10 Reasons Not to Use Weebly for Blogging

Weebly is one of the popular website builders that needs no technical knowledge. You can use Weebly for creating a blog as part of free or premium plans. However, blog is just an additional option in Weebly without complete features. If you want to build a complete blog then Weebly is definitely not an option for you due to various restrictions.

Limitations of Weebly Blog

Here we discuss the limitations of Weebly blog and the restrictions you should consider before creating a blog with Weebly.

1. Blog Copy and Backup

Weebly offers an option to backup the entire site as a ZIP archive. You can use this for offline reference and keep track of changes to your site. However, you can’t backup blog posts and product pages with this option. There are no other ways you can take a copy of your Weebly blog posts. This is a very danger issue with Weebly since you will not be able to migrate to other platform easily. The only option is to recreate your blog posts one by one in another platform which may not be a feasible task when you have hundreds of posts.

2. Danger of Deleting Blog Page

If you are familiar with WordPress and other content management systems, you will know that blog page is a dummy page. It will simply show the feed of your posts based on your theme’s design. Though the process is similar, there are big problems with Weebly blog setup.

• If you have wrongly deleted the blog post by mistake, there is no way to retrieve. Weebly does not have “Trash” option and the posts will be permanently deleted.
• Another issues is, if you wrongly deleted the blog page then entire blog posts will be deleted instantly. For example, if you have thousand posts on your Weebly blog and mistakenly deleted the blog page under “Pages” tab. This will delete all your thousand posts in single click without any option to restore the content.

3. Blog Migration Issues

Migrating your blog content to another hosting provider is a tedious task since Weebly blog does not have an option to import XML feed. The feed contains only the latest ten posts which is of not real use if you have hundreds of thousands of posts. Learn more drawbacks of Weebly platform.

4. Comment Control

Weebly blog comment control is very simple system which makes the spammers work easy to generate auto submissions. You will receive lot of irrelevant comments and managing them will be a big task. Though you can choose smart CAPTCHA and smart moderation, these things will not help much. You have alternate option to add comment control systems like Disqus or Facebook. However, this may not be a preferable option for many bloggers.

5. No Autor Name

You can add author widget on the main blog page. This means it is a fixed widget showing single author name on all your blog posts. Weebly blog post does not display the author name hence if you have a group of editors and want to show different author name for each post then Weebly blog is not an option for you unless Weebly comes up with an interface change.

6. No Sidebar Widgets

There are no sidebar widgets for displaying popular posts, featured posts and comments in Weebly. Without these widgets, your blog will not be attractive compared to thousands of other blogs available on the web.

7. Missing Featured Image

Many social media platforms use OpenGraph protocol for showing the shared content. Featured image is an important element in this protocol. It helps the shared content look elegant on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Though Twitter uses Twitter Cards, OpenGraph will still work on that platform as well.

Unfortunately, Weebly does offer an option to add featured image to blog posts. With this, your blog posts will not have any image when shared on social platforms. Otherwise, the platform may pickup suitable image from your content, mostly the first image, that may not look beautiful.

8. Sub-categories and Breadcrumb

Weebly offers categories for your blog post. On one hand, adding categories to your blog post is a pain. You have to click on “Post Option” button and then add categories. On other hand, there are no possibilities of creating sub-categories with parent-child relationship.

In addition, you will have no option to insert breadcrumb on your blog posts.

9. Only Two Social Sharing Networks

Content sharing is restricted to only two social media sites Facebook and Twitter. You have no options to customize the look of buttons or add additional networks on your blog.

10. Simply Blog Layout

Weebly blog layout consists of two columns – one is for main content and the other is for sidebar. Though you have an option to remove the sidebar by editing CSS or from the settings, there is no option to customize your blog layout. You can get beautiful and customizable layouts with free Blogger or WordPress accounts. However, even Weebly premium users have no options to customize the layout.

You will not be able to display your ads like AdSense inside the blog content. The only option to display your ads in the Weebly blog is the sidebar.