Weebly review – simplicity meets eCommerce

Weebly website builder was recently purchased by the Square payment gateway. This union has turned Weebly into an all-in-one platform, combining eCommerce, marketing, and a simple website-building solution.

Weebly makes difficult things simple and combines a helpful drag-and-drop editor with some great business tools. If you look to make a nice, simple website, or to quickly and easily sell online, it's a great pick.

Yet, simplicity might be not what you're looking for, in this case, we suggest taking look at an alternative website builder – Hostinger Website Builder – that offers multiple eCommerce features and more.

Best Weebly alternative

Hostinger Website Builder provides you with the essential eCommerce, SEO, and marketing tools to build your dream website. With over 130 responsive templates, AI tools, and in-house hosting services, you are bound for success.

cybernews® score

4.6 /5

• Affordable subscription plans
• eCommerce functionality
• AI business tools

Get Hostinger Website Builder

Overall, Weebly very nearly nails what a combo of a website builder and business tools should do. Even when it doesn't, it still is an excellent choice for beginners. Because at the end of the day, Weebly is super easy to use, and you can seriously launch an entire business in under an hour.

And oh – one more thing before we start – this Weebly review is quite big. So, click to read the full conclusion here if you want to get straight to my final thoughts.

Best Blogger alternatives:

★4.6/5

Visit provider

★4.8/5

View provider

Weebly pros and cons

What website to use Weebly for?

Each builder has its strengths and weaknesses. Weebly is not an exception – and it does differently on varying types of websites. So, if you have a specific goal in mind – this part is for you. Let's take a quick look at how Weebly will do on these types of pages:

Weebly for online shops

Weebly is quite literally made for online shops – that makes sense when you're owned by an online payment platform, right? Everything related to eCommerce is nicely baked into the whole Weebly dashboard, it's quite perfect for beginners.

But while you might be interested in taking a very affordable, eCommerce-capable Weebly plan at $12 a month...don't! The additional 3% transaction fee is simply not worth it. Instead, consider the upper plans, starting at $25 a month. Is Weebly worth it at that price? Well...that's something worth discussing. Read the full eCommerce section here.

Weebly for businesses

For small businesses, looking to advertise their brick and mortar location, or promote a service, Weebly offers a pretty good suite of options. There's email marketing, as well as a solid array of first-party and third-party plugins, that can add the business site a lot more functionality.

The only issue is that you might end up having to spend a lot extra. The email marketing tool's free plan is highly limited, and you'd need to buy a premium version to really do business. The same is true for other tools – you will need to spend extra to get everything going. Read the full business features section here.

Weebly for portfolios

Weebly is a pretty good option for portfolios. Setting everything up is very simple – so, this is a perfect builder if you're just looking for a quick way to add and share your work with the world. Just drop everything within the template, click the "Publish" button, and you're good to go!

The decision for you will boil down to one question: "Do I like the templates?". Because the thing is, there aren't all that many templates to choose from. There are only just over 60 in total and only a fraction of them are meant for portfolios. The ball is in your park. Read the full templates section here.

Weebly for blogs

Weebly offers a simple blogging interface. Simple is perhaps the key word here – it's a total no-frills experience. The blog editor acts similarly to a website editor, so don't expect fancy interfaces, or big management options. Weebly lets you type in words, and release them as blogs, but really – it's not made for that.

Later in the post, I dive in a little bit deeper into what it's like to blog with Weebly. Read the full blogging section here.

Weebly pricing and plans

Weebly offers one free plan, and four premium plans, ranging from $6.00 to $38 a month when paying annually, with special discounts available for non-profit organizations' websites. These prices seem pretty low when compared to the competition. However, it's important to remember that these are the prices if you pick the annual plan, paying for 12 months in advance. They will increase, should you decide to pay monthly.

These are the available options:

The Weebly free plan won't let you do much. With limited functionality, few features, and Weebly's branding at all places, it's not a good pick for your business.

Despite the aggressive branding, this starter plan a great way to test the platform to see if it's right for you.

That leaves 4 more options to choose from. So, let's dive in and see which one's best for your budget.

Connect plan

Most often, the cheapest plan out of the premium plans removes all the most obvious limitations of the free plan. This isn't one of those scenarios.

Weebly's Connect plan is one of the cheaper plans in website builders overall, starting at $6.00 a month ($8 if paying monthly). For that price, it is still pretty limited, the biggest drawback being that it keeps Weebly’s branding on your site.

If you just want to be able to connect a custom domain to a simple personal website – this is the plan for you.

Pro plan

The Weebly Pro plan unlocks several more interesting advanced features. It costs $12.00 per month ($18 if paying monthly). This plan gives you a free domain name for a year – once the year passes, you'll be asked to renew the domain on your own terms. Weebly’s domain cost after that will be $19.95/year. If you don’t like that, you can take a site built in Weebly elsewhere for hosting.

Also, despite the fact it has eCommerce functionality, I can't really recommend this plan. Sure, the $12 a month for an online shop is great, bordering very close to amazing. But sadly, there's one little problem: the 3% transaction fee.

Instead, I'd call this a personal plan, good for those looking to make personal, portfolio (it has image editing options!), or maybe even membership websites – after all, those features are made available on the Pro plan.

Business Plan

The Business plan takes a pretty steep price incline: at $25/month ($35 if you pay monthly), it's more than double the price of the previous plan.

However, this is the plan to get if you're looking to build an online business and sell on your site. Not only there is no pesky transaction fee to take away your hard-earned pennies, but you also can do much, much more with it, including adding gift cards, coupons, and being able to do advanced inventory management. You can also accept payments through PayPal, and have an unlimited amount of members on your website.

Business Plus

The most expensive plan – the Business Plus plan costs $38/month ($46 if you pay monthly), and for your money...you don't get very much. If you're interested in further optimizing your online store's performance with abandoned cart recovery and real-time shipping, this is the pick for you.

Overall, Weebly prices are quite decent – and there are many interesting plan options for you to choose from. However, my two preferred options are right in the middle.

The Pro plan includes some basic eCommerce and all the necessary website-building features, while the Business plan suits the name perfectly, and will be a great option for smaller businesses.

Is Weebly easy to use?

• Setup process – the setup process is really simple. It takes just a few clicks and choices to have a website, ready to be edited.
• Building the website – everything is fairly simple. You get to choose from various elements, which you then drag and drop on your website. The navigation menus are simple and clear.
• Managing the website – a clean dashboard focuses on marketing and eCommerce features above all, and makes managing the business pretty simple.

Weebly focuses a lot on ease of use. Everything in the platform is built the way a complete beginner would have no issues learning and mastering the system. Setting the website up was a super simple process, the editor was intuitive and easy to manage, and the overall business management experience was really quite pleasurable.

Weebly is one of the best website builders when it comes to making difficult things simple. And to make this Weebly review as accurate as possible, I signed up for the platform and made my own Weebly website. Here it is! (click the image to see the page in full)

Here's how everything went down for me.

Setting up the Weebly website

Once I chose to start using Weebly, I had to pick between one of these options.

In order to start using Weebly, choose the option for a "Website", or a "Personal website". The "Online Store" option will redirect you to Square – an entirely different platform with different features and website-building capabilities.

Then, after the right option was picked, I had to follow a basic registration process. Nothing unusual, with classic steps of "name-email-password".

Once that's done, I was given an opportunity to select a preferred theme.

Weebly's themes here were separated into several categories, letting to pick a starting point closest to what the finished product should look like.

And that's honestly it! Once the theme is selected, I was able to start editing my website and making it mine.

Building your website

Weebly is a drag-and-drop website builder, and its editor is quite simple. Whether you want to work on your site alone or let multiple editors work on it (Weebly allows that!), you won’t have many hardships with it.

The menu at the top lets you pick whatever you want to edit, whether that is pages or themes, and once you click on it, the menu on the left gives all the editing options.

For example, this is how the "Build" menu looks: it includes options for adding text, titles, and more intricate details, like an image gallery.

You can just take any element here, and drag-drop them on your website.

And actually – back in the day, Weebly offered more elements than it does now. But now, you'll also get an option called "Sections", which gives you access to some premade parts, that already include several elements weaved together.

Is this option good enough for you? Well, I certainly lack more choices. Five types of sections isn't all that much. And furthermore, in a drag-and-drop builder, replacing complete customizability with pre-made groups might be seen as something that would limit the design freedom.

On the other hand, you can use the regular Weebly elements to improve your sections. And so, they can be put together in order to improve what they are and what they can do.

Now, moving on to other editing options: the "Pages" menu lets you quickly manage, you guessed it – all the pages on your website. This is where you can rearrange and set hierarchies to everything.

Then there's the "Theme option, allowing you to change your theme (I knew it!), fonts, or edit various site-wide design options. This is also where you'll be able to add and edit HTML and CSS code.

I was really impressed by the options for fonts, as you could edit them for pretty much any part of your website – and there are over 200 fonts to choose from as well! Unexpected, but still thoroughly impressive.

Sadly, there is a drawback – Weebly lacks an Undo feature for site changes, such as adding elements or changing the theme. If you can overlook that, we can move on with playing with the editor.

So, the "Apps" menu will redirect you straight to Weebly's app store, and finally, the "Settings" menu will open a new page, that will include all the main information related to your website.

Overall, Weebly offers a simple and intuitive menu to build your website. The new option to add "Sections" does look a bit different from Weebly's general look. But overall, everything is accessible and beginners should have no problem mixing and matching the elements to suit their desired style.

Weebly dashboard

Weebly's dashboard is pretty simple and minimalist: on the main page, there will be some general statistics. If you're just starting out, this is also where a tiny start up guide will be.

The menu on the left lets to manage several other facts of the website: "Items" and "Orders" menus focus on all things eCommerce, letting to add and remove items, add coupon codes, gift cards, or read customer reviews, as well as see who's bought what. There's also a "Fulfillment" section, focusing on pickup, delivery, and shipping options.

"Reports" menu gives all the main data about your website's visitors – think site traffic, sources of it, and various information about your sales (if there is any!).

"Marketing" menu is all about your ads, automated emails, and collected leads. If you wish to use Weebly as your marketing platform – unsurprisingly, this is where you'll do all of your work. "Communications" does a similar job, looking at your abandoned carts, pop-ups, and communication with the visitors.

And finally, "General" looks into some basic settings, as well as checkout and sales taxes things related to eCommerce.

Weebly mobile app

Running a business is a 24/7 job, where you can't really be offline. But you won't always be able to access the computer to edit your site, manage your products, or see the overall performance of your project.

For that, Weebly offers a mobile app, that can be used by any Weebly user. Honestly – it's one of the best features of Weebly, full stop. The app is modern and very powerful.

Not only I could see how many users have visited my site, I could even edit my page right on the phone and add new items to the store.

Weebly mobile app is an excellent tool, that's very easy to use. It gives you an alternative method of building and managing your site: that's always available from the comfort of your pocket.

However, there is a drawback to Weebly – even though it provides a great mobile app to edit your site on the go, you cannot preview how your site will look on smartphones when you’re editing from your desktop. To see that, you’ll definitely have to download the Weebly app.

Overall, Weebly offers pretty good ease of use. Everything can be easily located, and the learning curve is pretty simple – for both website design and basic business management.

Weebly templates

• How many templates? Weebly offers around 40 original templates to choose from
• How much are they? Each of Weebly's own templates are free. There are also some third-party options that cost anywhere between $20-50
• Are they any good? They are quite simple, but diverse enough to offer a good selection for many different niches and design preferences

I will stay completely in line with other Weebly reviews here – Weebly certainly bets everything on quality over quantity. There aren't many themes to choose from (I counted only around 40, thrown around in 7 categories), but they all look pretty good and offer a full responsive theme experience, so they look good on all devices.

Once you start your website, you'll be asked to pick a starter theme. However, you can easily change the template in the middle of editing, without losing any of content on the website.

And you might want to give at least few of these themes a shot – they can be quite diverse and really lovely to look at.

That being said, there aren't all that many options to pick from. A drag-and-drop builder needs a fair amount of themes available, as the themes serve as a good starting point for users to pick from. 40 just isn't great.

But there might be an ace up Weebly's sleeve, as there's another curious option, allowing anyone to upload their own theme.

What does that mean? Well – it's actually one of my favorite options at any website builder. Weebly allows you to upload and use a third-party theme. All you need to do is to find those third-party themes on various marketplaces on the internet.

The options cost anywhere from $20 to $50 a piece, so they're not very expensive, too. But there's a problem: there aren't many third-party Weebly themes either. And many of those that exist, appear to have been last updated several years ago.

Overall, Weebly could do a bit better with themes. With a pretty, but small local selection, I expected the community to bail this builder out. Sadly, it hasn't.

There are still some solid options for most people to pick from though: and if you really love some of the Weebly themes, you'll have no issues there.

Weebly eCommerce review

From the time Weebly joined forces with Square, it was obvious to think that the platform would be heavily focused on delivering the best business features. Did this merger work? I would say that Weebly can be a powerful platform for both small and mid-sized businesses.

I'll repeat the very beginning of my Weebly review – this website builder is an eCommerce solution for personal users and small businesses, and it certainly acts like one. It's also really cheap, starting at $12 a month. Although if you pick this plan, beware: the 3% transaction fee and a limit of 25 products may be a bit too much for some ($25/month plan with no such limits is where it's at).

Overall, however, I enjoyed the Weebly eCommerce experience quite a lot. The entire dashboard of the eCommerce store is easy to understand, and simple to follow, making it pretty easy to add a shopping cart on your site.

If you've already used a different platform for your shop, you'll be able to quickly migrate to Weebly. Here, I was able to either add my items manually, migrate from a different platform like Shopify or Etsy, or upload anything using a CSV file.

If you choose to add the items manually, you'll be spending a good deal of time on this screen – here, you'll be able to choose what type of item you're selling (physical products and digital download options are both available), as well as setup prices, photos, and descriptions. Additionally, Weebly also lets you bulk-edit and delete products and redesign categories.

There you can also specify item variations such as size or color.

The "Modifiers" options will also let the visitors to, well, modify the item to their preferences.

And each item is also given an SEO optimization screen, where you can choose the link, and write down the most suitable title and description for search engine results.

Lastly – what's it like to add your store on Weebly?

Luckily, it's pretty simple: I just went to my Weebly site editor, added a new page, and selected an element called "Products". From there, I could manage the way the products would look on my website: this includes their layout and various display options.

So – to make a long story short – Weebly eCommerce is pretty solid. It's a beginner-friendly platform, and if you're looking for a simple option to run your business with, this is a great pick.

Have something else in mind for your online store? See our list of best website builders for eCommerce and what they have to offer.

Weebly email marketing and pop-ups

Weebly lets you make a professional G Suite email address right from the dashboard – but the real fun starts, once you actually try using your email for professional marketing. That's because Weebly offers some seriously good email marketing features – and while a lot of them are free, doing proper marketing through this platform will mean that you'll have to pay extra.

In the Emails section, Weebly gives you some quick ideas for sending out messages. For example, for adding a coupon to your store or listing an item on sale, the platform will automatically create an email to be sent to the audience.

Additionally, you can compose emails by yourself. Weebly has taken care to provide you with around 15 quite nice pre-designed templates and an editor, very similar to the website builder itself.

Weebly also has a section for automated emails – think something like a welcome email for new contacts, or offering additional products for existing customers.

However, as you may see from the yellow ribbon here, this feature will be under a paywall.

In fact, all Weebly email features fall under Weebly Promote – a separate service with its own separate pricing.

• The free plan will let you create two emails, and send them out to 500 recipients. The monthly email quota is 1,000.
• Build plan costs $8/month, lets you make 5 emails, and send them to 1,000 recipients. Lead capture will let you add customized forms to your visitors. Email quota. is raised up to 2,500.
• Grow plan costs $25/month, gives you 20 email campaigns, allows for 2,500 recipients per email, and increases the monthly quota to 50,000. You can also create up to 5 automated emails and segment your visitors to specific email groups.
• Accelerate plan will set you back $75/month, and for that, remove all limits, except the total email quota – which is raised up to a respectable 250,000. But with an additional fee, the limits could be increased even further.

Moving on, you know those pop-ups that jump out of a website, giving your an announcement, offering a coupon, asking for your email, or to verify your age? Bit annoying, right?

Well, they're effective! And with Weebly, you can do them as well!

The pop-up builder is pretty simple and intuitive, and you can very easily build a message for your visitors to read (and possibly skip through).

Weebly App Center

If you're looking for something a bit more specific to improve your website, Weebly's App Center is where everything's at.

Applications are separated into a few major sections: eCommerce, communication, marketing, social, and site tools. With over 350 Weebly and third-party apps available, this isn't the biggest such market out there, but for most needs, that will be more than enough.

The free apps (of which there are about 40) will mostly focus on website editing, offering various content display features. You know, tables, animations, boxes, that sort of thing.

But there are also going to be some great free, premium, and freemium apps related to more business-specific manners.

Using Weebly's app market, you can easily show live sale notifications, accept donations, and even do print-on-demand with Printful, meaning that you can sell merchandise with your designs on it, letting the platform do all the printing and shipping on your behalf.

Overall, I found Weebly's app market to be quite solid. There's a good bunch of applications available, and they both improve on Weebly's website building platform, giving the users access to more and better business features.

Weebly SEO and blogging

Weebly has a dedicated search engine optimization option for every single page. With it, you can add meta descriptions and keywords, as well as header and footer code.

In addition to helping with SEO, this means that you can use optimize the website to work with most of the top analytics tools – like Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity.

The dedicated SEO page in the Settings menu is where you can set up your redirects and add tracking codes for the whole site.

And also (it's something I mentioned before), you can add custom URLs, and meta tags to each and every single one of your sold items.

Moving on to content: to start a blog, in Pages menu, choose to make a Blog Page. The blog page is where you'll get to add, edit, and manage all of your posts.

The blog editor on Weebly, rather unsurprisingly, uses a very similar interface to building a website. You simply drag and drop elements, then edit them separately.

On top of that, this editor doesn't let you add headings to your text. SEO-wise, this is a massive oversight, fixed by (paid!) third-party plugins.

I would've honestly preferred something more writer-friendly: maybe a proper, full-blown editor, similar to something like WordPress? This option now isn't bad, but it's difficult to use this interface for both copying posts from elsewhere and writing the post right in it. Overall: good SEO, lackluster blogging.

And to sum up Weebly's business features – they're pretty good. Sadly, they're not as cheap as they might appear at first glance. The $12 eCommerce plan comes with additional payments, so does email marketing. But if those two things being expensive are not a problem for you, then Weebly is a very capable platform.

Of course, you can use Weebly for different types of businesses: it's also great as a website builder for artists and holds strong positions among the best photography website builders.

Weebly customer support

At all times of building and editing your Weebly website, a small "Support" will be available at the top. Upon clicking it, you'll end up in Weebly's special support zone, that includes relevant articles and a knowledge base – that's basically an almanac of all kinds of tutorials.

If that's not enough, and you wish to speak to a live agent to get your problems sorted out, you can – there's a live chat, email support system, and even a phone line (phone support available for Pro plans and up).

However, it's only available during business hours (6 AM to 6 PM PST). Outside of that, you'll get to talk to an automatic support system. Surprisingly, it's not that bad, offering quick tutorials on the fly.

Customer support is certainly one of the stronger suites for Weebly. They have plenty of options to connect to live agents, plus, there's a solid list of articles tutorials to help you learn more. Overall, pretty good.

Weebly website performance

Website builders are not commonly known as fast – because they're not. All the customizability of a website builder usually has a negative effect on how quickly their websites tend to load. Weebly, however, does rather well.

To test Weebly's performance, I gave my very own test website a spin on GTMetrix – a platform that measures page load time and platform optimization.

Here's what I got:

Certainly could be better. But overall, Weebly is rather fast – the whole page loads in just over 2.5 seconds. One of the main issues the tool had with Weebly was its slightly inefficient image loading. But even with that, the website loads under Google's recommended 3-second threshold for good SEO and retaining visitors.

So overall, Weebly's performance is alright. Not perfect, but alright. Your visitors shouldn't have any major problems loading your site.

Alternatives to Weebly

This Weebly review may have taught you many things. One of them could be that Weebly is not the right builder for you. I get it – while this is a solid pick, its hidden pricing, and relatively few themes could turn this option into a dealbreaker. And so, these are some of the best Weebly alternatives and competitors that I could find:

Wix

Wix is super versatile. With a massive app market, over 700 templates, and two different website editors (one for beginners, and one for advanced users), it can suit pretty much anyone out there. If you have a website idea, Wix can probably make it work. Check out our Weebly vs. Wix comparison for more details.

Visit Wix

Squarespace

If it's the themes you're looking for, Squarespace is the answer. With over 100 modern themes, anyone can have a good-looking website, even with literally no design knowledge. On top of that, powerful built-in marketing and business management tools offer a very simple all-in-one mission control center experience, perfect for small businesses. Learn more about how Weebly compares to Squarespace.

Visit Squarespace

Shopify

Need a place to sell online? Weebly is pretty good – but Shopify is the top dog, a super-popular eCommerce platform, used by businesses of all sizes. Why is that? Well, there are excellent built-in eCommerce tools, as well as discounts on shipping and transaction fees. Now add that to a massive third-party app store, giving you top-class functionality and a lively community, making all sorts of brilliant designs, and you're onto a winner.

Read more about these platforms on our Weebly vs Shopify comparison.

Visit Shopify

Other Weebly comparisons you might want to read:

• Weebly vs GoDaddy
• Weebly vs WordPress

Weebly video review

If you want to watch a video review instead, you can watch our YouTube video of Weebly review.

Final thoughts

On this Weebly review, I was impressed, with how easy it was to do things other website builders barely allow: custom header and footer code, as well as custom HTML on every page, these are all exciting features. And at the same time, the easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder lets even the rawest of beginners build their page just the way they want to.

And with Square's eCommerce pedigree, it's no surprise to see Weebly evolve. Plenty of helpful built-in tools and easy-to-use eCommerce make Weebly one of my top picks when it comes to selling and advertising online.

Sadly, Weebly is not perfect. Great email features are hidden under a massive paywall. The $5 plan still keeps Weebly's branding. eCommerce transaction fees are always an issue. And while some Weebly themes are really nice, I wish there were more good options for different types of websites. And yet, none of these problems really kill Weebly. It's still a solid pick – only with just a few quirks.

Weebly is a solid pick if you want either a simple personal website, or a basic way to sell online. It's more than a website builder – it's an intuitive, and easy to use business platform, suited for beginners.

And of course – there's a free plan you can use as well. So if you're still undecided, get right into it, and make a Weebly review of your own.

Visit Weebly

Weebly FAQs