Weebly Review: Is It The Right Website Builder for You?

Weebly is an easy-to-use website builder suitable for beginners and anyone wanting to set up a website for free.

Ever since Square acquired it, Weebly has also become a decent option for anyone who wants to set up an online store for a low cost.

With a free tier that includes robust eCommerce functionality and many themes and apps, you might wonder if building a Weebly site is the right option for you.

We are here to answer that question. As seasoned experts in the website-building industry, we’ve spent countless hours analyzing and comparing different platforms. n our in-depth Weebly review, we’ll unveil the pros, cons, features, pricing, and the types of websites Weebly is ideally suited for in 2026.

Weebly: A Quick Overview

Weebly is one of the largest website builders on the market, with more than 50 million websites built on its platform.

Weebly website builder was founded in 2006 and was acquired by Square in 2018. Since the acquisition, Weebly website builder has placed a large focus on offering an affordable way for people to set up commerce solutions for selling online or within a retail environment.

Compared with other eCommerce platforms, like Shopify or BigCommerce, you can get started with your online store for free with their website builder’s lowest plan. It offers very decent features, which is why we’ve crowned it as the best free website builder.

However, you can also create and publish many other types of websites using Weebly Builder, even if you don’t need the eCommerce functionality.

We’ll be covering the full range of themes and design features Weebly builder offers later on.

Here’s a quick snapshot of how it stacked up in our research and testing.

Our Review

However, since the acquisition, we have noticed a significant decline in developer resources and a slower rollout of new features.

Some features also are a little outdated with many of Weebly’s competitors having upped the ante and improved the web design experience for beginners in the years Weebly has been lagging behind.

However, there are still instances where it makes sense to use Weebly over any other website builder for free websites.

This website builder is ideally suited to anyone with a limited budget who will be running a small website or online store that they don’t intend on scaling too much.

Weebly offers a range of decent features on the free plan.

Even its lowest-paid plan offers comparable functionality to builders with prices starting at five times what Weebly charges!

Suffice it to say, Weebly builder is a top choice for the budget conscious and for beginners who need a simple solution.

Next, let’s dive into its pros and cons so you can decide if Weebly’s pros give you what you need and that its cons aren’t going to be deal-breakers.

1. Ease Of Use & Simplicity

Right off the bat, the first thing that has made the biggest impression on us is Weebly’s ease of use and simplicity.

From choosing a pricing plan through to setting up your website, it’s hassle-free every step of the way.

With a very simple and easy-to-understand pricing structure, beginners can feel at ease from the moment they decide which plan is best for them.

Even building a website is very intuitive, thanks to Weebly’s drag-and-drop website editor.

You can also easily add snippets of code to the website if you ever need to.

In addition, Weebly offers a number of helpful step-by-step guides in its support center.

You can find advice on coding, search engine optimization, and tips on boosting your site’s visibility online.

Stay tuned for more details on all of these features (and more) later in this article.

2. Free Tier & Value for Money on Paid Plans

There’s a reason we crowned Weebly as the best platform for building a free website when we reviewed the top website builders on the market.

Not only can beginners get their website online without spending a fortune, but Weebly is also quite generous with the features it enables in its free tier, especially for online stores.

Perhaps the only downside to the free tier is that there will be an ad placement showing on your website.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing when you consider that Weebly offers great value for money even on it’s paid tiers.

For instance, all its paid tiers are priced considerably lower than competitors.

Yet Weebly offers features that many website builders don’t.

3. Full eCommerce Options

Since the acquisition by Square, Weebly’s core focus has been on offering simple commerce solutions for selling online or in a retail environment.

That’s why, even on its free plan, Weebly offers a full set of eCommerce features with no limits on how many products you can list for sale on your website.

Nor does it charge you a commission on every sale. You can list as many products as you like, and you get to keep all the money on those sales!

Sounds simple, but you’d be surprised how many website builders don’t offer these features.

4. Can Build Larger Websites

A pleasant and rather unexpected surprise is Weebly builder’s ability to handle larger websites. We built over 150 pages on our test account with no problem. Many other drag-and-drop website builders cannot easily manage large sites.

For instance, both Wix and Squarespace are not designed to help you manage a website with a lot of content on it. Thankfully, Weebly is, so you have no limitations on the size of your website.

5. Can Switch Themes Easily

If you’ve tried out different website builders in the past, you may have experienced a situation where in order to change your website’s theme, you have to rebuild your website from scratch.

It’s been a thorn in the side of many website owners! However, with Weebly website builder, you can easily switch your theme without the stress or expense that comes with rebuilding your site from the ground up. Phew, dodged a bullet there!

6. Impressive App Store

Weebly has over 360 applications you can connect to your website through the App Center.

We are impressed by the variety of functionality available, including:

Not to mention, over 56 of these apps are completely free, and the rest are priced very reasonably.

7. Limited Design Features

All the merit Weebly earns for its ease of use it loses due to a lack of flexibility and limited design features.

There’s a fine balance between having an easy-to-use website builder that’s intuitive even for beginners and the amount of flexibility it can offer.

As a result, Weebly’s design features are pretty restrictive and can be frustrating for anyone seeking creative freedom.

If you want a website that will really stand out online, Weebly is not the best place to turn to.

8. Weebly Ad (Even On Paid Plans)

When it comes to the internet, if it sounds too good to be true, it typically is. Although Weebly offers a great range of features on its free and paid plans, there’s a pretty big hidden caveat.

Weebly will display its logo on your website if you use the free or Personal (paid) plan.

It doesn’t make sense to us why the ad would still show up on a paid plan, but alas, it does. The two most expensive plans are ad-free.

9. Hardly Any New Feature Releases

Since Weebly’s acquisition by Square, we’ve noticed a steady decline in the attention and resources that have gone into improving its functionality and user experience.

As such, there aren’t really any new feature releases or updates to the platform compared with other leading website-building platforms on the market.

For instance, there haven’t been any announcements for new features in 2023 in Weebly’s product development blog[1].

10. Somewhat Outdated UI & Features

To follow on from the above, since there haven’t been a lot of feature updates, the user interface and the user experience can feel a little outdated now.

With the rapid development pace of its competitors, Weebly is lagging far behind and does not offer cutting-edge solutions.

Its biggest advantage is that (at least for now) you can get started for free and with no strings if you’re ok with the limitations that come with its platform.

11. Not Very Scalable

While you can easily build hundreds of pages on your Weebly site, it’s not really a scalable solution for businesses or websites that are experiencing high growth.

Due to the neglect from the development side, you’ll find that you will quickly outgrow Weebly’s feature set and its limitations will become too restrictive to take your business to the level you want.

We also wouldn’t consider Weebly a great option for large online stores.

Although in theory there are no limits to how many products you can add and how many pages you build, there are a number of challenges that come with large online stores and Weebly is not equipped to handle them.

12. Not Suited For International Websites

If you’re building an international website with more than one language, you’ll struggle with Weebly.

Although there are a few third-party apps you can use, Weebly doesn’t really offer a great way for you to build a site with multiple languages that is also SEO-friendly (so all your content can be found in search engines for users all over the world).

There are currently about 20 languages other than English that Weebly supports, but you’ll need to use workaround methods to create a multi-lingual site.

And even then, non-English character sets are not supported for languages like Arabic, Russian or Chinese.

Not to mention that Weebly also automatically blocks all traffic from certain countries like Russia, Ukraine and China.

13. Poor SEO Performance

If you’re seeking the best SEO performance for your website so it can rank competitively, Weebly is no friend to you.

SEO is a type of marketing that enables your website to be found in search engines like Google. It involves a number of technical aspects that, when it comes to Weebly, are simply not offered.

For example, with most people now using a mobile device to browse the web, it’s important for your website to be mobile-friendly.

However, Weebly’s mobile formatting is quite underwhelming.

Issues like this will impact your site’s ability to show up in search results.

Other limitations also include:

Outside of very basic on-page SEO features, Weebly doesn’t offer much to help your site rank competitively in search engines.

Weebly Website Builder Plans

So now you know the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to Weebly. If you’ve decided that Weebly is still worth considering for your project, let’s dive deeper into the features and tools of the actual website builder.

Free Plan

You can start building a website right now for the low, low price of your email address and password!

Three aren’t a great deal of free website builders around that offer as much as Weebly does.

You will access:

Naturally, there are also a few limitations including:

Paid Plan

In comparison, on all of Weebly’s paid plans, you can unlock unlimited monthly data transfers.

However, the Personal plan is still rather limited.

It starts at only $6 per month but even with your payment, the Weebly and Square ads are not removed.

You also do not get unlimited storage.

If you’re thinking of building an online store or a business website, it’s worth considering either the Professional or Performance plans instead.

These offer the best value for money and are competitively priced compared to other website builders like Shopify, Wix and Squarespace.

On the top two plans, you’ll get everything in the Personal and Free plans, plus:

Plus these extra goodies on the Performance plan only:

If your budget allows, we recommend the Performance plan as the best value for money with Weebly.

It is cheaper than most other eCommerce platforms and offers decent features to get your store off the ground.

However, if you want a platform that grows with you, Weebly is not it.

Even on the highest plan, you will quickly outgrow its features.

Who Is Weebly Best Suited to?

If you’re worried about whether Weebly is suitable for the type of website you’re building, let’s take a look at that next.

1. Weebly for Small Businesses

If you’re launching a new small business, and you want to get started with a very low cost, Weebly cost is perfectly suited to your needs.

In fact, businesses are Weebly’s main target audience!

We would recommend considering either the Professional or Performance plans so that you remove the advertisements and get a custom domain name that matches your brand.

If you use the free plan, you will not be able to have a branded domain name.

Instead, it will be like mybrand.weebly.com, and you won’t be able to remove “weebly.com” unless you pay.

Putting that aside, however, you can save yourself thousands of dollars by using a professional Weebly theme and creating a simple website that gets your business online.

Not to mention the seamless integrations with Square’s payment suite, and you can start accepting payments online and offline through the same system.

Weebly has some big limitations that can prevent your website from scaling as you need it to.

2. Weebly for Ecommerce

Since Square acquired Weebly, it has focused a lot of its attention on supporting businesses that want to sell online and offline.

It’s worth noting that Square also offers an eCommerce solution called Square Online, which is the logical choice for anyone who needs more features than Weebly can offer.

However, Square’s pricing is significantly more expensive than Weebly’s, not to mention a transaction fee of 2.9% + 30c on every sale you make.

Between the two, Weebly is certainly more affordable and doesn’t charge you for every sale. It’s just a matter of how big you want to grow your eCommerce store and whether you’re ok with Weebly’s limitations.

3. Weebly for Retail Stores

Thanks to Square’s unique point-of-sale payment processor, retail stores can now seamlessly make sales online and offline.

So if you’re looking for a website platform that gives that seamlessness, Weebly may be perfect for you.

Whether you sell in a brick-and-mortar store or at events like markets, if you’re keeping things small and local, Weebly is perfect for your needs.

Not to mention how much simpler it is to keep all your sales and financial data in one place as Square allows you to do!

Say goodbye to the hassles of managing multiple payment processors for your online and offline sales.

4. Weebly for Personal Websites & Portfolios

Weebly is also an excellent choice for personal websites, CVs and portfolios.

It’s easy enough that you can build your own site from scratch fairly quickly.

Plus, it has a number of dedicated themes specifically for personal or portfolio-style sites.

Since your use case is also more casual than someone who needs to build a business website, you might also be ok with the free domain name Weebly gives you on its free plan, so you won’t even need to pay a cent!

Here are just some of the features that make Weebly a popular choice for personal and portfolio sites:

However, if you’re an artist or creative who wishes to create a portfolio that dazzles, you might find that Weebly web builder is too limited to allow you the creative expression you might be craving.

We suggest checking out Webflow or Squarespace for visually stunning designs that make a statement.

5. Weebly for Blogging

Weebly has been a long-standing platform of choice for many bloggers all over the world. It’s a solid and affordable option with some decent blogging features for beginners[2]. Their Weebly app center is pretty solid.

But it’s worth noting that it’s not the best platform for blogging out there.

Our top choice is WordPress and that’s what we use for all of our websites due to its flexibility and customizability.

By comparison, Weebly is far too limited for bloggers that want complete creative control.

However, if you’re new to the world of building websites and you just want an easy, simple solution to get your blog out of your head and onto the internet, Weebly is worthwhile.

Weebly’s blogging tools include:

6. Weebly for Basic Membership Websites

If you’re seeking to create a website with content that is hidden only for members, Weebly’s Professional and Performance plans may be of interest.

As with the other types of websites above, you will likely run into limitations so we don’t suggest Weebly as a suitable choice if you want to run a large membership community.

But if you already have a Weebly site or you’re after a simple DIY option to reserve certain pages for your members, Weebly can offer you those features.

Not only can you restrict certain pages, you can also allow specific individuals or groups of members to access any area of your website you like.

It’s worth noting, though, that there is no native functionality that allows you to offer paid membership plans, unlike what Wix and Squarespace offer.

Also, if you have an online store, you can’t have both your customer accounts and members area active at the same time.

Even so, there are better solutions out there for running a full-scale membership site.

Weebly is a decent choice for a low-cost, low-feature option to restrict some of your content, but that’s just about it.