Two Outstanding Website Builders

Wix and Weebly both are very familiar names to the hosting world inhabitants. The competitors began their journey just one year apart – Wix in 2006 and Weebly in 2007.

Since then, they have been battling for the number one spot among the website builders and have proved to be each other’s biggest competitor. So here we are today to figure out which one really wins the championship of stand-alone site builders. We will look deep into the differences after reading a brief summary of both.

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What is Wix?

Wix offer fully hosted online website builders which neither requires coding skills nor limits your creativity. It can provide many innovative and interactive features for your website with the support of more than 500 templates. It uses a drag-and-drop editor to customize the site according to your business needs.

Currently, it is powering 119 million websites and offers an affordable cost of only $5 per month initially. Wix has the ability to build attractive websites for a wide range of clients including small business owners, restaurants, hospitals, as well as creative individuals like musicians, photographers, and graphic designers. You can find some of those websites here.

What is Weebly?

Weebly is another website builder which caters to all creative entrepreneurs. It creates websites keeping minimalism, target audience and modern web design trends in mind.

A major part of its clients consists of e-commerce business owners who require websites with massive capabilities and attractive layouts. Weebly also provides advanced tools for easy management of shipping, cart, coupons, and finance.

It has created over 40 million websites by now and all of them draw in a total of 325 million visitors per month. You can check out some of those websites here. You can start for free here and then the packages begin at $8 per month for annual plans.

Detailed Comparison

Now that you’ve got a preliminary idea about the two popular website builders, let’s dive in deep to figure out which one fares better:

1. Design Templates

Wix has more than 510 templates at its disposal. Professional designers have crafted all of them which is why they tend to attract a huge number of users regularly. These templates also cover a wide variety of industries. So you don’t have to compromise and choose a theme template that is irrelevant to your business.

The template pages come pre-filled with content. As a result, it gets easier for you to replace them with your actual content. Weebly, on the other hand, offers over a hundred templates, but their designs are a little less polished than Wix. Making customizations here is a little difficult if you don’t know how to code.

A drawback with Wix is that you can’t modify the template designs after settling for it. So your website will look the same as other websites using that template. Thus, invest in your template choice here only when you are absolutely sure of it. On Weebly, you can transfer content from the old template to the new template easily without any loss of data.

2. Drag-and-Drop Flexibility

With Wix, you can experience a smooth drag-and-drop mechanism by inserting any element into the website. It offers more freedom than Weebly since there is no restriction as to where you can put the elements. Weebly allows you to insert the elements in the designated areas only. So if you want maximum creative control while designing your website, Wix would be the better choice.

3. User Support

Both Wix and Weebly offer support through phone, email and guides or tutorials. However, Wix provides a more comprehensive user support. Each and every website element on Wix comes with a small question mark icon. By clicking on it, you can view all the instructions related to that element. So you don’t have to spend extra time on looking for element-specific help guides. Weebly does not provide this convenience. You need to search for the element or keyword on their support center.

4. Pricing

Weebly costs a little less than Wix. The cheapest plan on Weebly is the Connect plan that begins at $4 per month for annual purchase. The most affordable plan on Wix is Connect Domain starting at $5 per month for annual packages. However, these packages don’t offer much other than a proper domain name. Also, if you want to sign up for it monthly, you will have to pay the same price for both – $7 per month.

You can also try out both Wix and Weebly for free, but the website will display branded advertisements from respective builders. For more premium packages, you can go for Starter, Pro, Business and Performance plans on Weebly ranging from $8 to $46 per month. In case of Wix, such packages include Combo, Unlimited, ECommerce and VIP plans ranging from $11 to $30 per month.

5. Money-Back Period

Weebly is more generous in this aspect since it lets you experience the tools and features for 30 days, while Wix allows the same for a maximum of 14 days. So if you want to take things slow, go for Weebly.

6. Loading Time

There are many tools or tricks to improve the loading time of a website. For example, image optimization, initial low-quality images, and CDN integration. Wix offers automatic image optimization which resizes the image quality and accelerates site loading time. Weebly does not have this convenience but allows a CSS/HTML editor to optimize the code for better performance. Wix also provides CDN support and progressive rendering of JPEG images to bring down the loading time even further.

7. Mobile Readiness

The new responsive templates of Weebly makes it easier for your website to be ready for mobile use. For the older templates, take help of their mobile editor to optimize them accordingly. Wix also has a built-in mobile editor that provides the same convenience, along with the freedom to hide a few contents for the mobile version.

8. SEO Friendly

If you are not familiar with SEO, you can ask help from Wix to guide you. Just select Help from the top menu and then click on “Getting Found Online (SEO)”. The following pop-up will show you all the instructions. You can modify the SEO parameters on each page by visiting the Pages category.

Weebly SEO features are not that easy to understand for people who are not used to it, since you need to fill out the meta description of each page or post. However, it does let you choose a modified URL, while Wix provides a complex and unchangeable URL structure.

Is Wix or Weebly Right For You?

Weebly is the way to go for individuals or companies who prefer a personalized URL structure and the freedom to change templates or modify elements. The initial cost of Weebly is also lower for annual plans. However, the premium plans for Wix come at a lower price compared to Weebly. So you just need to figure out which one can fulfill your business requirements the best.

If speed is an important factor for you, Wix will be better since it has CDN support and automatic image optimization tools. Wix also allows you a longer time to check out the features with the 30-days long money-back guarantee.

Now that you know what the website builders can bring to your dream website, you can pick the best one for your unique personal or business requirements. Take some time to visit the individual builders and make the most of their advantages.

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