Creating a Weebly site is an easy task whether it is for personal or for your business. However, running a website on long term needs huge effort in terms of time and investment. Unfortunately, many users can’t spend consistent time or invest money and want to close their websites. Weebly offers multiple solutions to handle this situation and we will explain all possible options here.
Reasons for Site Deletion and Solutions in Weebly
Below are some of the reasons users want to delete a site or account with Weebly.
- Weebly allows users to create 10 sites per account. Sometimes you will be creating a test site for checking a feature or an app. This is normal among Weebly users as there is no option for previewing the page before publishing. Weebly editor will show the live preview for the CSS defined in the main stylesheet. But the style codes you insert using embed code element or in the header section can’t be previewed on the editor. It is not a good idea to play around on the live site in such cases, so the best option is to create a test site by copying the original site in minutes and check the features. When you have lot of test sites, you will quickly reach the limit of 10. So, you should delete the old test sites in order to create a new one.
- Another topic is that you really want to take down your live site for a while preventing users and search engines from accessing. It could be for a simple rearrangement of pages or for troubleshooting purposes. Merely hiding the site from search engines with robots.txt will not help here as users can access the site’s content using direct URLs. In such case Weebly offers un-publish option to take the entire site down.
- Finally, you may really want to delete the complete account and get rid of Weebly. It could be due to you are winding off the business and online presence or migrating to another platform like WordPress.
In this article we will explain all the available options for deleting a Weebly site, delete entire account and un-publish a site.
1. Deleting a Single Weebly Site
Login to your Weebly account and click the site list dropdown in your dashboard. This will show you the list of all available sites in your account.
Find the site you want to delete and click the three dots button as shown in the below picture.
You will see two options for copying or deleting your site and click “Delete Site” option.
You will be asked to confirm the deletion of the site as below. Click on the “Delete site” button to permanently delete the site from your Weebly account.
Generally, the sites will be instantly deleted and removed from the list. However, in certain cases deletion may take sometime when your size is larger in size. Remember, this is a permanent way of deleting the entire site with single click. There are no ways to get your content back if you have wrongly deleted your Weebly site.
2. Un-publishing and Re-publishing Weebly Site
As explained above, un-publish is an option available for site owners to take down the publicly available site from online to offline mode. The un-publish option is available inside Weebly site editor under “Settings > General” section. Scroll down to bottom of the “General” section and click on “Un-publish Site” button.
You will see a pop-up like below and confirm the action by clicking “Yes, un-publish” button.
Un-publishing a Weebly site will not delete any content from your site. The un-published site can again be re-published online at any point of time with the latest updated content. Accessing the un-published site will display a “404 – Page Not Found” error on the browser.
Remember, you will not see the “un-publish” button when your site is not published. Weebly will show you a message “The site is not currently published” and 404 error when you open the site in browser.
3. Deleting Weebly Account
Many users send us email asking for how to delete their Weebly account. In most cases, the website was managed by someone else and they want to delete after a long time. There are many possible scenarios when you want to delete Weebly account.
3.1. Have Access to Weebly Account
If you have the access to your Weebly account, it is an easy job to delete your account without anyone’s help.
- Login to your Weebly account and click on the site name on top right corner in your dashboard.
- Select “Account Settings” option to go to your account settings page.
- Click on “My Data” tab and click on “Erase Data & Forget Me” button.
- On the pop-up that appears, select “I understand ” and click “Erase data” link on top left.
You will receive a status email from Weebly with the subject line as “Weebly GDPR Requests” with the message mentioning Weebly will delete your personal data from their system as well with all associated third-parties. Weebly will also send you another email with the subject line as “GDPR Forget Completed” after completing the deletion request. This will permanently delete your Weebly account and delete all website data stored in your account. You will not be able to login to your account afterwards.
3.2. Know Your Email But Forgot Password
If you have login email but forgot the password, simply go to Weebly login page and click on the “Forgot Password” link.
You will see a reset password request page. Here you can provide your email and click on the “Send” button to get an instruction for resetting your password.
After getting your password, login to your account and follow the steps explained in the above method to delete your account.
3.3. Don’t Have Access to Weebly Account
If you do not have the email and password then the task is complicated. You can either create a post on public Weebly community forum asking for help. In most cases, the community manager will able to resolve your problem and delete your account. Alternatively, you can call Weebly’s help desk and ask them to delete your account by providing necessary details.
Points to Note:
Below are some of the points to consider when you want to delete Weebly site or account.
- If you only want to delete blog section from your site, then go to “Pages” tab. Select your blog page and delete it. This will delete all blog posts attached to that blog page.
- Weebly does not offer a trash bin and you have no option to recover the deleted content. Therefore, make sure to delete only if you know what your are doing.
- In case, if you want recover the account details, you can go to account recovery page and fill up the form to get help from Weebly. We recommend you connecting your social account with Weebly so that you do not need to use email for logging in. This will help to avoid forgetting the email or password of your Weebly account.
- Though there was an initiation to merge Weebly account with Square, as of now you can still login to Weebly account without Square account.
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