9.0
4.5/5
VS
7.0
3.5/5
Last updated 25th of August 2023 | By the editorial team
220 million people have tried out Wix’s website building platform since it launched in 2006. The platform now consistently tops the DIY website building charts, largely thanks to the incredible pace of change and strong online community presence.
Wix’s acclaimed drag and drop page-builder is beautifully designed and easy to understand. Wix has all the tools that small business owners and entrepreneurs will need, to create a professional web presence and constant innovation means a business using wix will always have the latest features and wow factor.
Wix and Weebly websites are built by adding content blocks to pages, in a visual WYSIWYG (drag and drop) editor. Everyday objects such as text, photo galleries contact forms and more are available to add to pre designed templates. You can then customize to suit your needs, using settings panels that are similar to editing Powerpoint templates.
Wix has evolved to be more than a simple website builder, with a suite of business management tools, such as a CRM, invoicing tools, the ability to create membership sites, take bookings for your team, organize your calendars,the ability to easily handle GDPR queries, set up SSL certificates and so much more.
If you want to get up and running in under an hour, Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) is the place to start. You can then move to the Wix Editor, which gives you total design freedom. For advanced sites there is now Wix Corvid. It is possible to extend your site’s functionality with Wix Corvid APIs and your own JavaScript. You can create any type of website, including paid-membership sites, an online store, a sophisticated news site or even your own platform, and manage it all, in one easy-to-use dashboard.
Weebly were established in 2006, and have been a mainstay of the DIY website building industry ever since. Weebly sites are great for eCommerce, and since their acquisition by Square in 2017, the company’s focus has shifted even more towards that area.
Their website builder feels stuck in the past, their free image library looks like it has not been updated since the mid noughties, and many of the UX elements in their editor feel more last-gen than next gen. Unless they have something big up their sleeve, they will continue to fall further behind Wix.
Bottom Line: Wix has raced ahead of Weebly in recent years. Weebly now feels outdated in comparison.
Wix is an industry-leading web creation platform that provides everything you need to create, manage and grow your business online. They offer intuitive design features, faster load times and enhanced performance so you can build more memorable user experiences. You’ll also be able to reach more customers with their advanced marketing and SEO tools while their ultra resilient and flexible infrastructure means your site is ready for any amount of traffic.
Both platforms want to make sure that users find the process of making websites fun and exciting.
Wix makes building a website easy and intuitive. Here’s how:
You’ll be asked to choose from the two different domain options: use the free Wix.com domain or connect to your own customized domain. If you want to use a custom domain name (e.g www.london-flowers.com), then you need to subscribe to one of the premium plans.Once you get past the setup, this is where the fun begins. The Wix interface is easy to understand, and you can change everything you are first given from the template style.The downside to all these customisation options is that it can become quite fiddly to change the look and feel of your site if you have a change of heart. Swapping templates with one click is not possible.Weebly has a similar feel to Wix but their UI has not really kept pace, and now feels dated. Square acquired Weebly in 2017, and announced a host of new e-commerce features for the Weebly mobile app.Those features include the ability to ship and print labels, to respond to customer questions via Facebook Messenger, which can be embedded on Weebly sites. Site owners can now approve customer reviews, to create branded coupon codes and to edit every aspect of your store, including product listing and pricing — all from the app.Bottom Line: Wix has become more powerful, and with so many options, it does require some learning to get the most out of it. If you do need to hire a professional, the Wix Arena has 100’s of accredited designers and coders on hand.
Weebly is easy to use, but limiting due to a lack of customization options that are long overdue in being addressed by the developers.
Wix provides limitless features and customization tools, so you can build a site easily and quickly. Plus, their AI technology can build your site for you, or you can choose to build from scratch or use one of their 900+ fully-customizable templates. You can also use Wix’s Logo Maker to create an incredible logo for you in minutes. The endless apps, widgets, and add-ons in the Wix App Market Place also put Wix ahead of other site-building platforms in terms of integration. There are marketing tools and dedicated features to manage specific types of businesses. Wix has a mobile app (Wix Owner) for you to manage your site from your phone.
In addition, there are more than 200 Apps you can use in your Wix site. Some of our favourites are:
Bottom line: You can create whatever you want on Wix, but with so many design options available, Wix has become a little overwhelming, and can be awkward and time consuming. Weebly is less option-rich, and makes changing global design style changes easy, it’s perfect for people who prefer to.
Weebly isn’t going to be recommended by any SEO professionals anytime soon. Weebly is ladened with JavaScript ad has restrictions on commonly added tags, unless you use an app – which many people won’t.
Strangely headings are limited to H2. There’s a free app that enables headings from h1 to h6, however, it can cause issues with page design. It’s a less than perfect option and is something Weebly needs to catch up on.Weebly’s core product does allows users to edit site and page titles and descriptions easily, and edit URLs, but overall, SEO experts on the web do not rate Weebly highly for SEO.
Wix offers a robust suite of built-in SEO capabilities designed to help optimize your site for search engines so you can increase organic traffic. Save time with bulk 301 redirects, instant homepage indexing on Google, a Google Business Profile integration and more. Plus, customize meta tags, structured data markup and more across multiple pages of the same type at the same time. Every Wix site comes with a strong technical SEO foundation, so you can focus on growing your business.
Bottom line: Wix take SEO seriously, and offer more built-in SEO features than Weebly, including the killer instant-indexing partnership with Google.
When you build your site on Wix, you get enterprise-grade infrastructure so you can focus on growing your business, saving you time and money. Your site will be able to handle billions of requests daily, with multi-cloud hosting and total coverage of 200+ global CDNs. You’ll get industry leading speed and Core Web Vitals optimization. Wix site security is fully managed by dedicated experts—giving you 24/7 protection and peace of mind.
Wix users have grown at such a pace, that in their early years, they struggled with meeting customer service demands. They have since placed a heavy emphasis on developing their help center option. There are now more than 200,000 topics posted in their official help center/knowledge base, with hundreds of hours of video tutorials and walkthroughs. If you can’t fix the issue yourself, Wix offers email and phone support, with an average wait time of less than 3 minutes.
If you need help, you can contact Weebly via Phone, Live Chat, or a Support Ticket
Weebly’s Customer Success Team is ready to help seven days a week, Monday – Friday: 6AM – 6PM Pacific Time (9AM – 9PM Eastern Time) and on weekends from 8AM – 5PM Pacific Time (11AM – 8PM Eastern)
Bottom line: Both Wix and Weebly provide comprehensive help and support. Wix provides direct help and keeps their extensive knowledge base content up to date.
Wix has a free version where you can explore the basics and still have access to the 100s of templates, unlimited pages, and free hosting. If you upgrade to Premium you get even more.
Weebly operate a similar pricing model. Their Pro plan will cost $12 a month. The Business tier (for small online stores) is $25 monthly. Finally, the Weebly Performance plan (for larger stores) costs $38.
Bottom line: If you build a successful website, the small price difference will become irrelevant. Both platforms offer stable hosting and that is where much of the cost is attributable.
If this review was written in 2016, the result would be much closer, but Wix has developed their product offering at a much faster rate than Weebly.
Wix has improved in every way. From editing tools to the powerful Wix Dashboard. Wix Ascend and Corvid by Wix are new products which take Wix from being a page -builder to a serious tool for business. When you factor in the dozens of native Wix apps that extend the capability of the platform exponentially, this means that Wix can be used for nearly any type of website, platform or SAAS.
Wix now is head and shoulders above Weebly. They have developed features such as the Video Box and have made every effort to address the concerns users had. Now, with WIx Turbo, their sites are faster than ever.
Weebly has not moved it platform forward at nearly the same rate. Yes, it is a reliable and tested platform, with a strong e commerce offering. The templates are stylish, and responsive, and good to get started, but that’s it. Weebly will satisfy only the most basic use case, where as, the sky ‘s the limit with Wix.