Why Not Weebly? - Part 1

Last week, I made a post on Facebook about making a website. One friend came back and told me they use Weebly; I had to defend my art! So I responded with sullying its good name with claims of poor SEO and performance.

But after thinking about it, I realised I was becoming that grumpy, archetypal developer that doesn't like change and will blindly discourage anything that might lead to it.

That's not in the entrepreneurial spirit, so it was clear: I had to do my research and give Weebly the benefit of the doubt.

I've decided to write this article from the perspective of a small business owner who wants to keep costs to a minimum and is looking to launch a basic website to provide an online presence.

For comparisons, I will be using

Weebly sites: https://kikoplastic.com https://trattoriaomerta.com https://sarniahealth.co.uk
Custom site: https://socialsavanna.com

What is Weebly?

In the last few years, there has been a rise of self-service website creation tools such as Weebly, Squarespace and Wix, among several others.

These tools allow someone with little-to-no technical knowledge to create a website. They sort out hosting and give you the tools to make your site based on templates.

Weebly charges between ￡0 and ￡17 a month, which is a drop in the ocean compared to some hosting costs alone!

SEO

First off is SEO, which is usually the first thing I'll mention when discussing these types of platforms. To get a quick, easy representation of SEO impact, I decided to use the tool WooRank, which measures several metrics to define an SEO score.

The scores are fairly good, and most of the problems are caused by the assets the site owners have used, or based on a lack of social pages, Google listings, etc.

Having a custom solution gives you far more control over your SEO presence, but even our site isn't much better (for now).

Conclusion: While a custom solution does give you far more control over your SEO presence, it can come at a very high cost and take some time to perfect.

Winner: Weebly

Performance

Next up is performance. The performance of a website can have a drastic impact on the user experience. If a site takes 1.5 seconds or more, it's considered slow, and this can mean users clicking away and Google ranking it lower as a result.

I've used the GTMetrix free tool to give an indication of page speed on each site.

The results are still far better than I would expect from a platform such as Weebly, and most of the delay is caused by the end user not uploading optimised images. This isn't the platform's fault, although I'm sure there are ways they can improve that behind the scenes.

I don't know how well Weebly would scale, and the same could be said about custom solutions. Some will be very scalable, others not so much, and it would completely depend on your provider.

With a bespoke solution, you get far more control over the end product, how and when it loads things to provide the best user experience possible.

Conclusion: Weebly's servers are very responsive, but no matter how responsive they are, any site would slow down if the site owner adds large amounts of content or large videos/images. Using the same content on a custom platform, you would get very similar results.

Winner: Weebly

Design

When using Weebly, you have to use their pre-built templates, so if you're a designer or have a design in mind, you might be a bit limited.
At the time of writing, Weebly offers about 40 different templates ranging from very simple personal themes to much more business-centric ones, none of which, in my opinion, stand out.

This isn't a problem for a lot of people or businesses, looking to launch quickly at minimal cost, but if you're looking to build a brand, you won't get something completely unique to you. It's also very possible for a competitor in the same field to have a very similar website - if not identical.

Going the custom route, you get an almost unlimited flexibility. The site can be as creative as you or your designer are.

Conclusion: Weebly has a lot of themes to choose from, but the same can be said when going with custom. Using sites such as Themeforest, you can have beautiful and creative websites, without having to pay a designer. Most people who own a business want a brand identity, and their website plays a large part in that.

Winner: Custom

Flexibility

Once you've chosen your template, you select a layout and then you can drag and drop anything from text to YouTube embeds quickly and easily.

The layout is very flexible, there are plenty of elements to play with, and you can add various different pages with different layouts. You can even create a store front.

That is perfect for a simple business site or store with very few business rules, but if you need something more complex - for example, a store that integrates with eBay or Amazon - then it might not hit the mark. They do have an "app" store, but many items have a monthly cost.

Conclusion: While Weebly does provide a lot of flexibility in terms of how your content is structured and where, so does custom. And there is the added bonus that a custom solution can be specific to your business' needs, and not be just a generalised version.

Winner: Custom

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It's been a pleasure reviewing Weebly but I don't want to bore you! So i've split this post into two parts, part two will be Friday.

At the moment, it's a draw but everything could change in the second part!

Original Article: https://cevo.co.uk/why-not-weebly-part-1/