Weebly Review 2024: Pros & Cons and All Features Explained

Are you considering building a website with Weebly but cannot make up your mind yet? You have come to the right place. In this comprehensive Weebly review, we will walk you through all you need to know about Weebly – one of the best eCommerce platforms worldwide.

Here is a sneak peek of what we’ll cover today:

• Overview of Weebly and its pros & cons
• Weebly pricing
• Ease of use
• Themes & templates
• eCommerce features
• Responsiveness
• Performance
• Customer support

Let’s dive right in!

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A Glance At Weebly Website Builder Review

Let’s warm up by taking a quick glance at all the fundamentals of Weebly. This includes what Weebly is, the platform’s pros & cons, and, most importantly, who is suitable for Weebly.

Founded in 2007, Weebly’s core remains intact to this day. It’s a SaaS website builder that empowers users to build functional websites (blogs, personal websites, online stores, etc.) without code.

Up to the present, Weebly has empowered over 50 million websites globally.

Weebly’s user-friendly platform utilizes a drag-and-drop interface, allowing you to visually design your website by simply dragging and dropping various elements onto the page.

💡An interesting fact you might not know: In 2018, Weebly was acquired by Square, a leading financial services and mobile payment company.

By integrating Weebly’s website-building capabilities with Square’s payment processing and financial services, Square aimed to create a seamless end-to-end platform for businesses to build their online presence and manage sales both online and offline.

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Weebly Pros and cons

From our experience, here are all the pros and cons of Weebly as a multi-purpose website builder platform:

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Now that you have a better grasp of this platform let’s get to the main part of our Weebly review.

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Weebly Pricing

You wouldn’t want to break the bank just to build a website. Hence, Weebly’s pricing plans will be the first thing we examine in our Weebly website builder reviews.

Weebly has 1 forever plan with 3 paid plans starting from $10 to $26 monthly. Compared to other website builder platforms like Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, or BigCommerce, Weebly’s affordability is clearly unmatched.

Let’s take a look at the four pricing plans of Weebly we’ve wrapped up for you:

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Clearly, each of Weebly’s pricing plans is designed for different audiences. If you’re unsure which plan best suits you, use our guide for reference:

• Free – Testing: You get the basics – a secure, SSL-encrypted site with 500MB of storage. However, be mindful that Square ads will be part of your site, and you won’t be able to use a custom domain.
• Personal – Personal use or small project: With the personal plan, you get to connect your custom domain and unlock access to extra eCommerce features like digital product selling, shipping calculator, etc.
• Professional – Freelancers and small businesses: This plan removes Square ads, offers unlimited storage, and includes more advanced features like password protection and phone support​.
• Performance– Small to medium businesses:  If you want to scale up your online store with Weebly, the Performance plan is the way to go. It comes with more advanced features and priority support.

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Ease of use

Nobody wants to spend tons of hours editing and customizing websites, so ease of use is the next factor we’ll look into in this Weebly review.

Weebly truly shines when it comes to user-friendliness. For those eager to launch your website without getting tangled in technicalities, Weebly’s platform is a dream come true.

Weebly’s drag-and-drop feature allows you to add new elements to your pages effortlessly. Simply click on an item to tweak its settings and customize it to your liking.

However, a couple of enhancements could streamline the process even further. An undo button for quick corrections and the option to save your progress without going live would add convenience.

Also, while the classic editor is generally reliable, some users might notice it can lag occasionally.

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Themes and Templates

The quickest, most effective way to build a website is through templates. Hence, website template diversity is another factor we’ll look into in our Weebly reviews.

As of writing this article, Weebly provides you with 50+ templates to choose from. The best part is that they are all free– whether it’s an online store, business, portfolio, personal, event, or blog template.

With that being said, Weebly’s affordability doesn’t fully compensate for the platform’s lack of diversity. We meant 50 themes aren’t a bad number. But compared to other platforms like Wix (over 800 templates) or Squarespace (over 110 templates), Weebly templates are a bit limited.

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Website customizability

For users seeking deep customization and a wide array of design options, Weebly may feel limited compared to its rivals like Wix and Squarespace​​​​.

While the quality of Weebly themes is generally high, the customization capabilities within the classic editor are somewhat restricted. They offer more in terms of color and font options than truly transformative design changes.

A highlight is that Weebly enables you to switch themes without losing content. Platforms like Wix or Squarespace do not allow users to switch templates yet. Hence, this is really a highlight of Weebly.

However, the similarity in layout across many themes can lead to a lack of uniqueness, especially for online stores, unless you’re willing to dive into coding through the Weebly API.

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Weebly eCommerce features

If you plan to launch and manage an online store with Weebly, you cannot miss out on Weebly store reviews regarding eCommerce features.

SEO features

Weebly offers essential SEO features that prevent your site from being overlooked by search engines. This includes:

• Weebly allows for customizing URLs, title tags, meta descriptions, and image alt texts. These features are crucial for SEO as they help communicate your page’s content to search engines.
• Weebly supports 301 redirects, helping to maintain your site’s SEO strength by redirecting traffic from old to new pages and fixing broken links.
• Weebly automatically compresses large images, which can improve page load speed—a factor that positively impacts SEO rankings.

While Weebly’s SEO features cover the basics well, it may lack some of the advanced SEO tools and customizations offered by competitors like WordPress or Shopify. For instance:

• Weebly restricts heading tags to only Heading 2, which can limit your SEO effectiveness since varied heading structures are crucial for search engines to understand your content
• Unlike WordPress or some other platforms, Weebly automatically includes certain strings in URLs (like “/store/” for product pages or “/blog/” for blogs) that can’t be altered.

Marketing

• Email marketing: Allows users to create email campaigns directly from the Weebly dashboard, integrating seamlessly with the website’s contact list.
• Product reviews: Collect reviews from your customers via email and display them aesthetically on your Weebly store (for the Performance plan).
• Social media integration: Easy to link social media accounts and share content across platforms, helping to increase online presence and drive traffic.
• Site analytics: Provides insights into website traffic and user behavior, allowing for data-driven marketing decisions.
• Lead capture form: Tools to grow your mailing list and engage with your audience.

When comparing Weebly’s marketing capabilities to powerhouses like Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce, it’s evident that Weebly falls short in several areas.

For example, Shopify’s integration with apps like Klaviyo or Omnisend allows for sophisticated email marketing campaigns that can be highly personalized based on customer behavior.

Similarly, BigCommerce’s seamless connections with platforms like Google Shopping and Facebook Ads facilitate a more streamlined and effective social media advertising strategy.

App store

Weebly offers you sufficient tools to set up a functional e-shop. However, to make it stand out, you’d need the help of third-party apps.

Unfortunately, we find the number of apps on the Weebly App Center isn’t very impressive. There are over 100 third-party tools (most of them have a free plan).

Compared to 8,000+ eCommerce-focused apps on the Shopify App Store and 1,000+ robust apps on the BigCommerce App Store, clearly, Weebly needs to work the extra mile in the competition.

💡Check out our Weebly eCommerce Review: Everything You Need To Know for more detailed information on Weebly’s eCommerce functionalities.

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Responsiveness

From our experience, Weebly websites are responsive right out of the box, meaning they automatically adjust to look great on any device, be it desktop, tablet, or mobile.

Nevertheless, while Weebly’s templates provide a strong foundation for responsiveness, we’ve noticed that achieving optimal mobile functionality sometimes requires a bit of tweaking. This is especially true if you heavily customize your site or if you’re aiming for a very specific look and feel on mobile devices.

For instance, you might need to adjust image sizes or text alignment to ensure they appear as intended on smaller screens.

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Performance

Based on 01net’s findings, while Weebly offers a user-friendly interface and solid desktop performance, it struggles with mobile speed and stability, which are vital for SEO and user satisfaction.

Specifically, they tested Weebly websites on both GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights and found that:

• The GTmetrix test showed promising results: a Time to First Byte (TTFB) at 136 ms and First Contentful Paint (FCP) at 311 ms, with the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) hitting 600 ms. These numbers suggest that Weebly pages are efficiently lightweight and well-optimized. However, a Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) of 0.02 indicated potential stability issues on more complex pages.
• Conversely, PageSpeed Insights painted a different picture, especially for mobile performance. While desktop scores were decent, the mobile experience lagged significantly, with an FCP of 3.5 s and an LCP of 8.3 s, resulting in a low-performance score of 53 out of 100. This discrepancy underscores a crucial challenge for Weebly in optimizing for mobile users, who dominate internet traffic.

For those prioritizing a fast-loading website, especially on mobile devices, exploring other platforms might be advisable.

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Customer Support

Though Weebly is famous for its ease of use, you are not free from technical issues when managing your website. Therefore, customer support would be the last factor we’ll examine in this Weebly review.

Weebly’s support services are easily accessible and comprehensive. The Support Center, accessible via the “Support” link, is neatly categorized, featuring a wealth of articles ranging across various topics such as eCommerce and website building.

For further assistance, the Weebly community offers active forums with moderators providing tailored support.

It’s worth noting that all Weebly plans include email and live chat options. However, phone support is reserved for Professional plans and up, starting at $16/month. And if you’re a Performance user, you’ll even get access to Weebly’s priority support.

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Weebly Review – FAQs

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Conclusion

All in all, Weebly is an easy-to-use, affordable website builder platform with several well-responsive templates. Nevertheless, we are not impressed by the eCommerce features and customization options Weebly offers.

With that being said, if you want to build a website for personal use or small freelanced projects, Weebly is a top choice.

We hope after reading our Weebly review, you can now know whether it fits your demand and budget or not.

Don’t forget to check out LitExtension’s blog and join our Facebook Community for all things eCommerce.