Weebly has ascended the ranks of website builders since its founding in 2006 and later acquisition by Square in 2018. With its high brand recognition and easy setup, it’s no wonder you’re considering it to create a website. Before you dive into creating your website or ecommerce store with Weebly, there are some core features, pros, and cons you should know about from ease in design to SEO to how it compares with competing website builders.
This Weebly review will walk you through all this and more so take a quick look at the index below if you know what you’re looking for or read on for a comprehensive guide to Weebly’s features.
Pros and Cons: 6 things to know
First, you should know a few of the important pros and cons of Weebly. While this list doesn’t cover all of Weebly’s features, it provides an introduction to must-know aspects of Weebly.
| Pros | Cons |
| Cost-effective website builder with a low-cost tier starting at $6 Simple design abilities with low learning curve Hundreds of useful apps to level up your site | Fewer theme options than competitors Some SEO limitations like a lack of headers from H3 on Not as much design freedom as Wix |
Read on to learn more about these strengths and potential weaknesses in detail.
Themes: 40 curated, sure-to-impress templates
When creating your website or ecommerce store, choosing a builder with themes that fit your brand and purposes will make or break your vision. Weebly offers a decidedly simple approach to design, offering just 40 themes which are carefully curated to serve their customers’ needs. Unlike builders like WordPress, which offer thousands of themes, Weebly limits your options to curated themes they believe will fit your website goals.
You can find the right theme for your site on Weebly by first selecting your applicable category like Business or Blog and then choosing the theme that matches your tastes for your new site. If you don’t need a hyper-specific type of theme and are more content with broader store, portfolio, and regular site options, Weebly will be right for you.
Weebly’s themes are all responsive so regardless of your selection, it’ll look great on mobile or desktop views.
Key Takeaway: Weebly offers just 40 modern, responsive themes so if you’re looking for limited but modern options for your site, Weebly could be perfect.
Design: Drag-and-drop editor
Most first-time website creators aren’t looking for overcomplicated design tools for their site, especially ones that require coding. Fortunately, in the past few years, website builders like Wix and Weebly have been perfecting the art of drag-and-drop systems. While Weebly doesn’t offer as much design ease as Wix, it’s certainly beginner friendly and should allow you to customize your new site with limited complications.
Weebly’s editor allows you to move around text and elements like images to specific parts of each page. This designability in some ways makes up for the limited theme options Weebly offers. Right from Weebly, you’ll also be able to edit uploaded photos to showcase products, your work, or maybe just stock photos you pulled from Google.
You can also add unique experiences to your Weebly site like a video background that engages visitors from the jump. If you do happen to be skilled in coding, you’ll be able to edit your site with custom HTML and CSS or Javascript.
Key Takeaway: Weebly’s editor is more intuitive and beginner-friendly than many website builder competitors and offers a large degree of customizability.
Apps: 350 apps to upgrade your site
If you’re interested in adding unique features to your new website, you’ll be able to do so with Weebly’s apps, or plugins, both built by their team and third-party creators. Weebly offers over 350 apps which help with a broad range from aesthetic changes to marketing abilities.
Weebly’s apps like Icon allow you to add unique icons to your site and Popup allows you to better engage new visitors with popup messages with call to actions. Squarespace also offers design and marketing integrations with platforms like Noun Project which offers free icons and Mailchimp, an email marketing platform, to make your life as a website and business owner easier.
Weebly offers a greater selection of apps than competitors like Squarespace but far fewer than WordPress which boasts thousands of plugins.
Key Takeaway: Weebly offers a large number of third party and native plugins to supercharge your website, far more than typical website builders.
Snippet: Is Weebly good?
Yes, Weebly is an excellent website builder for both small-to-medium ecommerce stores and regular websites with low prices, a high number of features, and tailored, modern themes.
Pricing: From free to $26 a month
Weebly offers four options: one for free, personal, business, and ecommerce users. Weebly offers free plans without premium domains that could work well for entry-level websites and school projects.
All pricing options below are based on annual payments plans. You can expect to pay more if you pay month-to-month.
Weebly is cheaper than many competitors with each plan being less than half the cost of comparable Wix plans. Their free plan also offers nearly full ecommerce features which is unheard of among other website builders.
View Weebly’s pricing options below.
Weebly Pricing
| – | Free | Personal | Professional | Performance |
| – | $0/month | $6/month | $12/month | $26/month |
Features | Shopping Cart and other ecommerce features, SEO, Lead capture, lacks custom domain | Custom domain connection, Advanced site stats, Marketing tools | Free domain, unlimited storage, Password protection | Priority Support, Advanced ecommerce features, Advanced ecommerce analytics |
Snippet: Is Weebly Free?
Weebly offers a free plan that comes with many premium features like a shopping cart, unlimited products, SEO, site security, and more, but without a custom domain.
Key Takeaway: Weebly has a reasonable pricing option for everyone, whether you want to launch a simple D2C brand with a custom store with all features available or just host a simple portfolio site.
Ecommerce: Create a high-earning store
If you’re trying to crack into the ecommerce game, Weebly is an excellent website builder to start with. It’s perfect for smaller stores and has been attempting to become a more prominent name in the ecommerce world in recent years, especially post-Square acquisition.
Weebly has beautiful online store-specific themes that are sure to impress customers and a quick checkout experience with its Square integration. Weebly also offers impressive metrics tracking to help you get a better sense of how well your store is selling, in addition to ecommerce-specific emails that can be sent through Promote to market your products. With Weebly, you can also get past customers to leave reviews to help provide social proof for your products.
With Weebly, you can showcase all of your products, adding needed details to encourage visitors to convert. Plus with ecommerce features being available with the free plan, you could launch a store within a few hours for free to see how it all looks and works.
While Weebly is a great ecommerce website builder option for small stores, if you plan to build a national D2C brand, you may want to consider Shopify.
Key Takeaway: Weebly offers all of the ecommerce features you’ll need to build a successful small store with an easy checkout and store management experience.
Blog: Create engaging content
One of the best ways for you to earn new visitors for your site and engage existing customers is through blog content. Determining what content to create and actually creating it is half the battle but the other half is hosting it on your website successfully.
Fortunately, Weebly has upped its game in recent years and now offers a great blog-building experience with excellent content organization with categories and subcategories that you can house content under. From perfecting the look of your blog to formatting with the right fonts and looks, Weebly has you covered.
Weebly allows you to have multiple contributors and authors on your blog with their logins who you can assign editor and admin roles to, which will be essential if you have freelance or in-house writers creating blog content for you. Weebly has a number of blog specific themes that look great and offer vital features like social sharing so you can increase engagement.
While WordPress is the king of blogging in the website builder world, Weebly is on par with other competitors like Wix and Squarespace. Weebly is a great option for any business blog or even a simple personal blog.
Key Takeaway: Weebly offers all of the blogging features you’d need to create content and promote it to gain new site visitors or inform customers.
SEO: Earn more organic traffic
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is the process of improving aspects of a website or page according to Google search engine best practices in order to earn higher rankings and organic traffic. Weebly is eager to accommodate SEO-minded site managers and beginners to help them attract even more visitors.
One feature that’s particularly helpful in Weebly’s SEO arsenal is their definition of different important terms in their editor and their offer of editing of titles, meta descriptions, and URLs for SEO purposes. They also offer a SEO Starter checklist to help you follow keyword research and tracking best practices. In addition, Weebly offers keyword research recommendations according to best practices and offers site traffic tracking, as well as integrations with Google Analytics, so you can stay aware of how your site is performing.
One failure of Weebly SEO is their limitation of header tags to just H1s and H2s. More header tags from H3s on would be more optimal for your site’s SEO. On the SEO front, WordPress is known to be the king, offering all header options and more.
Key Takeaway: Weebly is an SEO-friendly website builder despite the header limitations and you should have little trouble ranking for longer-tail keywords, and maybe more competitive keywords in the long run.
Additional features: G Suite, email marketing, and more
On top of the normal features covered in this review, Weebly offers a number of additional features you should be aware of before choosing a website builder. From email marketing software to site monetization, Weebly packs in the perks.
Weebly offers integrations with G Suite so you can set up an account to create a professional email address associated with your custom domain for added professionalism as well as Google’s great office software like Google Sheets and Slides.
Weebly also offers Promote, an email marketing platform with a simple email drag-and-drop builder, mobile-responsive templates, and reports with all of your must-track metrics. This platform is comparable to Mailchimp, one of the most powerful email marketing platforms available. With Promote, you can get website viewers subscribed with ease from your website. Promote costs about $10 a month but is well worth the cost for such an effective way to engage readers and customers.
A big perk of using Weebly is the ability to add Google Adsense to your website so you can monetize traffic. It’s a relatively simple process which will help you earn some extra dollars to add an extra revenue source.
Key Takeaway: Weebly packs a punch with all of the features offered by its hundreds of apps as well as native abilities like email marketing through Promote.
Final Verdict: Impressive builder with an ecommerce focus
Weebly is a website builder that continues to become more impressive through Square’s innovation. If Squarespace and Wix had a child, it would be Weebly. Like Squarespace, it’s simple and curated, yet a bit more free with the drag and drop features, yet not as free-form as Wix. Plus with all of its apps, you can build quite the innovative site with features that’ll supercharge marketing and site functionality.
If you value simple, curated theme options, plenty of design freedom, and a platform for solid SEO, Weebly is an excellent choice. Plus, Weebly’s pricing is hard to beat and is relatively no-risk with its features-packed free plan. If you’re still curious about Weebly or want to dive right in with a tutorial, be sure to watch Santrel Media’s Weebly tutorial which explains in detail how to build a Weebly site from scratch.