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Weebly is often advertised as a website building platform for beginners, but which one of these claims is true?
We’ll break down what Weebly does well and where it falls short to help you decide if we’re the right site builder for you.
Weebly is a website builder that allows users to create their own websites without the need for coding knowledge. The site builder has been around since 2005, and it continues to offer many features. Weebly offers its customers a free 30 day trial of their website builder. Read more in detail here: weebly pricing.
Weebly is a popular website builder that offers a wide range of features and is reasonably priced. Users enjoy how simple the UI is to use and the value they receive compared to the cost of subscription plans, according to Weebly evaluations. Weebly is best known for ecommerce, but its affordable price (beginning at zero dollars) and vast app marketplace make it a top pick and one of the finest site builders for small enterprises in almost any industry.
Go to Weebly.com.
Overview of Weebly
Weebly
What We Enjoy
- With ecommerce, you may get a free plan for life.
- Beginner-friendly
- Paid plans begin at $6 per month.
- Any package comes with a free SSL certificate.
- Templates that are mobile-friendly
- A large number of third-party applications are available.
- Search engine optimization (SEO) solutions that work
- Booking system that is fully integrated
What Isn’t There
- The $6 entry-level paid plan includes advertisements; the first ad-free plan is $12 per month.
- Templates that are no longer valid
- Customization of the design is limited.
- There isn’t a restore option.
- It is not designed for foreign users.
Weebly Is a Good Fit For:
- Beginners in web design
- Startups and solopreneurs in ecommerce
- Budget-conscious small companies
- Portfolios on the internet
- Businesses that are founded on events
- Bloggers
Weebly is a popular all-in-one site builder, and according to our Weebly review, it’s one of the best website builders for small companies and novices. Weebly offers three premium options as well as one that is completely free. Unlike Weebly’s rivals, who reserve ecommerce functionality for higher-tier plans, all Weebly plans include ecommerce tools, which is unsurprising given that Square, the payment processing behemoth, is its parent business.
Who Should Use Weebly?
Weebly is a quick, economical, and beginner-friendly option to create a website with an online shop, according to our evaluation. While Weebly is most known for its built-in ecommerce, individuals who aren’t selling online can discover useful capabilities in its plans and via third-party app integrations to achieve almost any sort of functionality needed for a small company website.
It’s best for: According to our expert Weebly evaluation, it’s ideal for:
- Beginners in web design: You’ll receive a straightforward, easy-to-use interface whether you utilize Weebly’s drag-and-drop builder or the Square editor (for ecommerce sites)—perfect for newbies wanting to construct a site fast. Weebly’s features are anything from simple, so you can be confident you’ll have plenty to build and grow your company. In five easy steps, learn how to create a small company website using Weebly.
- Enterprises on a budget: Weebly’s premium plans start at $6 per month, making it one of the cheapest site builders available to small businesses. However, unless you move to the $12 a month Professional plan, your site will be ad-free. Even so, the features you receive, like as a free domain, strong ecommerce, built-in SEO, and a large range of third-party app connections, may be well worth the money.
- Weebly’s ecommerce features are among the finest and most economical in the industry. All plans, including the free one, support ecommerce. You must subscribe to the most costly plan to avoid transaction costs, but even that is reasonable at just $26 per month. It simply takes eight steps to create a Weebly shop, and you can do it for free.
- Photographers, graphic designers, and others who work in the creative field: You have unlimited storage and bandwidth with the Professional plan, so you may upload as much stuff as you want. It also has search engine optimization (SEO) and online selling features, allowing you to attract consumers and sell your work on the internet. Weebly is a leading portfolio website builder because of all of its features and reasonable rates.
- Weebly’s Advantages designs designed exclusively for event-based businesses. Calendars, RSVPs, forms, registration pages, and maps make event administration simple. Weebly is one of the most cost-effective methods to publicize events online and sell tickets, with free plugins like DonorBox available for charity events.
- Weebly’s blogging tools and UI are simple to use, making it one of the top blogging platforms. You receive unlimited storage and bandwidth with the Professional plan, as well as SEO and marketing tools to help you increase your audience and AdSense integrations to help you monetize your blog. You’re covered if you wish to sell products online since all plans feature ecommerce.
Who Isn’t a Good Fit for Weebly?
Weebly is hard to discover an industry that Weebly won’t work for, thanks to its well-rounded features and inexpensive cost. While it is a generally attractive website builder, it does have one major flaw: its design skills.
In comparison to rivals like Wix, the Classic Weebly editor for personal sites is a drag-and-drop editor with minimal customizability. The Square editor, which is used to create ecommerce sites, is even more restricted since it is a point-and-click, section-based editor that does not allow for simple interaction with third-party programs.
You only have a few hundred templates (which Weebly refers to as “Themes”) to pick from, and you can’t choose or update your template if you’re making a commercial website using the Square editor. Modern-looking, prebuilt templates for online businesses, blogs, and portfolios are included with the Square editor’s commercial sites.
Weebly isn’t recommended for the following things, according to our review:
- Businesses looking for a fully customized website: Weebly’s site editors are quite straightforward to use, as previously noted. Weebly, on the other hand, doesn’t prioritize customization, therefore the site editors don’t provide the same level of flexibility as Wix. You may need to experiment with Weebly’s code functionality to modify your site, which is not a beginner-friendly approach to get design modification. In this list of the top drag-and-drop site builders, learn more about Wix and other more design-friendly choices.
- Outside of the United States, Weebly prices and plans are dramatically different. International customers only receive ecommerce functionality on the $12 per month plan, and even then, they’re limited to 25 goods. If creating an online shop for free is a high priority, check out our list of the best free ecommerce site builders, or compare the best ecommerce platforms for the most complete ecommerce site possibilities.
- Businesses who desire to be able to alter their templates: You can’t pick or alter the template (Weebly calls them themes) you wish to start with when developing a company website using the Square editor, which is a major flaw. It’s chosen for you at onboarding, and that’s all there is to it. Squarespace is a far better solution for individuals who wish to change templates fast and simply without having to start from scratch.
Alternatively, go through our list of the top Weebly alternatives to see if one of them is a better fit for your company.
Pricing on Weebly
Pricing on Weebly reflects some of the most affordable paid plans among the best website builders as well as a generous Free plan with ecommerce features. While the Personal plan is on the cheaper end at only $6 per month, it displays Weebly ads rendering it too unProfessional for a small business. In effect, Weebly only has two ad-free plans at $12 per month and $26 per month, respectively.
*Based on a yearly billing cycle.
For more information about Pricing on Weebly and plans, select a plan from the drop-down menu below:
Free
Weebly has a fairly liberal free ecommerce package that allows you to sell an infinite number of items. This is almost unheard of in the website-building industry—the ability to sell online with a free plan is a huge deal. Weebly goes above and above with services like inventory management, shopping carts, and tax computations that are all automated.
Apart from ecommerce, all of Weebly’s plans include coding, free SSL security, and SEO capabilities and tools. While these are excellent features, bear in mind that the Free and Personal plans have some substantial limits, such as a 500MB storage limit and a single file upload size limit of 10MB.
Weebly advertising are also shown on these plans, and the free plan utilizes a subdomain. It’s not Professional enough for even a tiny company unless you really need a free plan to begin with. Starting with the Free or Personal plan, however, might be a smart approach to determine whether Weebly is the right website builder for your small company website.
Personal
Weebly’s Personal plan enables you to link an existing custom domain to your account, albeit it is not ad-free. It also improves ecommerce capabilities by allowing for the purchase of digital items and the use of a shipping calculator. Aside from these minor differences, the Personal plan is quite similar to the Free plan.
It is still much less expensive than comparable starting plans on the market. When combined with Weebly’s existing extensive online shop functionality, it provides excellent value for the money. However, the storage limit remains at 500MB, there is a high transaction cost of 3%, and Weebly adverts will continue to appear on your page.
Going ad-free is critical for small businesses’ Professionalism and brand trust. We recommend skipping the Personal plan completely and instead opting for the Free plan to try out Weebly or upgrading to the ad-free Professional plan, which also includes a one-year free domain.
Professional
The ad-free Professional plan is really where Pricing on Weebly and plans get competitive as a small business website solution. Aside from no ads, you get unlimited storage, a free domain for one year, and more Customer Service in the form of phone support. Ecommerce capabilities stay the same, including the 3% transaction fee.
For about $12 per month, this is a fantastic offer. Wix and Squarespace, for example, have premium plans that start at $14 per month, while Squarespace demands that you subscribe to at least the $23 per month plan to have ecommerce. Ecommerce is also only available in GoDaddy’s top-tier plan, which costs $24.99 per month.
Weebly’s broad app market (Weebly editor only) allows you to download applications like booking integrations, making it one of the most cost-effective methods to get your company online. It’s not designed for high-volume ecommerce, but it’s ideal for personal portfolios and resumes, service-based enterprises, restaurants, and other small businesses that do some light online selling.
Performance
At $26 per month, Weebly’s most costly plan is also the only legitimate business plan. There are no transaction costs for Performance plan customers, and they receive added ecommerce tools including PayPal, comprehensive ecommerce analytics, abandoned cart emails, and shipping labels. Although it is the most expensive Weebly plan, it is equivalent in price to Squarespace’s most basic ecommerce plan.
Due to Pricing on Weebly for this plan, it’s a great option for charities wanting to accept donations through PayPal as well as ecommerce businesses. It can even work for dropshipping, but keep in mind that Weebly doesn’t have many dropshipping integrations and currently lacks big names like Spocket and Printify.
Weebly’s Advantages
Weebly offers a comprehensive collection of capabilities, including built-in SEO, embedding code, and strong ecommerce tools and features. Furthermore, the ability to create a fully functional online shop for free is a unique selling feature for this premier website builder. Click the drop-downs below to learn more about what Weebly can achieve for you.
Templates & Design
Weebly falls short of other site builders when it comes to creative flexibility. Depending on whether you want a company or personal website, there are two editors.
For a Weebly company website with Square’s ecommerce features, choose “Try Square Online.”
Weebly’s Square site builder for business websites doesn’t compare to Wix’s extraordinary level of creative flexibility, despite having a blend of point-and-click with some drag-and-drop features. However, constraints might be beneficial since they make it more difficult to make mistakes and allow you to go online quicker.
There are only roughly 50 templates, and many of them are replicated among the seven Weebly theme categories. In contrast, Squarespace offers over 100 templates to pick from, while Wix has over 800.
The templates accessible when using the old Weebly editor, in particular, are obsolete. The Square editor’s templates are sleeker and more contemporary, but you can’t choose which one to use first. If this is a deal-breaker for you, consider Wix, which provides a free-forever version with practically limitless creative flexibility, or Squarespace, which allows you to change designs at any time.
You are not only unable to choose a theme, but you are also unable to alter it. After you sign up for an account, it is picked for you during setup. Individual page layout templates are likewise restricted to the functionality you specified for your site; however, you may expand your options by adding additional categories to your site.
When choosing a company website with ecommerce, also known as website templates, examples of Weebly themes are available.
Ecommerce
Weebly’s most appealing feature, and the one for which it is most known, is its extensive ecommerce for online selling, which is available on all plans, including the free one. For example, on the free plan, you receive an infinite number of product ecommerce capabilities. In instance, the Strikingly site builder’s free plan allows for ecommerce, but only for one product.
Weebly offers vital indicators for evaluating and improving your online marketing and sales.
Weebly’s free plan, in addition to this already excellent offering, includes additional sophisticated capabilities like as a shopping cart and inventory management. Most website builders don’t even offer free ecommerce plans, much alone ones with as many features as Weebly.
If you’re serious about selling online, switch to Weebly’s top-tier plan, which costs $26 per month and is still reasonably priced among ecommerce programs. You receive no adverts, an extra payment gateway, no transaction fees, and more comprehensive ecommerce analytics for this pricing.
Tools for Online Marketing
You may build time-limited or quantity-limited discounts and special offers, as well as pop-ups, to capture the attention of site visitors, starting with the free plan. In addition, starting with the free edition of Weebly, you may sell Square gift cards, which is a rare feature among site builders. Choose from a variety of preset gift card quantities ($10, $25, or $50) or create your own custom gift card amounts.
Make a coupon to promote site-wide or individual item or category sales.
Do you want to make your site visitors feel a sense of urgency? Add a countdown widget to your site to give customers a deadline to act, such as a specified date or a specific amount of minutes for a flash sale.
Create a feeling of urgency among site visitors to encourage them to take action.
SEO
Weebly includes a comprehensive tutorial to search engine optimization (SEO) for beginners. It covers everything from designing a plan to researching keywords and rivals, as well as monitoring and tracking outcomes.
Page-level titles and descriptions, as well as the option to add alt-tags to pictures, are all SEO settings that may help your site get discovered online. You may also add custom header and footer code, for example, to connect Google Analytics or other third-party programs.
Set SEO information for titles, descriptions, keywords, header and footer code, and even permalinks at the site and page level.
You may utilize roughly 400 paid and free third-party applications to boost site visitor interaction, promote traffic and revenue, or add specialist functionality to your website, such as appointment scheduling. You may use apps to add visual appeal to your website with animations, manage your Google advertisements, and promote your company on social media, for example.
Even with the free edition, you may link your site to the Site Booster app. You may use it for free or subscribe to its low-cost $4.99 per month plan to have access to all of its features. Your site will be listed and added to search engines, review sites, maps, and mobile app directories with the Site Booster.
Marketing through email
Weebly has Marketing through email tools, but you must add a Weebly Promote plan to use them, starting at $8 per month. This will make it easier to promote your online store to new and repeat customers. In addition, Marketing through email analytics are included so you can measure campaign effectiveness and gain insights to improve special offers and marketing emails.
With a Weebly Promote subscription, you can even segment lists and automate Marketing through email such as sending a welcome email to new customers or subscribers or an upselling or cross-selling email after a sale. Start with premade templates or create an email from scratch using a point-and-click editor similar to that used for site building.
Subscribe to the Weebly Promote add-on to gain integrated Marketing through email.
However, to send more than 2,500 emails per month, you have to subscribe to either the $25 per month Grow plan (50,000 emails per month) or the Accelerate plan at $75 per month (250,000 emails per month). Since you can embed code, even in the free version, a better and more budget-friendly solution would be to create a Mailchimp account. It’s free for up to 2,000 contacts and you can embed Mailchimp forms into your site and export your data to use Mailchimp for Marketing through email.
User-Friendliness
Weebly is promoted as a beginner-friendly website builder, which we found to be generally accurate in our Weebly review. Its interface is simple to use, whether you’re using the Classic drag-and-drop editor for a personal site or Square’s point-and-click editor for commercial websites.
Weebly will ask you if you need a commercial or personal site throughout the onboarding process. When you choose a Personal site, you’ll be sent to Weebly’s Classic editor and a template choosing process.
By choosing “Try Square Online,” you may choose a business website and then answer a series of questions about your company. Weebly then picks a theme for you and produces the initial pages of your site depending on your responses. This will take you to Square’s editor, where you will (sadly) be unable to choose your own theme or modify the template of your site.
Even while this phase has the potential to substantially alter the result of your website, it isn’t communicated to you in any manner before, during, or after the process—which might be annoying if you’re new to Weebly. Hopefully, future versions will address this flaw, and we will gladly update our Weebly evaluation accordingly.
The Square editor on Weebly is a little simpler to use than the Classic drag-and-drop editor.
Customer Service
The knowledge base on Weebly is quite useful.
Weebly’s Customer Service looks great on paper. On all plans, you get access to live chat and email support, plus a knowledge base and a support forum. By upgrading to at least the Professional plan, you also get added phone support, and on its most expensive plan, you get priority support.
However, customers don’t have many good things to say about Customer Service in Weebly reviews. Its live chat feature is slow to respond, and this, plus phone support, is only available to U.S.-based users. Surprisingly, the email support works well, but since it’s via email, don’t expect instantaneous answers.
If you have any urgent queries, you can always visit their knowledge base, where you’ll discover a wealth of in-depth articles to read. You can also ask questions and get answers from other Weebly users in the community forum or by searching for assistance using the magnifying glass button.
What Users Have to Say About Weebly
Weebly is one of the finest website builders for small companies for a variety of reasons, and we suggest it for small ecommerce enterprises and web design newbies alike. It has many capabilities to appeal to even intermediate-level site designers, and it incorporates ecommerce right out of the box.
Users from all across the web agree, according to average evaluations based on Weebly reviews:
With the exception of Weebly’s Customer Service and its Customization of the design is limited., Weebly reviews show that users are generally happy with how easy it is to use, and how much it offers for the price. Its ecommerce capabilities are some of the best and most affordable we’ve tried for an all-in-one site builder that isn’t dedicated to ecommerce (like Shopify).
Conclusion
Weebly is one of the most user-friendly and cost-effective website builders available to small companies. Its ecommerce features, particularly for US customers, go above and beyond what we anticipate from an all-in-one site builder. You may use the free plan to determine whether Weebly is the ideal site builder for your company’s website. While the number of templates and design options are limited, it’s still a site builder we’d suggest to any small company trying to go online fast and inexpensively.
Try Weebly
Weebly and Wix are two of the most popular website builders. They both have a lot of features, but they also come with their own set of problems. Weebly is more beginner-friendly than Wix, while Wix has more advanced options that are better for those who want to make websites without having to learn how to code. Reference: weebly vs wix.
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