Weebly became popular with their drag and drop website builder. They offer various services through Weebly.com website. However, many popular hosting companies also offer Weebly site builder as part of their portfolio. For example, SiteGround is the popular shared hosting company for WordPress websites and is also one of the recommended web hosts by WordPress.org community. Besides their WordPress business they also offer a white labeled site builder from Weebly. In this article we will discuss step by step instructions on how to install Weebly on SiteGround hosted domain or subdomain. We will also explain how to uninstall Weebly files and revert back your WordPress website.
Why to Consider Weebly on SiteGround?
Using Weebly.com is always the best option for getting ay latest updates from them. However, hosting on SiteGround can give you the following advantages:
- You can use WordPress and Weebly together on the same domain like one app on primary domain and other on subdomain or subdirectory.
- It helps to manage all your content under single umbrella and manage them effectively.
- When you use caching and CDN services like Cloudflare, it is easy to add the entire site including all installed apps.
- Unlike Weebly on Bluehost, SiteGround has the latest Weebly platform and make the integration worth of trying.
Install Weebly on SiteGround
SiteGround offers shared hosting account for as low as $3.99 per month. You can host WordPress, Weebly, phpBB or any other content management systems or static files on SiteGround servers. In order to access Weebly on SiteGround, first login to your SiteGround hosting account. Remember, you can’t access your Weebly site through Weebly.com and you need to login through SiteGround every time to access the site builder. Alternatively, you can use weeblycloud.com to login to your site using SiteGround credentials.
- After login to your hosting account, go to “Websites” section.
- Click on “Site Tools” button showing below the site in which you want to install Weebly.
- When you are in “Site Tools” section, click on “App Installer” option which is the last option available under “Dev” section.
- Select “Weebly” from the “Application” dropdown and choose the “Free” plan.
- Now you can install free Weebly plan on your domain.
- After successful installation, you will find the domain is added under “Managed Installations” section at the bottom of the page.
- Click on “Login” icon to go to Weebly Cloud website and start editing your site.
If the domain already have content with WordPress or static index.html file then all the existing content will be deleted once you install Weebly on it. So, if you are planning to test the Weebly builder then create a subdomain or use separate add-on domain to install Weebly.
Building Your Site With Weebly
When you click on the login icon, you will land on the Weebly Cloud platform dashboard.
Click on the “Edit Site” button to go to Weebly site editor interface. Below is how the site editor will look with Weebly and SiteGround logo on the top left corner. You can just drag and drop elements and start building your website. Remember, unlike a WordPress site, you need to publish the whole Weebly site for every modification to make the changes online.
SiteGround uses the latest drag and drop editor from Weebly Cloud as an integrated site builder. It has all the features offered by Weebly.com free account except Weebly App Center. You can upgrade to premium plans for accessing App Center with SiteGround Weebly editor. Nevertheless, default Weebly elements are sufficient to have a decent website. If you are looking for Weebly tutorials, we have one of the largest collection on web for free Weebly tutorial articles including free Weebly widgets, SEO guide and Weebly tips and tricks.
Weebly Pricing Plans on SiteGround
You can check out various Weebly pricing plans and features comparison in our earlier article. However, the pricing plans from SiteGround are cheaper than the ones offered on Weebly.com. For example, the Pro plan on Weebly.com will cost you $12 per month when paid annually. The same Pro plan will cost you $11.58 per monthly basis in SiteGround.
How to Uninstall Weebly on SiteGround?
Now that you know how to install Weebly on SiteGround. Sometimes you need to recover the domain or subdomain for installing other packages like WordPress. Unfortunately, SiteGround does not offer one click solution for uninstalling Weebly. You need to manually delete the files to cleanup the domain. If you have WordPress previously on the same domain, it is easy to revert back to WordPress. However, if you have static index.html file then Weebly installation will delete the index.html file. You need to restore the file from backup or create a new one.
Follow the below instructions to delete or uninstall Weebly in SiteGround hosting server.
Step #1 – Un-publish Weebly Site
- First step is to unpublish your Weebly site. Login to your Weebly site and navigate to “Settings > General” section.
- Scroll down to the bottom and click on “Un-publish Site” button to make your site offline.
- Un-publishing your site will delete the index.html file on your domain. So, if you access your site now, it will show either 403 permission error or 500 internet server error.
Step #2 – Delete htaccess Directives
Weebly will add lot of files on your domain when you install. You need to have a FTP account to check the root of your domain. If you don’t have a FTP account, learn how to create a FTP account in SiteGround cPanel.
- Login to your FTP account using software like FileZilla.
- Edit .htaccess file in the root of your domain and delete the content under #Weebly Additions Start section.
- Ensure not to delete other content in your .htaccess file. In order to avoid mistakes, first backup your file and start deleting the Weebly additions.
Step #3 – Delete Weebly Files
The last step is to delete the files added during Weebly installation. After modifying htaccess file, you can see few folders and files are added by Weebly.
- Delete the Weebly files in “w_api” and “files” directory.
- Also delete the “login.php” file created by Weebly.
- Basically, you have to cleanup all the Weebly files. If you had a WordPress installation before then you should have index.php file. Now you can try to access your WordPress site.
- If you had index.html file previously then you need to restore manually from your backup to access your site.
Summary
One of the biggest advantages of having paid hosting account is that you can have multiple sites on the same account. For example, you can host your primary site with WordPress and have smaller sites on Weebly. Especially when you have a WordPress hosting account with SiteGround, you can simply create one subdomain and install Weebly on that for free. The only issue is that every time you need to access your Weebly site through SiteGround or Weebly Cloud site which is an inconvenient process. This is different than accessing WordPress site from admin dashboard outside hosting account.
2 Comments
Leave your reply.