If there’s one thing you get a lot of with WordPress, it’s customization options. The trick is, you have to sign up for the most expensive plan, download plugins, and know at least a little about coding to make the most out of those options.
Now, we acknowledge that not every blogger needs a tricked out site with a merch store, a newsletter sign-up form, and two different RSS feeds (the coded version of your blog that can be embedded on other sites). And if you’re keeping it simple with your site, WordPress may very well be the best website to make your blog.
But if you’re new to website building or don’t have time to customize every tiny detail of your site, WordPress is probably not the right blogging platform for you.
Is Weebly the best website to start a blog? Quite frankly, no. Hosts like Wix and Squarespace tend to offer better blogging platforms with more modern-looking site design.
Weebly sites remind us a lot of the blogging sites from the early 2000s. They feature a list-style format (as opposed to a grid of articles), and they all have a right-aligned content navigation sidebar, complete with article categories, author bios, and social media links.
Now, we have noticed businesses that spring for a premium template can sometimes avoid this somewhat clunky style. But if you’re working with a low site-building budget, Weebly may not produce the best-designed blog for your money.
Then again, Weebly does offer other benefits (like a great, user-friendly interface and free cloud hosting). They may make the service worth it if you don’t need a fancy blog or think your readers would prefer a familiar, old-school format.
PS: Weebly does offer a free website builder plan. However, the free Weebly plan doesn’t include a unique domain, and it slaps Square ads on your site (because Square owns Weebly now). You’re also limited to just 500MB of storage.
When it came to usability, Weebly was certainly one of the best blog websites we tried.
Weebly’s interface is pretty great, if we’re being honest. Unlike other hosting services, Weebly provides menus that are easy to navigate, and all the site-editing tools you need are in one place. That means you don’t have to go hunting through tabs or submenus to find the right tool for the edits you want to make.
That already gives it an edge over other blogging sites. But on top of that, we found the blogging platform itself to be very easy to use. In fact, we were able to put up three different blog posts in about five minutes—not too shabby.
For the most part, we liked the design of the different Weebly templates we tried. But we ended up giving the service a three out of five for its design—mostly because of its clunky blog templates.
As we said before, Weebly features an older style of blog, which includes a right-aligned navigation sidebar that reminds us a bit of our high school MySpace days. Other hosts give bloggers more modern designs and more options for customizing blog layouts.
Now, to be fair, you can give your Weebly blog a more updated look with premium themes and plugins, but they can cost anywhere from $20 to thousands of dollars. So unless you have the extra budget to afford those themes and plugins, we’d say Weebly may not be the best website to create your blog.
Weebly offers a decent amount of customization on pretty much every aspect of your domain besides the blogging platform.
You can customize the font colors, background colors, and line spacing of virtually every tiny part of your site. And the drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to personalize your template and make your site your own. You can even drag and drop content blocks on your online store and create your business’s version of Target.com (complete with sliding featured product reels, huge promotional images, deal banners, and more). That’s a feature most other hosting services don’t offer.
Unfortunately, the only way to customize the layout of your blog is to get a premium template. Bummer.