We are blessed with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the challenge of creating a website for your business these days. It is still an issue as this is a significant issue to come across. You need to stay within your budget, match your skill level, and align with your business goals and needs. The challenge can become a seriously complicated one to undertake, mainly for people who are not coders by trade or hobby when you factor in the elements.
DIY solutions, primarily self-hosted WordPress, and easy all-inclusive site builders, including Weebly, are the two of the top strategies that most people in that situation consider. So, which are the ones that are important for you?
Note to Consider:
We are speaking about the open-source platform that you can download from WordPress.org and upload on your hosting company’s server and not the trimmed-down version that you get through WordPress.com when we mention WordPress in this article. There are some massive differences between the two.
All geared up? Let’s start!
What the Records show WordPress today is completely a Content Management System that is powering up to 34% of the website and more than 60% of websites that use a CMS being launched in 2003 mainly as a blogging platform. Thanks to Dave Rusenko, Dan Veltri, and Chris Fanini, Weebly, on the other hand, came to life in 2006, and by then, it was acquired by Square Inc in 2008. Making the life of Penn State students easier is what the original idea behind Weebly was.
How?
Students were required to have an online portfolio that could be easily created and updated with such a platform at Pennsylvania State University. The three launched their product after witnessing an untapped opportunity.
Interest around Weebly has never been close enough to what WordPress had gained and showed its peak in 2014/2015 years; it expanded its presence in Europe, having to score $35 million in the complete C series investing from Sequoia Capital s well as Tencent Holdings Ltd. A great amount of attention was brought to the company with both the news.
Here is the question here:
Is WordPress the right choice for you? Or, should you head out with Weebly instead? Let’s check on some of the answers here!
User-Friendliness
What We Consider:
When you are trying to accomplish the basics with the website, including the addition of copy, positioning images, updating the content, etc., how much of a learning curve a brand new, non-technically gifted person should face. Are these basic tasks fairly intuitive and complete? Or, will you be finding yourself huddled over the keyboard, switching between your site’s administrative interface and 14 different tabs of tutorials is what you are going to find?
Weebly
Weebly is considered the easiest site builder that is available for both business and personal use as it is perceived as being super-easy to work with. It has also earned a good reputation to a great extent. Weebly uses a single centralized set of tools and also offers a simplified nuts-to-soup process of building your site. You need not have to install WordPress, themes, and plugins and set up a new server.
It is probably more appealing to the folks without any experience in website creation as this is a centralized approach to set up, build-out, and manage.
WordPress
WordPress is often perceived as being much harder to learn for the non-technically-minded newbie, just as Weebly is perceived as being super-easy to learn and operate.
We are not completely convinced that the reputation is completely deserved in this case. It is easy as most email programs are with the basics of formatting and publishing content in WordPress are arguably at least as WYSIWYG. You can handle WordPress with a little bit of practice if you are not able to handle formatting an email message in Gmail.
Handling the core files and arranging for hosting, not to mention the selection, installation, and configuration of the themes and plugins from various sources is what WordPress does need to have. It is a bit more than what Weebly needs as you do get greater control in the tradeoff here though it might seem like a lot.
Customizability
Here we are talking about how flexible these two solutions are with any platform that can create a fully functional website. To suit your distinct branding and business needs, how easily can the out-of-the-box version of each platform be customized?
Weebly
Weebly employs prefabricated themes like WordPress. With the drag and drop builder, you can customize some of the parts as what you can transform can greatly depend on the theme that you are selecting. You can get the basic architecture and structure with the theme in itself. You also get a basic color scheme or palette with this. You can consider it as the platform where you can build and customize the rest of your site.
You will have two choices here to speak in general. You can easily select through a theme and then tweak some of the things that you would like to change. You can also use the base theme of your site as a skeleton and built out your site from there alternatively. You can alter several features of the code in Weebly’s code editor, also, download the theme files, editing them in your text editor, and then re-uploading the new files if you know HTML and CSS. In some cases, the access might be limited here. On the way to customize the theme, Weebly does give you a tutorial here.
WordPress
For WordPress, the developers have built thousands of themes. You can select from several drag-and-drop frameworks, including Divi that allows you the same expansive flexibility in addition to the rest. There is always the possibility of hiring your developer in terms of creating an ideal theme just for you and your brand, although that can be outside of the limited budgets of several individuals and brand-new businesses, of course.
Those who can code are at distinct advantages when it comes to exercising more finely-tuned control over the appearance of your site as with Weebly. You can change just about anything that you want on your site if you know HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Creating a child theme to work with your parent theme is the best practice here.
WordPress is probably the more powerful one when it comes to customizing your site is the bottom line here. That customizability comes with an additional complexity or expense depending on how you choose to proceed, however.
Ecommerce
How easy is it to manage the basic functions after adding a shopping cart to your site? How flexible are these options, and how intuitive are the basic eCommerce controls here?
Weebly
Weebly can easily support eCommerce. When your customers check out, they do so on your domain as they won’t get redirected to some other site, thereby increasing their trust and sense of security in your brand as you can sell physical goods or digital products here. For several of the site owners, the downside is not necessarily going to be the deal-breakers here as they should be considered.
The precise eCommerce aspects you enjoy will depend completely on the package level you are selecting first and foremost. The pro-level subscribers get no flexibility with taxes or shipping options paying as per transaction fee that is equal to three percent of the total as they can sell a limited number of products.
You can sell as many products as you like and get some control over the shipping and tax options with no transaction fee with the Business plan and the next level up. Few more advanced eCommerce features are also enjoyed by the business subscribers. There is no drop shipping option with any of Weebly’s plans, and it is unlikely that will change any time sooner is the other consideration here. WordPress is your better option if that is important to you.
If you only need a minimal e-commerce presence for your brand or if the full Business plan fits your budget, then Weebly will work for you is the upshot here. You will probably get more out of WordPress if you need some more control.
WordPress
WordPress eCommerce depends on the strengths of your eCommerce plugin almost universally. This is a great thing as some great, well-coded eCommerce plugins are available at WordPress sites. You will enjoy the flexibility in setting up both your online store experience as well as the underlying site supporting your eCommerce business is what it means here. From any SaaS eCommerce solution, this flexibility and customization is something that you will not get to the same degree.
You will still enjoy the same robust basic and advanced eCommerce features that will assist you in making your online store a mere success at the same time.
Through the proper way, your purchasers will take you through the shopping experience to checkout, and WordPress will be allowing you to get the customization done controlling just about every aspect of your eCommerce site from the types and quantities of products that you can sell. You can also have drop shipping incorporated into it.
This is the flexibility that means that you will have to do a little more research to locate the right plugin for your plans as a tradeoff here. It also involves a bit more work in setting up and configuring the options of your plugin here. The degree of control that you will be hard-pressed to find anywhere else is the payoff here.
SEO and Code
It is to what extent does the basic interface and code structure allows you to optimize your website for search engines? Will these controls be too easy to be accessed?
Weebly
You will have access to the most basic SEO tasks, including customizing the page titles, meta descriptions, and custom URLs for all the pages of your site with Weebly. You will get the limited use of headings, however. You might have to install a third-party app from the store of Weebly if you wish to edit these.
Set up 301 redirects and even access some of your site’s underlying code as you can edit the alt tags for your images. You can take advantage of SSL security with all the plans. In your Google Analytics code, there is also space where you can paste.
WordPress
You are allowed for varying degrees of access to important fields and code to extend its native WordPress SEO capabilities with WordPress plugins as well as some themes. Page titles, meta descriptions, and much more are what is included here.
WordPress prioritizes SEO straight out of the box, along with the ability to edit alt tags for image uploads with the custom URLs and URL structure options that are built-in. You can customize the appearance at will by changing the CSS as you have complete control over all headings, including H3 and beyond.
Through the plugins or by manually inserting it through the code editor of the dashboard, Google Analytics code can be added. Through the external solutions and plugins, SSL and 301 redirects are also available.
Support and Community
When you run into a problem that you are unable to solve yourself, how much support can you count on?
Weebly
Weebly prioritizes centralized support for all of its customers as a full-fledged SaaS business. Through its customer service team and knowledge base, Weebly offers professional support. You can look for assistance from fellow users in your community support forums also.
WordPress1. Most people are confused about choosing Weebly Or WordPress web builder for their website. here we share The Complete Comparison: Which Is Better, Weebly Or WordPress?
It can take several different forms when it comes to WordPress support.
The robust, enthusiastic user community is one of the biggest sources of assistance for WordPress site users. Through several forums and message boards, chief among them the official WordPress forums, millions of dedicated fans and professional developers can offer their assistance and support here. You can get more direct, one-on-one support by looking into a premium support solution also.
Final Thoughts
It is worth remembering that Weebly and WordPress were designed with very different needs in mind as the final words. To make your life easier and to create some great small to medium websites is how Weebly exists. Based on your needs, you can pay the same flat fee every month and everything that is included. To grow your business or creating art with the time you save on designing your website that can be spent to find new customers.
To give you complete flexibility, WordPress was built. Namely, in the form of time, this comes at a price. You will have to spend technical learning tricks, browsing for the best plugins, and installing them this time. For complex and advanced websites, this will make WordPress the best solution.
Hitesh Khatwani
Hitesh Khatwani is Sr. PHP Developer at USS LLC. He likes to share tips Codeigniter Development and Laravel Web Development