Weebly gets it done well
March 14, 2016

Weebly gets it done well

Robert Allen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Weebly

Many clients with limited needs and limited budgets require a simple, professional-looking website they can easily manage themselves. Weebly is the best solution for this. We are able to create a professional website in a fraction of the time with Weebly, which can grow in a few specific ways to fit client needs. Weebly is not our only tool, and certainly not our most common platform, but it is the most effective, usable, and capable drag-and-drop website builder we have tried.
  • The greatest strength of Weebly is the split design interface. The primary design method is graphical, drag-and-drop. The secondary design method is direct hands-on management of the CSS. This combination means we can get to launch far faster, without sacrificing customization.
  • One feature Weebly had which no competitors could match was enabling SSL for ecommerce sites. Where most competitors give a 'shared' SSL which exposes the platform's URL during the checkout stage, Weebly enables site-specific SSL, so your customers never leave your site.
  • Weebly's ease of management is less unique, but should be mentioned. Every object is managed in context, so the learning curve for clients who wish to self-manage is incredibly short. We are able to hand off the site confidently with just one or two brief training sessions.
  • Weebly's pricing structure leaves plenty of room for improvement. Their Pro and Business tiers should be combined, as the overlap is significant and often confuses clients.
  • The inability to expand my account to handle all 18 client sites under one account is frustrating. We are forced to have two separate logins and set both accounts as editors for all sites on each account, instead of just paying double the annual fee and getting all the sites together.
  • The inability to shift a client's site from 'white label' to group management is terribly irritating.
  • The default themes are fairly limited in style and do not always directly follow modern design trends, making matching client desires more difficult.
  • I can build two nearly identical sites, one on Weebly and one on the market leader CMS, and the difference in build time is staggering. Weebly takes approximately 5% as long to build.
  • As far as I know, Weebly servers have not gone down once in five years. Surely they must have, but it has never been reported. The uptime and security are magnificent, which means I never get angry calls from clients. That counts for a lot.
  • Servicing Weebly sites is much easier, faster, and less labor-intensive than the industry leading CMS, which means we can manage sites for lower-budget clients and still make a profit.
Squarespace is an underpowered and less-intuitive version of Weebly, which requires your customers go to site.Squarespace.com to finish the checkout process. This is absolutely unacceptable and I would never recommend anyone use them because of this alone, so no other comparisons matter.
WordPress is incredible because of the community around it. Tens of thousands of actively supported plugins and themes with breathtaking complexity are available for very small sums, and WordPress is the platform which keeps these extensions playing well together. That said, WordPress is too powerful for some clients or would exceed some client budgets.
Drupal is monstrous to implement, terrible to use, frustrating to modify mid-build, and is far outside the realm of self-management by clients, requiring an on-call development house handles even minor changes. There is nearly no situation I would recommend using Drupal.
Weebly is great if a client needs a simple site very quickly and doesn't want any hassle. I have previously prototyped a client website in just 20 minutes using Weebly, which won us the contract.

For future extensibility, advanced functionality, or complex site builds, I do not use Weebly.

Square Online Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
10
Code quality / cleanliness
10
Admin section
10
Page templates
9
Library of website themes
8
Mobile optimization / responsive design
10
Publishing workflow
10
Form generator
7
SEO support
5
Bulk management
3
Availability / breadth of extensions
Not Rated
Community / comment management
Not Rated
API
Not Rated
Internationalization / multi-language
Not Rated
Not Rated

Evaluating Weebly and Competitors

  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
I wanted a highly capable product which would get a simple site online quickly and easily, which would be mobile responsive and easily managed. Weebly was the best-looking option around.
My feelings toward Weebly have improved in the years since becoming a customer. This platform has met all of my expectations and even in my recent reviews of competing products I've concluded that Weebly is still the best of the bunch.