3 minutes reading
In a nutshell:
- 1.1 Background information
- 1.2 Overview of key data - advantages and disadvantages
- 1.3 Who is Weebly for?
- 1.4 What sets Weebly apart from the rest?
With the growth of e-commerce, a number of platforms are being developed to create online shops. One such platform is Weebly, which we will take a closer look at in this article. We will analyse its advantages and disadvantages to help you decide if it is the right option for your business.
What is Weebly?
Weebly is American platform for easy creation of websites and online shops. With a simple and flexible editor and multilingual help, it takes less than an hour to create a stylish website. Weebly is one of the most recognisable creators on the market, constantly attracting new customers. A testament to its popularity is that more than fifty million pages uses this platform.
Basic information
| Software | Commercial |
| Country of origin | USA |
| Year of issue | 2006 |
| Access to source code | Not |
Overview of key data - advantages and disadvantages
| Price | ❌ (a shop can be created for free, but you have to buy a package to publish it) |
| Hosting included in the price | ❌ |
| Security | ✅ |
| integration with accounting systems | ✅ |
| Sharing on social media | ✅ |
| Running a blog | ❌(no blog module after clean installation) |
| Implementation of change | ❌(hampered) |
| Integration with payment systems | ❌(Payments via PayPal are available in paid packages) |
| Implementation of promotions and discounts | ✅ |
| Possibility of selling virtual products | ❌ (in paid packages) |
| Shipping cost calculator | ✅ |
| Basket recovery | ✅ |
| Differentiation of product variants | ✅ |
| Search and filtering | ✅ |
| Returns management | ✅ |
| Technical support | ❌(available in paid packages, otherwise only via chat and email through which it is difficult to contact) |
| SSL certificate | ✅ |
| Automatic sitemap | ❌ |
| Editable 404 page | ❌ |
| Manual 301 redirections | ❌ |
| Mobile friendly | ✅ |
| Editing of URLs | ✅ |
| Making advanced technical changes | ❌ |
The pros and cons of having a shop on Weebly from an angle:
SEO: Basic SEO on Weebly may be sufficient for many businesses, but the bigger drawback may be that the platform has a headline restriction of H2 only. In order to use headers up to H6, you need to use the app, but this can interfere with the formatting of the page. Additionally, there is no option to create a sitemap or robots.txt file.
Maintenance costs: An online shop on Weebly can be created for free, but a package must be purchased to publish it. The platform offers three packages: Personal-$10/month, billed annually or $13/month; Professional-$12/month, billed annually or $16/month; Performance-$26/month, billed annually or $29/month.
Business scalability: Scaling a business on Weebly can be difficult due to limitations in SEO, support and template personalisation. Additionally, there may be issues with creating pages in some languages. For growing businesses, platforms that offer advanced e-commerce features may be more suitable.
Who is Weebly for?
| Shop up to 1000 products | ✅ |
| Shop up to 10 000 products | ❌ |
| Shop up to 100,000 products | ❌ |
| Shop 100,000 products and more | ❌ |
Weebly is a platform aimed mainly at small online shops.
What makes Weebly stand out from the rest?
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- Ease of setting up shop
The platform offers one of the most intuitive and simple solutions. Creating a shop is very quick and will not cause anyone any problems.
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- Security
Weebly provides effective SSL encryption on all its plans, including the free version. However, users need to manage backup and restore themselves. Currently, many save files in ZIP format.
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- Access to website statistics
Weebly's site statistics allow users to track data and traffic to the site.
Examples of shops built on Weebly
Below you will find examples of shops created on Weebly.
Douk Snow shop
Wall-in shop
LoveSeat shop
Source: weebly.com/themes#vertical/onlinestore, visible.com/blog/view-platform-cms/
Is it worth choosing Weebly: Our opinion
Certainly the popularity of Weebly is due to great ease of use, However, it does not offer much scope in many other respects. You cannot count on creating a customised solution, whereas SEO is not at the highest level. Creating a professional shop is not easy on this platform, in case of any difficulties it is hard to contact technical support. The problem is bound another disadvantageas we have no way of going back to the previous version of the page. If we publish something unintentional, we will have to report directly to support, with whom there is little contact. In addition, users complain about the small number of suitable graphics and photos to add variety to our shop.
Although Weebly is easy to use, the platform does not provide such simple shop management. Quickly creating a template solution may be convenient, but it is not necessarily sufficient to run a shop effectively.
If you want to compare Weebly with other platforms you can read our other articles:
Read the article: Review of WooCommerce - Creating a 2024 shop
Read the article: Review of Shopify - Creating a 2024 shop
Read the article: Review of Sote - Creating a shop 2024
