Weebly vs WordPress Which One is Best for Your Website and Which One to Use?

Weebly vs WordPress is a frequently discussed topic and sometimes leads to heated debates. But if we try to make a comparison and highlight pros and cons of each, we’ll have a general picture qualifyin each in a comprehensible manner.

Before passing to the discussion of Weebly vs WordPress and delving into their similarities and differences, let’s cast a quick glance at each of them separately.

The process of building a website is more straightforward than it used to be. But, it does not mean that developing one is easy.

For creating a stylish website with advanced functionalities there are many platforms and tools that can help even when you don’t know coding.

Two of such options are WordPress and Weebly, and in this read, we will try and figure out the best one for you. Both of them are popular and sometimes the discussion of Weebly Vs WordPress even leads to heated debates.

Weebly vs WordPress

WordPress

wordpress.org
WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems and open source blogging platforms at present. It is proudly positioned to be the digital spectrum of choice of many website owners: both beginners and experienced.

Released in 2003 and based on PHP and MySQL, WordPress offers both free and premium products and currently supports more than sixty million websites.

Well, this number tells a lot about the reliability and perfect usability of WordPress as a blog or website management platform.

The expression open source, in this relation, means that this platform is open for anyone in every corner of the world.

It means that you are free as in freedom when dealing with WordPress and its products. You can use, manage, alter and customize it the way you want and at any time you prefer.

Weebly

Weebly
Weebly is another top solution for personal and business website builders, as well as e commerce online traders and shop owners. It’s a popular web hosting service founded in 2006 and based on easy drag and drop functionality.

This ecosystem also offers free and premium working plans, which means that anyone is able to create his website based on Weebly without spending a dime.

As for the speed and security of Weebly based sites, they are unbeatable and well defended against hacks and spams.

Finally, it comes bundled with all the necessary features and controls, so that you can take a thorough control over each piece of your website without any hassle.

Of course, this quick overview can never be enough for you to get your head around what is there and which one is more reasonable to choose.

And if you find yourself bewildered when it comes deciding between WordPress vs Weebly, follow our article that wades through their rational comparison to dig out their catches and cons.

Introduction to platforms

Weebly is amongst the most popular platform when it comes to creating websites without knowing how to code. It is constantly improvising in the past years.

This has made it possible for sole website builders to be used for the development of professional websites.

It is amongst the most popular options in the market and hence has a lot going for it. Creating traditional and widely used common websites can be done easily here. Stylish pages can be created in record times thanks to the drag-and-drop builder.

On the other hand, the Content Management System WordPress and has gained a terrific user attraction in the previous decade. In different manners, a CMS can be used to develop a website.

The learning curve can be steep here but it tends to offer more options. It also enables you to use the desired hosting provider of your choice.

Full control of settings and sometimes complete configuration of the entire website is in your hands here.

We will discuss different factors and compare both these platforms and then come down to a verdict in the following sections.

This will help you in drawing a clear picture of what the platforms are capable of. After the analysis selecting one from both platforms that best suit your advantage will be easier.

Weebly vs WordPress

Customization – Weebly Vs WordPress

customization
For building specific types of websites there are a lot of platforms, plugins, and themes available today. This will offer you get the liberty, freedom, and power to create the website as per your requirement.

When it comes to traditional websites and online stores Weebly is great. It enables you to put together almost any style that you want with its drag-and-drop editor and range of themes.

Undoubtedly a professional website demands a lot more and not just looks. You will even need advanced functionality or apps and plugins for enhancing the features.

Weebly gives you access to dozens of free applications that can be installed on the site. Adding social media interactions and settings related to tweak search engine are few among others.

WordPress is a hub of plugins and themes that will enable you to add everything that is required. As of now, there are at least 50,000 free plugins available for use on this platform.

Now, this number does not include the count of premium plugins. When it comes to themes, previously the choices were limited. But now, even they are impressive and available in abundance as per the niche.

You can visit www.sktthemes.org/themes for a stunning and powerful variety of free and premium themes. The added advantage here in practice is that any feature and style can be added.

Plugins like WooCommerce even enable to transform the site into an online store.

Now as the number of options available is almost infinite and hence the selection process becomes hectic. Review and research before making the final selection is the only advice here.

This will not only help you in selecting the best but also address your answers for how it works in the long term.

Coming to a verdict for customization WordPress definitely has an upper hand. Despite Weebly offering plenty of choices, it is not comparable to what the other side has to offer.

Website Management – Weebly Vs WordPress

This section involves the most frequent tasks performed for keeping the website running.

Updating the platform, modifying the pages, backup, and SEO among others are examples of the tasks. Let’s explore what each of them has to offer.

When it comes to Weebly, from the settings options, general settings, SEO, and social integrations can be managed. You can even update the page name, manage re-directs, and the URL as well.

It also enables you to conveniently preview what the site will look like on SERPs. Adding descriptions and links to social media pages is also directly manageable.

The overall conclusion here is that it ensures that all mundane tasks need not be worried about. The concerning part is the lack of control over some crucial website settings.

On the other hand, the CMS WordPress does not fall short of settings and website management. The settings tab helps you with all the main options of the site and can be easily found on the dashboard.

You can set up a static homepage, configure settings related to search engines, alter the URL structure, and more. Configuring maximum resolution for every new image upload is also manageable.

It will not be incorrect to claim that almost every aspect of the site can be managed, controlled, and configured.

The verdict here as well goes in the favor of WordPress. Technically it gets easier with Weebly but the options for configuration are fewer. But, with its competitor, you have everything at your fingertips.

Performance – Weebly Vs WordPress

performance
From a performance standpoint, irrespective of any platform that you choose, the core requirement is that it should be flawless. The dashboard should feel light and the page should load at lightning speed.

Performance can be impacted by multiple factors. Both WordPress and Weebly are fast, but a page that includes 20MB of images will take time to load. Now this will feel slow to the visitors but this is how it is.

When it comes to using Weebly you will never have to worry about optimizing the website. The loading speed of the website tends to be pretty quick which happens to be an impressive feature.

But, as discussed in the earlier section the limitations with fine-tuning the settings happen to be a major disappointment.

WordPress being a self-hosted platform enables you to choose a web host of your choice. Hence, your selection can be easy with the one that has a solid reputation.

For improvisation of performance, settings can be tweaked to achieve the desired results. Automatic image optimization, integrating content delivery network (CDN), and leveraging browser coaching among others are some of the settings.

The verdict here is that squeezing performance with WordPress is convenient and easy. But, it demands more effort when compared to Weebly. The availability of options to better optimize is better than limited options.

Security – Weebly Vs WordPress

security
In this age of increasing dependency on the digital way of life security plays an essential role. Whether the owners are aware of this or not, a lot of websites are vulnerable to online attacks.

This can happens due to the usage of login information that is easily predictable. Using outdated software or a vulnerability in one of the existing URL extensions can also cause this problem.

A successful security breach on your website risks the visitors and their data. Hence, irrespective of whatever the case ensuring the security of the website is of prime importance across all platforms.

To make core changes in the website security settings one needs the liberty and freedom of selecting the desired hosting platform. When it comes to Weebly one has to use the hosted platform without any choice.

Although, changes in some aspects like SSL among others can be made. It has also occurred that many a time’s users face issues in setting up certain credentials due to various limitations.

WordPress has emerged as the most fascinating network and hence has been the target for attackers. Hackers are always in search of the smallest vulnerabilities that can be used to their advantage.

Due to the growing popularity and usage, the core of WordPress has improvised and is more secure. Due to the vast availabilities of plugins and themes most of the attacks are targeted through that medium.

Selecting applications after a thorough review and analyzing ratings can help you in avoiding that risk.

The major advantage of WordPress is that you get to choose your preferred web host. Hence, it is always safe to opt for the one that provides additional security like backup, firewall, and others.

The interesting fact is that plugins can be used to your advantage for enhancing security.

The verdict for this sensitive issue is not that simple. Both these platforms have had a history of being attacked in the past.

When using it you have limited freedom in Weebly. This makes it convenient for its competitor to win this comparison of Weebly Vs WordPress for this section.

Open source vs not open source

Let’s start our comparison with one of the most important technical points that defines your domination over your future platform.

As already mentioned above, WordPress is an open source platform and is ready to give you ultimate freedom to work with the given framework, its tools and codes (if you are profy in coding or development).

On the other hand, Weebly provides you with HTML and CSS code controls and not more. It means that not all the tools and elements are under your dominion.

Further, with WordPress you get access to thousands of additional tools in the form of plugins and extensions. However, with Weebly you don’t have right to rely on supplementary non Weebly tools since its core functions are unachievable for you.

Hosted vs self hosted

Another WordPress vs Weebly debate that ends with the triumph of WordPress is about their hosted and self hosted nature. To put it short, Weebly is a hosted platform and WordPress is self hosted.

Otherwise stated, if your website is supported by Weebly, it is located on their servers and functions in compliance with their terms and requirements.

If you ever need to migrate to another platform, it is going to be a daunting task for you.

With self hosted WordPress you can install your site on your web hosting account and have everything under your dominion. If you want to migrate to another platform, it’s much easier to do with WordPress than with Weebly.

Easy in usage

easy to use

Although both platforms are optimized for the beginners or non techy website users, Weebly is simpler and does not require any learning curve.

It’s based on easy to use drag and drop functionality so that its users can manage everything quickly and without complex processes.

However, it doesn’t mean that WordPress expects you to be a seasoned developer or designer to go live with your business website or personal blog.

As for the drag and drop functionality, in particular, there are also tons of WordPress templates offering this drag and drop page building strategy for you.

Thus its pretty balanced between Weebly vs WordPress in this case.

Prebuilt features vs additional tools and plugins

Weebly is a feature rich platform enabling you to make the most out of your site. But if you feel the necessity of some element that the default Weebly platform lacks, you won’t be able to rely on additional features or add them for further usage.

On the contrary, WordPress community has taken care of inserting basic elements into its templates and offers you thousands of additional tools and plugins to make your digital life easier.

Search engine optimization

seo friendly

Needless to say, that SEO is a major factor in defining your site’s place and visibility online. And when comparing WordPress and Weebly, we cannot overlook the importance of SEO.

Basically, both platforms are SEO friendly: Weebly with basic SEO options already preloaded and WordPress with SEO friendly nature, but plugins making it totally SEO optimized.

Anyway, this third party plugins can take your site’s ranking to the maximum and you will never feel anything missing from your SEO campaign.

In Weebly vs WordPress WordPress is definitely the top one to consider for SEO. SEO wise it is the best CMS and better than any other website builder in the world.

When it comes to choosing which platform to build your website on, the choices cannot get any starker than this, with Weebly vs WordPress, hogging the limelight.

It should be pointed out that both are equally good, and that makes it all the more harder to choose which one is better and which one to build your website on.

For example, WordPress is one of the most popular platforms and CMS systems in the world and today, it powers over 60 million websites all over the world.

That’s why it is important that you take a closer look at these two platforms, and answer the question of Weebly vs WordPress and see which one sounds better to you. So let’s take a closer look at both these platforms, shall we?

Platform: WordPress is an open source platform which entails absolute freedom and that you can customize all the page elements, utilize third party plugins on your website for added functionality and much more.

Open resource essentially means that you have a lot of freedom in determining how your tools work whereas with weebly, you do not have any say in how the tools are supposed to work on your website which is a disadvantage.

The fact that WordPress has many programmers actively coding and improving the platform essentially means that you can look forward to regular updates, better security and features in the long run.

On the other hand, weebly is more of a closed system where a select team of professionals develop the platform and all its tools and you have little or no freedom in customizing the website or in having a say on designing the tool or on how it is supposed to function.

Control: When it comes to management, WordPress enables you to manage your platform and provides you with all the tools you need for the same. Weebly on the other hand, micromanages everything and that includes your website.

With weebly, you have little say in how you would want your website to look or on how to improve its functionality. Moreover, weebly does not allow you to run third party plugins unless it has been vetted by them.

This is why WordPress is the better option of the two as it provides you with all the flexibility and freedom you need to develop a fully customized and 100% responsive website.

Cost: As far as cost goes, both average the same when you take into account the hosting charges which are minimal at best.

And after you include the cost of premium themes, add-ons, your cost should work to about a hundred or two hundred dollars for a premium website. Or you can opt for free designs with WordPress and whittle the cost further down.

This is why, all things considered, it makes more sense to go ahead with WordPress when setting up your website. As it stands you are bound to get access to more tools, functionality and freedom to customize with WordPress than you ever would with Weebly.

Related Post:Top 3 CMS Comparison WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal for Websites

Conclusion

We don’t want to announce a winner. It’s up to you to decide which platform better suits your needs and objectives.

In either case, you will be able to get maximum with 0 coding knowledge.

However, if you are planning to build a small and cozy website for your own needs and with limited performance, Weebly can satisfy your requirements.

If you want to receive more with less stress and confusion, have a wide variety of tools and freedom to manage them, WordPress is the platform to give preference to.

Related Post:WordPress vs. Blogger – Which one is Better?

When looking for a simple solution for creating websites that are e-commerce enabled then Weebly will attract you. With WordPress, both your requirements can be addressed and you also have multiple options.

We personally recommend using the program that has emerged as the winner in the above comparison of Weebly vs WordPress.

But given your requirements and the target audience that you are looking for you can make a wise choice.

About Sonl Sinha

Sonl SinhaSonl Sinha is a passionate writer as well as WordPress and WooCommerce rockstar who loves to share insights on various topics through his engaging blog posts. He runs a successful website design and digital marketing company. With 15+ years of experience in WordPress theme development, he strives to inform and inspire readers with his thought-provoking content. He helps thousands of small and medium businesses and startups create a unique online presence. Follow Sonl Sinha for your regular dose of knowledge and inspiration.

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