Weebly 101 – Frequently Asked Questions and Answers for Beginners

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 hosts your website free. Best part is 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. There are free and premium add-on apps you can install from the App Store to enhance the 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. It is similar to creating PowerPoint presentation where you drag and drop different elements. In case of Weebly, the drag and drop elements automatically convert to a website.

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 in some cases, Weebly will ask you to verify using phone number. After successful verification, you can login to Weebly account and start building your free website.

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 be able to build and host sites. You can login to your Weebly account using any web browser and create a website right from the browser like Google Chrome. You can connect to your Weebly account from any computer and edit your website from anywhere as long as you have 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 the free site with Weebly. All you need is an email to be associated with you Weebly account. Unless you need to upgrade to the Pro or other features, 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 lot of small business needs. You can build a super professional website using Weebly by spending just a bit of time. You can look at Weebly success stories for examples of some of the websites built with 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 Is SEO friendly. You can do many things to optimize your site for search engines. However, the Weebly blog lacks some necessary SEO. If you are looking for a serious Blogging platform, it might hurt your SEO. If you plan to use Weebly for regular pages, there are plenty of SEO optimization options available. Take a quick look at SEO Tips for Weebly.

10. What packages are available with Weebly?

Weebly offers five pricing plans for website and online store owners – Free, Connect, Pro, Business and Business Plus. While content website owners can use free, connect and pro plans, business plans are meant for ecommerce business 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.

12. Can I Use Weebly with Premium Hosting?

Yes, you can. Many hosting companies like Bluehost, SiteGround and iPages 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 single hosting account.

However, the disadvantage is that you need to login to Weebly through your hosting account. There will be no direct login to Weebly account possible with premium hosting 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.

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 switching 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 separate App Center with additional elements like table, counter and many others. You have to connect the required app to individual sites 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.

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 1and1.com, you can use it for your website built with Weebly. However, you have to purchase a premium plan for connecting custom domain.

18. Can I change website address after publishing my website with Weebly?

You can change the website address any time you want. You can change to a different sub-domain name or you can change to your own domain or from custom address to a Weebly sub-domain name. Weebly will setup automatic redirect only for upgrading from free to premium plans. If you change the free subdomain address, you will lose all previous ranking and there will be no link between old and new sites.

19. Can I place advertisements and earn money with the free website built with Weebly?

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 connect 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 site you built with Weebly 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 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 limitation with Weebly?

Yes, Weebly restricts all account holders to have maximum of 10 websites per account. This is applicable regardless of free or premium user. You have to upgrade each site separately and install apps. Free users have more restrictions like 500MB storage, footer ad with ecommerce features.

23. What are ecommerce features in Weebly?

With Square acquiring Weebly, it has become 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 support both digital and physical selling with inventory, tax and shipping management.

24. Is Weebly reliable?

Weebly is reliable for sites that are not mission critical. Weebly sites are down at times for a couple of hours here and there once in three months or so. It may not be suitable for a top end e-commerce site like amazon.com or ebay.com. However, for small businesses looking for web presence, Weebly is a reliable 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 a great amount of user management, Weebly may not be 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 help you with making the right choice.

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, Weebly, Squarespace and Webs are for small business and professionals.