Weebly Review 2025: Easily Create Your Own Website?

Quick drag-and-drop instead of boring programming: Weebly is one of many platforms that promise to make website building fun and simple.

Our review shows if building a website with Weebly is really as easy as its developers claim and how it compares to other providers.

Let's start by saying Weebly isn't meant for demanding pros. The platform is intended for beginners who are okay with trading control over design for ease of use.

This concept is fine, but its execution isn't. Despite its simplicity, designing a website with Weebly still isn't intuitive, making it less than ideal for any audience.

Let's start with the good stuff: Setting up a Weebly account is fast. You'll be redirected to Square, which now owns Weebly, to create your account.

Since there's a free plan (more on pricing later), you don't need to provide payment info to sign up. You only pay if you want to upgrade your plan.

After signing up, you'll find yourself in a clear management dashboard. Use the navigation bar on the left to manage your websites and shop products. The top menu bar offers links to Weebly's support, upgrades, and account settings.

Weebly kicks things off with a tutorial that guides you through the first steps of designing your website. Click "Add site" to start a new project.

First, you need to name your website project and answer some basic questions: Do you just need a website, or do you want a shop too? Are you already selling items, and if so, what kind?

Finally, provide an address for tax purposes, after which your website will be put together for you. It's saved as a project in the dashboard, and you can switch to the editor to fine-tune it.

Before you can tweak your website though, you need to choose one of the platform's pre-made design templates.

This is where the first issues with Weebly arise. There aren't many templates, and the filtering options, like by features or industries, are limited.

In the preview, you can't switch between views, like checking how the template displays on mobile devices. With one template, we even got a "404" error page instead of the website preview.

Also questionable: After choosing a template, its demo page failed to appear in full in the editor during our tests. Only its basic structure (menu and hero images) was there, and we had to add all sections and content ourselves.

Once you select a template, you enter the editor where you can adjust your website's design and content. This operates according to the "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) principle: How things look in the editor is how they'll appear to your visitors once your website goes live.

Weebly's editor is roughly divided into three areas:

Each page consists of a series of sections, which are made up of content like text and images. These are arranged like blocks and can be moved via drag-and-drop.

Even though you'll drag the blocks from the element selection sidebar onto your website, you can't position them freely, unlike with Wix. Instead, you'll be bound to the template's presets and frames.

Overall, Weebly felt clunky. During testing, we weren't always sure where an element would end up, and even placing them was frustratingly complex.

The same goes for many other standard features: If you want to move a section, you can't just drag it to the desired location like with other platforms. You have to select it, click "Move," choose how to move it ("On this page" or "To another page"), and then click again to move it "up" or "down."

Managing images also isn't streamlined. When we wanted to add an image, we weren't directed to an image library to select from something we had uploaded earlier but asked to manually upload it. To add insult to injury, the interface for doing so looks very outdated.

We never clicked with Weebly's interface. At first glance, its editor seems clear and well-organized, but it doesn't make website design intuitive.

With Weebly's iOS and Android apps, you can work on your website from anywhere. Their interfaces closely resemble those of the editor, so it shouldn't take long to get comfortable with it.

The mobile apps' design features are somewhat limited compared to those of the desktop version: For example, you can't drag and drop content.

A challenging desktop interface rarely gets easier to use in its mobile version. For that reason, we doubt that Weebly's users will make extensive design changes in the app. It's meant for quickly editing specific content like text or images.

From a performance perspective, Weebly's editor is average: Load times, like when switching between sections or adding elements, are reasonable. However, the processes aren't as fast as with other builders, and sometimes there's a delay for certain actions. Some things, like uploading photos, take noticeably longer.

Like many beginner-friendly website builders, Weebly limits creative freedom to avoid overwhelming users with complex customization options. Unfortunately, Weebly has cut too much and lacks many things necessary for basic personalization.

Weebly's selection of templates offers about 50 options. The templates themselves could be more diverse: Most are simple, stylish, scrolling designs with large images and clearly separated blocks. Unfortunately, they all look very similar, and many aren't up-to-date.

Templates are divided into categories like "Online Store", "Portfolio" or "Event", but there aren't any advanced filtering options.

Once you've picked a template, you can adjust its global design—style settings that apply across your entire website—in the "Design" tab.

There isn't too much to change here: you can adjust its theme and select fonts. Some templates offer other options, like switching between "Light" and "Dark" modes or tweaking the color palette, but not with custom colors.

If you know how to code, you can use HTML or CSS to modify templates to better fit your needs. However, if you're familiar with HTML and CSS, you're probably not using Weebly.

You'll need to make any other design adjustments directly in the editor to specific elements or sections. There, you can modify the background or font colors, and for standard elements like buttons, pick from a few pre-made designs.

Overall, the options are disappointing—even for beginner website builders. There aren't many ways to leave your mark on the template's design.

You manage your website's pages in the "Pages" menu. Here, you can create new pages and move existing ones. Unfortunately, Weebly doesn't offer page templates, which are fully pre-designed pages for specific purposes.

For each page, you can adjust a few settings, like search engine optimization (more on that later) or the header type. You can hide pages from navigation, which is useful for your website's legal notice.

Subpages and sub-subpages are also possible—there doesn't seem to be a strict limit on levels. However, displaying subpages in the navigation menu can be tricky depending on the template you use, so don't go overboard.

In general, there aren't many ways to customize the menu display. Some templates do offer a few choices in the "Design Options" area of the design menu.

Each page of your Weebly website consists of multiple stacked sections. You can either add these sections block by block by dragging selected elements from the sidebar onto the website or create them using section templates.

Unfortunately, the section selection is limited. There are only five categories, with a few layout options per category:

Many basic features aren't covered by the available templates. These include portfolios, testimonials, and FAQs. Even for the few sections that Weebly does offer, the layout choices are few and far between.

Here's an overview of Weebly's section templates compared to other providers:

Things improve when it comes to elements, the basic building blocks of your website. Most essential content elements, from text and images to contact forms, are included. Some advanced options, like a search feature for your website or the ability to include surveys, are also available.

Here are the elements Weebly offers compared to other providers:

Unfortunately, Weebly lacks a proper photo management system with a stock photo library. If you want to add an image to your website, you have to upload it each time you intend to use it or provide a URL that links to it.

There is a small assortment of stock photos for backgrounds, but the choice isn't great and options can't be filtered or effectively searched through. Integrations with commercial stock photo providers like Shutterstock aren't available.

At the same time, Weebly's photo editing options are solid: You can crop photos, apply filters, adjust attributes like saturation, brightness, and contrast, add text, and change the focus.

Of course, Weebly has plenty of other features. Let's start with its blogging tools:

Blogging on Weebly is a mixed bag: The editor is quite flexible due to the inclusion of the builder's elements, but the interface has its quirks.

Before you start blogging, you need to add a blog page to your website in the "Pages" menu.

On your blog page, you'll now find a menu bar pinned at the bottom (a bit hidden) where you can manage your blog and create new posts.

It's great that you can use all the features of the website builder's sidebar in the blog editor. This makes it possible to enrich your posts with photos, videos, surveys, and contact forms.

In the blog settings, you can decide how many entries to display per page and whether and how to show comments. Besides Weebly's standard comment system, Facebook or Disqus comments are also supported.

In the post options, you can schedule posts to go live on a specific date and create categories to group your posts by topic.

Overall, we weren't impressed with Weebly's blogging platform though. First, there's its navigation: Important features and buttons are randomly scattered across the interface. Other website builders are better organized and situate blog management in dedicated and separate areas.

There are also some features missing: You can't create blog post templates, so you have to create each post from scratch. Copying or duplicating blog posts isn't possible either.

Weebly is pretty good on the SEO front. In the SEO settings area of the site menu, you can edit page titles and page descriptions, and add meta keywords. It's also possible to specify page URLs.

Weebly automatically generates a sitemap; you can also integrate Google Search Console. Additionally, you can set individual pages to noindex by copying the No Index Meta Tag (<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />) into the header code in the page's SEO settings. 301 redirects are supported.

However, a few advanced SEO features are missing. For example, there's no easy way to edit robots.txt, which is important for controlling how search engines access your website.

Here you can see a comparison of Weebly's SEO features:

Creating multilingual websites with Weebly's built-in tools isn't smooth. You need to use third-party apps from the App Center, which charge a monthly fee.

There's a workaround: You can duplicate your website and link from one mirror to another in a menu item. However, this isn't seamless and makes it difficult to update content. With other beginner-friendly builders like Strikingly, Webnode, or Hostinger, creating multilingual websites is much easier.

Weebly flexes its muscles in ecommerce, mainly due to its connection with the payment processing provider Square.

If you haven't selected a shop template, you'll need to add a product page to your website first. You can create products directly in the editor, but most ecommerce features are found in the management dashboard under "Site Items." Click "Create new item" to add a product.

Product management is both flexible and user-friendly. You can create many different types of items—from physical and digital products to food and drinks, events, memberships, and donations.

It's also possible to specify different variations for any product, like colors or sizes, which customers can choose from in drop-down menus or option fields. Entire sets of options can be saved if you want to use the same variations for multiple products.

You can even offer buyers the option to customize products, like adding their own text.

In the dashboard, you'll also find all other order management and processing settings. Go to Processing > Shipping to set shipping rates for different regions and manage your sender address. Unfortunately, it's not possible to directly integrate carriers for automatic processing.

To access payment and tax settings, head to the "Settings" menu. Weebly supports Stripe and PayPal, which should cover most payment methods. Under "Sales Taxes," you can set tax rates for regions, which are automatically calculated based on the business's and buyer's locations.

You can offer discounts to your customers in the form of coupon codes. There are plenty of settings available. It's possible to specify a percentage or fixed amount, or offer free shipping. You can also limit the number of coupons that can be redeemed and their validity, and restrict discounts to specific orders, products, or categories.

Additionally, Weebly allows users to offer vouchers, which your customers can purchase to give to others. However, there are no discount rules like site-wide or category-wide promotions.

Overall, Weebly's ecommerce features are impressive. However, Square's shop tools feel like a V8 engine welded onto a used compact car: they're oversized and don't really shine. This is partly because the shop itself will be built on the less stellar Weebly framework.

Here's a comparison of Weebly's ecommerce features:

Weebly has many more features we haven't mentioned yet or only touched on. Here's a selection of the most important ones:

Here's an overview of Weebly's advanced features:

Weebly has a well-stocked help center. Its knowledge base is home to detailed help articles on various topics, divided into categories like "Building Your Website," "Domains and Email," or "eCommerce." All content can be full-text searched, which makes finding what you need easier.

It would be nice to have a more basic tutorial series that introduces Weebly's core features in a logical order. The articles in the knowledge base are a bit jumbled and displayed alphabetically. They cover both Weebly's built-in tools and features that can only be integrated via apps.

There's also a community area where you can ask other Weebly users questions. However, it doesn't seem very active, and many questions have few or no answers.

Unfortunately, Weebly doesn't offer video tutorials or courses.

You can contact Weebly directly via email and, starting with a "Professional" subscription, by phone. There's also mention of chat support, but it was never available for us, even during business hours.

Responses are promised within one to three business days. For us, it took a little less than 24 hours to get a response, which was unfortunately quite generic. It also seems like Weebly is no longer a priority, as the answers mainly focused on Square's capabilities.

Weebly is free to use indefinitely with the "Free" plan. This includes all essential editor features but ties users to an unprofessional Weebly subdomain.

If you want to create a website for professional or commercial purposes, you'll need to choose one of Weebly's three premium plans. Each includes a free domain for the first year and doesn't have any item, storage, or bandwidth limits.

Plans can be purchased on a monthly or annual basis, with the latter a bit cheaper.

Here's a current overview of Weebly's subscriptions:

And how does Weebly compare price-wise to the other providers we reviewed? We determined this based on the practical costs in two scenarios:

Price comparison 1: Simple website, ad-free, own domain possible

Here, Weebly is one of the most expensive providers in our review. Other platforms offer simple websites with their own domain at a fraction of the cost. Even with our top picks like Wix and Squarespace, which are much better equipped than Weebly, you won't pay as much:

Price comparison 2: Online store, ad-free, own domain possible

As an online store platform, Weebly is a bit cheaper because other platforms charge more for ecommerce features:

With Weebly's free version, you can use its website builder's basic features at no cost for as long as you want. All paid plans include a 30-day money-back guarantee.

With so many options, why choose Weebly? This isn't a rhetorical question—we really want to know. A few years ago, the website builder was competitive, but today its age shows, and not in a good way: Its interface is clunky, the design options are minimal, and its templates are uninspired.

The platform's main strength is in ecommerce, thanks to its connection with Square. But the good shop features are wasted since they can't really shine on Weebly-designed websites.

So far as we can tell, Weebly doesn't cater to any target group today. It seems Square has long ignored the builder, as there haven't been any improvements in quite a while. Currently, Weebly isn't a future-proof choice for your website—there are many, much stronger alternatives.

We create a demo page using all website builders in our comparison. Here's the admittedly not-so-great result from Weebly: Link

We use the same content for each of our demo pages, including Hero, About Me, Services, Testimonial, Pricing, and FAQ sections, as well as a Portfolio page, Blog, and Contact page.

Unfortunately, Weebly doesn't offer templates for many of these basic page types. For our portfolio page, we used an image gallery that links to blog posts, and for testimonials, we used the team section. We left out some sections due to the lack of templates.

With a bit more time and care, you could certainly achieve a nicer result. Website builders, especially those meant for beginners, should make creating diverse content as easy and straightforward as possible, and unfortunately, Weebly doesn't do that.

What do Weebly's customers think of the website builder? We surveyed the review sites and summarized the key takeaways for you:

Looking for an alternative to Weebly? These providers might interest you:

You can find more of the best alternatives to Weebly here: