Comparing Weebly with WordPress.com is a tough task. Weebly and WordPress address the needs of two different sets of consumers. They aim at different market segments. Comparing Weebly and WordPress feature-to-feature is not the real comparison. Therefore, in this review, we concentrate on presenting you information about the situations where Weebly would be a right fit and where WordPress.com would make it a better choice.
Though WordPress.org (self-hosted version) is a completely different ball game, we will briefly touch upon the advantages of WordPress.org.
Note: Most of the WordPress.org features will work in WordPress.com since both platforms use same software. Unfortunately, using the same name with .com and .org domains is unethical business model that confuses all new users. Due to this reason, our Weebly Vs WordPress.org article may look similar to this article when comparing certain features.
Weebly Vs WordPress.com Pricing
Weebly offers free, connect, pro, business and business plus plans. The free plan had limitations on 500MB storage space with footer Square or Weebly ads (Square is the owner company of Weebly). You can anytime upgrade or downgrade between plans based on your need. You can host 10 websites under your account and needs to upgrade individual sites to desired plan. In addition, Weebly also offer App Center from where you can find free and premium apps for your site to enhance the features.
WordPress.com offers similar pricing plans like Weebly. There are four plans available – personal, premium, business and ecommerce. Free plan has limitations of 3GB space with advertisement. Overall, WordPress.com pricing is bit higher than Weebly while offering additional features.
Footer Advertisement
Weebly will show either Weebly or Square advertisement in the footer. At least Pro plan is required to remove footer ad, use custom domain with unlimited space. This is a confusion with WordPress.com, as they will show two type of advertisements. One is the regular ads showing between content and other is WordPress.com brand showing on footer (like Weebly). Though personal plan will stop the content advertisements, you have to purchase business plan to remove the footer ad. That will be much higher cost for a normal user.
AdSense Earnings
As far as we have checked, WordPress.com does not block AdSense code on free sites. Though it will be difficult to get Google’s approval with subdomain, it works as long as you have valid AdSense account. WordPress.com also offer WordAds program to show display ads and monetize your website.
However, Weebly will block AdSense ads on free subdomain. You have to purchase one of the premium plans to use AdSense code. In addition, Weebly offers AdSense element as part of the editor that you can use to insert advertisements anywhere on your site.
Weebly Vs WordPress.com: The Fun Factor
You will enjoy creating a site with Weebly. If you are new to web design, you are going to have some fun building your site with Weebly, playing with it and tweaking it as you go. We have tons of tutorials on Weebly that is enough food for your thought.
Whether you brag about your Weebly site or not, you are sure to feel the sense of achievement. Weebly is fun to use and you keep getting more of it as you discover it is potential. With WordPress, you build a site to meet your needs. There will not be much fun when publishing content with WordPress.com editor. Though there are changes like Gutenberg, WordPress.com is more business and less fun.
Ease of Use & Skill Level
Weebly has a very short learning curve.
You can literally start from knowing nothing and can still have a simple website up and running in about couple of hours. If you spend a couple of days, you can learn and leverage majority of the Weebly features.
WordPress, on the other hand, has a relatively steep learning curve.
Unless you have dealt with CMSs, blogs, etc. in the past, you are very likely to find yourself being lost. If you are tech savvy and are familiar with jargon and terminology, you may spend a couple of days to get a feel for it and gain enough confidence to try it out for your business website.
WYSIWYG Editor
Comparing Weebly and WordPress.com editor interfaces
Weebly offers a WYSIWYG editor and WordPress does not. For some one new, this plays a very significant role in their ability to create a site themselves. The Weebly WYSIWYG interface also makes it quick and easy for maintaining the site.
If your needs can be met with Weebly, and if you are OK with a little glitches now and then, then you should stick with Weebly. Modifying content in Weebly is much faster with its WYSIWYG editor. You can also teach your staff to update content on a Weebly site easily. Recently, WordPress allows Gutenberg block editor that allows you to insert blocks and edit content similar to Weebly. However, it needs long way to catch up the look and feel of Weebly editor.
In order to update a WordPress site you need someone who is aware of how things work.
Features: Weebly Vs WordPress.com
Weebly is meant for no coders with simplified interface and tools. WordPress.com offers vast number of features. Here are the major features offered by WordPress that are not available with Weebly:
- Complete user management
- Advanced traffic statistics (do not compare with Weebly stats)
- Automatic spam protection with Akismet (no comparison with Weebly smart spam protection)
- High quality documentation
- Top notch blogging platform
- Over 30 drag and drop sidebar widgets (Weebly does not offer themes with sidebar)
- Easy migration options
- Beautiful themes that work without a glitch
- Efficient SEO
- Compatible across multiple platforms
- On demand premium features
- Private blogs, related posts and popular posts
- File management, page management and granular settings
However, you need long time to get familiar with these features. Weebly, targets people who like to launch website quickly.
Reliability, Consistency and Speed
Earlier days Weebly editor was stable. However, after Carbon update Weebly editor became so unstable, at times it will never load. On other hand, WordPress.com offers superior quality blogging platform with most needed options. You can create different types of post like portfolio, gallery and group them separately on a single site.
You can run small business websites with limited features on Weebly. So that you can focus on business by leaving the website management to Weebly. With WordPress.com, you can host mission critical sites that needs hyper-care support all times.
Migration, Flexibility & Archival
Migration is smooth with WordPress. You can export and import the entire site in minutes. This is very useful when you have large number of pages and want to move from WordPress.com to WordPress.org. In addition, WordPress.com also offer premium redirection service that can help you when moving out of their platform.
However, the situation is different with Weebly. It works fine when you have fewer pages on your site. You can download the HTML backup and recreate the content manually.
The Help You Need
Since WordPress.com and WordPress.org uses the same software, you can find decent documentation on the web. You can also find plenty of documents on WordPress.com website. Weebly guys are catching up with documentation and also offer forum support. However, when you have specific problem with Weebly, you may not get premium support from their support team.
SEO: Weebly Vs WordPress.com
Contrary to the common assumption, Weebly has enough tools in places to cater to the SEO needs of small businesses. Our Weebly SEO review covers the top 10 pros and cons of Weebly SEO and you can find full list of SEO features here. However, optimization with Weebly is limited, as you cannot access the server even with premium plans. On other hand, WordPress.com has excellent plugins like Yoast SEO to adopt the changes quickly.
Ecommerce: Weebly Vs WordPress.com
After Square acquired Weebly, the entire focus was changed to target ecommerce business users. You can setup digital store or physical product store with shipping and inventory management. You can use Weebly dashboard or mobile apps to track orders and respond to your customer. You should purchase business or business plus plans with Weebly to get most out of the ecommerce plans.
WordPress.com is a strong blogging platform. However, you can use additional plugins like WooCommerce to setup end-to-end store. This will help to setup excellent ecommerce store with all necessary options.
WordPress.org, a completely different animal
While WordPress.com is maintained for you, WordPress.org is a software distribution you take and manage yourself. WordPress.org is several times more powerful and even more times complex to deal with. You host the software on your own server, update the patches and take care of issues all by yourself. Nevertheless, you are in total control.
The functionalities you can add to your WordPress.org are limitless. It also comes with the burden of ensuring that all the pieces work in cohesion without conflict. Obviously, we run this and many other sites on WordPress.org platform. Checkout the comparison of Weebly Vs WordPress.org to learn more.
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