Weebly Comparison and Review

Pros:

• Limited free account available
• Very high quality templates
• Excellent guidance for website creation
• The ability to accept online payments is included with this plan
• Live chat support available
• Free one-year registration of a .com

Cons:

• Phone support not available without upgrading plan

Conclusion:

Weebly has become one of the most popular website builders on the market, and their Starter product offers a great value for an entry level price. They also include $100 of free credit for Google Adwords advertising. Weebly's free account option gives people a great way to test the product and view the templates before making a purchase.

Ease of Use

Weebly’s Starter website builder received 5 out of 5 stars for Ease of Use. The builder is intuitive and provides plenty of guidance while you create your website. The only downside is that Weebly does not provide a setup wizard to help guide you through the initial process of making your website and entering in content. Direct editing and drag-and-drop features make customizing your website easy. You can easily add an element to your site with a one-click, drag-and-drop process. Adding photographs is also simple. Weebly even provides an image gallery with free "royalty free" images to use or you can upload your own images if you wish.

Weebly provides over 40 professionally designed site templates for you to select from and customize to create your website. Weebly's beautiful templates give it a competitive advantage over many other builders. For advanced users, you can edit the HTML and CSS of whichever theme you choose. Weebly's builder is intuitive, and offers above average flexibility. It is easy to arrange content blocks, but you are limited in the size options for many of the boxes (although this has probably been done to simplify the process). This can limit your ability to completely customize your website and make it look the way you envisioned. Weebly allows you to insert your site title, description, and meta keywords for the purpose of optimizing your sites for search engines. The builder also allows you to add such types of content to your site as Youtube Videos, Google Maps, Flash modules, an audio player, contact forms, custom HTML code and more.

Customer Support

Weebly received 4 out of 5 stars for Customer Support. Weebly lost a star for not offering phone support to their Starter customers (although it is available with their Pro and Business plans) and for not including user forums. However, Weebly Starter users do have access to Live Chat support (M-F 8am to 8pm ET and Sa-Su 8am to 5pm) as well as a ticket based support system. Weebly also provides extremely helpful FAQs, tutorials, and a searchable knowledgebase.

Account Features

Weebly doesn't include email hosting with it's service, but it offers an easy way to set up Google At Work for email hosting, which costs $45/ year. Weebly's Starter plan includes "expanded stats" to help you understand how people are using your site as well as $100 of Google Adwords credit to advertise your site on Google. For an additional $10 per year, Weebly will provide Privacy Protection from the WHOIS database if you have registered your domain name through Weebly. The WHOIS database is a publicly searchable database with information about the registrants of domain names. Keeping information like your name, address, telephone number, and email address out of this database helps protect you against unwanted marketing, spam, and identity theft. When you purchase Privacy Protection, Weebly will keep this information private by replacing your contact information with theirs.

Pricing

Weebly Starter is available for $8 per month with an annual payment term, but you must pay the full amount upfront, which totals to $96.00. Month-to-month pricing is not available, but you can pay a little more per month for a $54, six month contract for or a save more by purchasing a two year contract for $120. One year of free domain registration is included with Weebly, and the price is $19.95/ year after. Weebly can also host a domain that you have previously registered with another registrar, as long as you point your registered domain to Weebly’s server. If you wish to sell products or services through your site, Weebly Starter lets you list up to ten products and enables you to accept credit cards and PayPal payments. Weebly also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee if you are not happy with the service provided by the Starter plan. Additionally, they offer a free account option, which will let you host your site on a Weebly subdomain (e.g. yourdomain.weebly.com), but each page created with the free builder must contain a footer exclaiming, “Create a free website with Weebly.”

Upgrades

Weebly also offers Pro and Business level plans with pre-paid annual plans of $144 (effectively $12/ month) and $300 (effectively $25/ month) respectively. These plans include features like phone support, higher quality media players, membership pages, more ecommerce options, higher security and more. These higher level plans are great for business that want to start their website small then grow its capability over time.