Weebly Pricing Plans
Square, an online payments platform acquired Weebly in May 2018 for $365 million. The two companies have been collaborating to launch Square Online, a platform built with Weebly technology. Users now log into a Square account, which offers seamless online payments, more robust ecommerce features, and a better ecommerce experience for buyers.
With the merger, Weebly technology makes it easy to build a website and Square’s payment technology enhances the payment experience for users. While Weebly is focused on individuals, Square Online allows small- and medium-sized businesses to do business online.
Weebly Pricing
Weebly pricing covers four plans, one free plan, and three paid plans. Users have the option to pay for their plans monthly or yearly. If you can afford it, pay annually as it’s more cost-effective.
Let’s look at the different Weebly pricing plans in more detail, to help you decide which plan will be best for you.
Weebly Free Plan
The Weebly Free Plan allows you to create a free website. It’s a great option if you:
- Are on a tight budget
- Don’t need an ecommerce site to sell products
- Just need a personal website
- First want to try out the platform before to see how you like it
The Weebly Free Plan comes with a free SSL certificate, limits you to 500MB of storage space, you can’t have a custom domain name, and you can’t remove Square ads from your site, but you do have unlimited bandwidth.
The one thing we like about the Weebly Free Plan is that it allows users to sell physical items for free. You can’t sell digital items and don’t have access to shipping labels, but you have access to SEO tools, lead capture, an Instagram feed, and inventory management. That is a lot of value for a free plan.
Admittedly, you can’t run a serious business with this plan, but you can certainly get your feet wet in the online business world.
Weebly Personal Plan
The Weebly Personal Plan costs $10 per month if you pay annually and $13 per month if you pay monthly.
You can now use a custom domain, which gives your site a more professional impression for visitors. However, this plan doesn’t eliminate Square ads, which detract from the professional look of your site.
In addition to all the features available on the free plan, you now can sell digital items, and have the use of a shipping calculator and shipping labels.
In terms of marketing features, you can now use pop-up notifications, which you can use to capture visitor emails, promote sales, and make important announcements.
As with the free plan, you can also access email and chat support.
Seeing that you get virtually the same ecommerce and marketing features as with the free plan, the real value of this plan is that you can connect a custom domain, which is a crucial feature for online brands.
Choose the Personal plan if you want a small business website with a custom domain to sell digital items, and need marketing tools to grow your business.
Weebly Professional Plan
The Weebly Professional Plan costs $12 per month if you pay annually and $16 per month if you pay monthly.
Weebly pricing plans also include the Weebly Professional plan. This plan offers all of the features available on the Personal plan, plus:
- A free domain
- Unlimited storage
- Advanced site statistics
- Password protection
- No Square ads
Domain registration is free and you can also connect your own custom domain. This is essential if you are serious about establishing your brand online.
This is the first Weebly plan that gives you advanced website stats, providing insights into your visitors, pages, and traffic. In addition to chat and email support, you now also get phone support.
With this plan you don’t get additional ecommerce features, these are the same as for the Personal Plan. Really? Why upgrade then? The only difference between the Professional Plan and the Personal Plan is the addition of site statistics and phone support. These are hardly worth an upgrade,
The Professional plan is good enough for small businesses, but so is the Personal Plan and it costs less. If you feel the need to upgrade to boost your online business, rather upgrade to the Weebly Performance Plan.
Weebly Performance Plan
The Weebly Performance Plan costs $26 per month if you pay annually and $29 per month if you pay monthly.
This most expensive Weebly plan comes with more ecommerce features than the Professional plan, including the ability to accept payments through PayPal, item reviews, and abandon cart emails.
These are all great ecommerce features that boost the economic viability of online businesses. PayPal is an attractive addition and the item review feature lets online store owners send automatic emails to request product reviews to be posted on the website. Abandon cart emails are essential for online businesses, and, in our opinion, should not be limited to the most expensive Weebly plan.
The only other additions not included in the Personal plan, are the advanced ecommerce insights and priority support.
Even with these additions, the Weebly Performance plan is not a good choice if you are serious about selling products online. A platform like Shopify is a much more robust ecommerce platform that supports merchants with a host of built-in ecommerce tools and a wide choice of apps for extra functionality.
On the other hand, if you are looking for a cost-effective and easy platform to build a website, and you are happy with a simple store with few features, Weebly may be a good choice for you.
Additional Weebly Cost Factors
Custom Domain
Professional and Performance plan subscribers get a free domain name. On the other plans, a domain name costs $19.95 for a standard .com domain or $49 for .store domains. WHOIS domain privacy is free.
Weebly Themes
Weebly offers a wide range of professionally designed templates. Weebly also has a free website template that users can customize to suit their needs. The Weebly themes have become somewhat outdated since they have not been modernized recently.
However, users have several other website design options. Through Weebly’s partnership with 99designs, you can get a one-page storefront for $199. A new site will cost you $450.
Alternatively, there are several online studios that specialize in designing and customizing Weebly templates.
Square Photo Studio
A clear product photo is an absolutely vital part of ecommerce. Not being able to touch a product, buyers depend on product images when shopping, which makes professional photography essential for online stores.
Weebly users can use Square Photo Studio for professional photos of their products. The service claims to provide sellers fast access to high-quality, professional, and online-ready product photography at a fraction of the cost of traditional photography services.
Weebly has a professional studio in their New York office where an experienced product photographer takes product photos for online business owners. You ship your product (s) to the studio, where three photos are taken of each product. You’ll receive a download of your images and the product gets shipped back to you.
The cost is $19.95 for three high-resolution, digital photos taken from three angles. There is also a neat free app that you can use to create professional product shots yourself,
Weebly Promote (Email Marketing)
Weebly’s email marketing tool, Promote, comes integrated with Weebly, but you need a Weebly account and have to pay extra for Promote. There’s no free option, but Weebly does offer a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can try it out for free for 30 days.
There are three email plans: Build, Grow, and Accelerate. Build is the cheapest ($10 per month) and it’s pretty limited. With this plan, you can create only five campaigns, and emails are limited to 2,500 per month. You can’t automate anything and there are no audience segmentation capabilities.
The next email plan is Grow, Grow is $33 per month. You can create and send 20 email marketing campaigns with an email limit of 50,000 per month. This plan has all the necessary marketing features like scheduling, automations, and segmentation. Each email can be sent to no more than 2,500 contacts, which some businesses will find limiting.
Accelerate is the most expensive plan at $98 per month. The plan allows 250,000 emails per month and unlimited contacts. On the whole, Weebly Promote provides few automations and integrations, which makes it a less useful email marketing tool than some others on the market. For instance, Benchmark Pro costs only $13 per month and includes email automation and A/B testing.
Payment Processing
As a Weebly customer, you will be liable for transaction fees. Stripe, PayPal, and Square integrate directly with Weebly websites. PayPal charges 3.49% plus $0.49 per transaction for transactions made via online stores. Standard credit and debit card payments are 2.99% + $0.49.
Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. The payment gateway supports a wide range of payment methods, including credit and debit cards, bank transfers, and digital wallets. It charges 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.
Additional payment options offered by Weebly through third-party integrations include Authorize.Net, Klarna, and Afterpay. Authorize.net also charges a monthly fee of $25, and Afterpay charges a fee of 4–6% per transaction.
Premium Apps
Weebly’s app center has 56 free apps and more than 300 paid apps designed to help you optimize your website. The app center has apps for e-commerce, communication, marketing, social media, and site management. There are 57 free apps, and the rest are premium apps.
For some apps, there is a once-off payment and others require a monthly payment. App prices vary considerably, from as little as $4, with many in the $50 range and some up to $150.
Some apps, like the Google Ads app, have a free as well as a premium version.
Weebly Pricing vs. Competitors
Comparing Shopify and Weebly
There is almost no comparison between the two ecommerce platforms. Both allow users to build websites and stores and to sell online, but Weebly is more affordable and much more basic, Shopify is expensive in comparison but also offers more robust features.
Shopify recently increased its prices across all its plans.
The Shopify Basic plan, which now costs $39 per month, offers basic reports, up to 1,000 inventory locations, discount codes, hydrogen storefronts, abandoned card recovery, gift cards, customer segmentation, marketing automation, shipping labels, and more. Clearly, right from its most basic plan, Shopify is focused on ecommerce and outshines Weebly completely.
You will remember that Weebly only offers ecommerce tools like PayPal payments, item reviews, abandoned cart emails and advanced e-commerce insights with its most expensive plan, which costs $29 if you pay monthly. In comparison, Shopify’s pricing is:
- Shopify $105 per month.
- Shopify Advanced $399 per month.
- Shopify Plus pricing starts from approximately $2,300 per month.
Weebly pricing is much less than Shopify across all plans. Even its most expensive plan, Performance, is only $26 per month. Admittedly, most online merchants don’t have to have Shopify Plus or even Shopify Advanced in order to have an online business.
While Weebly’s free plan has limited features, its premium plans are offered at competitive pricepoints. Shopify’s higher pricing is an indication of its more robust e-commerce solutions and the scalability of Shopify stores.
Weebly vs Wix
Weebly and Wix are often compared with each other. They are both known for being easy-to-use, drag-and-drop website-building platforms.
As you can see, Weebly is cheaper than Wix across the board. On top of that, Weebly allows its users to sell even with the free plan — not many, if any, website builders allow that. It is great value for someone who is just looking for a simple website to start selling online.
Wix users can only start selling when they sign up for the Core plan, but you also get more for your $29 per month than you would for the $10 per month Personal Weebly plan — you’ll be able to sell digital products in addition to physical products, plus you’ll benefit from subscriptions and abandoned cart recovery.
In terms of the lower-priced plans, Weebly offers more value for money, but the Wix Business and Business Elite plans offer much more in terms of ecommerce capability than the Weebly Professional and Performance plans.
Squarespace
Squarespace’s pricing is great value for money, scoring 4.2 out of 5 overall. Squarespace offers four plans ranging from $16 to $49 per month. You can also sign up for a 14-day free trial. In addition, you can get a 10% discount when using the code ‘WBE10’ at checkout.
Offering a free plan, plus starting from only $10 for the Personal plan, Weebly plans and pricing is cheaper than Squarespace’s. However, while Weebly’s plans cost less, Squarespace offers a better range of features with its Business plan at $23 per month. Features include free invoices, the ability to sell content and memberships, and advanced website analytics.
Weebly offers good value for many, compared to Squarespace but only if you don’t need beautiful templates, and or a feature-rich website.
FAQ
What does Weebly’s merger with Square mean for its users?
When Square Online acquired Weebly in 2018, it set about employing the Weebly software to create a new ecommerce platform. So, when you want to use Weebly to create an online store, the system directs you not to Weebly, but to Square Online. So your dashboard will have Square Online branding.
However, if you want to use Weebly to create a standard website, you’ll stay with Weebly.
The other factor to keep in mind is the merger has changed the focus to ecommerce, which means that Weebly’s website builder features are being put on the back burner.
Are Weebly and Square the same thing now?
No, they are not. Weebly has been acquired by Square, so it is now one of Square’s products. When you create a store with Weebly, you will be using the Weebly software, but you will also be using an editor powered by Square Online. The Weebly Square Online integration is what allows Weebly users to sell for free.
As a Weebly account holder, do I have to create a Square account even if I don’t sell anything?
Yes. As a Weebly user, you’ll need to create a Square account. This will allow you to receive product updates and boost your account security.
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