Weebly review – simplicity meets eCommerce
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Weebly is a user‑friendly website builder that makes it easy for beginners to create a professional‑looking site with drag‑and‑drop tools and built‑in eCommerce features. It’s a solid choice for small businesses, personal projects, or online stores that need a simple solution without coding. However, while Weebly offers convenience, there are more powerful and flexible platforms available today.
In this Weebly review, I’ll cover Weebly’s features, pricing, usability, performance, and more. I’ll explain its pros and cons, so you can decide for yourself whether it meets your website-building needs.
| Hostinger Website Builder | Weebly | |
| ⭐ Rating: | ||
| 🥇 Overall rank: | #5 out of #37 | #21 out of #37 |
| 💵 Price: | From $2.69/month | From $10.00/month |
| 🪄 Ease of use: | Extremely easy to use | Very simple to use |
| 🎨 Templates: | 300 | 65 |
| 🏢 Business features: | eCommerce functionality, analytic tools, SEO settings | Good in-house eCommerce |
| 👨💻 24/7 live support: | Yes | No |
| ✂️ Free domain (first year): | Yes | Yes (with Professional / Performance plans) |
| 🔒 Free SSL certificate: | Yes | Yes |
| 🔥 Coupons: | Hostinger Website Builder coupon 81% OFF! | Cybernews Website Builder Coupons |
Weebly pros and cons
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What website to use Weebly for?
Every website builder has its own strengths and limitations, and Weebly is no exception. Its performance can vary depending on the type of website you’re creating. So, if you have a specific goal in mind, this section is for you. Let’s take a closer look at how Weebly performs across different types of websites.
| Website type | Benefits | Limitations |
| Online store | Quick to set up, all core features easy to manage | Cheapest eCommerce-capable plan has an additional transaction fee, limited site design options |
| Business site | Tools for email marketing, pop-ups, solid plugin library | The best tools require you to pay extra |
| Portfolio site | Editor allows to easily add your work to the site | Portfolio themes are few and far between. Design could be better, too. |
| Blog | Simple to set everything up | The editor is somewhat awkward for blogging, with limited features for formatting and SEO |
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, which is great for beginners.
But while you might be interested in taking a very affordable, eCommerce-capable Weebly plan, bear in mind that with some plans, transaction fees apply. Read the full eCommerce section here to learn more.
Weebly for businesses
For small businesses, looking to advertise their physical 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.
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 there aren't all that many templates to choose from. There are only just over 65 in total, and only a fraction of them are meant for portfolios. 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 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 and 3 premium plans, ranging from $10.00 to $26.00 a month when paying annually. 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:
| Plan | Features | Price |
| Free | SSL security, Weebly branding (domain and ads), SEO tools, chat and email support | $0.00 |
| Personal | SSL security, custom domain connection, SEO tools, shipping calculator, pop-up notifications, chat and email support | $10.00/month |
| Professional | SSL security, unlimited storage, remove Square ads, eCommerce functionality, advanced site stats, free domain, phone support | $12.00/month |
| Performance | SSL security, unlimited storage, remove Square ads, eCommerce functionality, PayPal, item reviews, abandoned cart emails, phone and priority support, advanced eCommerce statistics | $26.00/month |
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, the free plan is a great way to test the platform to see if it's right for you. That leaves 3 more options to choose from. So, let's dive in and see which one's best for your budget.
Personal plan
Most often, the cheapest premium plan removes all the most obvious limitations of the free plan. However, this isn't one of those scenarios.
Weebly's Personal plan is one of the cheaper plans in the website builder industry overall, starting at $10.00/month (on an annual subscription). For that price, it is still pretty limited, with the biggest drawback being that it keeps Weebly’s branding on your site.
If you just want to connect a custom domain to a simple personal website, the Personal plan should be enough for you.
Professional plan
The Weebly Professional plan unlocks several more advanced features and costs $12.00/month (annual subscription). 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 around $19.95/year. If you don’t like that, you can take a site built in Weebly elsewhere for hosting.
Also, despite the fact that it has eCommerce functionality, I can't really recommend this plan. Sure, the $112.00/month for an online shop is great, bordering very close to amazing. However, there’s a 2.9% + 25c transaction fee, making it a much more expensive plan.
Performance plan
The Performance plan takes a pretty steep price incline: at $26.00/month (billed annually), it's more than double the price of the Professional plan.
However, this is the plan to get if you're looking to build an online business and sell on your site. Compared to the Professional plan, you 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 number of members on your website. Unfortunately, transaction fees of 2.9% + 25c also apply.
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, making business management pretty simple.
Weebly focuses a lot on ease of use. Everything on the platform is built in a way that 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 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.
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, I had to choose whether I wanted to create a website or a website with an online store.
After that, I was redirected to the main website management dashboard. There, the onboarding process begins with the first step: Design your website. Once you click this option, you’re taken to select the theme. However, the available themes aren’t organized into categories, which can make browsing for the right design a bit less intuitive.
And that's honestly it – once I selected the theme, I was able to start editing my website.
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 on the left gives you all the editing options and website settings. For example, this is how the My Site menu looks: it includes options for website overview, editing, managing orders, checking reports, and more.
You can just take any element and drag-and-drop it 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 that gives you access to some premade parts that already include several elements woven together.
However, in a drag-and-drop builder, replacing complete customizability with pre-made groups might be seen as something that would limit 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 all the pages on your website. This is where you can rearrange and set hierarchies for everything.
Then there's the Theme option, allowing you to change your theme, 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. 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.
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 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 aspects 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.
The 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).
The Communications section includes email marketing, pop-ups, and Facebook Messenger integration.
And finally, Settings looks into some basic settings, as well as checkout and sales taxes related to eCommerce.
Weebly templates
- How many templates? Weebly offers around 65 original templates to choose from.
- How much are they? Each of Weebly's own templates is 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 65), but they all look pretty good.
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 the content on the website.
And you might want to give at least a 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 number of themes available, as they serve as a good starting point for users to pick from. 65 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 find those third-party themes on various marketplaces on the internet.
The options cost anywhere from $20 to $100 a piece, so they're not very expensive. But there's a problem: there aren't many third-party Weebly-compatible 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
Since 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 $10.00/month. Although if you pick higher tier plans, beware of the transaction fees.
Overall, 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 to 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 set up 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 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.
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.
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 a pop-up to be sent to the audience.
Additionally, you can compose emails by yourself. Weebly has taken care to provide you with 4 theme options: Default, Color Block, Minimal, and Text Based.
Weebly also has a section for automated emails. These are mostly used to communicate order information.
Moving on, you know those pop-ups that jump out of a website, giving you an announcement, offering a coupon, asking for your email, or to verify your age? A bit annoying, right? Well, they're effective, and with Weebly, you can do them too.
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 many Weebly and third-party apps available, this isn't the biggest such market out there, but for most needs, it will be more than enough.
The free apps (of which there are about 68) will mostly focus on website editing, offering various content display features, like tables, animations, and boxes.
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 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 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.
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 the 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 isn't bad, but it's difficult to use 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 are they're pretty good. Sadly, they're not as cheap as they might appear at first glance. The $12.00 plan may come with or require plugins. But if those things being expensive is not a problem for you, then Weebly is a very capable platform.
Weebly customer support
At all times of building and editing your Weebly website, a Support option will be available at the top. Upon clicking it, you'll end up in Weebly's special support zone, which 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 the Professional and higher-tier plans).
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.
Overall, customer support is quite limited and depends heavily on your plan. Unfortunately, many complain about unresponsive service, difficulty reaching live agents, and issues like unauthorized charges going unresolved.
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 its websites tend to load.
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.
The results could have certainly been 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 decent. 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:
Hostinger Website Builder
Hostinger Website Builder is a strong and more affordable alternative to Weebly. It offers a single plan starting at just $2.69/month, which includes full eCommerce functionality for up to 500 products, making it far cheaper than Weebly’s online store plans. The platform also features over 300 modern, professionally designed templates and an intuitive drag-and-drop editor for easy customization. On top of that, Hostinger includes built-in marketing, SEO, and AI tools that help users grow and optimize their websites efficiently.
Wix
Wix is super versatile. With a massive app market, over 2700 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.
Squarespace
If it's the themes you're looking for, Squarespace is the answer. With over 199 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.
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. 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.
Other Weebly comparisons you might want to read:
Weebly video review
If you want to watch a video review instead, you can watch our YouTube video of the Weebly review.
Final thoughts
Doing 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. 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.
Sadly, Weebly is not perfect. While some Weebly themes are really nice, I wish there were more options for different types of websites. Besides, transaction fees might add up quite a lot making the subscription costs not so affordable.
Weebly is a solid pick if you want either a simple personal website or a basic way to sell online. However, if you want more for a lower price, I suggest better alternatives, like Hostinger Website Builder.
Weebly FAQ
Is Weebly any good?
Weebly is a decent website builder for beginners and small businesses looking for a simple, user-friendly way to build a website.
What is Weebly used for?
Weebly is a drag-and-drop website builder used to create websites, blogs, and online stores without requiring coding or technical skills.
Is Weebly good for SEO?
Yes, Weebly is a solid website builder for basic to intermediate SEO, offering essential tools like customizable meta descriptions, title tags, alt text, and automatic sitemaps to help users rank on search engines.
Is Weebly a good option for a personal website?
Yes, Weebly is a good beginner-friendly choice for personal websites, offering an intuitive drag-and-drop editor and responsive pre-made templates that make it easy and affordable to create a professional-looking site without any coding skills.
Is Weebly free?
Yes, Weebly offers a free plan you can use with no payment or credit card info required.
How much does Weebly cost?
Premium Weebly plans cost from $10.00/month to $26.00/month. Weebly also has a free plan.
