Moonfruit review - build your first website

The Moonfruit website builder offers an array of features, design options and excellent editing tools. It can help you build a website that’s attractive and responsive, with no coding experience needed. You can pick and choose from an array of template blocks to build your ideal site, whether it’s a personal blog, a web store or a creative portfolio.

But how does Moonfruit compare to other website builders? What are its limitations? Does it suit some sites more than others? Read our review for everything you need to know.

Overall score	3.2 ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆	Ease of use and affordable pricing makes it a good choice for beginners
Ease of use	★ ★ ★ ★ ☆	Easy to use with templates and guidance
Features	★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆	Decent, but modest selection of features compared to other builders
Ecommerce	★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆	Very basic e-commerce features
Pricing	★ ★ ★ ★ ★	Extremely affordable
Help & Support	★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆	No phone support and email response can take over 24 hours

Moonfruit Pros and Cons

Try Moonfruit today

Creating a website with Moonfruit

1. Creating a Moonfruit account takes seconds. You just need to put in your email, pick a username and set a strong password. Or, if you prefer, you can automatically sign in with a Google or Facebook account.

1. Then choose the name of your site and its Moonfruit subdomain address (for instance - CyberNews.moonfruit.com)

1. Now all you need to do is head to your email to verify your account and you can dive straight into building your website in Moonfruit’s Editor.

1. You start off with a blank canvas where you’ll see a space in the middle to build individual pages, and a section for both the header and the footer of your site which will show up on all pages.

1. You’ll find a sidebar on the left-hand side where you can start adding and building to your site. You can:

Add and manage pages.

Drag over template sections for the hero and body to adjust the layout.

Upload files to your site, like images and video.

Check general settings, site address and domain, add Google Analytics and Google Search Console integrations.

1. Once you’ve started building pages, you can edit by clicking on the blue menu on the right-hand side. Here, you’ll find all sorts of options, including editing text, adding animations, inserting links and buttons, and changing themes to get the look and layout of your site the way you want it.

1. If you want to remove a section, select a component and tap the X. If you need some help along the way the same menu has a ? icon too, and clicking this will open up a help page.

1. There’s also a handy menu along the top where you can undo, redo, save, preview, and check how your site looks on desktop, tablet and mobile. All Moonfruit sites are responsive.

Moonfruit tools and features

Moonfruit doesn’t have quite as many features as some of the more expensive builders, such as Duda and Wix. That said, there is a good range of tools that can help you achieve the site you want, including a great Editor, plenty of templates, site integrations and more. Let’s have a look at some of Moonfruit’s key features.

Moonfruit Editor

Moonfruit’s Editor has a varied selection of design features. And, as we showed earlier, it’s pretty simple to use. More often than not, you can make changes with a single click. So, for example, if you fancy some different text for a CTA button, simply Click it, type in new text and press Enter.

You can also add content blocks, change fonts, and adjust size and layout. On the flip side, if you don’t want to design your own site, you can pick a default theme and Moonfruit will do most of the styling for you.

Moonfruit templates

Moonfruit offers a good selection of templates that fit a variety of different site categories, including online shops, business sites, creative portfolios, blogs, and personal sites. You can choose a template and edit as you go along, or you can start off with a blank slate if you’re feeling creative. Moonfruit’s templates can be a bit hit and miss, with some looking more dated than others.

Multimedia and social integration

You can easily embed content from other websites to make your site more engaging for your visitors. Add in video from YouTube, music from Spotify, or even a Google Map to show your visitors where you’re based.

Let customers know you’re active on social media too by integrating your Twitter feed, Facebook likes, Instagram posts and more. Like most of the features on Moonfruit, these integrations can all be simply dragged and dropped where you want them on your site.

Animations

Moonfruit’s editor has some eye-catching animation effects to bring your site to life. You can set the background of your pages to videos, transitioning pictures or static images however you like.

You can also style your page links to make sure they grab your visitors’ attention and get more clicks.

SEO and marketing

Moonfruit offers some basic SEO features including:

• HTML 5 tags
• Metadata
• Page titles automatically set as H1
• Alt tags on images
• Sitemaps automatically added

Moonfruit does allow easy connection to Google Search Console where you can find reports and detailed SEO information on your site.

You can also integrate Google Analytics into your site to gain key insights into your traffic and visitor trends.

Domains

While you start out with a Moonfruit domain, you can remove Moonfruit branding and link your own domains to your website address. If you sign up for the Professional plan you’ll even receive a domain voucher, which you can use to get a .com, .co.uk .uk, .eu, .org or .net address. This can add credibility to your site so is definitely a good reason to go with the Professional plan.

Moonfruit limitations

Moonfruit certainly has good features, but there are some areas where it could do with some improvements.

Customer support

Moonfruit offers its users a few customer support options, such as a chat messenger tool, tutorials, guides and videos. However, there is no phone number to contact and the chat tool is not live. It can take a day to get a response. Your only other option is to fill out a support form and wait for someone to get back to you.

E-commerce

Moonfruit does let you build an online shop, but features are lacking, especially when compared to other builders. For instance, if you have products that come in different sizes or colors, you will have to list them individually. It’s only really suitable for very basic web stores.

Marketing

There’s no easy way to connect your Moonfruit site to email marketing services like Mailchimp. This can hinder your attempts to reach out to and engage with existing and potential customers.

Elsewhere, its SEO offering is a bit too basic, with features mostly limited to headings and keywords. You don’t get an SSL certificate either, which lessens your overall SEO score, although Moonfruit says this feature will soon be implemented.

Flash migration

Moonfruit has recently made the switch from Flash to HTML, and this has caused lots of problems for its users. Customers are currently reporting huge difficulties with editing and viewing their sites.

Moonfruit’s current response states that the new editor is currently able to make basic changes, with more features rolled out shortly. Users are encouraged to reach out to Moonfruit’s customer support if they are having problems.

What do Moonfruit customers say?

Unfortunately for Moonfruit, its current feedback is not great due to the Flash migration issues. Users have reported a host of serious problems centering around broken sites, inability to edit, missing files, crashes and more. Customers also say they’re finding it extremely hard to get in touch with Moonfruit customer service, making the problems worse.

Before this, reviews were positive with many people pleased with Moonfruit’s ease of use combined with its affordable price. And it’s worth remembering that new users will not be affected by the migration.

Moonfruit pricing - how much does it cost?

Moonfruit is very reasonably priced, making it an attractive option for website builders on a budget. The Basic plan is only $9.59 a month. At the time of writing you can get the Professional plan for even less. It’s currently available with a 50% discount so it’s just $6.99 a month. It usually costs $13.99 a month.

You can also try out Moonfruit on a free 14-day trial, with no credit card details required.

Here’s what you get for your money.

	Moonfruit Basic plan	Moonfruit Professional plan
Price	$9.59	$13.99
Number of sites	1 site with unlimited pages	5 sites with unlimited pages
Moonfruit ads	✔️	❌
Storage	500MB	10GB
Connect your own domain	✔️	✔️
Free hosting	✔️	✔️
Chat support	✔️	✔️

What kind of websites is Moonfruit best for?

Moonfruit’s ease of use and attractive price means it’s great for beginners who are starting out with a basic website. You can use the platform to put together a great looking portfolio or blog, as well as a content hub to show off video, photography, and social media posts.

You can use it to create a shop, but this will be pretty basic. So it might not be ideal if you solely have e-commerce in mind.

Also, since it’s lacking in marketing and SEO features, if you’re trying to grow as a business, you will be better suited to a platform that has more features.

Moonfruit alternatives

So what other website builders is Moonfruit competing with? There are a range of builders that are good for beginners with similar pricing, so let’s see what else is out there.

SimpleSite

SimpleSite is great for beginners. It’s easy to use with enough design features to build a decent site but not so many that you feel overwhelmed. You can also use it for free - indefinitely, and its Pro plan is just $15.49 a month.

Best of all, the free option even lets you build a fully functioning web store without having to pay - a very rare feature that you won’t find on many of its competitors, including Moonfruit. SimpleSite will also host your website, so it offers a good all-round package.

Choose SimpleSite over Moonfruit if: you’re building your first online shop.

Jimdo

Jimdo is a very affordable option with a permanent free plan, while Moonfruit only offers a free trial. Jimdo is pretty basic, but it’s very easy to use and could be the ideal place to start if you’re toying with the idea of building a website.

It’s especially suited to blogs and has a range of useful features, such as video add ons and image galleries. Jimdo also has a great selection of widgets, something Moonfruit is lacking.

Choose Jimdo over Moonfruit if: you want to build a great blog for yourself or a business.

Moonfruit review summary and final thoughts

Moonfruit is a decent website builder that is very affordable. It’s easy to use with a drag-and-drop format and it gives you a lot of design options to make your website stand out. It offers good integrations with social media, Google and content sites. While it’s lacking in marketing features, you can’t expect too much for the price. It’s currently just $6.99 a month for the Professional plan.

So if you’re making a basic website and you want to play around with some design features but don’t have much tech know how, Moonfruit is a great option.

It’s worth paying attention to how the Flash migration situation plays out, but if you’re unsure don’t forget you can try Moonfruit out for free with its 14-day trial.

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