separate Store Control Panel page, where you add products and configure shipping and payment options.
Credit card transactions use SSL security.
Another well-designed wizard takes you through the store-setup process.
Adding images and formatting text is easy, as is assigning categories and SKU numbers to your products.
You can also change localization for different currencies.
Shipping options are integrated with UPS and FedEx, or you can set custom rates.
FirstData, PayPal, and Stripe are the available payment processing options.
Import product lists in CSV, XCart, and LiteCommerce formats.
Finally, selling digital downloads (which Duda calls "e-goods") is supported, but only if you have the highest-level Business+eCommerce plan ($36.75 per month), which is also required if you want to create coupons for product discounts.
Site Stats
Duda offers deep and detailed site visitor statistics for paid users.
From your Duda dashboard, click a graph icon next to any of your site entries to see its stats.
The tool shows all visitor information or just that for mobile and tablet.
You can see not only site visits per day, but also the number of form submissions, clicks to call, and map clicks.
The tracking of visits and views is another helpful part of Duda's arsenal.
The left option panel lets you drill even deeper, showing individual pages' stats, including, time on page and bounce rate.
If that's not enough, you can see traffic sources, browsers and OSes used, and even geographic location.
I haven't seen any other easy site builder with nearly as impressive a level of traffic analysis.
InSite Personalization
For customers of its Business+ level, Duda offers another perk that goes beyond the standard site builder offering: InSite, which is found in the Personalize section of the main toolbar.
InSite lets you customize your site...
