Best Weebly Alternatives – Building a Website or Online Store

In order to find the most appropriate alternatives, we need to make sure that we understand what Weebly really is and how it works in the first place. Simply put, it’s one of those website builders that can help you build up your website from scratch and then maintain it. Weebly is actually one of the very first platforms for that purpose and it works well even if you are really bad at web design.

By replacing the whole coding process with a simple drag and drop function, the process of setting up and customizing a website became much easier. Just by using your mouse, you can add your own content and reposition everything to its proper place on your site.

The features are all easy to understand and Weebly basically takes care of the more technical stuff, leaving you with their convenient interface to work with.

How Good It Is and How Much Does It Cost?

The best thing is that the guys at Weebly are constantly working on new applications and features that you can use in your work. They also upload their reports about these fresh extensions every month so you can always learn about the latest updates and ideas.

The user interface is continually improving, meaning that you can always work in a straightforward and intuitive environment that is based on the latest, most practical ideas. Not to mention that no matter which theme you pick for your website, it will be surely responsive to the latest version of Weebly.

If you want to start using Weebly for free, you just need to enter some basic details and you can start right away. However, you will get a subdomain that will look like this: yoursite.weebly.com, and there will be some Weebly ads on your site as well.

Their very next plan costs only 8$ per month, granting your own custom domain while both the 500MB storage limit and the ads will disappear. Of course, there are many helpful features included with each subsequent package depending on your needs, up to the highest price of $38 per month. That’s for the biggest sites that also need their own email marketing features.

Designing a Website With Weebly

Weebly pursues the same goals as many other website builders on the Internet, and that is to create an environment where you can forget CSS and HTML coding and rather focus on building up your website with straightforward elements.

Although this well-known, drag and drop method doesn’t always work perfectly, there are much less operations that can go wrong by using Weebly. You can usually drag any element to the desired spot, leave it there and it will work perfectly. In case any modification is needed, you can always switch to their CSS module and edit the element.

Top 3 Alternatives to Consider Instead of Weebly

As you may already know, Weebly is a great website builder, but certainly is not for everyone. Those who are looking for a reliable Weebly alternative, we’ve created a list and reviewed tree of the best Weebly alternatives below:

#1 Wix.com

Introducing to Wix Website Builder

Wix.com is yet another all-inclusive platform for website building that has been around since the mid-2000s and became really successful over the years. You can build up and customize your own website through the Wix admin panel. They are direct competitors with Weebly because their software also gives you a simple and well-structured environment where you can comfortably create and design your website.

At the time Wix started, there were many professionals who truly hated it because setting up a complete website became much easier to a wider range of people. Initially, Wix was just a Flash program with a drag and drop interface that was very useful back then as well.

They ditched Flash soon after that started working on better tools and also improved the interface to make it suitable for businesses. Their main goal was to create something that is very fast and straightforward to work with.

Overall, if you need a simple website that can be customized and maintained easily and never lets you down; Wix might be the perfect pick for you. But if you own a bigger business that needs a versatile and professional website with many additional features, you should consider looking for other options.

Configuring Your Site With Wix

If you take a look at their interface, you can see that they didn’t put much effort in the aesthetics, but you can find everything easily so you can get familiar with it in no time. It even helps you in figuring out the appearance and complete structure of your website with its guidelines and effective tools.

Wix usually updates their templates multiple times a year, which is definitely a good point considering that their competitors usually upgrade them only once or twice a year. While looking for the perfect template, you can choose from more than 50 different categories. You can also find templates that are a bit outdated but there is a wide range of top-notch, modern themes as well.

All Features You Need for a Reasonable Price

Just like with Weebly, a free plan at Wix requires you to use a domain with their name in it, in the following fashion: http://newwebsite.wix.com/newwebsite. Their basic package which is $4 per month isn’t enough for removing their ads; it only lends you a certain amount of storage, bandwidth and a clean domain.

Their more expensive packages differ only in storage size and the additional goodies while you get the same type of pages every time. This is not bad at all because you can’t find a better solution right now for short-term projects if you consider the pricings. Most businesses use the $12.42 per month plan and it’s totally worth it considering the features they get.

#2 Volusion

A Great Kickstarter for Your Online Shop

Now Volusion is a bit different from the previous two website builders, since this one is solely designed for ecommerce owners. On these types of platforms, there is a lot of emphasis on the technicalities since the manner in which you manage your customers, items and payments can be a huge factor in the success of your business.

Volusion pretty much got all these details figured out and created an environment with a wide range of functionalities that can help your ecommerce shop grow in the long term. You will not only have your own, fully manageable website but you can also ask their professionals if you need any advice or help in your work.

Optimal Speed and Payment Options

Owning an ecommerce website usually means that there is an enormous amount of data that needs to be managed and you can be sure that your customers won’t be waiting for long. In fact, if they need to wait for more than a few seconds, they’ll simply leave and you can forget about them.

However, if you are using Volusion, their servers always guarantee a satisfying speed for anyone who wants to skim through your store. Their servers are fast and absolutely reliable.

On the other hand, you can’t accept payments from your customers unless you add an SSL certificate to your website that can handle payments properly and securely. That costs $89 annually, but comes with the benefit that the billing will happen completely on your domain via a unique SSL provided by Volusion.

The Interface and Structure of Volusion

Getting familiar with the environment is pretty much the same experience with every website builder. At first it’s not quite clear where to find the required tools and how the whole process of setting up your website will look like.

The interface of Volusion is also unique and you need to spend some time to get used to it, but it’s one of the more straightforward ones. Everything seems very logical and easy to understand for the beginners. However, it’s definitely worth your time and effort to get better at using this platform because it’s a great basis for the more advanced web shop operations as well.

Although they might not provide every marketing feature that you specifically need, but they surely have the most essential ones up in their sleeves. You can quickly find them and start using them to the benefit of your ecommerce site.

For starters, there is an awesome $15 per month plan that provides every necessary feature to kickstart your website with up to 100 products that you can start selling. Also, there are hundreds of templates, fully optimized for mobile devices. You might get one for free, however, there is a wide range of prices and some of them can cost up to almost $1000.

#3 WebsiteBuilder.com

A Versatile Platform for Both Beginners and Pros

Whether you want to launch an ecommerce store or your own personal website, WebsiteBuilder would be a great alternative for both projects. Although their interface may look overly simplified, you can work with lots of different tools that are quite specific. You can edit and change many little details such as the behavior of an element or the shape of the border around a picture.

With a considerable number of templates, it’s optimal for portfolios, e-shops, blogs, restaurants, you name it. You can modify them according to your taste, so their initial appearance in the collection is basically just for roughly showing you the style of the particular theme. Since WebsiteBuilder started only three years ago, the templates they offer are still quite modern and fresh.

Now Let’s Talk About Speed and Pricing

Depending on the membership option you choose, the prices can vary from $5.99 to $11.99 each month. These plans ensure you a personal domain and also the hosting on their servers which is fast and secure enough to be worth your money.

Even if you pick one of the simpler ones, let’s say, the Premium one, you’ll instantly get a taste of their quick servers and WebsiteBuilder’s intuitive interface with additional help to your SEO and allowing you to set up mobile websites easily for any device.

When you start working with the platform, you can tell that their software is well-optimized with the way their hosting works since everything happens so fast. It’s almost the same as working with a program installed on your computer, or sometimes maybe even faster if you consider more demanding software.

Their pages load in less than 1.5 seconds, and that’s true even for those websites which are loaded with tons of imagery.

Additional Features – Especially for Nerds

Although you don’t need to be familiar with coding, WebsiteBuilder still supports additional tools that can be used for both HTML and CSS. It’s not only a great option for those who want fast results with little effort, but more experienced web designers are also welcome. Another advanced feature is that they also allow you to add HTML to the header and footer with any template you choose.

With some of the other website builders, when you need a particular marketing tool, you usually need to find and use it separately, but that’s not the case with WebsiteBuilder. You can find them right away while working on your site at the interface, making it much easier to manage your SEO and marketing stuff. All in all, this is an outstanding choice for those who want a website builder without the usual limitations.

Summing It Up

By reviewing various top website builders, one always comes to the conclusion that the choice totally depends on the needs and goals of the user. You need to consider the main goals you want to achieve as a business or individual, and what tools are needed to help you in succeeding.

For example, there are businesses that want to build up their presence online and connect to their clients, but don’t want to sell their products online. On the other hand, many of them just want to sell and advertise their products online while they don’t have a local shop. Obviously, those two need to pick different platforms and to take advantage of different tools in order to build up a proper website.

If you are planning to start your own website, it’s recommended to check out these four alternatives and pick the one that is most reasonable to work with, and is also worth the money you are willing to invest.