Top Weebly Alternatives and Overview

Good: Ease of use, blogging and social media integration, great templates, cloud hosting, mobile editing, HTML5 support, no ads, free sub-domains, export or archiving.

Bad: No backup history, no SSL support, No third party apps to extend website features.

Overall: A perfect option for those looking for creating and hosting a business or personal site without much technical knowledge.

Weebly was launched in 2007. The company quickly grew and now hosts more than 20 million websites. Like many other platforms, They offers freemium pricing model where users can create free website on webbly sub domain and upgrade to premium plans according to their need.

Weebly is a user-friendly website builder that allows building a site as well as managing the content on it. It has recently rebuilt its control panel to offer a modern and flexible platform to create as well as maintain a site. Although the panel looks improved and the social media and cloud integration is tempting, there are not many security services on offer. Despite this, Weebly has never failed to satisfy the Web owners.

Different Packages

There are four different plans on offer: Free, Starter, Pro and Business. The Free plan comes with all basic features such as 10MB file storage and customizable header, you are not allowed to create more than 5 pages and can host websites only on weebly's sub domains. The Starter plan comes with custom branding options, premium support, and extended site stats with limitation to create upto 10 sub pages for a website. Lastly, the Pro plan offers value-added features such as HD Video player, full site search, header slideshows, and 250 MB file storage limit.

Business plan offers all the standard features along with unlimited pages creation, Option to build membership website with unlimited members and much more.

Features

Weebly is suitable for small businesses, personal website owners, photographers, and online stores. It is ideal for creating an attractive and functional site in least time and with least efforts. As mentioned above you can expect different features according to plan you select.

Some of the notable features includes site planner, built-in analytics, option to create photo or video websites and cloud hosting.

The Drag-n-Drop Editor

Weebly offers a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor that allows previewing the site at the time of building it. This preview is exactly what your visitors will see when the site is published. Thanks to the drag and drop functionality via which you literally drag the building elements and drop them onto your screen! The biggest benefit of such an interface is that you do not have to write any code. 

Further, you have only the useful components to choose; there are no fancy goodies to distract or confuse you.  As a result, Weebly is among the most intuitive and easy to use builders.

Mobile Optimization

You will surely love the Mobile Optimization power of Weebly via which you can automatically compress the site to fit on a mobile display. The mobile website builders also comes with drag and drop ability along with the preview feature make the mobile editor very friendly. The editor can design websites mobile and tablelet versions of website with the ease. They also offer readily available mobile templates.

SEO and Social Media

You can expect all basic SEO elements such as meta descriptions, keywords, descriptions, and titles for all your Web pages. Further, there is support for Google Analytics that helps tracking your site as well as visitor statistics. Alternatively, you will find a site statistic dashboard that allows monitoring page views and unique visitors. This one acts much like a built-in site analytic tool.

In addition, Weebly allows you to blog and manage social media promotion on several sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest. In short, search engine giants such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo will surely like your Weebly site.

Hosting

Weebly hosts all sites on cloud infrastructure even if you have a free account. Interestingly, your site take the benefit of cloud hosting that is scalable enough to meet your changing needs of hosting.

Mobile Apps to Manage Sites

The platform offers its users to manage websites from iPad, iPhone or Android devices. The app features includes payment or order tracking, blogging or visitor analytics. The apps are available for all their free and pain users.

eCommerce Features

Users can start their online store using weebly's ecommerce features. With free plan, users can add upto 5 products on their online store while for business plan, three is no limit on number of products allowed and access to many other ecommerce features. You can sell digital goods (like software or ebooks) using their business plan. It also offers advanced tools such as inventory management, coupon code support, custom checkout domain, shipping calculator and more.

Conclusion

Weebly has enough features to attract business people for creating dynamic pages. However, it lacks advanced or complicated components. An App store is really a much to connect third party applications with ease.

Company Name: Weebly, Inc.

Company Address: 460 Bryant Street, San Francisco, CA, USA

Founded in: 2006