March 29th, 2013
Weebly is a website hosting provider. They tout free websites and free use of their website building tool. With such an offer it makes one wonder why anyone would want to pay for a website. After working with weebly, it became clear that there are several reasons why paying for your own website can be better than using weebly.
Weebly's tools can help you easily create an attractive site. They have some nice templates to start you off and good looking components you can add pretty easily to your pages. Also, using the site building tool is intuitive.
Weebly offers free hosting, a free domain name, and free use of their software. Sounds great, right? Well it is, as long as you:
Weebly allows you to use all of their free stuff as long as you're under 5 webpages. If you want more, you have to pay. And actually, the price listed isn't that bad (currently $8.99/mo.). So, at face value, this isn't too bad of a deal, but it certainly isn't free. Also, my experience was that if you want to register a domain name through them, the price was quite high.
My experience with weebly was
using a free account. I created a couple of websites and
moved onto other projects for a while. Several months later, I
tried to login to
weebly and see what kind of traffic my websites were getting.
Oddly enough, I couldn't login. I'm sure I
had the right password but no matter - I couldn't get to my
websites. I tried looking for a way to reset my password.
I found it, but to my surprise my email account wasn't registered
with them. I tried every email address I had, but none
of them were registered with weebly. My next step was to
contact their customer phone support line hoping they could
help reset my password. To my surprise, they don't have
phone support.
They have no phone support. So, if you
need help right away - you're not going to get it.
However, you can still email them for support.
Perhaps it's just me, but I have a bit of a problem with
that. I mean, email is great, but sometimes you have to talk
to someone on the phone. So, unwilling to jump through their
support hoops, I decided to transfer those sites over to
another hosting provider.
(Note: I see now (Aug. 2014) that as part of one of their
paid plans they have support. Thus, this issue may not apply
to those who have a paid account).
The other problem I noticed about Weebly is that their tools create websites that are invalid. This can be problematic for a number of reasons including cross-browser compatibility.
If you're looking for free web hosting, there are two alternatives I know of. I don't have experience with them, so this is not an endorsement. You can always search the web for reviews of these two services. The two services are:
In the end, some parts of weebly are ok. Their software can
produce an attractive and well-functioning website
for simple needs. It can also be easy to work with.
However, when I wanted a reliable solution, I found that
weebly let me down.
Some may argue that if I had a paid account that I would
have been able to use a better version of their tool
and wouldn't have had problems. When I signed up
I didn't see anything about how I was using a "lesser" version that
lost my account login credentials. Plus, to me,
losing access to my account is a big
deal. I mean, how would you like to try logging in to your email
and find you can't get in? Do you really want to jump through the
hoops of trying to contact the provider and find out what happened,
or would you do what I did and switch to a more reliable provider?
Some may also say "you were
getting it for free". Just because I get something for free
does that mean it's ok if it's junk? Plus, what kind of reflection
is that on the company/service overall? In my opinion, there are
two kinds of free.
Free that is good, and free that is bad. If it's free and good
then you might consider purchasing. If it's bad, then you
avoid future contact. In this case it was bad. I plan to
avoid future contact.
Other article(s):
Eyelevel And Above The Fold Web Design Considerations