What Is Weebly?

Weebly’s website builder provides an easy to use platform where you can create a professional-looking website without any coding knowledge. It uses a drag and drop editor meaning you can create a website very simply and quickly.

If you do happen to know any HTML or CSS and want to put it to good use, Weebly gives you this option too. Weebly’s built-in code editor means you can customise your website further than you can, with code, than Wix.

Weebly powers more than 30 million websites, attracting 250 million unique website visitors per month. It’s hugely popular, so naturally, I wanted to discover why everyone raves about it.

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Pros & Cons

Is Weebly The Right Choice?

Before you begin reading my Weebly review, you may be wondering whether Weebly is the right choice for you. If you’re a small business or start-up or want to create a small online store, then yes, Weebly is a great choice.

If your plan is to create a personal website or online portfolio, again, Weebly is a solid platform that makes the process much easier than some other website builders.

However, there are better website builders out there, in my opinion. That’s not to say Weebly isn’t great, because it is, and in lots of cases it may be a more suitable choice. Anyway, we will get into the nitty-gritty details about that shortly.

For now, have a think about the following statements. If any of them ring true to you, then Weebly will probably be a good match, and you should continue reading my Weebly review to find out more:

• I want a website builder that is easy to use
• I don’t know any HTML or CSS
• I do know HTML and CSS and would like to make use of it
• I’ve never created a website before
• I want to create a website quickly and painlessly
• I want a platform that allows my website to grow with my skills

I’ve personally signed up to Weebly in order to test its usability, features, pricing, and overall functionality. I can safely say that if the above statements are ones that you may be thinking, then Weebly is 100% worth considering.

If you have plans to build a big online store with lots of features, then you may want to read my Shopify review, as they are my recommended eCommerce builder. Alternatively, if you want a website builder that offers more intuitive building capabilities, check out my Hostinger review – they are my #1 website builder of choice.

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Ease of Use

As well as being a drag and drop editor, Weebly promotes WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).

This means you can build your website by dragging, say, a text box element onto the header area of your page. That will literally allow you to place your element exactly where you told it to go. Again, I’ll reiterate, you can do this without any code.

If you like what you’ve seen so far, stay with me!

Although it’s not technically a website builder, WordPress doesn’t use WYSIWYG. Let me give you an example.

With a WordPress site, the editor shows you the information you’re editing, whether it be a post or a page. In order to see the changes you’ve made, you have to click preview to see how your website will look.

Weebly, on the other hand, shows you exactly how your website will look, at all times. If you make a change to your images, text, video, or anything at all, you’ll see first-hand how your website actually looks. Cool right?

Themes & Templates

In the past, Weebly was kind of known for having outdated and poor themes. It’s actually one of the reasons I wanted to revisit them and what prompted me to write this Weebly review.

Thankfully Weebly listened to the feedback they were getting and updated their Weebly Themes gallery, offering some pretty stunning designs.

Weebly’s themes are mobile responsive meaning your website will look awesome on any device. This is an absolute must-have for any website these days. If you don’t believe me, check out my design statistics post which may open your eyes up to some pretty interesting facts.

If you’re not particularly drawn to any of Weebly’s themes on their website, there are plenty of designers who have taken the time to create some incredible themes. I’ll provide you with a list of these in a moment.

In comparison to SquareSpace vs WordPress, in terms of design, Weebly, unfortunately, isn’t a match for them. I’d say they have the best themes and templates on the market at the moment.

Apps

If you want to take your website further than the basic editing tools Weebly has on offer, you can browse Weebly’s App Center for some inspiration.

These one-click app installations are a great way to grow your business and enhance what you already have.

For example, if you want to integrate your Instagram feed into your website, there’s an app for it! Simply click on the app to find out more, including features, reviews, and pricing.

Whilst their App Center isn’t anywhere near as powerful as Shopify or WordPress, I do like that they’ve included this into their platform. Remember, Weebly is really designed for beginners, so they probably don’t want to overwhelm people with too much choice.

If you’re not sure what you’re looking for, Weebly’s App Center is simply categorised. Click on one of the categories displayed on their App Center and it will display suitable apps.

But if you’re looking for something specific, you can use their easy search tool to find the answer.

Don’t worry, Weebly’s apps are one-click, meaning all you have to do is install them and you’re ready to roll. Simplicity is certainly something they strive for, and I think they’re achieving that.

Pricing

I will briefly explain Weebly’s pricing to you, but if you want to look at it in more depth, my Weebly pricing plan review is definitely worth a read.

Weebly has a free plan, so you can build your website with absolutely no cost if you like. In fact, their free plan lets you create as many websites as you like, along with their basic tools and features.

Weebly’s free plan is free for life, so you won’t have to worry about trials or expiry dates.

This may get you wondering why you’d want to pay for a Weebly premium plan. Well, I can tell you it’s worth it, and here’s why.

For just £4 per month, Weebly’s Connect plan opens the door to new possibilities. You’ll be able to connect your custom domain and remove Weebly’s branding from your website.

With many services that offer a contract or term, like web hosting, Weebly’s website builder is cheaper if you pay upfront, and for longer. A 2-year saving on Weebly’s Business plan could net you up to £240.

Can you see why it’s worth committing to a longer-term?

The great thing about Weebly is that you can try their service for free, and upgrade at any point. If you’re not sure about Weebly, give their free plan a go, then if you like it, you can move onto a premium plan.

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Customer Support

In order to contact Weebly’s customer support, you’ll need to be logged into your account. If you don’t have an account with them, you can still view their Community page.

You can contact Weebly via telephone, ticket system, and live chat. However, live chat is only available from Monday to Friday, 6am-6pm Pacific Standard Time (PST), and Saturday to Sunday 8am-5pm PST.

Weebly’s support team is mainly based in the U.S., so again, their phone support is pretty much on U.S. time.

I found the feedback given by users about Weebly’s customer support quite broad. Some people absolutely loved Weebly’s support, like these guys:

But others were not so keen…

I, personally, haven’t had any issues with Weebly’s support (thank goodness). Though in honesty, I haven’t really needed to contact them, and the few times that I have (to test their support system), it’s been a breeze.

If you’ve had a good or bad experience with Weebly’s customer support, please let me know in the comments, as I’d love to know!

Is Weebly’s Hosting Any Good?

Weebly hosts your website, as well as being a website builder. That means you won’t have to find the best web hosting for your Weebly site, as they’ve already done the job for you.

However, just because they’re handling everything, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s any good.

I have too many years of experience in the hosting industry not to test out Weebly’s hosting capabilities and performance. I started monitoring my Weebly website the minute I signed up for them.

In the past 6 months, my Weebly website had a total uptime of 99.97%. That’s actually a really good figure. Some web hosting companies offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which my Weebly website easily surpassed.

As well as monitoring my website’s uptime, I also used GTMetrix to check out my website’s speed performance. Although my website was pretty basic, it was fully loaded in 2.1 seconds, which is below the minimum recommended 3 seconds.

However, when you compare the total page size, which is a measly 2.20MB, I’d expect my website to load much faster than 2 seconds.

I hadn’t optimised my site at all, and this is shown through the PageSpeed score of 72% and YSlow score of 65%. Some improvements definitely required here!

Can My Site Rank Highly With Weebly?

Weebly is suitable for individuals and small businesses. For this reason, you may be considering whether Weebly is any good for SEO.

If you don’t know anything about SEO, Weebly offers some helpful starter guides to get you started.

With Weebly, you can complete basic SEO requirements like meta titles and meta descriptions, image alt text, and customisable URLs. Beyond the basics, their App Center has some SEO apps that may come in handy.

My suggestion would be to enable Google Analytics on your website so that you can track and analyse your website visitors. This is a good starting point as you’ll be able to customise your SEO strategy much more once you know a bit about your audience.

Weebly does have its own analytics tool, called Insights. This offers up useful information like sales, traffic, and a comparison tool.

If you’ve signed up to Weebly’s Professional plan, you’ll be able to learn more information about your site like which are the most visited pages and what search terms are being used by your visitors.

There’s absolutely no harm in combining Google Analytics and Weebly’s Insights. You can never have too much information about your website in order to improve it.

Summary

After rigorously testing Weebly, I can safely say that it is a great website builder for small businesses.

Weebly is easy to use, mostly intuitive and doesn’t require any special skills to get started. This makes it ideal for beginners, but also has the option for more advanced users to grow.

Admittedly, Weebly isn’t as easy to use as Wix, but it’s certainly not difficult either. If you want to experiment with a bit of HTML and CSS, their code editor is a safe place for you to do this.

My personal recommendation would be to sign up for Weebly’s free plan.

If you sign up for free, you’re not going to lose out financially. Spend a bit of time getting to know Weebly for yourself, then if you like it, you can upgrade to a paid plan.

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