Weebly: The Ultimate Website Builder

Weebly is a drag-and-drop website builder that is increasingly becoming a popular alternative to massive content management systems like WordPress.  The platform currently has about 30 million users, and the company pitches that it is “surprisingly easy to create a high-quality website, blog or online store” with Weebly. This site builder was recommended to me by many of my colleagues, so I went about and tested what Weebly can actually do, compared to what everyone else says it can do. Read ahead for my review of Weebly.

At-a-Glance

Weebly, like most of its competitors, has a free basic plan for users. Weebly users do not require any prior technical knowledge of coding for the web and such, which is an advantage over a CMS like Drupal. Anyone can sign up with a valid email. I chose the free plan to test it, and signing up was easy. The hardest part was deciding on a web address. Because I was using the free account, I got a mysite.weebly.com domain.

Ease of Use

Once I chose my web address, I was prompted to choose a theme. Weebly has a good collection of free and paid themes. Their free themes are stylish, and did not come off as cheap or out of fashion. With a little bit of customization, a free Weebly theme could be used for life.

Once I chose the theme, I was directed to Weebly’s website building interface. Basically, on my right-hand side was the web template I was customizing, and on the left was an options bar with buttons clearly indicating things I could tinker with, such as title, text and image.

Weebly is a drag-and-drop website builder as mentioned above, so everything was easy as dragging and dropping. For example, I wanted to add a photo gallery to my site, so I dragged the “gallery” button on the menu and dropped it on the template where I wanted the gallery. And voila, it was done and all I left to do was to upload pictures from my computer. I could easily customize as I wished from then on and include videos, comments sections and add-on features like online shopping cart software.

I found Weebly extremely easy to use, even more so than initially suggested. I didn’t have to go through tutorials; I was building a website soon as I signed up.

Pricing

Those who want to graduate from the basic plan can use paid plans starting from 8 USD per month. Domain registration is free for one year, and after that it costs 19.95 USD per year. This is a temptingly affordable option compared to many others currently available.

Compared to the Competition

Weebly is easy to use, comes with attractive themes, and is affordable. So how does it compare with the other popular CMSs? Weebly is on largely equal grounds with other drag-and-drop builders like Wix and Squarespace. It’s far more easy to use than WordPress or Drupal, but does not offer the same variety of features or community support.

All in all, I think Weebly is a great website builder for beginners. Professionals will find that Weebly lacks advanced features necessary for certain sites, and the ability to change code is limited. Therefore, Weebly is highly recommended for amateur users who want to build least-demanding sites.

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