Weebly Website Builder Reviews | IT Pros

Weebly is a low cost website builder. You can use it to build professional websites without writing a single line of code. It is the best website builder for small business sites and portfolios and also offers tools for search engine optimization and e-commerce.

Weekly Review: Snapshot

Weebly is one of the easiest website builders to use and has a great price, but it doesn’t offer as many features as its top competitors.

Weebly should be considered one of the best website builders available today, but we think it’s overshadowed by competitors Wix and Squarespace.In this Weebly review, we outline why .

Score: 3.5/5

Read our full Weebly review.

Weebly Competitors

Weebly is the cheapest of the popular website builders, but its features aren’t as sophisticated as Wix or Squarespace. Its template design is fine, especially for smaller business sites, but competitors tend to offer more for ecommerce features, marketing, and editor versatility.

How does Weebly compare to its main competitors?

Weebly: Key Features

The Weebly editor has a drag-and-drop interface for creating websites. Drag the item you want to insert from the side drawer onto the page and edit it as needed. The interface is cleaner and more overwhelming than Wix’s editor, as most menus only appear when you need them and hide when they’re not relevant.

In addition to basic elements such as titles, text and images, you can add interesting pre-made options such as galleries, maps, contact forms, videos, surveys, etc. The list of elements is similar to that of competitors Wix and Squarespace. It’s not as impressive, but here are all the typical embeds you’d want for a small site.

As you add new elements to your Weebly site pages, existing sections will move on the page to accommodate them. For simple sites, this is fine and can prevent you from deviating too far from your site’s design. However, Weebly can feel a bit rigid if you have more complex designs in mind.

At the top of the interface are options for adding new pages to your site and changing the theme to one of about 40 preset templates. From the submenu you can change the font and color of all major elements such as navigation menus, headings and paragraph text.

Weebly has a huge app market that you can use to add functionality to your site, usually provided by third parties. There are 360 ​​apps to choose from, 36 of which are free. Many apps can help you improve your search engine rankings, increase your social media presence, or set up new sales channels.

Once your site looks the way you want it, you can find additional tools beyond the Weebly editor. The reports section shows details such as where your site’s traffic is coming from, how many sales you’ve made, and which parts of your site are attracting the most interest from your visitors.

Marketing tools include many things you can add to your site to increase traffic and sales. You can create email marketing campaigns from template designs and automatically send emails when site visitors take specific actions. You can use this tool to display pop-ups on your website to invite visitors to join your mailing list, make important announcements, offer coupons, and more.

Weebly: What’s new for 2022?

In 2018, Weebly was acquired by Square Inc., after which the company sought to migrate Weebly users to another website builder tool called Square Online. This didn’t work particularly well for his long-term Weebly users, as Square Online lacks many of his Weebly editor’s more advanced features.

For now, Square Inc. maintains and updates two products, but the company suggests that Square Online is a better choice than Weebly for users with ecommerce in mind. .

In June 2021, Weebly announced it would be closing Weebly for Education in 2022. Weebly for Education is a program where a teacher and up to 40 students get her Weebly Pro account free.

Weebly: Pricing

Weebly offers a free plan but is ad-supported. You can pay for one of four paid plans, either monthly or annually, with discounts for paying yearly. A 30-day money-back guarantee is available, but only if you purchase an annual plan.

Weebly’s low-end plans are decidedly cheaper, but lack features. The Connect plan only includes 500 MB of storage space and does not offer a free domain name. This is fine for freelancers and portfolio sites, but for SMEs looking to sell online , you should consider at least the Pro plan.

It unlocks phone support and unlimited storage and removes the square footer that otherwise appears on every page. Finally, Business and Business Plus plans include PayPal, Product Reviews, and Waive An option to accept a deleted cart recovery has been added.

Weebly pricing plans

*Price when paid annually

Weebly test

To comprehensively compare Weebly against the competition, we analyzed a set of features and tools to see how they performed. This includes both uptime and response time. These factors are important factors when considering building a website.

What is Weebly’s uptime?

How often does the Weebly website go offline? To test this, I created a standard Weebly website and left it running for 7 days. Every 5 minutes we checked to see if the website was responding.

This was a relatively short test and Weebly returned 100% uptime. Nothing in our testing suggests that the Weebly servers are overloaded or prone to downtime.

How responsive is your Weebly site?

There are several metrics you can use to compare the speed of websites built by website builders, but response time is one of the fairest. This is the time it takes for a request from the user to receive a response from the server. Again, he tested Weebly’s response time every 5 minutes for 7 days, and in all he got 2,016 checks.

Weebly had an average response time of 379ms, but in most cases the response was closer to 347ms. The average is high because there were some spikes in response time over the course of the test, slowing down to 628 ms in the worst case. Overall, we consider Weebly’s response time results to be about average.

Weebly alternatives

Weebly offers the cheapest plans of all the major website builders, but be aware that their most basic plan is limited and lacks many of the features small businesses want to use. please.Comparing Weebly’s more feature-rich plans starting with £9 a monthit’s not a bargain.

Wix is ​​better than Weebly if you have more creative freedom. But Weebly works fine for small businesses and portfolio sites, and its huge app store makes it great for creating different kinds of sites.

Weebly is one of the few website editors that are not tied to using their platform going forward. You can export almost any HTML and CSS from your Weebly site so you can use it elsewhere if you want.

Similarly, Weebly scores points for allowing you to edit your site’s code. The general idea of ​​website editors is to never have to touch code, but some take this policy too far and prevent them from editing their site. An experienced developer can edit the code as needed.

Square Inc. seems to pay as little attention to Weebly as possible, especially when it comes to modernizing Weebly and adding new ecommerce features. Perhaps the company wants most Weebly users to switch to Square Online instead, so they’re paying more attention to its product.

Weebly Features Compared to Competitors

Weebly: Verdict

Weebly is easy to use and is recommended for beginners. The WYSIWYG interface is easy to understand and you don’t have to worry about editing the code. If you can make a PowerPoint presentation, you can create a Weebly website.

Weebly isn’t the best option if you want a lot of customization. You can certainly add and remove elements from your site’s pages and choose your layout, but your website should stay within the general outline of the template you choose.

Weebly’s themes are great, but rarely spectacular. With only about 40 to choose from and limited customization, your website may look like every other Weebly website. You may need to hire a third party theme developer to create a great looking Weebly site. Even small devices will look the same as your computer.

Weebly’s App Center is also massive, with hundreds of third-party apps to extend the site’s functionality. It’s easy to install and includes everything from e-commerce to social media marketing tools. Most of these tools are $10 When $30/monthso using too many can quickly make your website costly to run.

Weebly earned a reputation for search engine optimization by automatically creating sitemaps, SEO-friendly HTML code, and responsive design. Weebly’s documentation has great guides to optimizing your site for better search engine results, and the platform offers built-in website statistics to help you improve your site’s performance and traffic generation. You can check the origin.

In summary, Weebly offers most of the features you want in a website builder and is easy to use. However, some other website editors offer more features and better designs for similar prices.

More information about website builders

When it comes to website builders, tips for building your first website, how much it costs to build a website, and best small business website builders, best ecommerce website builders, and best free websites. Check out our builder buying guide.