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.
I would like to backup my email to a separate location on my computer. How can I do this?
Thank you.
You can’t archive emails like Outlook PST files on most of the email services.
Not being able to back up my weebly site is a total ripoff! I spend real money by upgrading to the business level and can’t be protected. This is unethical!!! If Weebly can’t protect its paying customers, they should go out of business.
I have an archive listed on my blog at my Weebly website. It shows my posts from the last three years. How can I increase this?
I don’t understand the last editorial post.
How does it help with Data loss, if it can’t be restored?
If it can be used for migration, why can it be used to create a new site?
You can’t upload the archive back in Weebly. But you can use the content to create a new site with different platform other than Weebly.
I had a website with Weebly but cancelled it due to stopping the business for a while. I do have a backup of the site and am going back into that business. Can I use my saved backup to get my old site back when joining Weebly again?
No, you can’t restore the site from the backup. The only way is to copy / paste and recreate again.
Hi there, interested to know more about back up options. few questions:
– if I give access to my website to another email address as administrator and my account gets deleted by weebly, will the site be deleted on the shared account as well?
– It used to be possible to make a copy of the site via the old dashboard but i cant find it anymore, did this disappear as well?
Thanks!
Your site will be deleted everywhere as other admin can only see the site which is still under your account (it is not hosted in two different places with the same domain).
Yes, it is possible to make a copy from the dashboard. However, you can’t copy blog/product pages.
I have the paid store and just realized I cannot backup my products. Will probably find a new service because this is a crazy oversight.
We run multiple sites on Weebly for past many years and did not realize the need of backup any time. But when things are messed up (either by Weebly or you or client or admins) you definitely need a backup to restore the site quickly. It is also questionable and surprising to have a site without backup features even for an eCommerce plan of $25 per month (current rate).
I’m trying to use the free Weebly builder and am looking for the Archive under General in Settings. It doesn’t exist for me. Sounds like it’s pretty useless anyway, but am I missing something, or is this really not an option for the free version (even though it says it is)?
Archive option should appear for all Weebly users including free users. If it is really not appearing on your site then submit a ticket to Weebly and get it clarified.
for me the archieve option doesn’t even work
This is unbelievable. I just started building a large blog on Weebly Pro with more than 500 posts. Now I find that there is no way to back up the site (as a backup, not a text dump)? How can any developer use this platform for building customer websites? What happens if they get in, and screw up their site? What I screw up their site?
This is the problem with Weebly and most free hosting companies, think of migrating to better platforms at least at this moment.
Re: backups: weebly lets you easily make a “copy” of a site, even on free accounts. It’s not a backup that you can store somewhere outside of weebly, but it does mean that I have got an original copy to go back to if something gets screwed up.
No doubt its good to have a content backup on your local drive. Unfortunately it’s of no use unless you can use it for restoring if not outside Weebly at least within Weebly. Moreover you can’t backup blog posts even to local drive.
One scenario – what would happen if you accidentally deleted the blog page (under “Pages” tab)? Your complete blog posts will be wiped off with no option to get it back from the whole world.
I have a big blog created with Weebly, is there a way to backup the entire blog?
There is no default way to backup Weebly blog post. If you are planning for migration then use feed readers to extract data of recent 10 posts. Then delete last 10 posts and continue the same.
It looks very funny that we can’t restore the backup again to Weebly, then what’s the use of backup?
Backup is mainly for data loss & migration, otherwise it can’t be used as it is.