Imagely Hosting Review
My love affair with Imagely was short-lived.
I had a tech crush on Imagely long before I became a customer. Their marketing is great and I fell for it, hard. I was finally ready to make the switch from Zenfolio in mid-February (2017) and jumped in with both feet.
Their marketing message had me convinced that they provided a turnkey system for photographers, as an alternative to the closed infrastructures like the Zenfolios and Squarespaces of the world. Their website touts 24/7 support and their podcast and other marketing convinced me their support was top-notch, fast, and would hold my hand to get my website up and running.
Frankly, they oversold and underdelivered. I was an Imagely customer for about a month. I spent four weeks trying to get my new website up and running before scrapping the site and starting over with a different hosting company.
Imagely’s 24/7 Support is a Joke
The snail-paced support was my biggest problem with Imagely. I had my first taste of it the day I signed up.
One of the services they offer is WordPress migration if you already have a WordPress site with another host. I initiated my migration request on February 16, 2017 and my migration wasn’t live until February 20, 2017. There were several emails clarifying things throughout those four days. Waits on replies from Imagely support averaged more than 12 hours and one reply took nearly 45 hours.
Furthermore, once the migration was complete I was not able to log into my site due to a problem with my username/password. I sent an email about the issue on February 20, 2017, about 3o minutes after they let me know the migration was complete. The login issue wasn’t resolved for another 24 hours!
It is important to note that the emails about migrating my site took place over Presidents’ Day Weekend. However, I expected better from a company that advertised 24/7 support. Nowhere on their website did it say that support was closed (or delayed) on minor holidays.
Although I was frustrated, I still wanted to love Imagely so I pressed on. Over the next few weeks I found that their slow support was a way of life, not an aberration on a holiday weekend. While a few support questions were answered within a few hours, most took 12-24 hours.
It is also worth noting that Imagely does NOT provide phone support. Many of my questions during those four weeks could have been solved with a 5 minute (or less) phone call.
Beautiful but Quirky Themes
One of the big selling points for Imagely’s service its that it comes with beautifully designed WordPress themes and gallery/ecommerce plugins built for photographers. The themes are pretty – but around week 3 of building my site and working to customize the theme to my liking I hit a snag.
I was working with the Lightly theme. It has a grid toward the bottom of the home page that shows thumbnails of recent blog posts. The only problem? The titles were only visible if you happened to mouse over the featured image. Since blogging is a big part of my business I wanted it to be obvious that those images were blog posts so I asked how to keep the titles visible.
I expected to be told where to find a simple setting or given a shortcode to make the change. (My expectation was based on past interactions with other paid theme designers.) Instead I was told that I would need to hire a developer. It was like they had kicked me in the gut. Not only did I not have the budget to hire a developer, I had banked on their advertised “hand-holding” to get my site looking its best.
No 1-Click Backup & Restore
After dealing with the theme issues above I decided to try a different theme. However, I didn’t want to lose all of the work I’d put into the Lightly theme in case the new theme didn’t pan out so I needed a backup.
On other hosts I’ve worked with it was easy to create a 1-click backup and restore from the hosting dashboard. In fact – Imagely’s own documentation confirmed that this was standard. (See the article on their site here.) However, when I contacted support for the steps in making a backup I was told that their backups were only for disaster recovery and that there was no way for a user to make a 1-click backup. My only option was to install a 3rd party plugin and run a backup that way.
UPDATE: In the time since I cancelled my Imagely account they have added 1-click backup and restore in beta test mode. You can read about it here.
In Conclusion…
I really wanted to love Imagely. I was mentally geared up to be their cheerleader and recommend them to other photographers, including my coaching clients. However, after my four weeks with Imagely, I can’t in good conscience recommend them as a hosting company. There were other “quirks” in addition to the ones above, but I think you get the idea.
One of the good things that came out of my four weeks with Imagely was working with their NextGen Pro gallery plugin. I liked it enough to purchase it separately for my website (now hosted on GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress Hosting). The couple of times I’ve contacted support for the plugin I’ve gotten a reasonably quick and helpful reply. The gallery plugin seems to be where they focus most of their time and attention. I’ve even seen the Imagely CEO involved in some of the plugin feature conversations on Facebook, which I found very encouraging.
Maybe in a few years (if they are still in business, and have added phone support) I’ll reevaluate. Until then, I’m pretty happy with my choice to switch to GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress Hosting. I can talk to an actual person 24/7 (yes, really!) and each time I’ve called they’ve been enjoyable to speak with and have quickly answered my questions.
As for my WordPress theme, I stuck with Gridsby by Modern Themes. It took a bit of work to get it looking the way I wanted, but I learned a lot in the process. Their support is pretty good and they’ve never told me to hire a developer when something malfunctions! They’ve just fixed it or sent me a shortcode.
If you are looking for a WordPress host I advise you to skip Imagely. If you decide to check them out, go in with your eyes open and realistic expectations.
Disclosure: One of the ways I support this website is by partnering with awesome companies, whose products I use and love. These partnerships allow me to earn a small commission when you make a purchase through one of my affiliate links, but there is no additional cost for you. Thank you for your support!
12 Comments
Leave a Comment
GET EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS WHEN A NEW ARTICLE IS PUBLISHED!
WhoA, I’ve been with Imagely for over a year , and have not had a problem. My site move was easy , and it’s been smooth sailing. I even broke my site once , coding experiment gone sideways, and they helped me get everything back in working order. I’ve been real satisfied with them.
Gservo – I’m glad to hear your experience with Imagely wasn’t like mine. If I’d had your experience I’d still be their customer! I really wanted to love them…
Hi, Angela. Your experience is similar to mine. I’m still in the free trial, and I’m looking for another host. I had faster page load speeds with a shared host, and that is saying something.
Hi Tim, I’m sorry to hear that you are experiencing some of the same frustrations! Check out Siteground for hosting. I went with GoDaddy and now I’m not so thrilled with that decision either. Their support is great but GoDaddy’s Managed Hosting removes a lot of functionality and caused a lot of problems with my site. I ended up going back to their shared hosting, which is slower, but at least my site is working correctly now. I joined a local WordPress meetup (I wish I’d found them sooner!!) and Siteground is a favorite host for a lot of those folks. I did talk to Siteground about moving my site, but I can’t get my $$ back from GoDaddy so I’m stuck for now. Good luck with your site! If you get a chance, let me know which direction end up going. Cheers!
I’ve gone back to Squarespace for now, but I’m still looking at photography themes for WordPress because I still believe it is a superior platform to Squarespace. I have pretty much decided, though, that if/when I go back to WordPress, I’m going to use LightningBase as my host. I’ve read nothing but good things about them, and so far, my questions have been answered within minutes by them (I am wary that this would change once they have made the sale). I’m looking more at managed hosting because of the supposed speed advantage.
Oh, one more thing, I was looking at the Imagely themes, and now I can’t find any mention of their hosting on the site.
Hi Tim,
After tackling the learning curve of WordPress I can see the allure of Squarespace! It does have its limitations, though. I’m using Gridsby Pro from Modern Themes and I like it. I did create a child theme to make some customizations, though.
I just took a peek at the Imagely site, and you’re right! It looks like they aren’t offering their hosting services anymore. I wonder if that is a permanent change…I do like their NextGenPro plugin (I’m using it on my site) and their themes are pretty. Perhaps they’ve decided to put more effort into their core strengths. We shall see.
Thanks for the update!
I SO agree with their support being a joke (if not something worse)! They are terrible – and outwardly aggressive, too. I contacted them with a simple request and they told me they couldn’t help but that I should contact them over social media (customer support 101 says that is a terrible idea LOL). Anyways, they sent an automated survey for me to rank them and I did and voiced the issue with their support and they replied with a verbal attack because I had rated them poorly. Please do not ask for feedback if you are not going to listen and if you are going to outwardly assault the person who has made use of the tool that you put in front of them.
Not sure about the rest of the company, but their support team is NOT empathetic, kind, or helpful. Hope they will reevaluate their hiring choices in support in the future. This really ruined my perception of their brand and I will be the first to recommend against.
Hi Kerri – I’m sorry you had such a horrible experience with Imagely! Not long after I wrote this article they ceased advertising hosting options, but I recently read that they are back in the game…apparently nothing has changed, except maybe gotten worse based on your recap. Luckily their NextGen plugin is pretty solid so I haven’t had to go to support, but I dread the day I need to.
Hi Angela,
I was going to contact you by email, but I thought my question might be of some benefit to your readers.
Your Ecommerce purchase and checkout proceedre looks very similar to that of the PhotoCrati theme by Imagely. Is that part of the NextGen Pro Gallery? I’m currently building a site using the PhotoCrati WordPress theme and I find that the Ecommerce module is very lightweight. For example, 1) it only supports one shipping rate that can be either a fixed rate or a percentage of the total purchase. This is too simple as it does not take into account different sizes, weights and distances which all factor into an accurate shipping cost. 2) Similarly, the sales tax support only allows for one tax rate. Considering I only have one nexus, I need only to be concerned with sales tax for one state; but the state has 62 counties all with varying rates. The state tax is all the same, but there is no way to automatically parse the purchasers location and include the local county taxes. Other Ecommerce options, such as WooCommerce, handle this both internally or with third party plugin options. I did notice that you seem to have a flat shipping charge and I was wondering if you find it sufficient to cover all situations. As for the sales tax, how do you handle that?
As for my experience with Imagely’s support of the theme, it’s similar to your experience with support for the hosting. I’ve asked a couple of very simple questions of where to locate certain aspects of the HTML so to make some simple tweaks; tweaks that I would make and I did not request for them to make. I was told to hire a developer. It seems to be a boilerplate response.
Regards,
Eligio
Hi Eligio – You are correct – I’m running NextGen Pro on my site. I agree that the eCommerce aspect is lightweight, but for now it works reasonably well for me.
For pricing, I made a very detailed spreadsheet with prices, markups, tax, and shipping. I work primarily with a lab that has a very reasonable rate, even for fairly large images so I just calculate that into my price. For instance – If shipping starts at $9.95, but on a larger piece that goes up to $19.95 I’ll add an extra $10 to my price for the artwork and keep the shipping rate constant. It is not a perfect system, but for now it works. For extremely large pieces I do custom quotes so I can work in shipping/tax on a case-by-case basis.
WooCommerce does have some better options available, but the cost was substantially higher when I last researched it.
As for the sales tax – I find this aspect very frustrating especially with upcoming rules that look like sales tax will need to be charged everywhere, regardless of nexus. At the moment I will pay the sales tax out of my profit so I stay in compliance, but it is far from ideal. NextGenPro could be a lot better in this area.
Apart from their hosting and the blog issue that you had regarding the title, would you recommend their themes in general?
Hi Sam – Apart from the less-than-stellar theme support, their themes seem to be reasonably well-built. However, after my experience I ceased using their themes (in 2017 when I wrote this article) so I can’t speak to the current quality.