What’s New in Weebly 4 – A Fourth Generation Platform Upgrade

Last year 2015 1^st of October, Weebly introduced a third generation Carbon upgrade. Many people still not come out from the negative impact of that upgrade. It was a dismal platform upgrade with 223 officially accepted bugs based on the user’s feedback in such a small platform. Recently, on 27^th September 2016 Weebly had again upgraded the platform naming it as Weebly 4 – a fourth generation upgrade. In this article let us explore what Weebly 4 will bring to you as a user.

Detailed points are mentioned in the below section under each feature.

Performance Plan

As it is evident Weebly’s every update is focused on improving ecommerce features more than focusing on regular content sites. Weebly 4 is not an exception, there is a new performance plan introduced to enhance your online store. It will cost $49 per month on monthly basis to get the following additional features over the existing business plan.

• Gift card
• Send email to customers for abandoned cart items which are not ordered
• Real time shipping rates
• 5 email campaigns per month to 500 contacts per email

Ecommerce Features

In addition to new performance plan below are some of the important improvements done on the storefront available fro business plan users.

• Product and category elements
• Automatic tax calculator
• Streamlined order management
• Branded store emails

Flexible Header

Weebly revamped the header, header types and page layout concepts and introduced a flexible drag and drop header concept.

1. All users can drag and drop elements in the header area.
2. Header area can be resized on the editor thus removing all redundant header types like small header, tall header, etc. Weebly 4 only has three header types – header, no-header and splash layouts.
3. Free and starter users can add image and color for header background. Pro, business and performance plan users can add image, color and video for header background.
4. Users can choose one of the available layouts made by Weebly.

Learn more on how to add flexible drag and drop header on your Weebly site.

Section Element

Adding full width element is now easy with section element. You can also easily create a parallax page without adding any external code. Weebly 4 allows to have section element only on new responsive themes and the element will not be shown on custom and non-responsive themes.

1. Drag and drop any elements inside a section.
2. Resize the height of the full width section area.
3. Edit the background with image, color or video. Video option is available for only Pro, Business and Performance plan users.
4. Move the section area within the page or copy to any other pages on your site.
5. Delete the section area.

Learn more on using section element on responsive and custom themes.

Layout Changes

Now you can move or delete all the elements on a page with single click. There are additional layouts for selecting header and section element.

New Themes

Weebly added handful of new responsive themes which is really a good news for those looking for latest themes for their sites.

Code Editor

The elements on the code editor are revamped and categorized under – header type, styles, partials and assets. With flexible header, all old header types are removed and regrouped as header.html. no-header.html and slash page. All .css files were removed from new themes and .less style sheets are used under “Styles” section. For example, the “main_style.css” file was removed and used as “main.less”. Learn more on how to use Weebly Code Editor.

Email Marketing

• Now Weebly Promote is integrated with your online store to send branded emails.
• Weebly Promote will auto suggest emails to be sent to customers based on the store activities.
• You can track campaign performance right from your dashboard.
• Share email newsletters on social networking sites and get more traffic back to your store.

There were also updates on the App Center for developers which were released before Weebly 4. Most of the changes are not available to Weebly designer platform as it is in a beta stage as of date this article was written.