New to Weebly site builder? For the benefit of those who are entirely new to Weebly, following are answers to some of the frequently asked questions. Remember, these are our own opinions and not affiliated to Weebly in any way. Learn more Weebly tutorials, tips and tricks and free widgets.
Weebly 101 – Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently asked questions about Weebly site builder to make everything clear.
1. What is Weebly?
Weebly is one of the free online website building tools available on the internet. It allows you creating a free website and host for free. Best part is that you do not need to download or install any software on your computer. All you need is a good and stable internet connection. You can use Windows PC or Apple Macintosh connected to the internet to build your free website using Weebly’s online site editor.
Currently, Square the popular payment processing company owns Weebly.
2. Does it require any prerequisite or technical knowledge?
One of the big advantages of Weebly is that it requires no prerequisites or technical knowledge for a creating your own website. You can drag and drop elements on the page to start building your site. It is similar to creating PowerPoint presentation where you drag and drop different elements. In case of Weebly, the drag and drop elements will automatically convert to a website. There are free and premium add-on apps you can install from the App Center to enhance basic features.
However, if you want to modify the HTML or CSS, you need to know the basic web development skills. Weebly is powerful enough to customize the way you want, once you gain some technical knowledge.
3. How can I signup and login to Weebly?
In order to sign up for Weebly, go to Weebly official site and register an account. You have to verify email address and also need to verify your phone number for using online store features. After successful verification, you can login to Weebly account and start building your free website.
At this point you need to create a Square account for logging into Weebly.
4. Do I need to download or install any software on my computer to use Weebly?
No. You do not need to download any software to build and host sites. You can login to your Weebly account using any web browser like Google Chrome or Edge and create a website right from the browser. You can connect to your Weebly account from any computer and edit your website from anywhere as long as you have the internet connection.
5. Do we need to provide any credit card information to build a free website with Weebly?
No credit card information is required to build and host free sites with Weebly. All you need is an email to be associated with your Weebly account. Unless you want to upgrade to a premium plan or purchase other stuffs (like an app or domain), there is nothing to pay and hence no need for credit card.
6. What is drag and drop site builder?
As the name indicates, you can drag and drop elements to any place on a page to create your own site. It is also called WYSIWYG editor stands for What You See Is What You Get. Weebly editor has the following three sections:
- Main content area where you can preview the content.
- Top bar from where you can navigate to different settings.
- Sidebar elements – drag and drop these elements on the main content area to add content for your website.
7. How much time I need to build a Weebly site?
You can pretty much get a site up and running in a matter of 30 minutes. There are plenty of different elements to cater to small business needs. You can build a super professional website using Weebly by spending bit more time. Also, look at Weebly success stories to get an idea of how other people are using Weebly.
8. Is building and hosting a Weebly website really free or is it a scam?
To some, it may seem suspicious when a website can be built and hosted for free. It may seem like a catch. Actually, there is no catch; Weebly is neither the first one nor the only one to offer free websites and hosting. There are many others and there is a strong business model around it. Some of them practice a freemium business model, where they put a price tag on advanced features. Some others operate as a non-profit. There are close to 40 million websites built with Weebly that are currently in use.
However, you need to upgrade to premium Weebly plans for using custom domain, removing footer ads and getting additional features.
9. How good is Weebly for SEO?
Weebly offers an SEO friendly structure that helps you improve your site’s visibility. It provides several ways to optimize regular pages for search engines. The challenge appears when you rely on the Weebly blog, because it misses a few essential SEO elements. This can affect results if you want a platform built specifically for serious blogging. Check our complete guide on how to optimize your Weebly sites.
10. What packages are available with Weebly?
Weebly offers five pricing plans for website and online store owners – Free, Personal, Professional, Performance and Premium. While content website owners can use free, personal and pro plans, business plans (performance & premium) are meant for ecommerce sites. Checkout the comparison of features and pricing of various Weebly plans.
11. What is Education and Designers Platforms?
In addition to various pricing plans, Weebly is also available as different platforms. Weebly for Education is targeted at teachers and students where the teacher gets to administer student sites. Weebly Designer Platform is for professionals who build and maintain sites for clients and get to use it as a white label platform. There is also a reseller platform for selling Weebly as a white labeled solution to your customers.
Note: Designer and Education platforms are no more available after Square occurred Weebly. At this point, Weebly is getting merged with Square Online as a backend though both platforms are available independently.
12. Can I use Weebly with premium hosting services?
Yes, you can. Few hosting companies offer Weebly Cloud through their reseller or partnership program. The pricing and features may differ from the original Weebly.com offerings. The advantage of this model is that you can combine multiple website building tools like WordPress, phpBB and Weebly under a single hosting account. However, the disadvantage is that you need to login to Weebly through your hosting account. It is not possible to login through Weebly.com with premium hosting services.
Note that some hosting companies SiteGround discontinued Weebly Cloud and offer their own website builder services.
13. Can I access Weebly from anywhere using any computer?
Yes. You can access Weebly.com from any computer and continue to build your site where you left off. It is like using Gmail or Yahoo! mail. If you use Weebly through hosted platforms like Bluehost or SiteGround, you need to login to the hosting account and access Weebly on Cloud. There is also a mobile app to monitor online sales and edit your websites on the go.
14. Does Weebly offer free themes?
Yes, all themes available in Weebly are free. At this point, Weebly does not offer premium themes, though you can purchase one from third-party developers. Due to this fact, the number of available themes are limited (less than 50). All available themes are responsive and automatically align on desktop and mobile devices responsively. However, generic html template will not work with Weebly unless you customize the source code using Weebly specific tags.
You can switch to a different theme any time after publishing your Weebly site. All elements like text, video and images you have on the site will be transferred to new theme. Any point of time, you can go back and forth and try different templates to pick the best one to your taste.
15. What is Weebly App Center?
Weebly offers a separate App Center with additional elements like table, counter and many others. You have to connect the required app to individual site on your account to enhance the features. For example, you can use Simple Table app to create tables that is not possible with default Weebly drag and drop elements.
The advantage with App Center is that there are many third-party developers offer beautiful apps that you can integrate with your site.
16. Am I allowed to build my client sites with Weebly?
Yes, with Designer Platform. We do not recommend using personal Weebly account for agency purposes. You can build sites for your clients under Designer Platform, maintain them yourself and bill your clients for your services.
Note: As mentioned above, Designer Platform is no more available after Square integration.
17. Can I choose my own website address for my Weebly site?
Weebly lets you choose your own subdomain name for free. You can pick up anything like example.weebly.com as long as it is available. If you have purchased your own website address from providers like GoDaddy.com or namecheap.com, you can use it for your website built with Weebly. However, you have to purchase a premium plan for connecting a custom domain.
18. Can I change website address after publishing my website with Weebly?
You can update your website address whenever needed. It is possible to switch to another subdomain, move to your own domain, or return from a custom domain to a Weebly subdomain. Automatic redirects are created only when you upgrade from a free plan to a premium plan. If you change a free subdomain (from one subdomain to another), the previous address will not redirect, which means you lose its existing ranking and any connection between the old and new site addresses.
19. Can I place advertisements and earn money with the free Weebly site?
No, Weebly does not allow showing AdSense advertisements on free subdomain websites. You can use the included Google AdSense element to generate revenues only with premium accounts. Nevertheless, it is still possible to show advertisements on free sites, using custom HTML or image element to show banner ads.
20. Does Weebly automatically force advertisements on my website?
Yes, Weebly show advertisement on the footer for free and Personal plan users. You should at least have a Pro plan in order to remove the footer ad.
21. Can I move my website from Weebly to another host?
Yes, manually. Weebly provides a mechanism to download the entire site so that you can host at a different provider like GoDaddy.com. There are a couple of things to keep in mind though. You cannot download all the functionalities from a published site. For example, blogs posts and product pages cannot be downloaded as a backup.
In addition, you have to manually extract and create content on other hosting company. There is no automatic option to upload Weebly backup to other services, or even with the same Weebly account.
22. Do I have account limitations with Weebly?
Yes, Weebly restricts all account holders to have maximum of 10 sites per account. This is applicable regardless of free or premium plan. You have to upgrade each site separately and install necessary apps. Free users have more restrictions like 500MB storage and footer ad.
23. What ecommerce features are available with Weebly?
After Square acquired Weebly, it became a complete ecommerce solution for small scale business owners. You can add shopping cart, checkout on your own domain, accept payment from PayPal and other payment processors. It supports both digital and physical selling with inventory, tax and shipping management.
24. Is Weebly reliable?
Weebly works well for sites that do not require mission critical uptime. It performs reliably for everyday needs, although it may not be the best option for high end ecommerce platforms. For small businesses that simply want a steady online presence, it remains a dependable choice.
25. Is Weebly the best website building application?
Weebly does not fit every one’s needs. For example, if you need a strong blogging platform with great amount of user management, Weebly is not the right choice. Nevertheless, Weebly is certainly one of the best for small business needs. Check the advantages, disadvantages and features comparison of Weebly Vs Wix, Weebly Vs WordPress.org and Weebly Vs Yola to understand the right choice for your needs.
26. Are there any other free website building applications like Weebly?
There are many other free website builders similar to Weebly. Some are very close to Weebly’s offerings. Some other excel in their own specialties. Providers like WordPress.com, Blogger are primarily for bloggers while Yola, Wix and Squarespace are for small business and professionals.
27. What is Square Online?
Square Online is another website building platform from Square, the parent company of Weebly. Square Online also uses Weebly as a backend but both platforms continue to exist independently. Check the differences between Weebly.com and Square Online to get more details.
