Weebly vs WordPress Ultimate Comparison Guide (2024)

15/03/2021

Choosing a Platform

Choosing the right platform for your website is crucial for its success. Your platform determines much of what your website will capable of and how it will function. Every web-hosting platform out there has its own unique set of features, pros, and cons that come along with it. For this reason, choosing the right platform for you may be very hard.

If you know anything about site-creation platforms, then you should know that Weebly and WordPress are two of the most popular ones that people choose. They both are great platforms with unique suites of features, strengths, and weaknesses. This ultimate guide will have several sections that weigh the two platforms to see which is better.

Each category in this article will explain the individual pros and cons of each platform. With this guide, you can see which platform is the right one for you. Before we can compare Weebly and WordPress, I should explain what they are and how they started.

Weebly and WordPress

Weebly is a website hosting platform founded by David Rusenko, Chris Fanini, and Dan Veltri in 2006. Their company was bought by Square in April of 2018. In that same year, Weebly also had more than 600,000 paid subscribers. Weebly currently operates 20 million websites with tens of millions of people signed up.

Weebly’s website builder is famous for being incredibly easy-to-use and intuitive. The accessibility and ease-of-use they provide are hard to beat. These factors helped Weebly become one of the most popular website creation tools of all time. Weebly is still one of the most popular choices for beginners.

Although WordPress is much more versatile and popular, Weebly offers an amazing set of features and is incredibly beginner-friendly. These strengths make Weebly one of the best choices for beginners who do not want the hassle of maintaining a website. Now that you know about Weebly, I can move on to WordPress.

WordPress is an open-source content management system that was created by Automattic in 2003. It is a tool that allows anyone to create their very own website without having to know a single line of code. WordPress has been around for years and has gone through countless versions.

It uses an open-source content management service that anyone can download. WordPress has made it so easy for someone to create and run their site that it powers nearly 40% of the websites on the internet.

It comes in two different versions that people can use; WordPress.org and WordPress.com. If you want to the differences between the two versions, then I highly recommend reading this article. For the sake of clarity, we will be only talking about WordPress.org.

Since WordPress has been around for years, it already has a library of thousands of plugins and themes for you to use. This pre-existing ecosystem of features makes WordPress perfect for every type of website.

With a vast sea of available plugins and themes bundled with one platform that gives you complete control, you can see why WordPress is so popular. Versatility, accessibility, and customizability are what make WordPress great. Now that you know what Weebly and WordPress are, we can move on to seeing which one is right for you.

Ease-of-Use & Accessibility

The first category for our platform stand-off is going to be ease-of-use and accessibility. This section will test how accessible the platforms are and how easy it is to make a website using them. This section will also explain how easy it is to create content and build your site.

The first platform we will cover is Weebly and its accessibility features. Weebly is similar to many platforms like Wix and Squarespace because it has a great suite of accessibility features. It is open to anyone from any country and can use several languages, except for right-to-left languages.

As far as other accessibility, Weebly stands up very well to competitors. Weebly only requires one account and one website to do everything you need to. Everything is stored on one login and can be accessed through their website. This feature makes it very easy to edit your site without any hassle.

Moving onto ease-of-use, this is where Weebly truly shines. To start, their website and hosting platform offers a clean, simple UI anyone can use. Their user-interface is perfect for all people and easy to navigate. It displays everything you need as far as features without looking bad or being slow.

The Weebly Editor is where they truly shine as a website creation tool. The WYSIWYG Editor is an absolute classic as far as site-creation tools. It provides a great variety of features without requiring coding skills or technical knowledge. If you use Weebly’s stunning set of features and UI along with the editor, you can make your dream website easily.

Their website editor stands out to the competition because it is blazing-fast, responsive, and offers compatibility for many features. You can make all types of websites on Weebly with little to no effort. Their designer is easy-to-use and perfect for all beginners due to their streamlined process and drag-and-drop editor.

On the other hand, we have WordPress and their site-builder. WordPress also a full suite of features and accessibility options. WordPress supports most languages, is translation-ready, and open-source. However, there is a catch to this because WordPress is self-hosted.

To use WordPress, you need to have a hosting provider for your website’s server. You must also do extensive installation and maintenance before your website will be fully functional and ready. There is no one account and website that you can use.

Moving onto the page-builder, WordPress has some reliable options. WordPress has a default page-builder called the “Gutenberg Editor”. This page builder is fast, though it lacks several features and can be intrusive at times. This issue, however, can be easily solved by using a third-party page-builder.

Since WordPress is open-source and supports plugins, you can pick between a lot of great page-builders. For this guide, we will be using the Elementor page-builder as our example, though there are countless other page-builders.

Elementor and the Weebly Editor both have extensive customizability and a large feature list. Another great thing is that a lot of page-builders like Elementor are usually free. However, the Weebly page-builder is easier to use and has a cleaner interface.

As far as the actual WordPress dashboard UI goes, it is well built but still needs some work. It has an easy-to-use sidebar that has everything you need in one place. However, there are some small issues, such as admin notices and trackbacks.

Overall, I would rate Weebly very highly in regards to their ease-of-use and accessibility. They offer great services and one of the best website editors. Their UI is non-intrusive and does not have any ads or annoying pop-ups. The only downside to choosing Weebly is the limited selection of languages.

WordPress also offers a great UI, even though it has some annoying features built into it and does not have a great default page-builder. The third-party page-builders like Elementor have more features than the Weebly Editor but are harder to use. Overall, WordPress holds up very to Weebly. However, I think that Weebly deserves the point for this section.

Performance, SEO, & Security

Performance, maintenance, SEO, and security are four crucial elements to running any website. People expect your website to load in seconds. Maintenance determines how much care your site will need. Site security is vital for your site because security breaches will endanger user data and slow down your site. These features are a necessity for all websites.

Starting with Weebly’s performance, there are very few problems as far as speed. Weebly offers blazing-fast loading times, server speeds, and responsiveness like no other. Their servers and optimization are on point with performance, so your site will not have to suffer from much loss in speed.

Site maintenance on Weebly is minimal because you only need to take care of a few optimization features. The only other thing on your site that needs cleaning and maintenance is your content. Thankfully, Weebly does not require you to deal with many technical problems and bugs. Their services have little to no issues and bugs.

SEO on Weebly is also well-made and easy-to-use for all beginners. They offer some basic SEO options and tools for your website. You can edit redirect links, metadata, images, and more. They let you edit the main elements of SEO without providing any advanced settings. Their SEO features are the best out there, but they get the job done.

The security features on Weebly are also just as phenomenal. Their service does not have any major security breaches or issues. If you use Weebly, your site will incredibly secure from hackers and malware. Furthermore, their 24/7 support team will help you instantly and deal with any issues.

WordPress is a very different case when you look at performance and security because it is self-hosted. Self-hosting requires you to manage your website’s security and performance yourself. Performance and security are all dependent on the site creator. Thus, the results will vary from WordPress site to site.

WordPress performance requires a reliable and fast host, like Host Armada, to get the full potential out of your site. There are also countless plugins, CDNs, caching plugins, and other things you can install/tweak to increase performance. On the bright side, the overall performance of the WordPress platform is exceptional.

Having to maintain a site yourself is also a double-edged sword. You will have full control and customization on your site, but you are responsible for everything on your site and how you manage it. Unlike Weebly, if you have technical problems, you have to fix them yourself. You must also have some technical knowledge to use WordPress.

As far as maintenance is concerned, WordPress can be a hassle. You have to consistently clean, optimize, and manage your site to make sure you’re getting the most out of it. If you want an easy solution for WordPress maintenance, then Labinator’s web-experts can auto-pilot your site for you!

As far as SEO is concerned, WordPress can be better than Weebly in several ways. Although SEO requires more time and tweaking, it is much more advanced on WordPress. With WordPress, you change everything about your website’s SEO with ease. The only problem is that it requires the right plugins and configuration to get started.

For security, WordPress also does a good job. Their site security features are not perfect but good enough for the average person. As long as you keep your account secure and maintain your site well, you won’t get a breach. If you have a security breach, then you and your host have to deal with it.

For this section, I would have to give the point over to Weebly because it provides great performance and security without hassle. They have very few faults and technical problems. WordPress offers exceptional performance, though only when you tweak your site correctly. WordPress also requires more attention, care, and technical knowledge to maintain.

Restrictions & Monetization

Some other vital things to consider if you operate a website are restrictions, monetization, and growth potential. These elements will be very critical in the long-term and business side of things. This part of the guide will cover the implications of SEO, monetization, rules, ownership of content, and any restrictions/limitations.

Starting with Weebly, you will see several similarities with other site-creation platforms, such as Wix. However, unlike some other platforms, they have much fewer restrictions. They allow you to pursue almost anything, as long as it is not illegal or against their eCommerce rules.

Furthermore, Weebly does not contain the ownership of your content or website. They only have the rights to the distribution, so they cannot control what is on your website. They also cannot delete any parts of your website unless they break laws. With Weebly, you should have no issue with creating your site.

As far as monetization is concerned, Weebly also has you covered. They offer different types of plans for site-owners. There are also eCommerce features available for creating an online store. These features are not the greatest, but they get the job done. You need to have the right Weebly plan and follow their guidelines.

If you want to work with Google Adsense, Weebly has the right tools for you. Weebly offers some built-in tools for adding advertisements to your website. Other than that, you can probably monetize your website however you want. Like other platforms, Weebly lets you create everything from memberships to email lists.

The growth potential of a Weebly site is high. You can scale and expand your website very fast with Weebly. They offer several plans, tools, services, and exceptional performance. Your Weebly site will easily handle large amounts of traffic and customers. The only downside is that you need to have a specific plan to access some features.

Moving onto WordPress, a lot of similarities with Weebly are present. WordPress is mainly different because it is self-hosted and open-source. These attributes allow WordPress to have more flexibility and control. A website created on WordPress will require more work, but it pays off.

There are much fewer restrictions and limitations on what you can do. Firstly, WordPress has very few rules on what type of content you make and the things you sell. WordPress also does not have ownership of your content either. As long as you are not breaking laws, you can create or sell anything you want.

Secondly, they give you full control over your website. You can edit and tweak your site in any way you want. Almost everything in WordPress can be changed or removed. They also let you directly edit the code of your website and change SEO. You get access to much more on your site with WordPress.

Lastly, WordPress offers more growth potential than Weebly because of more monetization options. WordPress provides plugins like WooCommerce that have much more eCommerce capability than Weebly. These allow you to create a fully customizable store and add things like memberships easily.

WordPress is excellent for the long-term because you can quickly transform your site into a fully-fledged business. Furthermore, there are fewer performance limitations because you can always upgrade your site. Unlike Weebly, there aren’t only a couple of plans you can choose for upgrading your site.

When discussing restrictions and monetization, I would have to hand the point over to WordPress. They offer full control without any unnecessary limitations or restrictions. They also give you greater growth potential for the long-term. WordPress even has more monetization options for your website. This is why WordPress deserves the point for this section.

Customizability, Features, & Design

One of the last sets of things we will be covering is customizability, features, and design. These things are crucial for both adding functionality and designing a good website. This section will cover the functionality, site designing features, plugins, and aesthetic options that Weebly and WordPress offer.

Weebly has a lot as far flexibility and customizability are concerned. To start, you can edit most of the crucial elements on your website. You cannot tweak the backend and tools on your site. However, you can still change your website’s code. You retain control over the website’s creative elements because Weebly takes care of the technical aspects.

Besides the design and content, you can edit the main features and elements on Weebly. Their flexibility for HTML and CSS is acceptable but cannot be changed as easily as WordPress. Weebly still gives you full control of the appearance and design of your site. However, if you are keen on heavily editing your site, Weebly is not for you.

For features, Weebly is a little lackluster when compared to WordPress. Weebly has great features for building a simple and minimal website. They also offer a few good options for eCommerce and interactive websites. However, the App Center they provide is mediocre and does not have as many features or tools.

For design and aesthetics, Weebly does much better because it has a great site builder. Weebly also offers several themes you can pick from, which you can edit and tweak to your liking later. They can be quite basic, but they have full customizability and some stunning designs. They are not very advanced, but they get the job done.

WordPress gives you full control over your site and complete customizability. They give you the tools and options to make your site into whatever you want. This fact is also helped by its exceptional library of plugins. The WordPress platform itself allows you to change everything from your SEO to the code directly.

Since WordPress is fully open-source, anybody can create anything for the platform. If you can code it, you can add it to a WordPress site. This also ties into the great number of features that WordPress offers. Plugins and the pre-existing WordPress settings let you add anything without editing the code.

WordPress features tens of thousands of plugins that can do anything from removing a specific notification to overhauling everything about your site. Plugins and themes are the bread and butter of WordPress. Since WordPress is open-source, the plugins can achieve anything imaginable.

WordPress offers so much in design that it can get overwhelming. Although creating a site is more difficult with WordPress, it has thousands of plugins to help you. WordPress also has thousands of stunning themes that ready out of the box. WordPress themes can range from full overhauls to frameworks you can build on, like NanoSpace.

The design options are extensive and flexible. The page-builders and customizability features let you change everything about the website. Weebly has excellent aesthetic and design options, but WordPress has more. WordPress also allows for complex features such as parallax scrolling, custom links, custom CSS, and much more.

In conclusion, I believe that WordPress easily wins this discussion. It has a much higher level of customizability, aesthetic options, and extra functionality. WordPress has higher fidelity as far as what you can change and to what extent. Weebly offers some great options for you, but WordPress has more and does it better.

Pricing

Pricing can be a deal maker or breaker for most people looking for a platform. You need a platform that is cost-effective and provides flexible pricing options. Since pricing can vary greatly when creating a website, we will only focus on the basic things you need.

Thankfully, Weebly is straightforward with its pricing and plans. Before we cover the plans, you should know that there is a free plan. Weebly offers a completely free plan, although it only has basic features and tools. It is good for beginners, but cannot fulfill all of your needs. The rest of the plans range from $6 to $26 every month.

The plans come with four different sets of differences. These include marketing tools, eCommerce capabilities, support, and website features. Thankfully, most of their plans are very well balanced and offer great benefits. However, their most expensive plan is not worth the price increase. You can check out the plans through this link.

WordPress is a very different case because pricing for a WordPress site can range between $15 a month to $500. There are several things you can buy for WordPress, but you can also take the free route. WordPress gives you financial flexibility and countless options.

If you want a WordPress site, you need a domain and hosting provider. WordPress itself is free, but since it’s self-hosted, you will need a hosting provider. Hosting providers range in price from $3 to $20 every month, each with different speeds and features. I would once again recommend Host Armada if you want a place to start.

After getting a hosting provider, domain name, and installing WordPress, you don’t have to pay for anything else. However, WordPress has a library of thousands of plugins, themes, services, add-ons, and other products you can buy.

Plugins and themes are the main things you can buy, but things like CDNs and services are also useful. All of these products can range in price. If you want a place to buy the best WordPress products and services, I would highly recommend Labinator.

In conclusion, I believe that WordPress would win this category because of its incredibly flexible pricing. Weebly is slightly more restrictive with pricing and has less flexibility. Overall, Weebly is the cheaper option for a full website, but WordPress offers much more for the cost.

Pros & Cons of Weebly

Pros of Weebly:

Simple and appealing visuals that fit any style.
Easy to use with no technical knowledge required.
A support team that handles most of your problems.
Little to no website maintenance and problems.

Cons of Weebly:

Pricing is restrictive and can get expensive.
To get the most out of your site, you need to pay.
Limited customizability and settings.
Much less overall long-term growth potential.
Limited design options and features.
Limitations and restrictions on some areas of your site.

Pros & Cons of WordPress

Pros of WordPress:

The platform itself is completely free and open-source.
It’s a much more popular option.
Already a library of thousands of plugins and themes.
You have full control and customizability.
There are very few restrictions and limitations.
It costs much less Weebly and has more flexible pricing.
You can add a lot of functionality and extra features.

Cons of WordPress:

It requires technical knowledge and isn’t easier to use.
It takes some time to learn and create a site.
You have to perform maintenance and optimization.
You have to pay for third-party services, like a host.

Weebly vs WordPress Comparison Table

Feature	WordPress.org	Weebly
Open-Source
Design Options
Flexibility & Scalability
Control & Customizations
Ease Of Use
Core Features
eCommerce
Popularity & Community Size
Support
Value & Pricing
Total Points	9.5/10	6.5/10

The Final Verdict

In conclusion, there isn’t a right or wrong answer for choosing between Weebly and WordPress. Weebly and WordPress both have individual strengths and weaknesses that make them different. It comes down to what type of site you want. They are better at separate things, though I recommend WordPress over Weebly for most people.

Weebly is usually better for short-term or simple websites that only have one purpose. The easy-to-use tools, accessibility, free option, and reliability make it a good option for small sites. Weebly is a great solution for beginners, but WordPress offers much more scalability and long-term potential.

WordPress is better for long-term sites or businesses because of its degree of control, flexibility, and customizability. It offers more monetization choices, features, control, and more functionality. Even though it is hard to set up and operate, it has growth potential and flexibility that Weebly cannot compete with.

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