Readymag is a robust web design tool excellent for creating a simple, short, and beautiful website on the fly with absolutely no coding required. From one side, the platform is novice-friendly for building sites with simple requirements such as portfolios, presentations, or startup landing pages. But, on the other hand, Readymag won’t suffice the needs of blogs, business platforms, or any sites that require formal navigation.
Readymag is a compound browser-based website building platform that covers site building tools, a domain, and hosting services. What strikes the eye first is the complete freedom it gives to its users. Due to the wide availability of impressive animations, modern typography, and the absence of layout limitations, a user’s creativity doesn’t face any limits. With only a small learning curve, you can design your perfect site from scratch.
Not to beat around the bush, let us introduce the core essence of Readymag through our unbiased and comprehensive review.
Ease of Use
Readymag is rather a simple platform with a drag-and-drop editor. You don’t have to master website development coding to create a stunning landing page for your company or a nice presentation. However, the website builder is chock full of screenshots and videos on how to start and use the platform to get the exact result you expect.
Right upon the registration, which doesn’t take more than several seconds (signing up through Facebook and Google is also an option), you will be taken on an optional introductory tour. It is a 12-step tooltip-driven tour of Readymag.
The Readymag interface is well laid-out, and all the elements reside within their own designated spaces. After learning what each icon stands for, you will instantly hang of how the platform works. Then, you simply click on the page or widget you want to work on and choose the necessary tool from the static side toolbar with all available options.
Readymag Features
Some of Readymag’s perks are the ability to protect any project you build with a password and share it privately if you want to. Though SEO tools are strictly limited, you can create and manage custom Google Tag Manager tags. Exporting a project via a PDF file is also an option. Readymag enables users to map domains to their projects or their profile pages.
Let’s get a deeper insight into the system and check if it complies with your requirements.
Dashboard
Readymag was founded in 2013 and featured a simple interface. However, the user interface has undergone great changes, and plenty of new functions are now available. Readymag features a clear and understandable user interface. Once you sign in to your account, you get all the available functions within a click or two. All the projects you have worked on appear on the main page. And by clicking any, you continue from where you left.
An editor’s interface opens a whole spectrum of tools and icons for viewing the applied changes and settings. You can enhance the settings by adding navigation cursors, changing metadata, adding your domain, etc. The left-hand menu holds the main controls, including the undo/redo button, settings for the mobile version of the site, grids and guides, working with the background such as adding videos or photos, as well as element creating buttons, page size settings, etc.
Website Editor
Whatever site or page you create on Readymag, you get a big array of tools for customization. You can crop and rotate images, add links and animations, make widgets draggable, add shadows to page elements, align them, etc. When finished, you get the preview option before publishing it.
Note that the created sites and pages are fully mobile compatible. Widgets are automatically rearranged, however you can adjust them if needed or create a completely different mobile version.
Readymag features plenty of possibilities. And yet, not everything in this drag-and-drop editor works smoothly. For instance, when building the site, you won’t notice any problems with image loading. And yet, once you switch the preview mode and scroll through the site, the lag time instantly strikes the eye.
Adding a domain is possible only after publishing the project. The same refers to coding. Even if you inject code into your project, it only works when published.
eCommerce
Readymag is not the perfect platform for setting up an eCommerce site. However, if you are in the starting phase and need a basic site with few options, you may get along with Readymag. The platform offers four eCommerce templates, each with several pages and specific objectives. In addition, each template is accompanied by a brief description of what project it will best fit into.
Once you have chosen a template, you can work on every page separately. Readymag allows customizing the URL of the page to make it more specific to the page’s purpose. Unfortunately, eCommerce site SEO tools are generally very basic and don’t offer advanced options, even via integrations. All that you can customize for search engine optimization are the title, description, and keywords of the site pages. The same refers to social sharing.
Building an eCommerce website, Readymag users can also add About and Shipping pages. However, whatever you plan to add to set your Readymag-based online shop to work, you will have to do it through an eCommerce integration. The available options are Ecwid, Stripe, Gumroad, and Shopify. The price for these integrations isn’t included in the cost of the Readymag plan you buy. Obviously, if selling online is the purpose of your project, it makes sense to choose a ready eCommerce solution instead.
Landing Page
To set up a landing page on Readymag, you have over a dozen templates to choose from for a start. The platform allows constructing a landing page by adding firms, codes, music, video, buttons, maps, etc. Here again, basic SEO, social sharing, and page settings are available. Like in all projects, you can access customization options for snaps, grids, and guides.
It would be wrong to persist that Readymag comes packed with multiple in-built features. And yet, to enhance the project at work, you can use the offers at the integration library.
Portfolio
What Readymag does great is creating portfolio pages. The respective pages are all professional looking yet have a distinct similarity to each other. This means you won’t find a diversity of options to choose from as a layout for your one- or two-page portfolio. However, whatever theme you pick up will let you alter some social sharing, SEO, and page settings to customize the page to your project’s purpose.
Readymag Website Analytics
Readymag entrusts such tools for providing in-depth analytics as Facebook Pixel and Google Search Console. Thanks to these tools, users get credible data on their audiences, what interaction patterns they show, and what engagement levels they have. Use them to track views, the average time spent on each page, and bounce rates.
Furthermore, suppose you don’t suffice with the in-built analytics tools. In that case, Readymag suggests integrating such tools at an extra price as Google Tag Manager, Matomo, MetaPixel, AddThis, Hotjar, and Pinterest Tag. Integrations through custom code are available with any paid plan, without extra payments. Google Tag Manager tags can be included in project settings without adding custom code.
Design and Templates
Readymag is not an all-purpose website builder. If you aim to set up a fully-functioning eCommerce site, business website, or blog, you will find this website editor not as powerful as necessary. To start working on creating a site, you need a premade template. Readymag has over 30 of them. These are all clear, modern, easily updated themes to fully comply with almost any niche. Each template comes with up to a dozen pre-designed pages, which are all fully customizable. The themes are categorized into:
- Portfolio
- Presentation
- Landing page
- Editorial
- eCommerce
- Sandbox
However, what unites all the suggested templates is their magazine look. Thanks to this feature, there is a heavy investment in the graphical elements of the site builder. Overall, you can find over half a million photos pulled from Unsplash, two million icons taken from The Noun Project, and three thousand free fonts. These fonts are taken from Webtype, Adobe, Google Fonts, and several other sources. With Readymag, you can also create video shot sequences and play them On Hover or On Scroll, thus significantly enhancing the look of your site.
You will like working with the custom cursor and draggable objects when creating a site from a premade template or a draft. No matter how complex your project is, you will succeed in a few clicks if you are a no-coder. Animations of Readymag are quick and powerful. They are easy to use and compatible with any layout you choose. You can change the widget opacity, rotate them, and scale or combine them to create multi-step dynamic designs.
Nevertheless, despite targeting beginners, Readymag will also suffice the needs of an expert developer. You can add JavaScript, HTML, and CSS code to make your project even more unique and professional. In addition, they can enhance the animation effects, change the styles, integrate third-party tools, and perform other customization tasks.
Customer Support
Readymag has an extensive help center available in English. The Learn section incorporates a load of helpful videos, tips, and tutorials to give a thorough reply to any question a new user may have and guide them throughout the entire process of creating a site and managing it properly. The video tutorials will vividly demonstrate how to perform bread-and-butter tasks in a breeze.
A detailed and comprehensive user manual can be found in the Help sector. The Learn center also offers shortcuts to learn the vital key combinations, a client’s guide addressed to explaining how to update any project, effective, individual paid training sessions, an expanded blog with Readymag’s latest product updates, and so much more. If you plan to enhance your opportunities of creating and managing a site, you can find the library of integrations and embeds right from the Learn sector.
If you are already working on a project, you can open the Help center to get assistance with any question right from the editor. You can ask for support, open help pages, get shortcuts, open the forum, and learn more about the current phase of page editing you are on.
Nevertheless, to get in touch with Readymag directly, you must use the Support button at the bottom of the page. Normally, a reply is to be expected within 30 minutes.
Readymag Plans and Pricing
Readymag suggests testing out the platform entirely for free! The Free plan allows designing as many projects as you wish and yet publish only one with Readymag’s branding without even providing a credit card number. Surely, the offer is very limited in features.
Choose any of the four paid plans to your liking for more robust tools. Purchasing any of them annually, you get a 10% discount per monthly price.
- Personal – Priced at $13.5/mo, this streamlined plan for a personal site or portfolio offers one project with a custom domain, 10K views per month, and a bunch of other features.
- Freelancer – Priced at $22.5/mo, this plan is great for website developers working on orders. The plan allows creating three projects with custom domains and publishing up to five ones at a time. Other perks include two collaborations, project transfers, etc.
- Studio – The most popular choice of Readymag clients costs $36/mo and is great for editorial teams and small or medium companies.
- Business – At the price of $58.5/mo, the Business plan tailored for bigger teams suggests creating up to ten projects with custom domains and publishing unlimited ones. All Readymag features become available to Business plan owners.
Whichever paid plan you choose, you get a free domain for one year if you subscribe to Readymag newsletters.
Readymag Website Examples
Despite being rather new in the website building industry, Readymag has already drawn the attention of many big and small companies worldwide. The brand’s unique signature and style are the reason for such booming popularity. Readymag-based sites catch the eye with their modern and out-of-the-box designs that best transfer various companies’ brand visions.
Readymag claims teams of such companies have chosen it as Amazon, Conde Nast, Tracksmith, CBRE, United Colors of Benetton, Airbnb, etc.
Paralect – venture studio
Postmates – food delivery
Peter Elima – designer
Verdict: How Good Is Readymag?
Readymag is a good platform to work with as long as the website owner has basic requirements and expectations. The website builder features easy-to-follow content creation with unmetered editing options, various images, fonts, and icons, and a library of decent one-of-a-kind templates, while blank templates will not limit your creativity. It gives users complete control over what to show on the site and how it should look and work.
Although the website builder is catered to no coders, without the comprehensive help center and numerous interactive tutorials, you may feel frustrated. The customer support is responsive and knowledgeable and can be contacted directly by email support@readymag.com.
On the other hand, Readymag themes look similar and are not appropriate for any niche (most are of a magazine style), especially if you have eCommerce features in mind. Generally, anything more than a simple online presentation or portfolio will be difficult to set up due to the lack of in-built business features and a rather poor library of appropriate integrations. Meanwhile, the pricing plans are quite expensive compared to other more popular and powerful website builders in the market.
