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WordPress vs. Weebly

Creating a good-looking website without extensive web development experience is much easier today than it’s ever been, thanks in part to site builders like Weebly and content management systems (CMS)—platforms that offer the ability to design, update, and customize sites with little to no coding required.

What you get in ease of setup, however, you do tend to lose in customization and flexibility. That’s why businesses who want both sides of the coin tend to look at WordPress, and invest in extending the open-source platform with a developer’s help. For advanced functionality, the sky’s the limit with WordPress. However, for individuals with zero technical knowledge who need less complicated requirements from their site (and something fast and on a budget), it’s not uncommon to turn to click-and-create website builders like Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly.

From the ground up, these two routes are very different. Imagine you’re building a gingerbread house. With WordPress, you’re given all the ingredients, structural templates, and decorations to make it from scratch, exactly how you want it. There’s no limit to what you can come up with, but there’s a little more legwork. With Weebly, you’re given the premade gingerbread walls and a selection of pre-picked decorations. The hard, behind-the-scenes stuff is done for you, but you have less flexibility.

So which platform is right for you? It boils down to what you need from your site, the kind of development help you can afford, and how much you plan to scale up in the future. In this article, we’ll compare two top platforms for building sites, WordPress and Weebly, to help you decide which one is best for you.

Comparing WordPress and Weebly

WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world, boasting more ease of use than CMS’s like Drupal and Magento. It’s not just a blogging platform anymore—it’s expanded into a totally customizable framework for building and updating websites. This is accomplished with plugins and third-party integrations, and there’s a near-endless supply of both to choose from. They extend a basic WordPress site to do anything you need—sell online, integrate email marketing, get advanced SEO and analytics, or use forms to communicate with users. WordPress is coded with PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript—so the more customization you want, the more technical expertise you’ll need to get it there.

Weebly is a website builder that requires absolutely no knowledge of code. Instead, it uses extensive drag-and-drop functionality to build nearly every aspect of a site, from the home and interior pages to email marketing templates and custom forms. The pricing ranges from free to $8 a month to $35 a month, depending on the plan: Pro, Store, or Business. Weebly offers free hosting, 500MGs of storage, and SSL security, keeping it pretty on par with WordPress.

Set-up and learning curve

This is where Weebly immediately will appeal to a small business owner with no technical knowledge and a tight budget—it handles so much for you behind the scenes. Everything with Weebly revolves around templates and drag-and-drop editing—it’s all visual so you can see what your site will look like as you’re putting it together.

You can pick a professionally designed template and create a responsive mobile site, and, like WordPress, Weebly has a mobile admin site so you can update your site, track performance, and manage orders from customers on the go.

Getting set up with WordPress can require a good amount of coding and installation. After downloading the latest WordPress installation (.org, not .com), you’ll need to find your own hosting service and set up a domain name. Once that’s set up, you can install and customize your theme of choice. You’ll probably want to make tweaks to a theme, and this can quickly add up to a lot of work depending on the functionality you’re looking to get.

When it comes to adding content, WordPress is more involved than Weebly. While WordPress does have a preview option, it can take time to get comfortable actually building the page. The dashboard is famously user-friendly, however, but unless you have a web developer or designer, you’ll probably want to get comfortable with some basic HTML and CSS.

Add-ons and extra features

Most WordPress sites use custom or commercial plugins and themes that dictate the appearance and functionality of the WordPress site. You can layer these on or switch them out without altering the underlying code or content, so it makes it easy to do a lot with a site without a ton of code. With both WordPress and Weebly, you can choose themes that are designed to support different categories of websites, whether it’s an online publication, a photo gallery, a portfolio site, an online store, or a marketing page for a company.

When it comes to customizing a Weebly website, you can choose between dozens of different responsive templates within different categories. Weebly’s answer to WordPress plugins is the Weebly App Center, where you can find third-party integrations to extend functionality, like adding menus or payment options. There are other built-in features like SEO (with a guide to setting up SEO on a page-by-page basis), real-time stats and analytics, email marketing support with Weebly Promote, and an integrated ecommerce platform.

Support and maintenance

What happens when you need help with your site? Another big differentiator for newbies is Weebly’s chat-based support, which makes it easy for non-developers to troubleshoot aspects of their site quickly and affordably, without having to engage a developer to make costly edits or fixes. With Weebly, there’s also never anything for you to install or update, and they promise excellent site performance with their servers. Essentially, it’s all handled in the background.

While WordPress enjoys a massive community of developers and has ample documentation, when it comes to getting help or troubleshooting support with specific themes or plugins, chances are you’ll need the help of a developer. Updating, maintaining, and optimizing your site will all remain important through the lifecycle of your WordPress site. The WordPress platform receives multiple updates per year, and while the code and database get updated in the background and plugins can be updated with a click, there’s always the chance an update can break more complex, custom-coded functionality. If you’ve coded the site yourself, this can be a pretty straightforward process. If you’ve had a developer custom code much of your site, you’ll likely want them to handle updates to ensure nothing breaks. And not updating your installation—especially if you’re using a lot of plugins—can leave you vulnerable to security flaws.

Which is right for you?

Every CMS makes tradeoffs between flexibility and simplicity. Which matters more to you will depend on the kind of website you’re building, and your own skill level. WordPress is one of the most flexible platforms around, but getting the most out of it requires time and programming resources. Weebly, on the other hand, makes it super easy to build a simple, good-looking and functional website with very little hassle, but that comes at the expense of functionality and scalability.