Choosing between website builders is always tough. Weebly and Wix are two of the biggest names in the website building segment. If you too are looking to build your website using one of these tools but aren’t sure which one to choose then this guide will help you.
Weebly and Wix have lots of features in common like the drag-and-drop editor, marketing tools, and templates. However, there are certain features that make each of these platforms unique.
Platforms Overview
Both Weebly and Wix are created to assist people who have little knowledge in coding. Some use website builders to speed up the website designing process and find an easier way to edit the content as and when they require.
Weebly has a drag-and-drop editing tool that lets you create great-looking professional websites easily. Weebly is a “WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get)” editor.
This means what you see in the template editor is how your website will look like. You won’t have to flip back and forth between editing and preview mode.
Wix, on the other hand, is a combination of a template website builder and an AI platform. You can choose from more than hundreds of templates and customize them to meet your needs using Wix’s drag-and-drop editor.
Or you can let Wix ADI (artificial design intelligence) design a website for you.
Ease of Use
When it comes to using a website builder, Wix is a lot easier to use than Weebly.
The primary reason why Wix outperforms Weebly in ease of use is its ADI. Wix ADI asks you a few questions about your business’s needs and then creates unique, dynamic, and tailored websites in minutes. Wix is the preferred website building tool for millennials and Gen Z audiences who are looking to grow their business.
Sites hosted on the Wix platform have grown from 110 million websites in 2017 to over 160 million websites in 2020.
This is great as it saves time and doesn’t require any effort from your side. Once Wix ADI has designed a website, you can add, change, or remove things easily. However, Wix (manual) offers a wider range of features than Weebly.
Weebly lets you create your entire website by dragging different elements (such as photos, menus, etc.) onto your pages. You can then move them around and resize them as per your requirements. But, it isn’t as beginner-friendly as Wix.
Just like any other website builder, Weebly doesn’t require you to have coding knowledge at all. However, unlike Wix, Weebly does have a built-in code editor that lets you customize your website more extensively. This is great for people who are well-versed with HTML or CSS.
Wix does offer access to its integrated development environment (IDE), which provides syntax checking and basic analysis for your code.
You can use the Custom Element feature of Wix to design your own elements or iFrame to insert an external site like MailChimp form. All of this enables you to enhance your website’s design and functionality.
If you’re looking for an easy to navigate, and beginner-friendly website builder, then Wix is the right choice for you.
Winner: Wix
Design, Customization, and Flexibility
Wix is the most flexible site builder. There are more than 510 templates to choose from. Just pick a template, add the elements you would want in your web page and make it completely unique with only a few clicks.
Weebly is more structured, meaning it’s less flexible than Wix. There’s less scope of customization in Weebly. Besides, there are only 50 industry-specific templates to choose from. But, Weebly allows you to import premium templates from external sources (Wix doesn’t let you do that).
All the templates in Weebly and Wix are mobile-friendly. You won’t have to bother about optimizing your website for mobile devices.
However, the down-side of Wix is that you can’t change your template once you’ve chosen it. If you do, you’ll have to start designing your web page from scratch again.
Weebly enables you to change the template whenever you want while keeping all the elements intact.
Winner: Wix
Add-Ons
As soon as you design all the web pages, you would want to add more functionalities to improve your site’s usability. It includes live chat widgets, shopping carts, search bar, social feed, and more.
When it comes to add-ons, Weebly has a slight edge over Wix. Weebly’s App Center has more than 340+ apps. There are plenty of sophisticated tools that can help you grow your business.
Wix has its own App Market with more than 250+ powerful web apps. From forms to countdown timers, online scheduling to live chat, Wix has all the necessary add-ons you’ll need.
Weebly’s App Center is much more organized than Wix’s App Market. You can easily find desired apps as per your goals, such as boost traffic, increase sales, or get social.
Winner: Weebly
SEO
When it comes to accomplishing high rankings in Google, both Wix and Weebly provide great SEO tools. This includes editing meta titles and descriptions, customizing URLs, and adding ALT text tags.
Weebly has the ultimate SEO guide on its website that covers all the basic aspects of SEO. From an SEO checklist to keyword research and tracking, the guide covers almost everything. There are even more SEO resources in the Weebly Blog.
Wix, too, has extensive SEO articles to guide you to improve your website’s rankings in search engines.
However, Wix overpowers Weebly in terms of SEO features. The primary reason for it is the Wix SEO Wiz that provides a personalized SEO plan. Wix SEO Wiz will ask you a few questions about your site, location, and keyword. It’ll then give a step-by-step SEO plan to make your website SEO friendly.
Wix SEO Wiz also allows you to analyze your keywords and get key insights about your SEO. Weebly doesn’t offer anything like that.
But, Weebly lets you optimize the web pages as you design them. There’s a tab in the editor called “SEO Settings” that offers basic SEO optimization tactics.
You can also integrate plugins like Traffic Booster and Positionly that enable you to track your rankings, check backlinks, spy on competitors’ SEO, and analyze which tactics are working and which are ineffective.
If you want a website builder with robust in-built SEO tools, then Wix is the perfect option for you. Weebly, too, has great apps that can help you do the same (but with an extra cost).
Winner: Wix
eCommerce
When it comes to eCommerce, Weebly offers three plans for eCommerce stores in Weebly. All of these provide free SSL certificate, unlimited storage, free domain (worth $20), $100 Google Ads credit, and lets you accept payment through Square and third-party providers.
Wix also offers three plans for eCommerce stores. All three plans provide a free domain for one year, allowing you to accept online payments, $300 ad vouchers, unlimited bandwidth, and site booster app worth $60.
The important things to note are:
- Both their free plans are ad-supported and will show a self-promoting banner (they are little but still visible, Wix’s more than Weebly’s). Also you won’t have a custom domain name.
- Wix lets you cancel your paid plan within the first 14 days and give you a full refund. No questions asked!
- With Weebly it’s even better: you get 30 days to decide.
- All of Weebly’s plans include an online store while Wix only lets you test it unless you go for one of the eCommerce plans.
- Both Wix and Weebly make you pay for your domain name after the first year (Weebly charges slightly more than Wix).
- Both make you pay for an email account with your website domain through Google’s Google Workspace (find out more in our Google Workspace review).
Winner: Overall, we’d hand this round to Weebly. In most cases, Wix’s Combo plan ($16/month) or Weebly’s Professional plan ($12/month) should be the right choice as they allow access to all features. Comparing these two, Wix is a lot more expensive but also has a lot more features and nice designs.
It was a close round, but Weebly is the more affordable website builder overall! 5:5 is where we’re at.
Responsiveness and Navigation Levels
With Wix, you can choose how your site will look on a smartphone, which is excellent! The only bad news is that sometimes you indeed have to rearrange some elements, as they are not always aligned perfectly.
This is because, unlike Weebly, they don’t have fully responsive templates (which is not that big of an issue unless you are building a larger site).
Wix also only offer one sub-level for navigation, which is not really enough if you want a complex online home menu. Again, Wix is more suitable to smaller sites of less than 30 pages.
The reason Weebly is following a more structured website building approach is that all their templates are designed to work on mobile devices – automatically. Once you’re happy with your design, no need to change a single thing.
It will (usually) look good on all kinds of screens, from smartphones to tablets. Though, in a few of our Weebly websites, we have the problem that the font-size on smartphones is too tiny. And there is absolutely no way to change that
As a big bonus, however, you also have an unlimited amount of sub-levels for your website, which is great if you want to create an online maze for your users (which you hopefully won’t!).
No, but in all seriousness: Weebly is capable of accommodating much larger websites than Wix is. With large we mean 50+ individual pages.
Winner Responsiveness & Navigation Levels: Weebly by a small lead. 2:1 for Weebly.
Blog
Like with SEO, both Wix and Weebly have improved their blogging options a lot over the last few years. So that’s something to say for the power of competition!
And while both offer basic blogging features, we’d have to say that Weebly delivers a bit more in this department.
However, this is only because Wix’s editor is not as well integrated into the rest of the site builder. It appears in an external window and lets you add images, text, videos and tables. It’s quite a nice editing experience and you’re able to add different blog authors and schedule posts.
Weebly on the other hand, will let you create more complex layouts for blog posts, and you can add any Weebly element from the regular editor (e.g. forms, image galleries, etc.) you’d like to.
The only issues is that, just like the rest of the Weebly editor, the blog looks a bit duller than Wix’s. Nevertheless, we consider Weebly one of the strongest (free) blogging platforms.
If you’re really into blogging, though, Squarespace might be a more interesting solution for you due to better commenting features and other integrations (e.g. podcasting).
Winner Blogging: Weebly
Just to recap, Weebly is equalizing – 3:3!
Customer Support
Stuck for help? Both Wix and Weebly offer phone support, live chat, good tutorials and active online forums. Oh, and you can also pester them via Facebook or Twitter if you want to pressure/shame them into giving you an answer.
Weebly still gets an extra point (or maybe half a point) because they have clear Contact Us details including email address and phone.
Wix really wants you to find an answer in their FAQ first, and makes you go through a chatbot, which can be a little frustrating sometimes. In our extensive support quality study of 10 different website makers both actually scored equal points, placing them right in the middle of the table.
Winner Support: too close to call!
Backup and Restore Options
Weebly lets you manually download a copy of your website so you can store it locally. This is useful because you’ll have a copy of your content stored elsewhere.
But the big con here is that this file that you download is not restorable, in other words, you won’t be able to upload it to Weebly’s server site and return your site to a previous version.
It also won’t work properly if uploaded to a different server via FTP as dynamic elements (blog, store etc.) will not function.
Instead Wix offers a pretty useful feature here. The Site History functionality tracks your changes and saves a copy of your site each time. Then with 1-click, you can restore your site to a previous moment.
This is light years ahead of Weebly’s solution because you don’t have to remember to make backups and you can restore your site within seconds. It’s a bit like Apple’s Time machine or Google Docs if you’re familiar with these products.
Winner Backup and Restore: It’s nice that Weebly lets you create a backup, but this can’t be compared to what Wix offers; they win this round without a doubt. 6:5
