WordPress vs Weebly – Which is Best For Your Use?

If you are looking to create a website by using website builder, how it can be not to name the top two- WordPress and Weebly.

Recently, we were also developing a new website for our new venture and though to explore Weebly also. This post is all about WordPress vs Weebly in terms of their website building feature. I am not going to make any conclusion in the beginning but first, we will evaluate both the platform on various aspects and then we will come to any conclusion.

We will make this WordPress vs Weebly based on various features like-

• Ease of use
• Pricing
• Support
• Functionality and various others

So, based on these let’s start with the comparison between WordPress and Weebly for their website builder. I’m sure most of you including me think WordPress is far ahead of Weebly buts till I feel there can be different needs and both can work best at their places.

WordPress vs Weebly- an Overview

I’ll first start with WordPress and then we will go ahead with Weebly. As we know WordPress is a content management system (CMS) to create blogs/websites/stores or we can say any kind of online presence.

Here is the stat for the WordPress which includes both the free WordPress platform (wordpress.com) and standalone platform (wordpress.net).

There are Millions of customers who use WordPress by any means to power their website. And these constitute around 26% of the website and so you think of the popularity of the WordPress CMS. Along with this, there are thousands of independent developers who keep on working to make WP better by developing plugins, add-on etc.

Weebly is a composite website builder with an additional feature for domain and hosting. That means you can create a free website on Weebly like you do on WordPress.com. You will get a domain with the subdomain name weebly.com. If you want your custom domain, you may have to pay for this which we will talk later. Here are some stats about the Weebly website builder.

WordPress vs Weebly Installation

Now let’s see how easy it is to install both the platform. I will do the comparison considering a new person in mind.

WordPress Installation

To install WordPress, you need to have a hosting service. There are many companies who offer dedicated WordPress hosting which you can buy. For now, we will use 000webhost free hosting service.

You can simply sign up with 000webhost and verify your email account. Once done login to the 000webhost and you’ll be redirected to a page with several options. Here Click the Manage website “your-site” button or the Build Website button. On the build website page, you have three options:

• Build a stunning website with 00webhost’s Easy Website Builder that requires no technical knowledge
• Create a beautiful and powerful website using WordPress
• Upload a website you’ve built previously

You can select the second option and you will have a screen something like below-

It will show you a popup asking the user id, password, URL, and language. Select these as required. Make sure to use strong user id and password.

Now click on install and a new window will come which will show you the progress of the installation. Once the installation is finished, you will get a successful screen like below.

Now you can start with the domainname/admin and get started with the WordPress. There you can create pages, posts etc. as required. If you are new to WP, you may want to check our post for a beginner- how to start a website on WordPress from Scratch?

Weebly Installation

Installation of Weebly is also simple and until the time you don’t need a custom domain, you’re good to host on Weebly only. Head over to weebly.com and click on get started as shown below-

A signup popup will appear where you can fill out the details. There are many ways to signup and you can select as per your need. Now it will ask you whether you want to sell or not. That means you need a normal website or kind of ecommerce. We will go ahead with the normal site as of now and so select the first option.

The next option is to select a theme for your new Weebly website. There are few options available and you can select as per your need.

It will take you to a page where you can edit the theme as per your requirement. You can make limited changed to text, location, color, etc. as the selected theme allows.

On the next screen, you will be asked for the domain name. As said above, either you can go with the custom domain or the subdomain with weebly.com extension. We will go ahead with weebly.com subdomain for this tutorial.

Once you are done with all the editing, just hit the publish button and you’re good to go live. Your website will be live with the subdomain you selected.

So, as you can see, the installation of both WordPress and Weebly and similar and simple. Anyone with no prior knowledge can do it easily. Now let’s talk about more features of WordPress vs Weebly.

Weebly vs WordPress: Features

In this section, we will talk about the different features available with both the platform. For example, the ease to use email subscription, starting an ecommerce store, creating a blog, making a personal website and so on. Let’s first start with the WordPress Features!

WordPress Features

WordPress is one of the top website building frameworks which not only allows you to create blogs but a fully-fledged application quickly. The thousands of developers who keep on introducing the new features to WordPress makes it even more favorable.

Design Options

Well, I think you can do everything with the WordPress design as you want. There are Millions of WordPress themes available in the market for different purposes and you can select the one as per your need. For example, if you are building a content-based blog, you may want to select AdSense optimized WordPress blogging themes and so on.

Also, there are many themes marketplaces like ThemeForest or individual theme developers like MyThemeShop or TeslaThemes etc. who produces some stunning WordPress themes.

So, you just name your requirement and you’ll find hundreds of themes available for you to use. Some of those might be free while advanced themes are paid but charges are nominal. Once you’ve selected the theme you can head over to your WordPress dashboard and install that theme. Then you can also edit the theme as per your need and most of the themes are fully customizable. If you need any help selecting the template or theme for your website, you may browse this article- How to select the best theme for the blog?

Plugins & Ad-on

I personally believe no other CMS can beat WordPress in terms of Plugins and ad-on. Currently, WordPress has over 53K plugins with around Millions of downloads.

Again, you just name a feature you need, and you have a plugin for that. For example, if you are looking to gather the email ids of your users, you can use the opt-in plugin and similarly for another purpose.

Content Creation

WordPress dashboard is quite simple and easy to use. Just log in to your WordPress dashboard and you will find all the option there. For example, if you want to create a new post, simply head over to Post >> Add New and a new window will open where you can create a new post as shown below.

Similarly, you can do to create a new page as per your convenience. As you can see whatever you want to do in WordPress everything can be done very easily without any external support. Most of the times, the theme you buy also give you documentation to customize it which makes your work again easy. Now let’s see the Weebly Features and then we will make a comparison.

Weebly Features

Weebly doesn’t ship as many features as you found with the WordPress. It also lacks on the ground of some basic functionalities. The two-major downfall is-

• You need to pay to unlock the best features out there
• Even though you will use advanced theme, you won’t be able to fully customize your website

Design Options

Most of the design options you’ll find with the Weebly are within the scope of site builder. There are around 66 themes available for Weebly which you can use. Select the theme which you want and then using the Weebly website builder, customize it. But there are limitations, you can’t place the text anywhere on the theme and similarly for other design options. You will be bound to the themes’ defined places.

Although it allows you to do some changes in the HTML and CSS but those are also limited. And so, you can make a decent website with Weebly but not great if you are looking for some functionality.

Content Creation

This section is similar to the WordPress and you need to navigate to Posts -> Add New to add a new post. While to add a new page, you will find a small button at the bottom which you can use.

While creating the post, you will find the website builder visible and that is attractive.

To do the same in WordPress you have to install some external website builder plugin like Thrive Architect or Visual Composer etc. but here it is inbuilt.

Functionalities

In this section, Weebly is far behind the WordPress and there are limited functionalities available. In the app store, there are around 280 free and premium plugins and ad-on available using which you need to maintain everything.

If you want to start an ecommerce store, in WordPress we have WooCommerce which is free and works great. But in Weebly, you need to take the paid subscription for that which we will talk in the next section. So, it terms of features, WordPress is far ahead of Weebly by all means.

Pricing and Support- WordPress vs Weebly

WordPress is an open source platform and is free for everyone. You just need to pay for the hosting and domain you buy. If you will go with a shared hosting which usually comes around $2-$3 per month and a domain of around $10 per year, which comes around $3-4 per month. This is quite decent for any website.

While Weebly offers four different pricing options and you can select as per your need. Ecommerce option is not included in the free plan and also you need to pay 3% of all transactions which is making it costlier.

In terms of support, as WordPress is free and so there is no official support there. But they have one of the most active forums where you can ask questions and surely you will get resolution. Also, there are thousands of WordPress dedicated blogs which help you resolve your quires.

Weebly is a premium product and so they have 24x7 dedicated support to help you. Whenever you face any issue, just get in touch with the Weebly support and your issue will be addressed quickly.

WordPress vs Weebly- The Conclusion

After going through all the points, we discussed above, I think anyone can easily say WordPress is far better than Weebly. But again, it all depends on the need. If you need some sort of free landing pages for quick work, you can go ahead with the Weebly.

What is your comment on this -Weebly vs WordPress?

Share This:

Post Tags:

Blogging Resource WordPress Plugins Wordpress Theme

Ashutosh Jha

Ashutosh Jha is a professional blogger, Blog and IT Consultant. He writes about Blogging, SEO, Making Money, Internet Marketing and Web Design.
If you liked the post, You can follow him on the below social media.

Website: TricksRoad

• Social Links:

• Rss
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Linkedin
• Youtube