Weebly Website Designer Pros and Cons

Weebly website designer is one of many platforms you can use to build your website, but is it worth trying out? With so many web design options available today, it can be hard to find the best one for you. This guide covers all the pros and cons of Weebly, its pricing system and a few alternatives to consider. 

What is Weebly? 

Weebly is a code-free website builder and hosting service. You can use it to purchase a domain, host a website, and create and customize sites for everything from blogging to e-commerce. Thanks to a collaboration with Square, Weebly has become a top choice for creating online stores. 

Weebly Pricing Tiers

Weebly offers a few different pricing tiers, all of which are very affordable. It starts with a free tier anyone can use, which includes a generous amount of features. It’s worth noting websites made with the free tier have a “.weebly” label at the end of their web address. If you want to remove it, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan. 

There are three paid subscription tiers on Weebly: Personal, Professional and Performance. The Personal plan starts at $10 per month. It allows you to customize your domain name and adds some premium features like a shipping calculator and shipping label generator. 

The Professional plan starts at $12 per month. It includes everything in the Personal plan plus some additional features geared towards small businesses. These features include advanced site statistics, ad removal and a domain at no extra cost. 

Finally, the Performance plan starts at $26 per month. It includes everything in the Professional plan along with some premium e-commerce features. One particularly advantageous feature is the ability to accept payments through PayPal, which is not available on lower pricing tiers. 

Pros of Weebly

Why should you use Weebly website designer rather than similar services or custom web design? There are a few benefits worth considering. Key among them is price. Weebly is very affordable, even among other no-code web design platforms. Most website builders have a free plan, but Weebly’s is more generous and less restrictive than other free alternatives. 

Additionally, Weebly is great for e-commerce. Their collaboration with Square resulted in a robust set of tools for online businesses, particularly small businesses. The combination of advanced site statistics and versatile shop tools makes Weebly a good option for online businesses that are new to web design. 

Weebly’s theme library is smaller than that of Wix or WordPress, but the themes they do have are clean and responsive. So, there may be fewer customization options but the simplicity and reliability of the available themes may be helpful for beginners. Page editing and theme swapping tends to be quick and easy, as well. 

Cons of Weebly

Weebly isn’t for everyone. It has certain limitations and drawbacks that make it less ideal for some users. For example, the limited theme customization is one of its biggest disadvantages compared to other website builders, let alone custom web design. Weebly has fewer pre-built themes than alternative platforms, as well. 

Weebly website designer is also rather limited in long-term flexibility. It is extremely difficult to migrate your website from Weebly to any other platform, including WordPress. A significant amount of the process is manual since these website builder platforms don’t have cross-compatibility with one another. 

This might not be a concern for beginner web designers, but it’s worth considering if you plan to grow your website. While Weebly does have some great features, there are plenty of reasons someone might want to migrate their site away from Weebly. If this is a concern for you, you may want to look at other web design options. 

Finally, the mobile page generation on Weebly sites could be better. Pages look good on desktop, but the translation to a smaller screen often leads to lackluster mobile sites. 

This is especially important for e-commerce sites since surveys show 76% of consumers are buying goods on their smartphones. A poorly optimized mobile site could significantly impact a business’s impression with mobile shoppers. 

Alternatives: WordPress, Wix, GoDaddy

Weebly is ideal for people who are new to web design or website builders as well as anyone who wants to make a website for free. Its design and features are very beginner-friendly and the paid tiers are all affordably priced. 

However, there are a variety of reasons why Weebly might not be the best option for you. If you’re looking for an alternative to Weebly website designer, you have a few options. 

One obvious choice is WordPress. While it may be a bit more intimidating for beginners, WordPress is a much more robust hosting and web design option than basic site builders like Weebly. It has thousands of themes to choose from, tons of compatible third party plugins, a huge community of users and the versatility to adapt as a business or site grows. 

If you’re looking for another website builder with a little more flexibility and variety, take a look at Wix. It’s a bit more expensive than Weebly but offers hundreds of themes, so there’s a lot more design variety. All paid plans on Wix also include a free domain. Wix has more compatible third party integrations than Weebly, as well. 

Another alternative website builder is GoDaddy, which is especially good for ecommerce websites. GoDaddy includes more themes than Weebly, although customization is limited. It’s great for anyone who wants to get their site up and running as fast as possible while still delivering a good UX. GoDaddy also has more SEO tools and better mobile performance compared to Weebly. 

Who Should Use Weebly Website Designer? 

Weebly is best suited for web design beginners and small businesses. It is very beginner-friendly with affordable pricing and an approachable interface. Weebly’s simplicity makes it easy to use but also limits the potential for growth and customization. So, growing businesses, large organizations and users who want more design freedom may be better served with a different web design platform.