Among website builders, Weebly’s free plan is among the best. If you use Square products for your business, switching to Weebly is a no-brainer because of the seamless integration between the two platforms. Even if you don’t, it’s a great option for anyone with little to no experience in web hosting, design, or development who wants to get up and running quickly.
Here at the Weebly hosting review, we put their claims to the test. We will put their product through our extensive tests and analysis in the following categories:
Reliability: Will your website be available at all times, with no downtime, and in a reliable manner?
Speed: I was wondering how quickly pages loaded and how well Weebly dealt with unexpectedly high volumes of visitors.
Features: Do they offer all of the functions and tools that you will require to complete your task?
Customer Support: Is it simple to get assistance whenever you require it?
Pricing: How much would it cost, and are there any discounts or deals offered by Weebly that could save you money?
This is going to be an in-depth review of Weebly, including a comprehensive analysis of the hosting offered by Weebly.
Performance Grade A+
Average Load Time 669ms
Free SSL Yes
Free domain No
Support Phone/Live chat/Knowledge base
About Weebly
Weebly, like many of the other top website builders we reviewed, is free to use for both site creation and e-commerce. Their free tier, however, blows the competition out of the water by including a plethora of handy extras. As one of the easiest-to-use sites, Weebly is great for newbies.
Especially for smaller e-commerce sites, the simplicity with which an entire store can be built from scratch without the need for complex configurations is unparalleled.
Remember that if you want a serious online presence, you’ll have to shell out some cash for a premium package. However, unlike other website builders, Weebly’s paid upgrades are relatively inexpensive.
Weebly Hosting Speed Test
Every hosting company claims that their servers are the fastest, that they have the best customer service, and that their clients have the best possible experience when using their services.
We concluded that it would be in our best interests to conduct our own extensive testing on Weebly’s claims in order to determine how well they perform in comparison to the criteria that we use when conducting tests.
Weebly Hosting Speed Test Results
We used Pingdom speed test tool for Weebly testing and here are the results.
It took less than a second for our test site to load, which is an excellent result.
Pros and Cons of Weebly
Pros
- User friendly: As far as drag-and-drop site creators go, Weebly is among the easiest and most accessible. In addition, they will provide you with detailed instructions to launch your website. Without touching a single line of code, this platform makes it simple to insert and remove content at will. The intelligent system allows you to see the published design in real time as you go, and it will reposition itself and other objects to accommodate the position of the widget you’re dragging.
- Speed and website security: Weebly’s free hosting is much more reliable and fast than the free hosting offered by the other site builders we’ve tried. Even on the free plan, you can expect your site to be up and running smoothly all the time.
- Tools: Compared to other online marketing tools, these are on the simple side, but they are still useful to have in your site-building platform. In addition to social media features and AdWords credits, Weebly also provides email marketing (with templates for different types of emails) and search engine optimization (SEO) tools.
- A free plan: Weebly provides a free one-click SSL certificate, 500 MB of storage, free hosting, SEO tools, lead capture forms, and 24/7 live chat and email support simply for signing up. Weebly is the only website builder we found that provides free round-the-clock support. As first-time website creators, we really appreciate the availability of assistance during the trial period.
- Mobile application: Unfortunately, the Weebly by Square mobile app isn’t as feature-rich as the desktop version; however, this is par for the course and not the main attraction. The Weebly mobile app accomplishes its intended purpose of facilitating rapid updates while on the go. We especially like how you’re not tethered to your desk and can easily communicate with guests. If you enjoy keeping tabs on your site’s statistics while you’re on the go, you’ll love this feature.
Cons of Weebly
- Customer service: Weebly used to have a stellar reputation for customer support, but as the service has expanded, it has become more challenging to speak with an actual person. On the plus side, you can reach someone at any time, but it may take a while to get a response. Especially if you have to wait days for a response from the community, which may or may not be helpful. When time is of the essence, this is not the best option.
- Language support: Although Weebly is currently accessible in English and a dozen additional languages, developing a site that supports multiple languages is a significant challenge that requires workarounds such as third-party apps. Weebly also has limited support for languages other than English, including Chinese, Russian, and Arabic.
- Limited design: The fact that some of the pre-made templates and widgets have locked design features is our primary complaint about Weebly. Although Weebly’s themes speed up the process of creating a website, some of the available templates and widgets are incredibly limiting and difficult to modify. Additionally, there are only a little over 50 themes to pick from, which is a lot fewer than Wix’s over 700 available themes.
- Branding: The free plan includes a Weebly subdomain and an ad at the bottom of your website. Due to the lengthy and difficult-to-remember nature of the default domain, the free plan is best suited for experimental or temporary websites or projects. Our advice is to switch to a paid Weebly plan once your site begins to receive regular visitors.
- Stats of visitors: As far as I can tell, reporting is the only function that has been removed from the free plan, though it was previously included. If you don’t want to pay for an upgrade and integrate Google Analytics, you can’t view traffic and visitor behaviour statistics.
Weebly Hosting Plans and Features
When you sign up for Weebly, you have the option of building a commercial site that integrates with Square Online, or a personal site that doesn’t. Then, you can launch your site without spending a dime and with all the fundamental components you need.
- Free plan: When compared to free trials offered by competing website builders, Weebly’s permanently free plan does a great job of showcasing the platform’s features and capabilities.
Lead capture forms
Free SSL security
Post in the community forum
Chat & email support
500 MB storage
Instagram feed
Ecommerce essentials, like shopping cart, item badges, product categories, inventory management, and more
Unlimited products
For most businesses, we think the Free Plan is best just for test-driving Weebly before investing in more advanced features. It can be useful for personal projects or creating mockups for designers. There are numerous use cases for the free plan, and you could keep your site free indefinitely, but you won’t get what’s required for legitimate businesses these days, such as your own domain.
When you want to upgrade from the free plan, Weebly has four pricing levels to choose from: Personal, Professional, Performance, and Premium.
- Personal plan:
Comes at 9$ per month or 72$ if billed annually.
Personal plans are ideal for creating a resume, portfolio site, or blog. Because you can now publish your site to a custom domain, this is the bare minimum for a professional-looking site. However, if you have more ambitious plans or want to completely remove advertisements, you should consider upgrading.
- Professional plan:
Comes at 16$ per month or 144$ if billed annually.
Professional plans are ideal for small businesses and membership sites. You can now not only connect a custom domain, but also add additional customization. You can also begin to allow your visitors to sign up for special content. Additionally, you can use options to automatically approve or manually review all members, manage them in groups, and control which pages they have access to.
- Performance plan:
Comes at 29$ per month and 312$ if billed annually.
The Performance plan is ideal for dedicated ecommerce sites and is the best option if you want to accept payments via PayPal. You can now include features that help your business grow, such as allowing customers to review your products, sending abandoned cart emails, and utilising more advanced sales and marketing reporting.
- Premium plan:
Comes at 79$ per month and 864$ if billed annually.
The price jump from Performance to Premium is significant for two reasons. The Premium plan is the only one that includes a real-time shipping rate calculator and a lower processing rate. The upgrade is worthwhile for users who process enough transactions to justify the monthly cost of this plan. However, because this is only a small subset of Weebly users, you won’t see this option until you sign up for an account and receive the option to upgrade.
Let’s understand more on features of Weebly hosting.
Because free SSL security is the norm, this is nothing to write home about. However, some website builders limit the number of pages available on the free plan, which Weebly does not.
The custom domain and more advanced backend management are the main draws of Weebly’s paid plans, but the free plan includes everything you need to get started.
Even as a beginner, you should have no trouble building the entire site from start to finish. However, Weebly does provide the option of hiring a designer to build your site for you, beginning at $199.
Weebly Customer Service
All plans include chat and email support, but Professional and Performance also include phone support. In addition, the Premium plan includes priority support.
It’s worth noting that, aside from lower processing fees, this is the only feature that distinguishes the Premium plan. However, it stands to reason that higher transaction volumes will necessitate more complex and urgent support requests.
Bottom Line
Weebly is a strong contender among today’s no-code, drag-and-drop website builders. It unquestionably tops the list of free website and online store builders for providing the most functionality on a zero-cost plan.
Overall, if you’re creating your first website or need to get a new website up and running quickly without the help of a professional, we highly recommend Weebly. This is one of your best bets for a straightforward website that works flawlessly right out of the box. You can sign up and start building in minutes, so there’s no harm in giving it a try.