What is Weebly?
Weebly is a website builder and e-commerce store builder that is powered by Square.
This gives Weebly the powerful payment processing abilities that Square has to offer, as well as a seamless store management system.
Small businesses that already take advantage of Square’s in-store POS system can use Weebly to grow their presence online. It’s a great move.
So, it sounds like Weebly isn’t so bad of a platform, but how does it scale as your business grows? That’s something we will talk about in this article.
Benefits of Using Weebly for your Website
As we have helped many clients migrate from Weebly to WordPress, we have seen why many of our clients decided to choose Weebly when they were just starting off.
Here are some of the most popular reasons people use Weebly for their website:
- Direct integration into Square
- Powerful Mobile App
- A simple website design process
- Basic SEO Functionality
Direct Integration into Square
As we talked about in the intro, Weebly is powered by Square and will directly integrate with your Square store as you use it in your brick-and-mortar business.
Square includes powerful payment processing as well as an easy-to-use inventory management system that can help businesses get accustomed to organizing inventory and monitoring analytics.
Powerful Mobile App
Weebly features a fully functional app that allows users to design and edit the content on their website from their cell phone.
In comparison to updating WordPress from your phone, this process is much easier and allows people who don’t have computer access all the time (or don’t want to be on their computer) to still effectively manage their website.
Simple Website Design Process
With an extensive theme library to choose from, choosing a design for your website is pretty easy and doesn’t take much time. If you ever want to update the look of your Weebly website, you can purchase or install free themes to get a new look a feel. Just make sure that your content on the page still looks good!
Basic SEO Functionality
Weebly comes out of the box with some basic SEO functionalities. For local businesses or small online stores, this is just enough to get your store visible across the search engine. If you look at my Weebly SEO case study you will see that it can be hard to generate
Downsides of Using Weebly
After using Weebly for one or two years, most websites grow large enough to where Weebly is not really helping them grow their SEO. The best SEO strategies involve custom development and unique strategies that Weebly generally has limitations. Here are the downsides to using Weebly:
- SEO Doesn’t Scale Well
- Limited Custom Development
- Not Open Source
Is Weebly Good for SEO?
Weebly is good for starting off your SEO, but not for growing it long term.
Using meta and title tags you can greatly increase the number of keywords your website is ranking for, but how can you get more than that? Weebly has built-in blog functionality, but it’s generally hard to see success across all of your posts. Using custom development like structured data can help your website, and Weebly makes it hard to implement.
Let’s dig into this a bit more, and start understanding why Weebly might not scale well for your business.
Is Weebly a Fit for Your Business?
This is one of the most important questions to ask. I have a lot of clients that use Weebly for their business, and I continue doing SEO on their website. How do my services benefit Weebly SEO? Depending on what type of business you have, scaling your SEO may not be a problem. Some of my clients have user experience as their main focus. This means Weebly is a suitable platform as it makes it very easy to update the design and optimize the functionality of key features.
If you have a non-profit organization, Weebly is a good fit for you because you will be focusing on optimizing the conversions of traffic you are getting from outside sources.
If you are in the service industry, Weebly might be a good fit for your business to start off, but it won’t scale well because you will need additional traffic coming from organic search.
Why Doesn’t Weebly SEO Scale Well?
I understand I’ve been drilling the point that Weebly doesn’t work for long-term SEO, but why is that? In my experience, there are several features missing from Weebly to make it effective for SEO. One of the most important ones is custom post types.
These allow you to create SEO-targeted category pages across your site that can help rank for broad-term keywords over time. Platforms like WordPress and even Wix make this functionality easy.
Other features like Schema integration are a bit difficult and not intuitive for general users.
