Weebly review: Pros and cons in 2024 (2024)

Weebly is a wonderful tool for building a website when you have no tech background and a limited budget. Unfortunately, this might not be the best time to start using it. Weebly was acquired by Square in 2018, and the parent company has been explicitly noncommittal about continuing to support it past July 2025.

In this Weebly review, we’ll go over some of the reasons this platform has been popular for so long and some of the alternatives you may want to migrate your site to should the product be discontinued next summer.

Weebly overview

Weebly is an intuitive, easy-to-use website builder. Every package comes with free hosting, and some of the packages come with a free domain for the first year. You’ll build your website using drag-and-drop tools, with access to a full suite of e-commerce functionalities with all paid packages. Pricing is extremely competitive, but Square – which owns Weebly – has only committed to supporting the product through mid-2025.

Weebly pros and cons

Weebly is affordable and simple to use, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best choice for your business. If you anticipate your business being around past 2025, you may want to look elsewhere.

Pros

Weebly is incredibly user-friendly – even if you don’t have a tech or graphic design background, you should be able to build your website on your own. The pricing is extremely competitive, making Weebly a go-to choice for small business owners who might not have room in their budgets to hire someone to build their website for them.

Weebly’s extensive suite of e-commerce tools is available to all membership levels, though paid plans do come with the added ability to ship online orders. The bad news is that as great as Weebly may be, it may not be around for much longer.

Cons

The biggest con to Weebly is that it’s potentially being phased out. Weebly was acquired by Square in 2018. In the time since, Square has built its own website builder, which doubles as an e-commerce platform. Square is now encouraging users to switch over to the new product, but for now, it is still supporting Weebly. The Weebly product is unlikely to get new updates, but it will be supported through at least July 2025.

For now, you can continue to list products and complete sales using Weebly, though Square does encourage you to use the Square website builder if you need an e-commerce service. If you’re trying to set up a shop or even a website that you plan on existing past the summer of 2025, the safer bet would be to use Square instead of Weebly.

Weebly pricing and value

Weebly’s free plan includes a lot of functionalities, but you’ll only be able to build your site on a subdomain, which will look something like “https://yoursitename.weebly.com.” Subdomains are viewed as unprofessional and may signal to your customers or clients that you don’t take your business seriously.

All of Weebly’s other packages include the ability to use a custom domain – and the top three tiers allow you to get a custom domain free for the first year. These upper-tier plans also remove Square ads from your site, which adds another layer of professionalism. The highest three tiers also give you unlimited storage compared to the 500 MB of storage available in the Personal plan.

The Personal, Professional, Performance and Premium plans are priced extremely competitively compared to the best website builders on the market, but proceed with caution. With the anticipated potential sunsetting of Weebly in the near future, you’ll likely have to go through the headache of migrating hosts over the next 18 months.

Website editor features

Weebly uses a drag-and-drop interface that’s simple and easy to use. It’s perfect for DIY business owners who don’t have the budget or coding experience themselves to build a website from scratch.

The trade-off to having such a user-friendly interface is that your customization options only go so far. While you can change which elements you’re using in the template, the basic bones are fairly static.

Blogging features

All Weebly packages come with the tools you’ll need to set up a company blog or simply start a blog as an entity of its own. You’ll use a simple interface to write each post itself, and you can also implement more advanced settings like meta keywords, apps and RSS feed capabilities.

E-commerce features

All Weebly packages come with an impressive array of e-commerce features. You’ll get:

• Unlimited item listings.
• Shopping cart capabilities for online ordering.
• Item badges.
• Item options.
• Quick shop option.
• Inventory management.
• Automatic tax calculator.
• Coupons.
• Square gift cards.

With the Free plan, you can only offer your customers in-store pickup – they can’t opt to have the order shipped to their home. If you’re not running a local business, shipped orders are paramount when you deal with physical products – you’ll need a paid plan.

Personal and Professional plans add a shipping calculator and shipping labels for your business. A Performance plan opens up the ability for customers to leave item reviews, PayPal payments and automated abandoned cart emails.

The most expensive plan – Premium – lowers your payment processing fees and ensures that all shipping calculations are accurate in real-time, helping your online shop avoid excess over- or under-payments.

Marketing features

Weebly does include some basic marketing features. All packages come with SEO tools, lead capture and Instagram feed integration. If you upgrade to Personal or Professional, you’ll also have the ability to use pop-up notifications.

Performance and Premium users get access to advanced marketing analytics. While these marketing features are nice to have, they are a bit basic. With its new website builder product, Square offers additional features like Facebook ad integrations and customized QR codes for your customers.

Customer support

All Weebly plans come with access to chat and email support. If you want phone support, you’ll need the Professional plan at a bare minimum, which gives you access to phone support from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. PT. Performance and Premium members get 24/7 phone support.

These options are middle-of-the-road. While competitors like Wix have 24/7 customer service – including phone support – available in all packages, others like Webflow either give you email access to CSRs only or give you your own dedicated account manager.

Weebly vs. top competitors

Weebly has historically been a great option – especially for small teams on a budget. In the current environment, though, it doesn’t really matter how much value Weebly provides when Square is signaling that it could be phasing the product out. If you’re setting up a website soon, it’s not a good use of time to put all your efforts into a platform that may not exist past the summer of 2025.

Weebly vs. Square Website Builder

If you currently have Weebly, Square is hoping you’ll migrate your service to its new website builder before July 2025. It made its packages similar to Weebly’s in many ways. While it eliminates the Weebly Personal and Professional plans, Square’s Plus plan looks extremely similar to Weebly’s Performance plan. It’s three dollars more expensive per month, but it also comes with some additional features like custom QR codes and order-with-Google capabilities.

The Square Premium plan is akin to Weebly’s Premium plan, with lower transaction rates, real-time shipping rates and 24/7 customer service. It’s $7 more per month, but it adds features like Facebook ads and waives in-house delivery fees. Whether you go with Square or Weebly, the Premium plan is best if you’re mailing physical products at a serious volume. If you’re deciding between the two platforms, Square is better if you plan on your business operating past 2025.

Weebly vs. Wix

Wix’s equivalent to Weebly’s Personal plan is its Light plan. Light does not come with e-commerce capabilities, and it’s more expensive than Weebly’s equivalent. When you move up to Weebly’s Professional package, Wix’s comparison is Core. The Core package only comes with 50GB of storage space, while all Weebly plans, Professional and up, come with unlimited storage.

Weebly continues to provide more value for the price when you move up each tier, though Wix does start adding some additional features like multiple currencies and back-in-stock notifications. Even if Weebly generally outperforms Wix in terms of value, the fact that it’s in the process of sunsetting makes Wix a better choice if you’re looking for stability for your business.

Weebly vs. Shopify

Shopify doesn’t come with a free plan like Weebly. Instead, it regularly offers free trials. At the time of writing, the offer is for a three-day free trial, after which your first three months will only cost one dollar. After that, you’ll be billed at regular prices. These regular prices are dramatically higher than Weebly’s, though you might find it to be worth it if you’re particularly focused on e-commerce. Shopify does provide large shipping discounts and fraud analysis in every package.

Shopify is also easy and intuitive to use with a drag-and-drop interface. If you have HTML or CSS skills, you’ll be able to use them, but they’re not required. Whether you’re setting up a new website or migrating away from Weebly, Shopify is worth considering as an alternative, especially if you don’t have a ton of coding or website-building skills of your own.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)