Choosing the right website builder is one of the most important decisions a business owner will make when establishing their online presence. Two of the biggest players in the website builder space are Weebly and WordPress.
Weebly is known for its easy drag-and-drop editor and range of stylish templates. WordPress offers more flexibility and customization through its open-source platform and thousands of plugins.
In this comprehensive comparison, we’ll evaluate how Weebly and WordPress stack up across key criteria that impact your own website and business, including ease of use, design and features, SEO capabilities, speed, and reliability. By the end of the article, you should be able to determine which is the best platform for your business goals and technical needs.
1. Understanding the Basics
Weebly was founded in 2006 by David Rusenko, Dan Veltri, and Chris Fanini as an easy website builder for non-coders. Since then, it has grown into one of the most popular website creation platforms. Weebly claims over 40 million users and is used by individuals, small businesses, bloggers, and online stores across the world.
WordPress emerged in 2003 when founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little created an open-source blogging platform. It has since evolved into the world’s most widely-used CMS. WordPress now powers over 41% of all websites, from personal blogs to enterprise sites. Its open-source model fosters a vibrant community of developers who create thousands of plugins and themes.
In terms of market position, WordPress dominates as the #1 CMS while Weebly holds a smaller share as a website builder. However, both remain popular options for creating sites without needing to code. Their longevity demonstrates the value they continue providing to users despite an increasingly competitive space.
2. Ease of Use
Weebly
Weebly is known for its intuitive drag-and-drop editor that makes building a website easy for beginners. Users don’t need any coding knowledge to get started. The editor allows you to add elements like text, images, videos, and more by simply dragging them onto the page. Everything happens visually, so you immediately see how your site looks as you build.
The simple dashboard is well-organized into sections like Pages, Blog, Store, and Apps. This makes key features easy to access. Guiding tooltips explain what each option does to enhance the user experience. Weebly also offers pre-designed templates across over 40 industries to simplify getting started. Users can easily customize colors, fonts, and layouts.
Overall, Weebly provides an accessible user interface for those with no web design experience. The learning curve is minimal, with most users comfortable building sites within an hour or less. The intuitive editor and abundance of templates streamline website creation.
WordPress (Hosted on Bluehost)
WordPress has a steeper learning curve than Weebly. While the platform is very flexible, it requires more technical know-how to utilize that flexibility to install WordPress and build your WordPress website. The WordPress dashboard has a more cluttered feel with various menus and settings. This can overwhelm beginners.
Without coding skills, users are limited to working within the constraints of existing WordPress themes. Customizing beyond basic widgets in the theme requires HTML and CSS knowledge. Unlike Weebly’s drag-and-drop editor, changing content in WordPress happens through the dashboard vs. visually on the page.
While WordPress isn’t the most beginner-friendly platform, the variety of tutorials, documentation, and support available helps lessen the learning curve. As users gain experience, WordPress becomes more intuitive. Most users can gain comfort with core functions within a few weeks. However, utilizing WordPress’ full potential requires advanced skills.
Winner: Weebly
Weebly is the clear winner when it comes to ease of use and beginner-friendliness. Its drag-and-drop editor and abundance of templates provide an accessible starting point for non-technical users. The interface and workflow are designed specifically to minimize the learning curve.
3. Design and Customization
Weebly
Weebly offers hundreds of professionally designed templates across over 40 industries and styles. Users can easily filter and browse templates to find ones that fit their niche and aesthetic. The template editor makes customizing fonts, colors, layouts, and more a simple drag-and-drop process.
Users can also fully customize individual page elements. The Weebly editor enables adding custom CSS or editing HTML/JavaScript code for greater control. There are limitations, however, in how far templates can be customized compared to editing raw code.
Weebly automatically optimizes websites for mobile responsiveness. Templates resize flexibly across devices. Users can manually optimize elements for desktop vs. mobile display. Every Weebly site is also optimized for speed based on the device.
WordPress (Hosted on Bluehost)
WordPress grants users access to thousands of free and paid themes to give sites a visual starting point. The WordPress theme marketplace offers diverse options from minimalist to bold designs. Users can browse by industry, layout, features, and more to match their vision.
WordPress themes allow for deep customization if you know CSS and HTML. Tweaking a theme’s style.css file provides advanced control over all elements and layouts. For those without coding skills, many themes have customizer areas to modify colors, fonts, etc. But options are limited.
WordPress is responsive by default for mobile sites. Developers optimize themes for adaptable multi-device experiences, or users can manually adjust elements. There are also dedicated mobile plugins to enhance WordPress’ mobile capabilities.
Winner: Tie
Weebly and WordPress offer robust design and customization options appropriate for their respective platforms. Weebly provides drag-and-drop simplicity while WordPress enables deeper code-based control. Both ensure mobile responsiveness and adaptability. Overall design and customization capabilities are evenly matched.
4. Features and Functionality
Blogging Tools
Weebly
Weebly makes it easy for users to add a blog to their site. The platform provides pre-made blog page templates that can simply be dragged onto the site. Posts can be created right from the Weebly editor using the visual post editor. This enables adding text, images, embeds, and more without coding.
The editor allows basic formatting like bold, italics, links, headers, etc. Weebly also includes SEO tools for optimizing blog content like meta descriptions and tags. However, compared to WordPress, options for customizing blog layout and functionality are limited.
Weebly blogs lack some key features like blog categories, author archives, RSS feeds, and more. Comments can be enabled, but control over moderation is minimal. There are also limited options for customizing blog sidebar widgets. Overall, Weebly blogs offer user-friendly creation but lack the advanced capabilities of a dedicated platform.
WordPress (Hosted on Bluehost)
WordPress was originally designed as a blogging platform, so it offers incredibly robust tools for blogging. The WordPress post editor makes content creation simple while also allowing for HTML formatting for advanced needs. Drag-and-drop widgets enable fully customizing blog sidebars with search, categories, calendars, and more.
WordPress sites can have multiple blogs each with distinct settings like theme, URL, admin users, etc. Granular controls manage privacy, indexing, comments, trackbacks, and discussion options. WordPress blogs integrate features like tagging, categories, author archives, RSS and Atom feeds, notification emails, and more.
There are also thousands of blog-specific WordPress plugins to add capabilities like social sharing, SEO optimization, gallery integration, subscriptions, and newsletters. For those needing a true content hub, WordPress provides enterprise-grade blogging functionalities.
Winner: WordPress (Hosted on Bluehost)
WordPress dominates as the superior blogging platform between the two. Its decade-plus development solely focused on blogging tools provides WordPress users with far greater capabilities and customization for their site blogs versus Weebly.
E-commerce Capabilities
Weebly
Weebly offers robust e-commerce features to create an online store. Users can easily add a store and choose from dozens of pre-made store templates across categories like fashion, jewelry, photography, and more.
The drag-and-drop editor makes it simple to customize the store layout, design, product pages, and checkout process. No coding skills are required. Weebly provides built-in secure checkout, support for physical/digital products, inventory management, coupons, taxes, and shipping cost calculators.
It integrates with payment processors like Square and PayPal to accept payments. Weebly also includes SEO tools, blogging, and customer CRM features tailored for e-commerce use. Limitations include a lack of dropshipping support and limited customization compared to standalone e-commerce platforms.
WordPress (Hosted on Bluehost)
Turning a WordPress site into an online store requires installing the open-source WooCommerce plugin. This adds e-commerce functionality like carts, checkout, product management, and order tracking. Thousands of add-ons expand features further.
WooCommerce grants users far greater design control and customization than Weebly stores. But it does require HTML/CSS skills to customize design beyond themes/templates. It also takes more setup compared to Weebly’s integrated store building.
WooCommerce integrates with virtually any payment processor. Other strengths include role-based permissions, tax/shipping cost control, inventory management, coupons, reports, and analytics. Developers can also customize WooCommerce with WordPress APIs and hooks.
Winner: Weebly
For non-technical users wanting basic online retail capabilities, Weebly provides an easier and more integrated e-commerce solution. WordPress enables much deeper customization and control through an ecommerce plugin like WooCommerce but requires strong coding skills to leverage its flexibility.
SEO Tools
Weebly
Weebly offers basic built-in SEO tools for optimizing site content. The editor allows entering meta titles and description tags for pages and posts to customize how they appear in search engines. Alt text can also be added to images.
URLs are SEO-friendly by default, generating keyword-rich links based on page names. Weebly also auto-creates XML sitemaps to improve indexing. There are limitations with customizing technical elements like metadata, JSON-LD markup, robots.txt files, etc.
Overall, Weebly handles much of the technical SEO optimization behind the scenes. However, advanced users may find the inability to directly modify source code limiting for maximizing SEO capabilities compared to WordPress.
WordPress (Hosted on Bluehost)
WordPress provides robust SEO capabilities both through core features and an ecosystem of SEO plugins. Default settings include search engine-friendly permalinks, meta title/descriptions, image alt text, and XML sitemaps generation.
The open-source codebase allows direct editing of key files like robots.txt and HTACCESS for advanced control. Plugins like Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack optimize technical elements like metadata, readability, and speed. There are also plugins for local SEO, redirection management, SEO-friendly images, and more.
For an integrated approach, WordPress gives users more direct access to modify SEO site architecture. The plugin ecosystem expands this for advanced technical optimization far beyond what Weebly offers out of the box.
Winner: WordPress (Hosted on Bluehost)
WordPress takes the win for SEO capabilities between the two platforms. While Weebly handles SEO basics automatically, WordPress provides greater customization for optimizing technical elements through its open-source platform and robust plugin ecosystem.
Integrations
Weebly
Weebly offers a collection of built-in integrations that can be activated from the App Center. Options include email marketing, polls, reviews, bookings and appointments, lead generation forms, and more.
Key platforms supported out-of-the-box include MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Google Analytics, Stripe, and Constant Contact. Weebly apps cover categories like SEO, marketing, sales, booking, productivity, and social media.
The integrations are user-friendly “plug and play” apps that connect seamlessly with Weebly sites. However, the selection is limited compared to WordPress and supports mainly Weebly partners versus a wide range of third-party integrations.
WordPress (Hosted on Bluehost)
With over 55,000 plugins, WordPress offers nearly limitless integrations to customize a site’s functionality. Plugins exist for forms, analytics, SEO, security, e-commerce, social media, and more.
WordPress can integrate with popular email marketing, CRM, and sales platforms like Mailchimp, HubSpot, Constant Contact, Salesforce, and dozens more. The plugin library allows connecting virtually any external service API needed for business operations.
The open-source community develops free and paid plugins, creating a vast selection. The self-hosted nature of WordPress also allows advanced integrations by developing custom plugins tailored to specific needs not covered out-of-the-box.
Winner: WordPress (Hosted on Bluehost)
WordPress dominates integration capabilities between the two platforms with its unparalleled selection of over 55,000 plugins. While Weebly offers user-friendly built-in integrations, the variety pales in comparison to what WordPress makes available through its plugins and custom development options.
Analytics and Reporting
Weebly
Weebly has built-in analytics through Weebly Insights that provide key site metrics. This dashboard shows traffic volume, visitor location, popular pages/posts, top referral sources, and more. Data can be filtered by date ranges for comparison.
Insights integrates directly with Google Analytics for expanded reporting. Weebly also provides basic e-commerce reports on sales, top products, conversions, and other store data.
However, Weebly lacks more advanced analytics around goal conversion, individual user tracking, heatmaps, and more robust segmentation. There are also limited options for automating or sharing reports beyond manual exporting.
WordPress (Hosted on Bluehost)
WordPress offers robust analytics and reporting capabilities through both core features and plugins. The built-in Site Health provides diagnostics for site performance, security, and automated backups.
Popularity with SEO and analytics plugins like Google Analytics, Matomo, and Jetpack expands available reports. There are also dedicated plugins for in-depth analytics on traffic, engagement, conversions, and more.
E-commerce plugins like WooCommerce integrate tailored sales, order, inventory, and coupon usage reporting. Plugins enable automating exporting reports, setting goals and alerts, and displaying custom analytics dashboards.
Winner: WordPress (Hosted on Bluehost)
WordPress wins for analytics and reporting depth between the two platforms. Weebly provides website basics through Insights. But WordPress’ ecosystem of analytics plugins gives site owners far greater data customization, segmentation capabilities, and visualization options for both standard sites and online stores.
5. Website Performance
Website Speed and Load Times
Weebly
Weebly automatically optimizes sites to load quickly on both desktop and mobile. All Weebly themes are designed with speed in mind, minimizing HTTP requests and employing code minification.
Images are automatically compressed and resized responsively. Weebly also supports fast, global CDN asset delivery optimization based on location. Site caching further speeds up performance.
Overall, benchmark tests show above-average load times for Weebly sites compared to competitors. Homepage speeds often load in under 2 seconds. Weebly’s integrated speed optimization provides a performance lift without manual tuning.
WordPress (Hosted on Bluehost)
As an open-source platform, WordPress offers less built-in speed optimization than Weebly. Performance relies more on the hosting environment, theme, and plugins used. Too many resource-heavy plugins can slow things down.
However, WordPress gives developers more control over optimizations like caching, compression, CDNs, and asset leveraging. There are also dedicated performance-enhancing plugins like WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, and LiteSpeed Cache.
With the proper optimizations, WordPress sites can achieve fast load times. But it takes more manual configuration compared to Weebly’s integrated speed features. Load times also depend on site complexity, traffic, and hosting resources.
Winner: Weebly
Weebly takes the win for faster load times out-of-the-box. Its integrated speed optimization provides consistently fast performance without manual tuning. While WordPress offers more customization to improve speed, it requires actively configuring optimizations versus Weebly handling it automatically.
Website Reliability and Uptime
Weebly
As a closed-source SaaS platform, Weebly manages servers, software updates, and security centrally. This ensures consistent reliability and uptime across sites. Weebly promises 99.9% uptime on its high-availability global data center infrastructure.
All sites have regular automated backups for disaster recovery. Monitoring tools proactively identify and resolve server issues. If outages occur, status alerts are provided and the time to recovery is typically within an hour.
Overall, Weebly’s managed infrastructure and dedicated support staff help maximize uptime. Users don’t have to worry about optimizing reliability on their own sites.
WordPress (Hosted on Bluehost)
As a self-hosted open-source platform, WordPress uptime depends more on users’ hosting environments and configurations. Reliability varies based on hosting choice, traffic levels, use of caching/CDNs, and other optimizations.
Thankfully the open-source community has developed reliability-enhancing plugins for backups, monitoring, load balancing, and auto-scaling. There are also managed WordPress hosts that handle optimizations and security. But ultimately reliability requires more proactive administration from users versus Weebly’s turnkey infrastructure.
With the proper hosting and configurations, WordPress sites can achieve excellent uptimes. However, the level of management required exceeds that of Weebly’s integrated solution.
Winner: Weebly
Weebly wins when it comes to maximizing website uptime through its centralized infrastructure and management. While WordPress can also achieve excellent uptimes, it requires more hands-on optimization from users that Weebly handles automatically behind the scenes.
6. Customer Support and Community
Weebly
Weebly provides 24/7 customer support via email, live chat, phone, and support tickets. As a paid platform, all users get access to support resources. Weebly also offers an extensive knowledge base, guides, webinars, and FAQs.
The Weebly user community provides peer-to-peer help and idea sharing. Active forums exist on topics like e-commerce, marketing, and SEO.
Overall, Weebly provides reliable support channels supplemented by engaged community forums. The paid model enables dedicating resources to customer service versus open-source community support.
WordPress (Hosted on Bluehost)
As open-source software, WordPress depends more on free community support versus dedicated customer service. The platform maintains active forums where volunteers provide help to each other.
Popular channels include WordPress support Forums, a Facebook Group, and Stack Exchange sites. There are also WordPress Meetup groups in many cities. Support options for those using hosted WordPress solutions like WordPress.com are more robust.
While WordPress community support is free, response times can vary with no guarantee. Those needing reliable support for client sites may invest in managed WordPress hosting with service-level agreements.
Winner: Weebly
Weebly wins for customer support given its dedicated team, knowledge base, and 24/7 channels. While WordPress provides free community-based support, users don’t have guaranteed response times. Weebly’s paid model includes professional support resources perfect for site owners managing live business sites.
7. Pricing
Weebly
Weebly offers 4 paid plans ranging from $10- $26 per month, including a $0 option with Weebly branding. More expensive tiers include more features like e-commerce, video storage, site search, and API access. All paid plans are annual subscriptions but offer month-to-month upgrades.
Weebly pricing is straightforward with all extras like a free domain, emails, shipping discounts, and SSL certificates included. The $26 Performance Plan unlocks the full capabilities most businesses will need without added fees, including basic ecommerce features. Custom Enterprise pricing is also available.
Overall, Weebly offers an affordable all-inclusive solution for creating sites without hidden charges. The tiered plans make it easy to scale features as needed.
WordPress (Hosted on Bluehost)
WordPress pricing is more variable as an open-source platform. The core WordPress software is free but hosting and other services cost money. Self-hosted sites incur fees for hosting, a custom domain, and premium plugins/themes.
Managed WordPress hosts like WP Engine provide bundled plans with hosting, CDN, backups, and security starting at around $35/month. There are also free limited options like WordPress.com with paid upgrades.
Given the DIY flexibility of WordPress, costs can range widely. Custom development also impacts pricing. Budget hosts can run WordPress sites for cheap, while enterprise deployments cost thousands per month. The open model enables scaling spend to needs.
Winner: Tie
Weebly offers simpler all-inclusive pricing while WordPress has more variable and scalable costs, such as a reliable hosting provider. There is no definitive winner – Weebly fits simpler needs with predictable fees while WordPress enables custom spending based on site complexity and traffic.
8. Reviews and Reputation
Weebly
Weebly earns positive reviews for its easy drag-and-drop site builder. Users praise the intuitive interface and range of stylish templates as ideal for beginners (CNET). Customization is more limited than WordPress but sufficient for basic sites.
Reviews also highlight excellent uptime and speeds. Customer support receives mixed feedback, with some experiencing slow responses (TrustRadius). Weebly is best suited for hobby sites over complex business usage due to feature limitations.
Overall, Weebly satisfies users who want a simple yet professional website builder. But those needing advanced functionality may outgrow its constraints.
WordPress (Hosted on Bluehost)
WordPress garners outstanding reviews for capabilities and customization. The open-source model provides unmatched flexibility through plugins and development. This enables scaling complex sites.
Users praise WordPress’ SEO features, e-commerce functionalities, flexibility, and strong community support. However, the learning curve is cited as a challenge for less technical users along with potential performance issues.
Backed by its strong brand recognition, WordPress satisfies users wanting maximum control over sites. But those seeking simplicity may prefer a more turnkey platform like Weebly.
Winner: WordPress (Hosted on Bluehost)
With over 60% market share, WordPress is the undisputed leader in the CMS space. Reviews highlight the immense power its open-source flexibility provides in the right hands. While Weebly offers an easier starting point, WordPress typically earns higher praise and trust long-term, especially for growing sites.
9. FAQ’s
Weebly FAQs
- Is Weebly really free? Weebly offers free plans but they include Weebly ads. To remove branding, you must upgrade to a paid plan starting at $6/month.
- Can I sell products through Weebly? Yes, Weebly has built-in e-commerce capabilities to create an online store and sell both physical and digital products.
- Does Weebly work with WordPress? No, Weebly and WordPress are separate website-building platforms. Plugins and themes for one won’t work on the other.
- Is Weebly easy to use? Yes, Weebly is one of the easiest website builders with drag-and-drop simplicity and a user-friendly interface. No coding skills are needed.
- How long does it take to create a Weebly site? Most users can create a basic Weebly site in under an hour. More advanced sites may take a few hours to customize further.
WordPress (Hosted on Bluehost) FAQs
- Is WordPress really free? Yes, the open-source WordPress software is free to download and use. You just need web hosting which starts around $5/month.
- Can I sell products through WordPress? Yes, WordPress supports e-commerce sites through plugins like WooCommerce. You can build a full online store.
- Is WordPress easy to use? WordPress has a steeper learning curve compared to simpler site builders. You’ll need some technical know-how to leverage its flexibility.
- How long does it take to build a WordPress site? Basic WordPress sites can be online in under an hour. More advanced sites with customizations can take weeks or months depending on complexity.
- Does WordPress work with Weebly? No, WordPress and Weebly are separate, incompatible platforms. You cannot use them together or migrate between them.
Final Thoughts
Choose Weebly if…
Weebly is the best choice for non-technical users who want a simple yet stylish website builder. Its drag-and-drop editor, range of templates, and integrated e-commerce make Weebly perfect for small businesses, online stores, portfolios, and more. While advanced customization is limited, the ease of use and built-in speed optimization provide an affordable starting point before considering pricier or more complex solutions.
If you’d like to learn more about this website builder, take a look at my Weebly review.
Alternatively, you can read up on my various comparisons that showcase how well (or not) Weebly compares against other site builders:
Choose WordPress if…
WordPress offers unmatched flexibility and customization for sites of any size and complexity. Its open-source roots, vast plugin ecosystem, and SEO power make WordPress ideal for blogs, news sites, directories, communities, and advanced e-commerce stores. WordPress enables developers and experienced users to build truly unique sites with infinite scalability. While the learning curve is higher, possibilities are endless for maximizing capabilities through code.
Choosing the right website platform is a key business decision that impacts your online presence and broader success. We hope this comprehensive Weebly vs. WordPress comparison provides useful insights into weighing the pros and cons of each. Please ask any questions in the comments – we’re happy to provide additional guidance to help determine the best solution for your website needs!