Weebly is a popular website builder solutions that hosts more than 40 million websites worldwide.
Suitable for customers who are just starting an online business from scratch or taking your in-person business online, with Weebly, entrepreneurs can build websites that customers love to visit and shop. The powerful tools make it easy to build a professional, mobile-optimized site and grow your business with integrated marketing and advanced analytics. Weebly also helps you tackle the manual hassles of running a successful online store by simplifying shipping, taxes, and inventory management. Since Weebly is part of Square’s commerce offering, Weebly customers can easily sell in-person.
Weebly works by offering users a very visual interface which they can use to build their websites and requires no knowledge of coding at all. All you need is to drag and drop stuff, resize things with a mouse and add or edit text and images.
Right off the bat, Weebly gets down to business and the first thing you’ll be asked is if you’ll be selling stuff online or not (more on this later). Next, fill in your website information such as name, products and other descriptions and you’ll be shown the template selector.
Weebly features many beautiful templates and once selected, you’ll be asked if you’d prefer a Weebly domain, to purchase your own, or use a domain you already own. Having looked at the templates, I’m left wondering if there is a need for much of Weebly’s drag and drop features.
Despite the massive amount of options that you can drag and drop onto the existing templates, they are already so comprehensive and editable that most people who are seeking simple, static websites would need not much further modifications. One good point to note though is that Weebly automatically helps you create a mobile version of your site.
The catch comes in when you want to sell stuff online. While the setup for this is fairly simple, Weebly charges sites that sells products on top of monthly fees. Unless you’re a business user that pays top dollar of $25 a month, Weebly will charge you a 3% fee per transaction.
To look into this in context, read our study on how much should a website cost here.
Weebly Pros
- Easy customization.
- Integration with other apps and add ons.
- Intuitive and easy to use.
- Affordable.
- Constantly improving and adding new features.
- Meets standards for security and cookies.
- Has an auto-save function so your work doesn’t get lost.
- Many template options to use as a starting point.
- Offers a strong support community to solve problems and find ideas.
- SEO settings are easy to implement and update.
Weebly Cons
- Sometimes the platform can be glitchy and needs a refresh.
- Some formatting and placement options are not customizable and this may be frustrating to some users (especially those coming over from WordPress).
- When you are uploading photos, you have to wait for the upload to finish before working on another part of your site or your work won’t save (I lack patience so this bothers me).
- Detailed customization in the HTML is possible but may create over-confidence in users – especially those that don’t have coding experience.
