Weebly is an ecommerce website builder founded in 2007. Now owned by Square, Weebly integrates digital payment processing into its websites seamlessly, along with must-have ecommerce website features like mobile optimization and tax calculations.
Weebly’s website themes, drag-and-drop builder, and domain and hosting management make it easy for anyone to build a website without technical experience. We recommend it for solopreneurs because of its straightforward interface and its ability to create full-fledged websites in minutes.
Weebly Compared
Weebly made our top list as the best website builder for solopreneurs. Although its simplicity may work best for freelancers or solo business owners, Zyro’s more comprehensive features come with attractive price points. Try Zyro free for 30 days.
- Zyro – Best for keeping website costs low
- Wix – Best website builder for your first website
- Shopify – Best for selling products and services
- Bluehost – Best for WordPress websites
- Squarespace – Best website builder for creators of all stripes
- Weebly – Best for solopreneurs
- GoDaddy – Best for building your website from your phone
Learn more about our other best website builder recommendations.
About Weebly
Weebly offers an out-of-the-box website builder primarily for ecommerce websites. Acquired by Square in 2018, Weebly’s seamless integration with the payment processor makes it easy for online businesses to accept digital payments, calculate shipping, and run their stores via Weebly’s platform.
Weebly’s website builder can create traditional websites and online stores. Premade themes bring any website to life, while ecommerce tools provide the functionality necessary to build a brand and market products online.
Weebly Health and Stability
Weebly was independently owned and operated from 2007 to 2018, when digital payment company Square acquired it.
Before the acquisition, Weebly made a name for itself as an easy-to-use website builder that created professional websites with no coding experience. The company and its founder, David Rusenko, received recognition in Forbes, Business Insider, and Time for its innovative approach to website creation.
In joining forces with Weebly, Square hoped to become a strong competitor for Shopify, blending Square’s straightforward payment system with Weebly’s flexible drag-and-drop website builder. According to data from W3Techs, Weebly creates about 0.4% of all websites, while Shopify creates about 4.1% of all websites.
Although it has some distance to reach Shopify, Weebly still excels at what it does: helping solopreneurs and small businesses set up their online stores quickly without the need for a professional developer or designer. With Square on its side, Weebly has the potential to keep growing in this space.
Weebly Pricing
Like many website builders, Weebly offers a free plan for basic usage. Of course, most users will probably need a paid plan to get a custom domain and other tools for online store management and marketing.
Three paid plans are available for Weebly users, each of which can bill annually or monthly.
Weebly Pricing Structure
Weebly’s free plan gives website owners some important basics, like an SSL security certificate, a shopping cart feature, and digital inventory management. Free lead capture and SEO tools make the free version relatively comprehensive compared to other website builders.
However, the free and first-tier paid plan, Personal, includes ads for Square across your web pages. To create a site without ads, you’ll need the Professional plan for $16 per month or $144 annually, or the Performance plan for $29 per month or $312 annually.
Both of these high-tier plans include a free domain, unlimited storage, advanced site analytics, and phone support. Performance users can benefit from priority support, ecommerce insights, PayPal payments, customer reviews, and abandoned cart recovery emails.
Weebly Pricing Comparison
As someone looking to build a website using a helpful site-building tool like Weebly, you probably want to know how top products differentiate from one another with pricing. All things considered, Weebly is somewhat pricier than our top picks, like Zyro and Wix.
Wix has a free plan like Weebly, but both companies generally offer these so that website owners can test them out before committing. For the purposes of this comparison, we’re going to speak only to paid plans without ads.
With Weebly, users need to go directly to the Professional plan for $16 per month. A comparable plan on Wix, Business Basic, is $27 per month, but with significantly more features, like abandoned cart recovery and recurring payments.
Zyro beats both in terms of affordability with its $14.99 per month Business plan featuring a free domain for one year, unlimited storage and bandwidth, and multiple communication channels, like Messenger and WhatsApp.
Weebly Trials and Guarantees
Weebly’s free plan is always free without signing up for a trial or demo. However, it’s really only ideal for testing Weebly’s service, as it adds Square advertising to your website. Still, you’ll get an idea of its basic features, including some ecommerce features like its tax calculator and item options.
The free plan may also give you insight into what other features you might need for a functioning website and what paid plan suits those needs best.
Unfortunately, there’s no current trial or demo for paid plans. But, Weebly does offer a 30-day money-back guarantee for users paying annually.
Weebly Website Builder Review
Weebly provides a simple solution for individuals and small businesses needing a professional website set up in a short amount of time. The flexible website builder lets you add or remove elements from virtually anywhere on a webpage, resulting in a fully functioning site that lets you describe and sell your services or products easily.
Our research finds that Weebly is best for solopreneurs, like freelancers and consultants running service-based businesses. However, some small businesses selling products online could also find Weebly to be a good fit for their needs. To see how Weebly stands up to its competitors, check out our top picks for website builders.
What Makes Weebly Website Builder Great
- Ease of use: The Weebly editor helps anyone create a website that’s ready to publish in minutes. Weebly uses a drag-and-drop builder for users to add any element they’d like, such as video, maps, or image galleries, to their sites. Website owners can also create custom pages, change their theme’s colors and imagery, and add apps from Weebly’s App Store straight from their dashboards.
- Professional designs: Weebly makes your site look like you’ve hired a professional to design it with its eye-catching, easily navigable website themes. Weebly users can choose a theme based on the type of website they want to create, like a blog or online store. Each theme comes preloaded with pages and elements typically needed for that type of website, with full customization via its editor.
- Mobile app: Being able to edit your website or manage orders from anywhere is a must for busy entrepreneurs and small businesses. The Weebly app—available for iOS and Android users—lets you access your website theme, inventory, blog, analytics, and more, right from your mobile device. You can even use offline mode to make edits without an internet connection, saving them for when you can upload your changes.
- Simple pricing: Weebly outlines its pricing transparently on its website without hiding potential fees and other costs that raise your monthly or annual costs. With only four pricing tiers for individuals or businesses, it’s easy for potential users to decide what plan fits their budget while giving them the necessary features for an online business.
- Always-free plan: Weebly’s free plan isn’t necessarily designed for users to stick with forever. However, it’s always there for anyone to test the platform and its features before deciding whether Weebly is the right website builder for them. In many ways, the free plan is better than a trial, as it gives unlimited time to test all of Weebly’s back-end and front-end features.
- Easy upgrades: You can upgrade your Weebly plan at any time if you decide you need more features without the change affecting your current site. Simply log into your dashboard and choose the plan you’d like to upgrade to. Weebly prorates your subscription to begin your new plan on the current date, giving you access to all features of your upgraded plan immediately.
- Helpful support: Weebly offers multiple avenues to get the help you need with your new website. Users can check its vast knowledge base for answers to common questions, read in-depth blog articles, or ask questions in the Weebly community. There’s also 24/7 support available for more complex issues by sending a support ticket through your Weebly dashboard.
- Numerous integrations: Weebly may not have as many features as other website builders out of the box, but its App Store includes hundreds of addable apps that integrate right into your Weebly website to add functionality. Find apps that help with everything from traffic to marketing, including Weebly-made apps designed to fit seamlessly into a Weebly site.
- Marketing features: Weebly’s builder is for more than just websites. It also lets you transform words and images into marketable emails and announcements using the same drag-and-drop process as you would for your website. Unlike other website builders that require additional services or apps to do this, Weebly includes it all in the user-friendly dashboard. However, you can also add your other preferred marketing tools with available connections in the Weebly App Store.
Where Weebly Website Builder Falls Short
- Unreliable speeds: The jury is out on whether your site will run fast or slow on Weebly. Some customers get fast loading times while others experience lagging. The speeds you get could depend on your theme—some may include more bloated code than others—and the apps you install. Unfortunately, speed simply is not as reliable with Weebly as it is with other website builders.
- Fewer blogging features: Weebly has a set of blogging tools that simplify the process of adding a blog to a website or creating a blog-focused website. However, it’s not as feature-rich as others, like Squarespace, Wix, and WordPress, which include several tools for SEO, promotion, customization, and more.
- Limited placement options: Some website builders let users drag and drop elements almost anywhere on their websites. Weebly isn’t quite as flexible with its stricter outlines for elements. Users still have some control over where things go, but they won’t find as much freedom with placement as other options, like Wix.
- Clunky migration: The process of migrating a site to or from Weebly won’t be an easy one. You’ll need to choose a new theme when coming to Weebly, since Weebly uses its own coding and files to create a site. The same issue occurs when migrating away from Weebly with the additional headache of not being able to transfer your blog content over. Some WordPress plugins can help you move your Weebly blog there, but other hosts and website builders may not have an available tool.
- Minimal photo tools: While leading website builders include a list of tools to edit images before placing them on your side, Weebly’s options are limited to just a few basics, like adding a filter or blurring the photo. To resize or make more detailed edits, you’ll need to do it outside the platform with a photo editing tool.
Weebly Website Builder Compared
Weebly can be a solid option for freelancers and microbusiness owners, but it lacks more advanced features that make it a scalable and affordable option for larger businesses like others on our list of the best website builders.
- Zyro – Best for keeping website costs low
- Wix – Best website builder for your first website
- Shopify – Best for selling products and services
- Bluehost – Best for WordPress websites
- Squarespace – Best website builder for creators of all stripes
- Weebly – Best for solopreneurs
- GoDaddy – Best for building your website from your phone
Final Verdict
The ability to create a professional website in minutes is something most business owners can appreciate. Many of today’s website builders feature a range of helpful design, marketing, and ecommerce tools that give business owners what they need for a successful website.
Weebly has affordable solutions for businesses on the modest side of ecommerce, making it a good fit for solopreneurs and freelancers who sell a few services or products. However, larger businesses may do better with other website builders that include more features and add-ons for better scalability.
Source: quicksprout
Weebly Review