What Is Weebly?
On the wide spectrum of website building solutions, Weebly lives on the end that is all-inclusive and provides everything you need to get started and grow your website. It’s in contrast to solutions where you buy, install, and manage all the “pieces” of your website separately.
It’s like trading off some control for more convenience.
Using Weebly is sort of like leasing and customizing an apartment in a nice development instead of buying and owning your own house. You’re still in control of decor, cleaning, and everything living-wise – but you leave the construction, plumbing, security, and infrastructure to the property owner. That point is key because there’s usually a direct tradeoff between convenience and control.
All the functionality and design that are included with Weebly work seamlessly together as a platform. That’s what allows them to have drag and drop design, layout, and content.
Pros of Using Weebly
Here’s what I found to be the pros of Weebly – not just in comparison to Squarespace and Wix or Weebly vs. WordPress, but also as an overall online website solution.
Speed & Security
Weebly provides hosting for all the websites that are built on their platform. That can be good or bad, but in Weebly’s case, it’s a pro. They have fast load speeds. Their websites are optimized for their own hosting. They take care of security against hackers and spam. With business plans, they even install and maintain SSL across your entire site. Here’s my speed test:
There are still speed and security risks, but overall, it’s an advantage for many website owners to have someone else take care of speed, security, backups, etc. The cost is bundled with pro and free accounts, so it’s a solid value-add.
Overall Pricing
If you don’t mind your site on a subdomain (ie, http://yourwebsite.weebly.com) then Weebly is free with no expiration. A pretty good deal – especially for temporary sites.
Overall pricing is very competitive not only compared to other all-inclusive website builders but also with buying your own hosting. Their Starter plan starts around $8/mo when paid up front. And they don’t have the typical caps of other website builders. The Pro plan adds solid features and still stays under $12/mo.
And again – you’ll notice that everything is bundled and unlimited. There are no caps on pages or storage space. And unlike competitors like Wix, they remove all ads with the first paid tier.
Even their business pricing, while more expensive than doing the same thing on your own hosting, is much cheaper than comparable plans with direct competitors.
Compared to building your own website on your host and especially with other website builders, Weebly’s pricing is very competitive. Price isn’t everything, but I really like how they structure it.
Site Building Process
One advertised advantage of using an all-inclusive website builder is that you won’t have to write HTML or CSS code. You can just drag and drop elements. What you see in the builder is what you get on the website.
Onboarding & Education
Whenever you start any piece of software – no matter how intuitive – there’s that moment where you think “ok, what do I do now?” That process is called onboarding, and it’s also incredibly tough to implement well.
Built-in Feature Set + Extensions
The big advantage of building your own website on your own host is that you don’t have to depend on a platform’s feature set. If you go the platform route, it’s key to make sure they have all the features you want and need.
Weebly’s feature set is strong. They’ve got all the basics – like blog functionality, contact forms, etc, but also the necessary advanced features like URL redirects and page-level custom code placement.
Even beyond the advanced necessities, Weebly even includes features like forums, membership options, integrated advertising options, file uploads, etc. They also have eCommerce options, which I’ll cover separately below.
If you go the all-inclusive website builder route, Weebly’s feature set should provide everything you need for typical personal/business sites (though as we’ll see in the Cons section, you do want to be specifically aware of advanced options).
Additionally – Weebly has plenty of built-in features, but it doesn’t have everything. Platforms overcome this by allowing 3rd Party apps (think the App Store or Shopify’s App Store).
With your own WordPress site, adding functionality is as easy as installing a plugin. With Weebly – you can browse their growing (though still somewhat limited) app center.
Cons + Complaints About Using Weebly
But of course, no Weebly review would be complete without looking at the downsides. Every piece of software will have complaints. Let’s look at 3 specific cons I found.
Content Management System
A content management system is exactly what it sounds like. It’s an interface that allows you to sort, filter, edit, and publish different types of content on your site.
Weebly sort of has that. It has a Pages section that lists out all the pages on your site. It allows you to drag and drop the hierarchy and click to edit each. But it’s far from an efficient system.
There’s no way to add custom content types (except within an individual page). If you are planning a large site (like hundreds of pages), the content within Weebly would need a personal system to keep it all sorted and easily accessible.
This disadvantage can be overcome, but I wish content could be more easily managed within Weebly.
Advanced Marketing Tools
Since Weebly allows for HTML editing, most marketing tools and features can be added to your site. However, since you still do not have 100% control over your site & server – it can be difficult and/or impossible to add advanced marketing tools such as an EV SSL, custom email collection tools, custom analytics packages, custom social shares, specific Schemas and A/B testing software.
In the jargon – the main issue is not having “root” or “FTP” access to your server files. This is not an unsolvable problem, but it is something to be aware of if you are planning a long-term project.
For most all website owners with average traffic – you’ll want to be aware of the limitations, especially if you are planning for rapid growth.
Platform Lock-in
The last big disadvantage of Weebly is that moving to a new platform is difficult. If you want to move somewhere else, such as your own WordPress powered website, migrating your content and redirecting your URLs will be a difficult process.
Weebly allows you to export your Page content via zip file but blog content will have to be manually copied and/or migrated via RSS.
Again – migrating platforms will always be difficult, but it’s something to consider if you are planning on rapidly growing traffic and/or content.
Product Investment & Company Structure
Now – the acquisition from Square does come with a downside. That’s regular website builder features. Weebly’s incentive is to invest in features that make it more valuable as a whole for Square.
Features like appointment scheduling, blogging, etc are only valuable in so far that they benefit the parent company.
If you are looking to build a long-term content or lead generation site, then I’d look at WordPress.com (for content) or Wix (for general drag & drop) rather than Weebly. Even if Weebly meets your needs now, they might not in the medium future.
Weebly Review Conclusion
Weebly is a great choice for an all-inclusive website builder. They have great pricing, good functionality, and good user experience. There are a lot of tradeoffs for using an all-inclusive website builder, but if that route fits your goals – then Weebly is a solid choice.
