Tilda

Tilda Publishing has established itself as one of the most elegant and intuitive website builders available, offering a distinctive block-based approach that sits at the sweet spot between template-driven simplicity and full design freedom. Founded in 2014 and now operating from Latvia within the European Union, Tilda has attracted millions of users who appreciate its focus on beautiful typography, clean layouts, and a publishing experience that feels more like assembling a magazine than coding a website. The platform is particularly popular among creative professionals, small businesses, and marketing teams who need to produce stunning landing pages, portfolios, and business websites quickly without compromising on design quality.

What distinguishes Tilda from competitors like Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress is its modular building philosophy. Rather than starting with a full-page template that users must modify, Tilda presents a library of over 550 pre-designed blocks, which are self-contained sections like hero banners, feature grids, testimonial carousels, pricing tables, and contact forms, that users arrange vertically to compose a complete page. Each block is professionally designed and fully responsive, meaning that even users with no design experience can create pages that look like they were crafted by a professional agency. This block-based approach encourages creative experimentation while maintaining design consistency across the entire site.

Block Library and Page Building

Tilda's block library is the foundation of the platform and represents one of the largest collections of pre-designed website sections available in any builder. The 550+ blocks span every category a modern website might need: cover sections with full-screen imagery, about sections, team grids, feature presentations, gallery layouts, video backgrounds, call-to-action sections, blog feeds, e-commerce product displays, form blocks, footer designs, and navigation headers. Each block comes in multiple variations, providing dozens of options for any given section type. Users simply browse the library, select the blocks they want, and arrange them in their desired order to build a page.

The block editing interface allows deep customization without any coding. Users can modify text, swap images, change colors, adjust spacing, toggle elements on or off, and configure responsive behavior through an intuitive visual editor. Typography controls are particularly strong, with access to a curated selection of web fonts and precise control over font sizes, line heights, letter spacing, and text alignment. The result is a building experience that is simultaneously fast and detailed, allowing users to go from an empty page to a polished website in under an hour while still having the option to fine-tune every visual element.

Zero Block: Advanced Design Editor

For users who need design capabilities beyond what the standard blocks offer, Tilda provides Zero Block, a pixel-perfect design editor that functions as a built-in graphic design tool. Zero Block gives users complete control over element positioning, layering, sizing, and animation on a free-form canvas, similar to tools like Figma or Adobe XD but integrated directly into the website builder. Designers can place any element anywhere on the page, create custom animations and scroll effects, layer text over images with precise typography, and build entirely bespoke sections that go far beyond the standard block library.

Zero Block supports responsive design through a breakpoint system that lets designers create different layouts for desktop, tablet, and mobile screen sizes. Each breakpoint can have its own arrangement of elements, ensuring that custom designs look polished on every device. The editor also supports advanced features like step-by-step animations, scroll-triggered effects, background video, and parallax scrolling, enabling the creation of interactive storytelling experiences and immersive landing pages. This combination of block-based simplicity for most sections and Zero Block power for custom designs gives Tilda a unique versatility that appeals to both beginners and professional web designers.

E-commerce Capabilities

Tilda includes built-in e-commerce functionality that allows users to set up online stores without third-party plugins or integrations. The e-commerce system supports product catalogs with variants (size, color, etc.), shopping carts, checkout flows, and order management. Product pages can be built using the same block-based approach as the rest of the site, ensuring visual consistency across the shopping experience. Tilda supports multiple payment gateways including Stripe, PayPal, and various local European payment methods, and provides integrations with delivery services for shipping calculation and tracking.

The e-commerce features also include promotional tools like discount codes, campaign management, and automated order confirmation emails. While Tilda's e-commerce capabilities are well-suited for small to medium-sized stores selling physical or digital products, it does not match the depth of dedicated e-commerce platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce for large-scale retail operations. Businesses with complex inventory management needs, multi-currency requirements, or thousands of SKUs may find the native e-commerce features limiting, though the ability to create beautifully designed product pages and landing pages makes Tilda an excellent front-end for stores that use external fulfillment systems.

Built-in CRM and Lead Management

Tilda includes a basic CRM system that captures and manages leads generated through the platform's form blocks. When visitors submit forms on a Tilda website, their information is stored in the built-in CRM where it can be viewed, filtered, exported, and used for follow-up communications. The CRM integrates with Tilda's email functionality, allowing businesses to send automated response emails when forms are submitted and to manage ongoing communication with leads and customers. For businesses that do not already have a dedicated CRM, Tilda's built-in system provides a convenient starting point that avoids the need for additional tools.

For more advanced CRM needs, Tilda integrates with external platforms through webhooks, Zapier, and native connectors to popular services like Mailchimp, Google Sheets, Airtable, and HubSpot. Form submissions can be automatically forwarded to these external systems, enabling businesses to incorporate Tilda-generated leads into their existing marketing and sales workflows. The combination of a built-in CRM for simple needs and flexible integration options for complex workflows makes Tilda adaptable to businesses at different stages of operational sophistication.

SEO and Performance

Tilda provides built-in SEO tools that cover the essentials of on-page optimization. Users can set custom page titles, meta descriptions, Open Graph tags for social sharing, and canonical URLs for each page. The platform generates clean, semantic HTML that search engines can easily crawl and index, and supports custom URL structures that allow for SEO-friendly page paths. Tilda automatically generates responsive images at multiple resolutions and uses lazy loading to optimize page load performance, which contributes positively to Core Web Vitals scores that Google uses as a ranking factor.

Pages built with Tilda generally perform well in speed tests, particularly when using standard blocks without excessive custom animations. The platform's CDN delivers content from servers close to the visitor's location, reducing latency and improving load times globally. However, pages heavy with Zero Block animations, large video backgrounds, or numerous high-resolution images can experience performance degradation, so users should balance design ambition with loading speed optimization, especially for pages where SEO performance is critical.

Templates and Starting Points

In addition to individual blocks, Tilda offers complete page templates that provide fully designed starting points for common website types. Templates are available for landing pages, portfolios, online stores, blogs, event pages, restaurant menus, and various business types. Each template is essentially a curated arrangement of blocks that users can modify freely, adding, removing, or rearranging sections as needed. The templates serve as inspiration and time-savers rather than rigid frameworks, and many users start with a template and then customize it extensively with additional blocks and Zero Block sections to create something uniquely their own.

Animation and Interactivity

Tilda offers a range of animation capabilities that bring websites to life without requiring JavaScript coding. Standard blocks support entrance animations that trigger as elements scroll into view, including fades, slides, and scaling effects. The animation editor within Zero Block provides much more granular control, allowing users to create step-by-step animations with custom timing, easing curves, and trigger points. Scroll-based animations can transform elements as the user moves through the page, creating parallax effects, progressive reveals, and interactive storytelling sequences.

These animation features position Tilda as a capable tool for creating marketing microsites, product launch pages, and interactive brand experiences that would traditionally require custom front-end development. The visual animation editor is accessible to non-developers while providing enough depth for experienced designers to create sophisticated effects. However, animation performance should be monitored carefully, as complex animations can impact page load times and scrolling smoothness, particularly on lower-powered mobile devices.

GDPR Compliance and European Hosting

Operating from Latvia within the European Union, Tilda is fully GDPR compliant and provides the data protection assurances that European businesses and their customers expect. Websites hosted on Tilda benefit from European data hosting, meaning that visitor data, form submissions, and e-commerce transactions are processed and stored within EU jurisdiction. The platform includes GDPR-friendly features like configurable cookie consent banners, privacy policy page templates, and data handling practices that align with European regulatory requirements.

For businesses serving European customers, Tilda's EU-based operations eliminate the complex data transfer considerations that arise when using US-based website builders. There is no need to evaluate Standard Contractual Clauses or Privacy Shield alternatives, as data remains within the European Economic Area. This simplifies compliance for small businesses that may not have dedicated legal resources to navigate cross-border data transfer regulations, making Tilda a pragmatic choice for European organizations that want to avoid GDPR-related complexity.

Pricing and Plans

Tilda offers three pricing tiers. The Free plan allows users to create one website with limited access to blocks and Tilda's subdomain. The Personal plan at $15 per month provides full access to all 550+ blocks, custom domain connection, removal of Tilda branding, form data export, and full SEO settings. The Business plan at $25 per month includes everything in Personal plus the ability to manage up to five websites on one account, HTML code export, API access, and A/B testing capabilities. Annual billing offers discounts on both paid plans. For most individual users and small businesses, the Personal plan provides the optimal balance of features and value.

Limitations and Considerations

Tilda's block-based approach, while powerful, imposes some structural constraints. Pages are inherently vertical scrolling compositions of horizontal sections, which means unconventional layouts like complex grid-based portfolios or magazine-style multi-column designs require extensive Zero Block work. The platform does not support multi-language websites natively, requiring workarounds like duplicate pages for different languages. Blogging capabilities are functional but basic compared to WordPress, and the CMS does not support complex content types or custom fields. Additionally, the free plan is quite restrictive, and the pricing has increased from the original $10 per month to $15 per month for the Personal plan, which puts it at a similar price point to competitors with more features.

The e-commerce functionality, while improved significantly, still lacks advanced features like subscription billing, complex shipping rules, and detailed inventory management that dedicated platforms provide. Users who need to export their websites for self-hosting must be on the Business plan, and the exported code requires some technical knowledge to deploy independently. Despite these limitations, Tilda remains one of the best choices for creating visually stunning websites quickly, particularly for users who value design quality and European data hosting above all else.

Who Should Use Tilda?

Tilda is ideal for creative professionals, freelancers, small businesses, and marketing teams who need to create beautiful websites and landing pages without coding. It is particularly well-suited for portfolios, agency websites, product landing pages, event sites, and small e-commerce stores where visual design quality is a priority. European businesses that require GDPR-compliant website hosting will appreciate Tilda's EU-based operations. Users who need complex e-commerce capabilities, extensive blogging features, or highly dynamic web applications may find dedicated platforms better suited to their specific requirements, but for the core use case of creating stunning, fast-loading websites with minimal effort, Tilda is difficult to beat.