Weebly is a great website building platform for its ease of use and simplicity. For people who are developing their website for the first time, and want to do it themselves, I recommend platforms like Weebly. They have many pre-built themes that make it easy to create a cohesive look for your website, and they also offer free options.
Problems with Using Weebly for Your Business
Although Weebly is straight forward to use for creating a website, it is not friendly for SEO. There are many options inside of the software that allows for optimization of SEO, but they also restrict some features that benefit SEO until you pay for more expensive packages.
SEO optimization is the most important aspect of your website, and the platform doesn’t allow you to build websites with SEO in mind from the beginning. Spending time building your website without optimizing SEO can equate in wasted time on a website that can’t rank organically.
Is WordPress Better than Weebly?
Weebly is generally easier to set up than a custom installation of WordPress, but platforms like WordPress.com makes it really easy to get a basic installation of WordPress started.
Migrating from Weebly to WordPress
Some of our clients come to use with a website built in Squarespace or Wix, asking how to increase their SEO and overall traffic. When it comes down to it, even platforms where you can pay for SEO like Shopify, can’t even ensure your website will rank.
We can migrate your website from any website building platform, onto a WordPress install that is SEO optimized. For one of our clients, we did a full website migration from Weebly to WordPress and saw a big increase in overall organic traction.
Weebly to WordPress SEO Case Study
We initially did the migration in December of 2018, when we started noticing that the website was losing traction organically to competitors who were running ads and pushing people directly to their website.
When we started the migration, these were our organic keyword numbers for the month. The main goal of any SEO campaign should be to increase the number of Top 3 keywords your website is ranking for, as these ranks will always see the most traffic.
With a total of 121 keywords, our client was a bit scared to move forward because she assumed we would lose ranks if we were to migrate the website. When migrating a website to WordPress, there are a few key steps that need to take place to ensure you maintain your current SEO rank:
- Download current keywords
- Redirect old URLs to new URLs
- Copy meta & title tags
Results of the Migration
Overall, we saw complete success with migrating the website to WordPress. As you can see in our keyword rankings for June of 2019, we essentially doubled the number of organic keywords our website is ranking for. Even though we didn’t see a large increase in our Top 3, we did see that our 51-100 keywords essentially doubled.
This, in turn, strengthens our top performing keywords and keeps them safe from competitors who may be using black-hat strategies for boosting their SEO.
Is it Worth Migration from Weebly to WordPress?
Yes. WordPress is much more effective when it comes to optimizing for Organic SEO, and Weebly probably did a good job and setting the base for the keywords your website should be ranking for.
