Weebly vs. WordPress
Individuals and SMBs use website builders to create professional-looking, no-code websites and run their ecommerce businesses. In a market with several different types of website builders, it can be difficult to choose the best one for you and your small business.
We’ve created this guide to discuss the main differences between Weebly and WordPress. Below, we describe how each solution differs in terms of features, pricing, usability, and website creator type each is best suited for.
All of our recommendations are based upon extensive research, discussions with website creators, and dozens of hours spent hand-testing the leading website builder software platforms. The details of our research process can be found on our website builder category page.
Comparison Summary
Weebly and WordPress are two well-known website builder solutions. We rated Weebly 89 out of 100 and WordPress 85 out of 100, respectively.
Weebly was rated higher than WordPress because its platform is more feature-rich, easier to use, and is more accessible for beginner website creators. WordPress was rated lower because it is best for intermediate website creators, and you need to download certain plugins to optimize WordPress’s functionality.
This breakdown shows our review criteria and the ratings that Weebly and WordPress received for each category.
| Criteria | Analyst Rating | Features | Usability | Pricing | Customer Support |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Weebly | 89 | 8.5 | 10 | 9 | 9.5 |
| WordPress | 85 | 8.5 | 8 | 9 | 8 |
Overall, Weebly is more affordable than WordPress. Weebly’s most expensive website plan costs $16 per month and its most expensive ecommerce plan costs $29 per month. WordPress’s most popular website plan costs $14 per month and its only ecommerce plan costs $59 per month.
In general, both platforms offer standard website builder features. This includes a drag & drop editor, a WYSIWYG blog editor, ecommerce tools, marketing tools, and traffic and sales analytics.
Overall, Weebly is more user-friendly, and more well-rounded in terms of features. It is best for beginner website creators who want to build simple, but effective websites. WordPress’s platform is better for intermediate website creators who want more control of their website’s functionality.
Here’s a few key differences between the solutions to determine which is best for you:
- You want to build basic, but effective websites
- You want in-platform ecommerce features like automatic shipping and abandoned cart recovery
- You want an in-platform email marketing tool
- You want to customize your website using plugins
- You want higher quality traffic and sales analytics – i.e. more data points
- You want to be able to display your most recent blog posts on your homepage
Table of Contents
- Comparison Summary
- Weebly & WordPress Price Comparison
- Weebly & WordPress Feature Comparison
- Weebly & WordPress Top Feature Comparison
- Bottom Line
Weebly & WordPress Price Comparison
Overall, Weebly is cheaper than WordPress. Weebly’s most expensive website plan costs $16 per month and its most expensive ecommerce plan costs $26 per month. WordPress’s most popular website plan costs $14 per month and its only ecommerce plan costs $59 per month.
Weebly Pricing Details
Weebly’s pricing ranges from $9 to $29 per month. You can also save up to ~33% if you pay for the annual subscription upfront. Here’s an overview of Weebly’s pricing plans:
| Plan | Pricing |
|---|---|
| Personal | $9 per month |
| Professional | $16 per month |
| Performance | $29 per month |
WordPress Pricing Details
WordPress’s pricing ranges from $7 to $59 per month. You can also save ~40% if you pay for the annual subscription upfront. Here’s an overview of WordPress’s pricing plans:
| Plan Type | Pricing |
|---|---|
| Personal | $7 per month |
| Premium | $14 per month |
| Business | $33 per month |
| Ecommerce | $59 per month |
Weebly & WordPress Feature Comparison
Weebly and WordPress both offer standard features found in most website builder solutions. This includes a website builder, a blog editor, ecommerce tools, SEO optimizations, and traffic analytics. However, as shown below, there are features available in one platform but not the other.
For a full analysis of each solution’s features, read our Weebly review and WordPress review.
| Feature | Weebly | WordPress |
|---|---|---|
| Email Marketing | Yes | No |
| Abandoned Cart Recovery | Yes | No |
| Automatic Shipping Rate Calculations | Yes | No |
| SEO Tools | No | Yes |
| Displaying Most Recent Posts on the Homepage | No | Yes |
| WYSIWYG Blog Editor | Yes | Yes |
| Sales Analytics | Yes | Yes |
| Comments | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic Tax Calculations | Yes | Yes |
| Drag & Drop Website Builder | Yes | Yes |
| Mobile App | Yes | Yes |
| Plugins/ Extensions/ Applications | Yes | Yes |
| Contact Forms | Yes | Yes |
| Coupons | Yes | Yes |
| Traffic Analytics | Yes | Yes |
| Social Media Marketing | No | No |
| Visitor Engagement Analytics | No | No |
Weebly & WordPress Top Feature Comparison
Below we provide our in-depth analysis of five key features that are included in Weebly and WordPress – the website builder, WYSIWYG blog editor, ecommerce tools, marketing tools, and analytics. Overall, Weebly’s platform is more well-rounded in terms of features and is better at supporting beginner website creators.
Website Builder
Weebly and WordPress both offer drag & drop website builders that let you design your website. Overall, Weebly’s website builder is best for those who want to design basic web pages and need a user-friendly platform. WordPress’s website builder is best for those who need an advanced builder, and want to upload a wider range of site elements to their pages. However, it should be noted that WordPress’s platform is less intuitive to use.
WordPress’s website builder lets you add over 50 types of site elements – including polls, a table, a “click to tweet” button, and an alert button. An advantage of WordPress’s website builder is that it also lets you view your website and its sections in a "list" format. This helps you view the structure of your website and access certain areas without having to scroll all the way down.
Weebly’s website builder lets you upload over 28 types of site elements – including images, videos, YouTube videos, a search bar, and files. Weebly also lets you insert custom HTML. This feature is easy to use and you can use it to insert site elements not currently available in Weebly including tables.
WYSIWYG Blog Editor
Both Weebly and WordPress offer a WYSIWYG blog editor. A major advantage of this type of editor is that it lets you edit your content as it will appear when published. Overall, Weebly’s blog editor is sufficient and more user-friendly than WordPress’s blog editor. WordPress’s blog is more advanced, but not as intuitive to use, and it does not let you optimize your posts for SEO.
An advantage of Weebly’s blog editor is that you can optimize your posts for SEO. For each post you can edit its permalink, SEO title, and SEO description.
An advantage of WordPress’s blog editor is that you can tag each post. Tags indicate to search engines what your content is about and help your visitors look for specific and related content while browsing your website.
Ecommerce Tools
You can use Weebly and WordPress to run your ecommerce business. Both offer tools that help you manage your inventory, orders, and calculate tax, and shipping rates. Overall, Weebly’s ecommerce tools are more user-friendly, and better at supporting beginner ecommerce business owners. WordPress’s ecommerce tools are better at supporting larger ecommerce businesses, but would intimidate beginner ecommerce business owners.
Advantages of Weebly for ecommerce include:
- An in-platform abandoned cart recovery feature
- Automatic shipping rate calculations
- Customizing a product’s SEO title and description
Advantages of WordPress for ecommerce include:
- Filters to organize your inventory and orders
- Email notifications when a product’s inventory count hits a given threshold
- Not charging an additional 2% transaction fee for payments made through its ecommerce plan
Marketing Tools
Weebly and WordPress offer tools that let you market your website once it has been published. We’ve determined that Weebly offers a superior email marketing tool and WordPress offers superior SEO optimization tools.
Weebly’s Email Marketing Tools
Weebly offers an email marketing tool that enables you to encourage visitors to consistently interact with your website. You can choose to compose emails from scratch or through templates.
You can include different elements in the body of your email – including text, images, buttons, blog posts, and social links. Weebly also lets you import your contacts or create a contact list of whoever you want to send your emails to.
WordPress’s SEO Optimization Tools
It’s incredibly important to consider SEO when creating your website. The search channel is typically the largest traffic driver for most websites. WordPress lets you customize and preview how your website and its pages appear in search results.
You can use WordPress to customize the page titles for different sections of your website, including your front page, posts, and other pages. After you’ve made your changes, you can preview how your SEO optimizations appear on Google, Facebook, and Twitter. WordPress also lets you edit your front page’s meta description.
Analytics
Both solutions offer dashboards that provide an overview of how your website is performing in terms of traffic and how your ecommerce business is performing in terms of sales. Overall, WordPress’s traffic and sales analytics are more advanced because they provide more data points.
WordPress Traffic
Both Weebly and WordPress let you view the number of page views your website has received, your top referrers, and most popular search terms. However, as you can see below, WordPress gives you additional traffic data – including how many times your videos have been played, and where geographically your traffic is coming from.
Sales
If you choose to run an ecommerce business through Weebly or WordPress, both platforms let you view your sales data through dashboards. Both include data on your total sales, average order value, and total orders.
As you can see above though, WordPress offers additional sales data points. This includes trends for the number of products that have been purchased, coupons used, refunds given, shipping charged, and tax charged.
Bottom Line
Overall, Weebly is best for beginner website creators who want to build simple web pages and run a small ecommerce business. Its platform is one of the most user-friendly available. If you’re leaning towards Weebly, we also recommend comparing it against Wix.
WordPress is best for intermediate website creators who want significant control of their website’s functionality. If you are leaning towards using WordPress to build your website, then we highly recommend looking into the best plugins for your website to maximize WordPress’s functionality.
If you’re interested, visit Weebly or WordPress today to get started.