Working on Weebly’s drag and drop editor is a fun and fast way to build your online presence. This WYSIWYG editor is the one main reason people starting with Weebly once hesitate to move away to another companies. It is a wonderful experience to publish a site without the need of previewing it before. But the point of online presence is not limited to just having fun with site creation, it should add value to both you as a site owner and the visitors who expects something from your site. In order to provide better value mix and establish your own branding it is necessary to have your domain and use upgraded features. In this article, we compare the features of free and Professional plans to help you understand what exactly you will get as part of Professional plan package and whether it is worth of paying the desired amount for that.
Weebly Pricing Plans
Weebly users have four different plans to choose from for building their sites.
| Plan | Target Users |
|---|---|
| Free | All type of users wants to create a showcase site with few pages and a blog with no additional features. |
| Personal | Users want to build a basic site with minimal features. |
| Professional (Pro) | Users want to build professional looking site with own branding like self hosted video player, search box and header slideshow. |
| Performance Plan | Full fledged online store with discount coupons, gift cards and sending abandoned cart email to users. |
Restriction on Free Accounts
Though a free site may be sufficient for a personal blog it is not the case even with a normal site having lot of content. Generally, content sites are meant to provide different type of information to users beyond time boundaries (unlike a news feeds valid only at that moment and the entire thing would have been changed by that time someone reading that article). In order to build a site for long run it is necessary to have the followings as minimum:
- Own domain name.
- Sufficient storage and bandwidth.
- No footer ads.
With free Weebly site you are more prone to promote Weebly through the subdomain URL and footer ad instead of promoting your own content. Moreover, limited storage space makes the free plan of no use and forcing users to looking for upgrades or alternate platforms. Though Weebly Personal plan is one of good choices, there is no harm in looking a packaged solution like Weebly Professional (Pro) plan.
Weebly Free Vs Professional Plan Features
Below is the list of features showing what you will get under Pro pack compared to free plan.
| Features | Free Plan | Pro Plan |
|---|---|---|
| Free Site Builder | Yes | Yes |
| Free Web Hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Unlimited Bandwidth | No | Yes |
| Custom Domain Connect | No | Yes |
| Remove Footer Ad | No | Yes |
| Drag & Drop Footer | No | Yes |
| Custom Favicon | No | Yes |
| Complete Site Statistics | No | Yes |
| Premium Support | No | Yes |
| Editor Permissions | No | Yes |
| File Upload Limite | 100 MB | 250 MB |
| Audio Player | No | Yes |
| HD Video Player | No | Yes |
| Page Password Protection | No | Yes |
| Site Search Box | No | Yes |
| Site Members | No | 100 |
| Member Registration | No | No |
| Unlimited Products | Yes | Yes |
| SSL Certificate | Yes | Yes |
| Shopping Cart | Yes | Yes |
| Selling Digital Goods | No | Yes |
| Inventory Management | Yes | Yes |
| Shipping Details | No | Yes |
| Tax Calculator | No | No |
| Offer Coupon Codes | Yes | Yes |
| PayPal Payment | No | No |
Weebly Pro costs $12 per month for a yearly plan and varies based on the timeframe you choose. You need to renew the upgrade continuously in order to retain Pro features on your site.
Check out the comparison of Weebly Free Vs Starter and Weebly Starter Vs Pro.
Conclusion
Before concluding the worth of paying $12 per month for Weebly pro, it is important to understand the below points:
- After the Pro pack was introduced years back, there are no news heard from Weebly to add or improve any additional features exclusive for Pro users whereas most of free features like ad display, unlimited storage and custom domain options were removed.
- Weebly Pro was more powerful pack till the time Weebly came up with a separate Performance plan for ecommerce users. Now that Pro pack is sidelined with Performance plan especially with the latest addition of membership option where Pro users are restricted with 100 members without the option for registration. It is not a practical thinking from Weebly that one can have a Pro site without registration option which essentially means you need to add the members manually to your site.
- Some Pro features like search box can be obtained freely from third parties with better capabilities. For example, Google custom search box offers the option to choose site search or web search along with monetization with AdSense.
- Though the cost is in line with other service providers, $12 per month is costly for the features Weebly Pro pack offers. For example, you can go for paid hosting with SiteGround for the price as low as $3 with one year free domain and install self-hosted WordPress for free of cost. The learning curve for sure is larger but you will have all features with free plugins and themes which you will never be able to get with Weebly.
Unless you love that header and footer layouts which are useful only on landing pages and protect individual pages with password Weebly Pro is not a cost effective option for free users to upgrade. Instead you can try with other providers to build your site, especially, if you have not started a site with Weebly yet. With Pro being sidelined by Performance plan Weebly needs to consider adding additional features to Pro pack to make it more competitive.
On other hand, if you want all in place with the hope of Weebly will add additional features like member registration, then you can choose Weebly Pro for long run.
