Weebly VS Squarespace | Which Website Builder Should You Choose

A full comparison between Weebly and Squarespace to help you decide which website builder is the best for making your site. You can get your website live quickly without learning how to code, and both platforms are beginner-friendly.

Weebly and Squarespace are two reputable US-based, that provide website building and hosting services.

	Squarespace	Weebly eCommerce by Square
Launched in	2004	2007
Monthly search volume	898K	387K
Power around	100 million websites	30 million websites
Domain name and hosting	Yes	Yes
Free plan	No. Plans start at $23/month.	Yes
Most used for	eCommerce, blog, portfolio website	eCommerce, blog

What is Weebly?

Weebly is a website and eCommerce service which was created to help businesses with the development of their websites. This tool helps you create a good website even if you don’t have any coding knowledge. Its features and design templates simultaneously make your website easy to use and beautiful.

It also has a drag-and-drop feature using which you can easily create a professional website without any technical skills. You can easily drag and drop photos, videos, or maps to your website. Weebly was started in 2007. It currently powers millions of businesses on more than 50 million sites around the world. Weebly is based in San Francisco with offices in New York, Scottsdale, and Toronto.

What is Squarespace?

Squarespace is a website builder that helps creative businesses in building incredible sites. This tool is high on design. This tool’s design themes and templates are one of the many great things it is known for. Customers even claim that it has the best design themes in the market.

The features of this website builder will help you create a website for your business without any coding or technical knowledge. Squarespace was launched in 2003, in Maryland in the United States. Initially, it started as a blog hosting service but eventually became much bigger. Until now, Squarespace has powered millions of websites and continues to do so.

Weebly vs Squarespace: Main Differences and Similarities

Weebly and Squarespace are both well-known players in the market of website building.

Weebly is best known for its affordable high-end features, whereas Squarespace offers amazing design templates. Also, the brilliant functionality of this website builder has amazed quite a lot of people.

Weebly vs Squarespace – Features

Let’s talk about the most important thing that you should focus on while choosing a website builder; the features it has to offer you.

Originally, Weebly has a wide range of features for you to use as compared to Squarespace. Weebly also has its app market from which you can integrate add-ons to your site.

Squarespace, however, does not have its app market, but what it offers best is the high quality of features that it provides to your site.

Let’s discuss more features provided by these two website builders.

Blogging

Blogging is the most common online business that people start when they enter the internet world. Like any other business website, blogging also needs a website builder to create a great blogging site for newbie bloggers out there.

Weebly and Squarespace both allow newbie bloggers to create their blogging websites without any coding work. It allows them to create a blogging website and publish a blog post in the simplest way possible.

Weebly and Squarespace are pretty much neck-to-neck when it comes to blogging. One thing that Squarespace has an upper hand over Weebly is the stunning design templates for blogging websites. Some features that both Weebly and Squarespace provide you as a blogger are:

Archiving blog posts on your site.
Creating categories for your blog post will make it easy for your users to search your content.
RSS Feed.
Allowing comments on your blog posts.
Search feature.
Social bookmarking and social media share options.

E-commerce

When it comes to e-commerce sites, Weebly is practically built to support e-commerce websites. Weebly’s main features are related to creating an online store. It allows you to sell products and services in the most convenient ways possible. If you’re not looking to build a huge e-commerce website, Weebly would be a good choice for your goals.

Squarespace also allows you to create an impressive e-commerce website. The design templates Squarespace provides give you an edge on your website. Even though this website builder is not specifically built for online store creation, it still provides you with useful features that make your website outstanding.

The one feature that Squarespace has over Weebly is multi-channel integration. It allows you to connect your social media channels to your site. This feature allows you to make sales directly via a social media platform.

Analytics

Your website needs an analytics feature to help you know the statistics of your website, such as bounce rate, page views, and sales. Weebly and Squarespace both have their own, built-in analytical tracker. Additionally, these analytical trackers are integrated with Google Analytics if you need more information and detailed data for your site.

Social Media Integration

This feature allows you to add social media buttons to your website. It will allow your users to share your content on social media. Both Weebly and Squarespace provide you with this feature for your website, and along with that, you can use either of them to put a live social media feed to your website so that your visitors can see your posts, tweets, or photos directly from your website.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the great ways to find your potential customers.

Weebly and Squarespace both let you create a custom email for your business using G suite. This way, you can send emails to your clients in your business’s name. You can create and send

“Weebly Promote”, a part of Weebly’s service, allows you to create and send multiple email campaigns. It is free for you to start with and costs $10 per month.

Getresponse or ActiveCampaign provides you with email marketing services that you can use to connect to your customers. You can connect any email marketing tool, like an autoresponder, to your Weebly or Squarespace-powered website. These autoresponders will help you reply to your customers automatically and save much of your time.

Ease of use

Ease of use is the other major thing to look out for when choosing a website builder for you.

Not everyone is comfortable with building a website through coding. Neither can they hire someone to work on their website every other day.

That is why having a website builder that you can use easily is very important in these modern times.

Weebly and Squarespace are both quite easy to use, but there’s still a slight difference between them, which we’ll highlight.

Weebly has a wide range of features and an app market from which you can integrate any add-ons that you need for your website. Also, the drag-and-drop feature allows the users to move the website’s content to any place they want. All these things add up to the great functionality of this website builder and allow the users to easily create and edit their website.

Squarespace does not have a wide range of features as compared to Weebly. It also doesn’t have its app market in contrast to Weebly, so what you see is all you get. Squarespace offers you more creative layouts than Weebly, which might be a plus point for its users.

Businesses usually find Weebly slightly easier to use than Squarespace because of its features and app market plus points. However, your business goals define which one is best for you to use.

SEO plugins and tools

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the changes you make to your website and your content that allow your website to rank on Google. These changes may be keyword implementation, adding Meta descriptions for your content, editing the URL slug of your web page, etc.

Weebly and Squarespace both allow you to manage your SEO settings by providing you with some editing options:

Meta Description/Titles – Meta titles are short descriptions of the web page’s content. They appear in the search results under the URL of the webpage.
URL slug – These are the texts that come after your domain. It is the link directed toward a particular web page on your website. For example, www.domainname.com/blogposttitle/
Image Alt text – This is the text that describes what the image is about. It lets Google know what the image is about so it can be ranked whenever someone searches for the term related to it.

Weebly and Squarespace pretty much offer the same SEO settings. However, Weebly is considered better in the SEO context because of the wide range of add-ons that people can choose from regarding SEO.

It allows you to better your SEO settings by adding apps that will help you with keyword support, SEO analytics, and coding.

Design and customization

Your website’s design is something that can define your success online. If the visitors don’t like the design of your website, they aren’t going to stay on the site for a long time. This will increase the bounce rate of your website, which is a negative point for the SEO goals of your website.

This suggests that the design of your website has a large impact on the ranking of your website on Google. Weebly and Squarespace both give you tons of templates to choose from according to your goals.

Weebly offers you 35 different themes that you can choose from. These themes are divided into categories (business, portfolios, and online stores), making it easy for you to browse through them. You can preview the website theme to see if it goes with the kind of content you put out in the internet world.

However, there are a few things that Weebly can improve in this area:

There’s no way to preview the themes to know how they will look on mobile phones or tablets.
There’s no search function in the themes section. This means you’ll have to scroll your way down the web page whenever you want to find a specific kind of theme.

Squarespace is practically a master in this area. It is well known for its beautiful design templates and themes, which it offers to its users. It has loads of luxurious and classy themes for you to choose from.

Users agree that Squarespace has the best design themes for any website builder on the market. You can easily preview the themes to know how it will look with your content on them.

It lets you know what the theme will look like on mobiles and templates.

Squarespace wins the game when it comes to the design of the website.

Weebly vs. Squarespace: Support

Weebly vs Squarespace has worked pretty well in this area.

Weebly has email, phone, and live chat support for its users. Users can connect to these help and support services from 6 am – 6 pm Monday to Friday and 8 am – 5 pm on the weekends.

On the other hand, Squarespace has 24/7 email and live chat support services (4 am – 8 pm EST, Monday to Friday) for its users. Moreover, it doesn’t have any phone services available as of now.

Squarespace has an upper hand in this area because of the 24/7 email support for its clients.

Weebly VS Squarespace: Pricing

Weebly Pricing

Weebly provides nominal pricing offers to its users starting from $0/month. Yes, you heard that right, Weebly offers a free plan to whosoever needs to start a website without spending a penny for it.
However, there’s a drawback of having a free plan, it provides you with the domain that has .Weebly attached to it. However, you can always upgrade your plan before publishing your site.
Weebly has four premium plans, starting from $5/month to $38/month. If you want to start an online store, you’ll need to upgrade directly to $12/month plan or higher.

Squarespace Pricing

Just like Weebly, Squarespace also has four premium pricing plans. However, they’re a little pricier, ranging from $ 12 per month to $40 per month. This website doesn’t have any free plan to start with, which can be a drawback for someone who wants to start a business without any investment.

Squarespace does have a 14-day trial plan. The reason behind the no-free plan is the design themes of this website builder. It is best known for its designs and doesn’t want to compromise its design by running ads on it. All in all, 14 days count as plenty of time to decide whether to upgrade or not.

Weebly is considered more cost-effective as compared to Squarespace. If you want a simple website for personal or business use, Weebly is the best choice for you.

But, if you want a website for portfolios and other creative reasons, Squarespace would work best for you.

Weebly vs Squarespace (Pros and Cons)

Let’s discuss the pros and cons of Weebly vs Squarespace.

Pros and cons of Weebly

Pros

It is an easy-to-use website builder.
It has an impressive range of themes and templates.
It gives a great selection of in-house and 3rd party apps.
It also provides a free plan that allows you to start a website for free.
It has a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Cons

It lacks customization; the design flexibility of this website builder is not as good as other builders.
Full support options are available only to higher-tier subscribers.

Squarespace pros and cons

Pros

Stunning designs and templates: most aesthetically pleasing among builders.
It has impressive eCommerce features.
It provides great help and support functions.
The Mobile app of this website builder is available on Android and iOS.

Cons

Not the best website editor in the market.
It doesn’t have any automatic backups.
Page speeds are not the fastest.

Conclusion: Choosing between Weebly and Squarespace

Now the real question pop-up, “Which one is the best for website building?” or “Which one is best for your business?”

Well, it all depends on your needs and goals. If you want a general website for personal and business purposes, you should go for Weebly.

Weebly’s design templates go well for a simple business website. Weebly is the best e-commerce website and allows you to use a wide range of features and also gives you an option to add add-ons to your website. It is best suitable for online stores and beginners.

Squarespace works well for blogging. It is best for creative purposes like creating portfolios, blogs, etc. If you are a blogger, you’ll get tons of amazing features for your blogging website.