Weebly Review
Summary of the Weebly Review
Based in San Francisco, Weebly was founded in 2006 and with more than 12 million users worldwide it is one of the biggest players in the website builder segment. In 2007 Weebly was voted by TIME magazine as one of the 50 best websites. The company is focused on the continual development and optimization of their product, the benefits of which are passed onto the users. In the following table you will get an overview of the Weebly review, for detailed findings just go further down on this site.
Overview of the review
Review category | Score | Comment |
| Ease of use | 5/5 | Easy registration process and intuitive handling, full score. |
| Pricing | 4/5 | The price depends on the length of the contract you choose. For a one year contract it is $39.95 per year and $24.99 p.a. for a 10 year contract, both are a fair price. The lack of transparent presentation of the prices gets one point deducted. |
| Setup Speed | 5/5 | The setup is pretty fast and easy, it’s nearly as fast as the Jimdo setup. |
| User Interface | 5/5 | Very clear, the editing options are focused on a main menu. |
| Customizable | 4/5 | A lot of possibilities to customize your site, but some limitations, i.e. editing the footer. |
| Designs and Templates | 5/5 | Wide range of designs, also integrated in the free Weebly version. |
| Going mobile | 5/5 | Within the main settings you’ll find the mobile settings, which are preset so that your page will automatically appear correctly on mobile devices. |
| SEO | 4/5 | It’s not possible to change the site title and URL for a separate page. Apart from this the on-page optimization is easy to handle with Weebly. |
| Analytics | 3/5 | Weebly provides some statistics in the pro plan and you can also integrate your Google Analytics Tracking Code. Weebly recommends you add the code to the footer, but for getting correct numbers you should integrate the Analytics code to the header of your page. |
| Special Features (z.B. Widgets) | 5/5 | HTML Widgets are easy to integrate on your Weebly site. |
| Total Score | 45/50 | Weebly is an extremely fast and easy to use website builder with some shortfalls in the analysis. In our review Weebly just misses out on the best possible rating, but it’s a solid base for building your website. |
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Review Details
Signup: You have the choice between two registration options on Weebly, either you register with your name, e-mail address and password, or you can use the Facebook connect registration and sign in with information from your Facebook account. If you don’t want to link your personal information from your Facebook account to your Weebly website you should choose the direct data entry. 
Registration Assistant: After your signup you are guided through a registration assistant. In the first step you’re asked to type in the title of the new website and choose a suggested category (e.g. personal, business, wedding, etc.). In the second step you choose your desired domain, a live check will show if the domain is available or not. A nice function here is, that you can name an already registered domain which you own on which the Weebly content will be delivered. The drawback in this step is, that it’s not clearly stated that you have to choose a pro account when you want to take your own domain – which you have to pay for. The Weebly pricing is not transparently presented, but the conditions are fair, see pricing in the screenshot below:
Choose a plan: If you decide to take the free plan, your website will appear with a subdomain of Weebly, which looks like this: www.my-domain.weebly.com
After choosing the right Weebly version for you, you’ll be directed to the editor. Now you can start to work on your new website. The editor is found in the main editing menu at the top of the page, see screenshot:
Editing: What caught our attention in the editing process was the speed of the interface, it requires no loading time when you edit elements or change the appearance. Your website isn’t directly published on the web so you can work on it in “stealth-mode“ till you think it’s ready for publishing. You can find the publish-function in the header on the right hand side.
Navigation and edit new subpages: You can remove unwanted sites from the navigation, which makes sense since not all pages need to appear within the navigation. Unfortunately it’s not possible to customize the URL of subpages, which means that the URL is always depending on the title of the specific page.
Special Functions: With your Weebly website it’s possible to setup different accesses levels with specific editing rights. The idea behind this function is that more people can work on the project. You don’t have to pass your personal login information to a third party and afterwards you can change or delete the access, since you are the admin of the Weebly page.
Conclusion: Weebly offers a well-engineered product, with which you can set up your own website without trouble. We were pleased by the playful editing mode and the super fast loading time. Some points are missing because of the lack of transparent price display and a lack of analytic possibilities.
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Review Date: 2013-11-06 | last Update: 2013-11-06 | reviewed by Dirk Fuhlhage
