Create a review of Weebly: Simplify website creation with this user-friendly, complimentary web builder
Weebly, a popular website builder, offers a user-friendly platform that caters to individuals with limited technical skills or web design experience. In this article, we'll explore the pros and cons of using Weebly as a free website builder for photographers and artists.
Pros
- No upfront cost: Weebly’s free plan lets users build a basic website without any monthly or annual fees, making it a low-risk way to test the platform.
- Essential features included: Even on the free tier, Weebly provides hosting, security, analytics tools, and ecommerce capabilities, allowing users to sell products right away, which is rare on free plans.
- Generous storage: 500MB of storage is included, typically sufficient for portfolios or galleries that are not extremely content-heavy.
- User-friendly: The drag-and-drop interface is intuitive, making it easy for beginners such as photographers and artists to create sites without technical knowledge.
Cons
- Storage limitations: 500MB can quickly become insufficient for image-heavy portfolios, limiting how many photos or high-resolution files you can host.
- Weebly/Square ads: The free plan displays advertisements on your site which can detract from a professional presentation and potentially impact your brand image negatively.
- Limited customization: Compared to competitors, Weebly’s free plan offers fewer design options and less flexibility to customize layouts, which might frustrate more advanced users or creative professionals seeking unique presentation.
- Features and templates lag: The platform has had few recent updates to tools and templates, so sites on Weebly—even paid ones—can appear dated compared to others.
- Bandwidth and traffic constraints: Implicit in free plans are limits on bandwidth and visitor traffic, which can affect performance as your site grows.
In summary, Weebly’s free plan provides a strong, easy-to-use starting point with ecommerce features and decent storage, suitable for photographers or artists new to website building or on tight budgets. However, limitations in storage, customization, presence of ads, and dated design options make it less ideal for professionals seeking a highly polished, scalable, and fully branded portfolio site. Upgrading to paid plans may become necessary for serious online presence.
Weebly is suitable for creative professionals, small business owners, and anyone who wishes to build a simple, functional website quickly, without complexity or high costs. The Personal plan, priced at £5 per month when billed annually, includes a custom domain connection and allows selling of digital goods.
However, the layout editor on Weebly is quite restricted in terms of where elements can be placed. The platform also has a limited selection of Themes, with only 68 templates overall. The editor in Weebly sometimes feels less responsive than more modern alternatives, with slight delays when dragging elements or previewing changes.
Weebly's support system falls short of the 24/7 availability and consistently rapid response times offered by some rivals. The amount of flexibility to change themes is also limited. Despite these drawbacks, Weebly offers good ecommerce features, easy form builder, and built-in SEO tools.
The author found Weebly to be the easiest platform they've ever used for building a simple website. The author used Weebly to create a portfolio site, which is accessible here. The chosen theme, Breal Edison, had a homepage, portfolio page, About me page, blog, and Contact me page.
In conclusion, Weebly offers a competitive pricing structure compared to Wix and Squarespace. While it may not be the most feature-rich or customisable platform, it provides a straightforward and efficient way for beginners to create a functional website quickly and easily.
- The free plan on Weebly includes hosting, security, analytics tools, and e-commerce capabilities, allowing users to sell products.
- With 500MB storage, Weebly's free plan is normally sufficient for portfolios or galleries, but can become insufficient for image-heavy portfolios.
- The drag-and-drop interface of Weebly is user-friendly, making it easy for beginners like photographers and artists to create websites without technical knowledge.
- Weebly's free plan has fewer design options and less flexibility to customize layouts compared to competitors, which might frustrate more advanced users or creative professionals.
- The platform has had few recent updates to tools and templates, resulting in sites on Weebly, even paid ones, appearing dated compared to others.
- Implicit in free plans are limitations on bandwidth and visitor traffic, leading to potential performance issues as a site grows.
- The Personal plan on Weebly, priced at £5 per month when billed annually, includes a custom domain connection and allows selling of digital goods.
- The author of the article found Weebly to be the easiest platform they've ever used for building a simple website, using it to create a portfolio site, which is accessible here.
