OutwitTrade

Weebly Reviews: 21 Weebly Users Comment

Weebly is one of the most popular website builders and hosting services, with millions of users. To help you decide if Weebly is right for you, we asked Weebly users what they thought of it, and got dozens of responses (we’re also still collecting Weebly reviews, and if you’ve used it, you can make a contribution here).

Here’s how I’d summarize what people have sent us so far: Like Wix, Weebly is best suited only for beginners who can’t code and have never built a website before. For anyone else, you’re better off going with WordPress or another platform. Here are the issues some people brought up with Weebly, and why it’s not recommended for anyone who needs anything more than a basic site:

See for example this comment (“If there is one thing I regret putting money into, it’s Weebly”) from a former Weebly user frustrated with its limitations.

However, if you’re brand new to making a website, Weebly may well be a great option for you, primarily because it’s dead easy to use. Of all the comments we received on Weebly, not one complained about it being difficult to make a simple website in, and the vast majority of people who had simple requirements for a website builder spoke positively of it. See this comment for example:

Personally I love Weebly … it’s the perfect website builder to teach my non-techie family and friends the basics of creating a webpage. So if you ever needed a website builder that you can literally teach your grandmother how to use, it’s Weebly. 

Plenty of other comments (eg. here) also spoke positively of Weebly. If you read through the comments below and click through to the websites of people who like Weebly, you can also see some of the websites they created using Weebly. If you’re looking to build a website no more complicated than those then Weebly should work for you.

As a final note, and as a couple of the comments below mention, if you’re going with Weebly you’ll want to pay the $6/month to be able to host it on a real domain name (eg. outwittrade.com) instead of on weebly.com (eg. outwittrade.weebly.com). A free website will look extremely unprofessional and may not work for SEO.

Weebly can be a great website platform option for someone looking to save on costs. It's good for a single person with a project, and has a bunch of customization features that allows even a beginner to create a mobile friendly website fairly easily. Plus, there are even free package options to try it, and see if it's a good fit.

But usually, in the case of a for-profit business, we recommend WordPress. WordPress has much more functionality and customization ability, and will look more professional, if it's created by a developer.

--Michael Visconti, V12 Marketing

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#michael

I've used Weebly in the past to host my personal website but found it to be one of the clunkiest platforms in terms of design and functionality. I now host my website on Squarespace and it's much smoother. The one good thing about Weebly is that it's very simple and straightforward, so those who aren't as experienced at building websites and only want an easy drag and drop website-building interface can easily use Weebly.

--Jarry Lee, jarrylee.com

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#jarry

When I first came into the website building industry, I didn't know much, and stumbled across weebly.

Back then, my knowledge was very basic, and weebly helped me create a simple and basic website without knowing any html, using a drag and drop interface.

As my knowledge increased, I had the ability to use the custom html editor, thats built in, allowing me to customise my website to my likings.

Not many companies have this feature.

Generally speaking, weebly is fantastic for small business that don't have much knowledge on building sites, ease of use, includes seo and has fantastic functionality.

I would certainly recommend it to new users joining the website community.

--Omar Black, Wevier

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#omar

Weebly may meet the needs for vast small business owners as a DIY website builder. But that does not mean, it can beat WordPress, in any case

Pros

1. Ease of Use- Weebly is very easy to use. No doubt

2. Excellent mix of templates

Cons

1. Not good for blogging at all

2. Limited social media sharing options

3. Poor back up systems

4. Not at all good for customization for business websites

5. Help/Support is based on the plan you have purchased

6. Not good for large websites or scalable ecommerce stores

--Rahul Gulati, GyanDevign Tech Services LLP

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#rahul

I've used Weebly to build one website and Wordpress to build many. I'd never use Weebly again to be honest. It is simple enough to use, but it is far more inflexible than Wordpress and it doesn't have the array of plugins that Wordpress offers. Wordpress has plugins to integrate with Google Analytics and Google Adsense, optimise your site's on-page SEO, back up your site and much more, as well as themes to change the look of it. The majority of these plugins and themes are free. With Weebly, if you want to access the more powerful site building tools that Weebly offers you are committed to paying their recurrent fees of at least $6 a month, whereas with WordPress there are no recurrent fees. Please, I implore you, build your site in WordPress - it's better, more adaptable and costs nothing.

--Rick Wallace, Navient Class Action Lawsuit

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#rick

As an SEO consultant, I take a very SEO focused approach when deciding on which platforms to build a website for clients.

I’ve used Weebly in the past, and whilst it can make the process of building a website quite straightforward, it still lacks heavily in customisations from a back-end perspective, as well as it not being fully in line with SEO best practices.

In my opinion, using WordPress to build a website is the most popular and SEO friendly platform to choose.

--Itamar Blauer, itamarblauer.com

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#itamar

We DO recommend Weebly for:

- Anyone looking for a website builder with the concrete structure of Squarespace and the versatility and app market of Wix

- Anyone looking for a free website builder

- Anyone looking for a budget friendly website builder

We DO NOT recommend Weebly for:

- Blog sites looking to create many posts and gain substantial traffic

- Large online stores (small ones will be just fine)

Is Weebly SEO friendly?

Weebly has some great tools for search engine optimization (SEO), including an SEO starter checklist and accessible meta-description, title, and url-slug editors. Weebly does, however, limits you to only H1 and H2 headers, not allowing anything beyond that (H3, H4, etc.) You can also get SEO apps for your Weebly site to audit and improve your website. Weebly’s checklist is nice, but you are left to make the changes on your own, unlike the SEO Wiz offered by Wix.

--Mike O'Brien, Santrel Media

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#mike

Weebly is a poor option for building websites for a few reasons. First and foremost, you’re building your website on a platform you don’t control and your site can’t easily be exported to other platforms should the need arise (without rebuilding the site).

Second, you’re building your website in a closed system where certain functionality doesn’t exist, and can’t be added, should you find you need it (which is often the case).

The last thing I’ll mention is that Weebly is not good at all for SEO and getting organic search traffic. It has major issues related to headings and URLs and it’s missing other advanced SEO features.

--Kevin Geary, Digital Gravy

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#kevin

Personally I love Weebly and even though I prefer to handle the coding myself as a programmer by trade, it's the perfect website builder to teach my non-techie family and friends the basics of creating a webpage. So if you ever needed a website builder that you can literally teach your grandmother how to use, it's Weebly. The best part about it is that it's completely free, which separates it from the majority of web building and hosting platforms that charge a fee.

The Weebly platform is completely drag-and-drop, making it very easy and intuitive for anyone with limited computer knowledge to use. You can get a page up and running in no time using the presets that come with Weebly, which is really handy. Weebly is perfect for beginners and for those looking to get a webpage up in a hurry but it lacks the customization capabilities of other more complex website builders.

Despite its simplicity, Weebly can still be used as a powerful marketing tool for small businesses. When you can do the entire website yourself, you save money by not having to hire developers and graphic designers. So if you are starting up a business, Weebly is awesome to help get your name out there on the web quickly, while still looking professional even if you don't know how to code.

--Daniel Juhl Mogensen, Kodyl

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#daniel

We're very happy with Weebly and have been for years. We use it for our own sites as well as some client sites.

Here's why:

We find Weebly's drag and drop interface super easy and predictable (in a good way)

We enjoy the relative ease of setting up a store and shopping cart and being able to tie it in with multiple payment processors like Square, PayPal, Stripe, etc.

There are a fair number of apps to fold into Weebly sites to enhance user experience, both free and paid. These include email, FAQs, graphics elements, popups, chatbots, rollovers, and lots more. This allows us to really customize a site for a client, depending on their needs and budget, even though we're working in the land of templates.

We find you can integrate really easy with external sites/suppliers as needed to make the site most useful. For example, with our client we were able to tie seamlessly with their donor CRM LittleGreen Light, MailChimp for mailing list signups, and UserWay for better accessibility. This gave a lot of power to the site behind the scenes, making life easier for donors, volunteers and students of their educational programs, as well as just a cleaner overall experience for site visitors.

We find the hosting is affordable with the ability to scale up (or not) depending on your specific needs.

--Tim Hart, Hart Communications

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#tim

Weebly is an effective drag & drop website builder. The confusion most people have is about the domain name. If you use a free weebly domain name, your website is not going to rank for anything on search engines. You need to pay the $6 per month to get a real domain name so that you can properly implement SEO. Traditionally, there's been a stigma attached to website builders in the SEO community, but Google doesn't care if your site is Weebly, as long as it follows best SEO practices. The main downside is the lack of plugins. There are things you'll want to implement on your website that are much easier with Wordpress.

--John Matyasovsky, Contractor Webmasters

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#john

Weebly is amazing for people who need a very simple, professional website. The software is intuitive and you don’t have to be an experienced developer in order to create a website.

However, if you need any additional features or unique design, Weebly is not the tool for you. It’s almost impossible to customize elements in HTML and change existing templates. The best you can do is insert your own content and visual materials, but the structure pretty much remains the same. Plus, anyone who knows more about websites will be able to tell that you used a template.

--Aleksandra Arsic, CapitalCounselor

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#aleksandra

I've played around with pretty much every platform from Wix, Weebly, Shopify, Wordpress, Squarespace, Blogger, etc. I think Weebly or Wix are great for people to get started, to get comfortable managing a website. It's easy for even someone new to put together a nice looking decent functioning website. That said if you plan on growing the site into something bigger or larger or more profitable and eventually want to switch to a platform better suited for that it's going to be a huge hassle and there's going to be some negative SEO consequences in doing so.

One other problem I see with Weebly, Wix and similar sites is your somewhat limited in what tools you can use for popups, email marketing, etc. Personally I wish there was a solution that was like Shopify but for blogs as opposed to ecommerce sites. I've had problems ranking sites made with Wix and Weebly and despite Shopify being equally dumbed down and a WYSWYG type editor, the sites tend to be faster, better looking and rank better. Unfortunately Shopify is pretty much exclusively for eCommerce and not a blog or standard website.

--John Frigo, Best Price Nutrition

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#johnf

I started to build my website in Weebly, then decided to switch to Wordpress. Weebly is easy to use for non-technical people, which is great. You can build something pretty nice looking without coding skills. However, a website - no matter how nice it looks - is useless if it can't get people to visit it. This is where Weebly falls short as it's not set up as well for search engine optimization (SEO) as other website builders like Wordpress or HubSpot CMS. If you were to look at the code of a Weebly site, it looks jumbled and has a lot of JavaScript. If you look at Wordpress code, it's clean and simple HTML. Since Google prefers that simple and clean code, it's more likely to send people to those sites than ones with jumbled code like Weebly.

--Henry O'Loughlin, Buildremote

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#henry

I’ve used Weebly to create a website a few years back but it wasn’t very good. The layout was somewhat confusing and it was very dated for the time. I recently revisited it about a week ago and it’s definitely improved but it takes some getting used to. There’s a good sense of customization with the pages. The category and product pages are only accessible if you have something for sale in your store. Overall, Weebly is a decent website builder with plenty of functions to help you get started on designing. I would recommend it only if you want a basic website.

--Dante Donahue, Triple D's Estates

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#dante

Weebly is an awesome platform for creating websites, but it's mainly meant for beginners. It can be all you need for a smaller project, but it won't help you get found organically through Google since it's not search engine optimized properly. I've found using Wordpress is a better option for most established businesses, so I'd check that out if you're looking long-term. You'll have more customization available, which is always good for growth!

--Dylan Gordon, HustlerSource

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#dylan

If there is one thing I regret putting money into, it’s Weebly. Originally, the low prices peaked my interest when I wanted to create an initial website for my real estate investing business. Boy, was that a mistake. From a design perspective, it was very easy to use. Drag and drop, changing colors and adding text - all the simple things were easy enough to get by. However, after letting a website designer do some work, they told me to use Wordpress. Weebly didn’t have all the functions nor coding ability that Wordpress had, and my website’s design was beginning to age - quickly. There was no issue with the hosting, but the flexibility that other website builders had showed how Weebly was a time sink, especially if you wanted to spend more time creating your site. If you’re bound to using Weebly, you can’t actively change your design to help with Search Engine Optimization, if you need something to change, it takes forever to do so. The digital market is always changing, and your platform needs to adapt in order to survive. If not, Google punishes you for not being up to date with current practices. By the time I was done with Weebly, it gave me a horrible ROI, especially in terms of time. My experience with Weebly was awful, and I would not recommend it to anyone.

--Eugene Romberg, We Buy Houses in Bay Area

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#eugene

We use Weebly for our charity website. I like it because I can update the website without support or paying experts to maintain the website or write code. Over time our website has gotten better and is being used by a lot of schools and donors to contact us or to get information about our charity. The new acquisition seems to hurt any progress or support you can get from Weebly which is a concern. I will continue to use Weebly and its good for a do it yourself website.

--Randy Tarpey, Central Pennsylvania Scholarship Fund

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#randy

Weebly is excellent in terms of its customization options. Its excellent customization feature can be attributed to its integration capabilities to a multitude of apps and software.

The integration-friendly feature makes it easier for non-techy website builders to create a thriving ecosystem using existing tools and programs they already love using the Weebly builder.

Although it is more affordable than its other rivals, it does offer limitations on customizing placements and formats. WordPress users might notice the lack of such features, which might frustrate them because of the lack of more in-depth customization for placements and format.

However, the price is worth it for people who do not take formatting and placements options seriously. Its current features are enough to create a website that is intuitive and easy to use.

--Jeremy Owens, Seriously Smoked

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#jeremy

I used Weebly for a while when first building my husband's website for his flooring business. While it has simpler features than other website builders (which can make things much easier!), if you're not a novice at creating a website, it really holds you back. What I did not like is that Weebly was really locked down in terms of templates. I supposed it would be like the difference between iPhone and Android. A lot of people prefer the simpler approach!

On the other hand, I learned (and I'm sure you can even read about it on their site), the more structured template Weebly uses makes it really easy for mobile use, and overall it worked. The downside is some graphic placements just didn't match up to par.

I would not recommend Weebly if you want to tailor your website, but it is great for blogging or if you have less particular ideas on design!

--Victoria Stratton, Health Labs

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#victoria

I've built my website using Weebly and I would recommend it to others. I like Weebly because it is one of the best drag-and-drop website builders on the market. All you have to do is choose the elements you want and quite literally drag them into place. The downside to this type of website builder is that you don't have as many features or as much ability to customize as you would with a Wordpress site built from the ground up. That's a decision people have to make for their respective businesses. The other thing I like about Weebly is that their customer support is great. They openly admit that they won't give you any coding advice, but they will help you navigate Weebly itself to find anything you need in there. The few times I've had to call them have been a breeze.

--James Pollard, The Advisor Coach LLC

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/weebly-reviews#james

RELATED: See also our compilation of Wix reviews, a similar website builder to Weebly, and our compilation of Webflow reviews and Strikingly reviews.

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