Taking backup of entire site is one of the most important tasks for any website owners. You can use the backup in emergency situation to restore site’s content. Backup is also important for migrating to other platforms and to avoid the fear of content loss. Especially, with a free site builders like Weebly it is essential to backup your site. Because there are possibilities of the site being deleted due to violation in terms of services which is applicable for both free and premium users. So, here is how you can backup your Weebly site and have peace of mind.
How to Backup Your Weebly Site?
Login to your Weebly account and edit the site you want to backup. In the site editor navigate to “Settings > General” section.
Enter your email id under “Archive” section and click on “Email Archive” button. The backup process will take some time depending on the size of your site. When the content is backed up, Weebly will send a notification to the mentioned email address along with a complete backup as a .zip archive file. Click on “Download .zip archive” button in your email to get the backup on your computer.
Downloading Recent Backups
In addition to downloading backup from email, you can also download recent exports from your Weebly account. Again, login back to your account and go to site editor. Navigate to “Settings > General” section and check under “Archive” section. There you can find the backups under “Recent Exports”. Weebly will keep the last three backups under “Recent Exports” which you can download by clicking on the corresponding link.
Weebly Backup Issues
Though it is easy to export the backup archive in Weebly, there are some problems associated with Weebly backup. Unfortunately, the archive is not a complete backup solution and site owners should aware of this fact to avoid unforeseen scenario after building a large site with Weebly.
- Backed up .zip file can’t be uploaded back into another Weebly site, which defeats the very purpose of backup.
- If you have a problem with current version of your site, then the only way is to copy paste the content from your backup which is really time consuming if the site is larger in size.
- Blog posts can’t be backed up. This is the reason why people should be away from using Weebly for blogging; later migrating to another platform will become a real issue. Any unindented deletion of blog posts will result in irreversible content loss.
- Site backup will have all images, which are not part of the published site. For example, you might have uploaded an image “example.png” and resized it to fit on your layout. In this case, Weebly stores two images – one is your original image and the another is with the modified size. Though the original image is not the one displayed on published site it will be still available with the backed up content. If you want to migrate your Weebly site to any other platform, then you first need to cleanup the “uploads” folder in the backup under which all images are stored. This is not an easy task when you have thousands of images.
- You can’t backup product pages. Hence, think twice before creating an online store with Weebly platform.
Other Options to Consider
There are two options you can consider when comes to backing up your Weebly site.
- Copy site – you can copy and duplicate the entire site and keep it in your account without publishing. Since this is a manual action, you need to do this manually whenever needed. In addition, Weebly restricts 10 sites per account. So, you should delete the old copied site before duplicating the latest version. If required, you can unpublish the original site and point the duplicate site to your domain name and make it a live site.
- Using Third-Party Tools – there are third-party apps like Sitesucker for macOS which you can use to download the complete Weebly site. The advantage is that you can get all your blog posts and product pages.
The problem with first option is that the content will be still on the same Weebly server. You may loss the content in case of any problem with your Weebly account. And the second option is only for keeping your content offline without any option to import back to Weebly site.
Final Words
The default Weebly backup includes all pages including blog index page and store page. However, you will not get individual blog posts and product pages in the backup. You also can’t upload the content back on your site from Weebly account. So, all what you can do with the exported ZIP file is to simply extract and keep the image and HTML content of pages for offline reference. This essentially means, you can create a small business website with Weebly but not a large blog. If you are planning for a large blog with hundreds of thousands of pages, then consider using self-hosted WordPress platform. You will have a complete control of backup and restoration process as it needs a paid hosting service.
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