Weebly Review: One of the Best Website Builders?

Dragging and dropping instead of programming: Weebly is just one of many website builders that claim to make website creation as easy as possible. With the extra free time, you should be able to do what matters most: Work on your website's content. In this review, we'll check whether the platform is as simple to use as its marketing claims, and how it stacks up against its competitors.

Weebly* is a San Francisco-based website builder and hosting service that has helped create more than 50 million websites. In 2018, it was purchased by Square Inc., a financial services company, to add to its ecommerce portfolio. Weebly aims to provide customers with the best of both website creation and ecommerce in a user-friendly interface.

In order to see what Weebly is capable of we put its site builder to the test.

You won't need long to find your feet with Weebly. Since the service is available for free, after registering, you'll be taken directly to the user dashboard. In the main navigation menu to the left, you can manage your website(s) and products. Contacting support, purchasing upgrades, and tweaking account settings are all possible through the upper menu bar.

A brief tutorial walks new users through the first few steps of designing a website.

To get started, click on "Add a website" to the right of the upper menu. Next, answer a few basic questions, such as whether you want a basic website or one with store capabilities. If you need a store, Weebly will ask if you've already sold products, and if so, what kind.

Following this, you'll be asked for your physical address (for tax purposes). Then, you're good to go!

Before working on your site, you'll need to select from one of several ready-made themes. After previewing it, switch to the editor, and get to work! Weebly embraces the "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) principle: In other words, the design that's displayed in the editor is exactly what visitors will see once your page goes online.

With Weebly, elements are arranged by literally dragging and dropping their blocks from the menu. Unlike with Wix though, you can't position them freely, but rather to certain areas, similar to Squarespace. Unfortunately, Weebly's editor is a bit clunky and we weren't always sure where a particular element would wind up.

Apart from text, images, and slideshows, you'll also be able to move audio and video content blocks, newsletter forms, and even entire sections, like team pages or restaurant menus.

Your site's pages are managed using the upper menu bar. There, you can change themes and fonts, and alternate between mobile and desktop views. This is also where Weebly's extensive app center for third-party extensions and add-ons is located, a feature that other website builders might want to include in their offerings.

Android or iOS users can build with Weebly on the go, thanks to the mobile app which comes with the same drag and drop functionality. Because its interface is so similar to that of the main editor, switching between the two is easy.

Few other website builders from our sample facilitate working on a website on the go to the same extent that Weebly does. If you're always on the move, you should definitely keep Weebly in mind.

Overall, Weebly offers an intuitive platform for website design according to the WYSIWYG principle. Its user interface would benefit from a few improvements here and there: As just one example, a button for undoing your last action or change would be great.

Being unable to freely arrange on-screen elements has both advantages and disadvantages, however, users aren't really shown the reasoning behind this. In addition, some parts of the interface, like the area for uploading images, look slightly dated.

Weebly's vanilla version (without any external apps) already comes loaded with features. This is important since the difference between a good site builder and a poor one comes largely down to how well their editor performs. Luckily for Weebly, they do quite a bit right.

You'll find plenty of different content blocks; menus and sub-menus can be easily configured and arranged into any sort of hierarchy you'd like. And, should a feature be missing, you can have a look in the well-stocked App Center.

The 360 apps available as of the time of writing are divided into four categories and can be narrowed down using the search bar. Whether adding testimonials, forum widgets, or customer service chats to your page, chances are that you can find it in the App Center.

Like most app marketplaces, you'll need to sniff out the 'good' extensions largely by trial and error. Since Weebly's marketplace is not as overloaded as WordPress's or Wix's, choosing is definitely easier.

Weebly offers bloggers a helping hand. To get started, click on the "Pages" tab and configure your site as a blog. A menu bar is pinned to the bottom of your blog which helps in managing it and creating new entries. These can be edited just like regular pages by dragging and dropping content blocks.

Under blog settings, you can specify how many entries are displayed per page and whether comments should be shown. Facebook or Disqus integrations are available, and if you want, you can insert user-defined HTML code in the page header or footer.

If working as part of a team, it's possible to include additional authors in the editor.

Unfortunately, Weebly makes creating a multi-lingual website much trickier than it needs to be. If this is important to you, some of its competitors, like 1&1 IONOS offer particularly easy solutions. With Weebly, you'll have to create a copy of your entire website and link each individual page to its localization(s). For static sites, this isn't too much of an issue, but, if you plan on regularly updating your page, you'll have your hands full. To be fair, we should point out that an extension is available for purchase in the App Center which makes this easier.

Weebly's variety of features is impressive on its own, with its App Center filling any of the gaps. While Weebly has upped its support for blogging since our last assessment, anyone looking to create a multi-lingual website will have their work cut out for them, unless they're ready to pay for a third-party app. Neither option is ideal, particularly considering that several of Weebly's competitors offer these capabilities out of the box.

With 57 different themes (as of the time of writing), Weebly offers a good, but not a great selection. Making matters worse, the themes are too similar to one another, and not nearly as diverse as what WordPress or other services provide.

Weebly seems to embrace sleek, stylish designs that are well-suited for large images and setting clear divisions between content blocks. Both of these factors are important for scrolling site navigation. If you're looking for this kind of theme, you'll be very pleased with what Weebly brings to the table, however, we prefer more variety.

Once you've selected a design, you can customize it via the upper toolbar. Your choices are again pretty limited since you can only alter its color scheme and font.

For anyone with some programming knowledge, it's possible to add more oomph to the default templates by working on the page's HTML or CSS. There also exist online marketplaces for self-created Weebly themes, which are importable.

Weebly comes with visually-appealing themes, which after a while, all blur together. This lack of choice is definitely a disadvantage when comparing Weebly to its competitors. The drag and drop editor offsets this somewhat since it makes the site-building process easy. Similarly, the ability to import elements or work directly with your site's source code also allows for greater customization and personalization.

In terms of ecommerce, Weebly flexes its muscles. This definitely has something to do with its parent company, the payment processing provider, Square Inc. In the store dashboard, you can add products, while Weebly will help to set prices and configure additional settings.

Product variations, such as different colors or sizes, can be added and displayed to customers through drop-down menus or option fields. Entire sets of options can be saved, which comes in handy should you have the same variations for multiple products in your catalog. With Weebly, it's even possible to allow customers to personalize or modify an item, such as by adding text to it. Digital product sales are supported too.

Even though you can add products through Weebly's editor, store management occurs entirely in the platform's dashboard. There, it's possible to keep tabs on your orders, check statistics related to page visitors, and much more. Additional settings for tax, shipping costs, and payment options are also configured here. PayPal and Stripe for credit cards and digital wallets can be integrated.

Beyond this, Weebly also offers plenty of options for promoting your store like gift cards and coupons, sales, and customer reviews and ratings. You can also specify when customers should receive emails from your shop, and what these should say. When it comes to email marketing most site builders only serve up the bare minimum - thankfully, Weebly goes far beyond this.

To access these (as well as most of the ecommerce features), it's necessary to purchase a Weebly subscription, but more on that below in the "Pricing" section.

Search engine optimization (SEO) settings can be accessed for each individual page in Weebly. These include page titles, descriptions, meta keywords, and URLs. Unfortunately, no tools are offered that make SEO easier for less-experienced users.

The "Reports" area is where paying Weebly subscribers can view visitor numbers and other statistics. Google Analytics and other trackers can also be easily integrated.

As a platform for creating an online store, Weebly does almost everything right, wowing with its versatile marketing and sales tools. You can have access to all of these too, so long as you're ready to pay for them.

Weebly's Support Center is made up of a knowledgebase, blog, forum, and so-called "Inspiration Center". In the last of these, experts write about specific topics, making it a sort of second blog.

Live support is offered seven days a week from 6 AM to 6 PM (US Pacific Time) on weekdays and from 3 AM to 3 PM (US Pacific Time) on weekends. Should you have a question or issue at another time, you can send an email. During testing, our email was answered within four hours.

In total, Weebly shines in terms of support, offering a great deal more than its competitors.

A free version of Weebly, including all editor features, is available. This ties users to a Weebly subdomain while limiting access to a number of premium tools and metrics. If you want a unique domain, you'll have to book one of the four paid packages. Each includes a free domain for a year, as well as an SSL certificate. Although the Connect package only comes with 500 MB of storage, the other three premium packages include unlimited space.

Beyond that, as the price of each subscription package increases, so does the number of features it includes. Beginning with the Starter package, you can remove ads from your site and view page statistics. Pro subscribers can integrate a search bar, password-protect pages, and display video backgrounds.

The Business package is an absolute must for larger online stores since it is the only option that allows subscribers to make unlimited sales, and without transaction fees to boot.

All plans can be booked on a monthly, yearly, or two-year basis, the last of which is considerably more affordable (per month) than the other two options.

Below, we've provided an overview of Weebly's current subscription rates:

And how does Weebly stack up against the rest of our sample? In the table below, we compared each provider's annual subscription which includes a unique domain and is ad-free. According to these criteria, Weebly is one of the pricier options:

You can test all of Weebly's basic features for no charge in its free version. In addition, all paid subscriptions come with a 30-day, money-back guarantee.

Weebly is a powerful website builder that makes creating a site easy thanks to its intuitive editor. Even if you know nothing about programming, you can tinker around with your site. For business owners, a variety of highly versatile e-commerce tools await. Weebly also stands out thanks to its nifty mobile app, which makes site building from practically anywhere much easier than other services.

Turning to the negatives, more template variety and greater flexibility in the drag and drop editor would be desirable. The latter would greatly help to customize stores, in particular.

Apart from these issues, there's little about Weebly that we disliked: The website builder is an excellent choice for beginners without programming knowledge or anyone who just wants to easily create a store online.

In most review aggregators that we consulted, Weebly was among the best-performing site builders. Most praised was its ease of use, with a majority of reviewers appearing to be beginners. On Trustpilot, reviews were mixed, with some complaining about poor customer support and recurring usage issues.

Most of Weebly's competitors offer simple and intuitive site builders that don't require any coding. Squarespace, for example, offers similar drag and drop functionality, enhanced personalization, as well as templates that are more aesthetically pleasing.

In case you want even more creative freedom, look no further than Wix. With its editor, you can drag and drop page elements completely at will.

The best alternatives to Weebly can be found here: