Weebly Review

What is Weebly? If you don’t know it’s a free website builder you can use to create a website quickly without any knowledge of coding, and will let you get your site online quickly. I recently tried out Weebly to see if it’s any good, and how it stacks up to some of the other online website builders that offer free sites.

How it works

Like I said Weebly is free, as in 100% free. If you opt for the free account your site will get a sub domain. (www.your site@weebly.com for example) You can also choose to buy a separate domain name either through Weebly or another domain host provider such as Go Daddy or Fat Cow.

Everything on Weebly is drag and drop, though to place it on the page you have to use page dividers to get it where you want exactly. While this can be a pain with some objects like share buttons, it helps keep those objects from moving around on the page. This can be a real problem with some site builders when you view your website on different browsers, especially older version of Internet Explorer.

The free version of Weebly offers most of the features as their pro account. You get unlimited storage space for your site, bandwidth, and pages in the free version. This is a huge bonus since the majority of online website builders only offer a limited number of pages and space. You also have full access to HTML; you can add items using HTML code or even customize the layout of the website if you have some experience with coding.

The pro version which costs about which costs just under 50 dollars a year (U.S dollars) offers all the same plus a few added features such as the ability to create up to 10 sites per account, 100mb file uploads, password protected pages, and 100 dollars in Adsense advertising. Both free and pro versions only give your site a sub domain. If you want your own domain name you can buy one through Weebly which costs about 40 a year. Personally I suggest you save your money and go with Go Daddy which offers domain names from as little as $2 to $12.50. You can also add a customized domain name to a free account so you don’t necessarily need to upgrade to a pro account either.

What’s good about Weebly?

The biggest attraction to Weebly is that you can create a website of any size, with as many pages, and as much storage as you want for free. Online website builders such as Yola for example only give you about 1GB of storage. Many of the free website builders out there also deny you the ability to copy and paste HTML code onto the site. This means everything from advertising, to share buttons can’t be added unless you upgrade to their paid versions. Weebly on the other hand allows you to add as much of this as you want.

Another limitation that I’ve seen on many free website builders such as Jindo is that they force you to have massive amounts of page space dedicated to advertising. In Jindo’s case in particular, you’re forced to have a massive logo displayed in a prominent position on the side bar. To get rid of it, again you have to upgrade to a paid account. With Weebly you have a small advertisement at the bottom of the page; it doesn’t take up space that could be used for something you want to promote.

What’s bad about Weebly?

While there is a lot of good things to say about this free website builder, there are some things I need to point out. The first is that if you want to monetize your Weebly site, they take 50% of what you earn from Google Adsense; this applies to both the free and pro versions. I don’t know how it works with other advertisers, but it’s something you need to be aware of if you plan on using this site builder with Adsense.

Another big factor is that the editor will slow down as your website gets bigger. When I was using Weebly I noticed the speed start to slow down right away, and I hadn’t even gotten half way though making the homepage. 10 pages later the editor was taking forever to load. The icons you grab and drag down to your pages would stick and freeze making adding even a simple picture time consuming and a royal pain in the ass. This was using the free version so I don’t know if this problem is on the pro version of Weebly.

And finally the templates Weebly offers are very basic. While you can do some things like change the text and pictures for your header, you’re forced to use a very basic layout. Unless you are good with using code, you’re going to be stuck with the default page color, menu bar, and page size.

Overall though Weebly is a good website builder, and one you should take a look at if your looking to build a free site. Compared to other free sites, it really offers a lot, and is a good site to use if you’re brand new to building websites and need to get your site out quickly.