Weebly vs Squarespace: Which One Is Right for You?

Want a quick overview of Squarespace and Weebly before we go into more depth? Here’s how they compare:

Building a professional website needn’t cost you an arm and a leg. When looking for your next builder, you need to find a paid plan that keeps your wallet happy and gives you the features needed to thrive online.

Our research shows that Squarespace’s pricing is great value for money, scoring 4.2 out of 5 overall. The four main plans range from $16 to $49 per month billed annually, while you can also access a 14-day free trial before making a paid upgrade. Two weeks is more than enough time to test the website builder before committing to further payments.

Want 10% off your Squarespace plan? Use the code “WBE10” at checkout.

Weebly’s pricing is cheaper than Squarespace’s. Plans start from $10 per month billed annually and you can also access its free plan to get started without spending a cent. This free plan also applies to ecommerce stores, where you can set up and sell for free.

Weebly’s plans may cut costs, but you will miss out on key features taking your page to the next level. For one, Weebly’s free plan leaves your website with ads and a Weebly URL, making your website look unprofessional to users. You’ll get a better range of features with Squarespace, with all of its plans including unlimited bandwidth and a free domain for a year.

The Winner

Squarespace offers better features with its paid plans

Squarespace’s four plans are fantastic value for money and include all the features you need to get started with your website, be it professional templates or unlimited bandwidth.

As soon as a user lands on your website, they’ll make an initial judgment about your homepage design. To impress visitors, you’ll need a sleek template that’ll draw them in. But which platform has the most attractive designs?

Squarespace’s website builder is the clear answer. With 168 free templates to choose from, it offers professionally-made designs for a range of industries. These designs are also fit for different purposes, such as online stores, portfolios, and blogs. This design-centric focus is ideal if you’re in a creative industry, since you’ll quickly find a template that represents your unique style.

If you need a template that’s slightly more tailored to you, or don’t have the time to look through them all, you can also use Squarespace Blueprint. Introduced in May 2023, the feature generates a fresh design based on your unique requirements. All you need to do is answer a few questions first.

However, Squarespace’s beautiful templates do come with a cost. In our testing, we found that Squarespace’s loading times were slower than competitors like Wix and GoDaddy. This is mainly due to its content-heavy templates and rich design-elements. If pages take ages to load, users may get impatient and are more likely to click out of your website.

In comparison, Weebly’s templates aren’t as sophisticated as Squarespace’s. First off, you’ll have around 50 templates to choose from; a small number that does limit your options.

The real kicker is how restrictive these templates are. They come with limited customization options and aren’t mobile optimized. The latter point is the biggest downside since nearly 66% of all online searches are carried out by mobile devices. If your website isn’t mobile friendly, this can cause a clunky user experience that frustrates users and makes them exit your website altogether.

If you’re a creative looking to showcase your work, or a small business who wants to build a professional presence online, we’d avoid Weebly because of its limited templates. Instead, Squarespace’s more elaborate, mobile-friendly designs will impress visitors.

The Winner

Squarespace’s luxurious designs are difficult to beat

If you want your website to impress, then Squarespace is your best bet. You can choose from a plethora of professional templates suitable for different industries and needs.

So you’ve picked out your template, but you want to take your website’s design to the next level. For a seamless experience, we recommend Squarespace. The easiest website builder to use on the market, our research shows that the builder’s “Fluid Engine” editor offers simple ways to edit your pages.

The editor has an uncomplicated drag-and-drop interface, so arranging different sections and elements around your website is simple. You can add blocks such as images, buttons, forms, and accordions, and change your website’s structure via sections.

One key feature to note is that you can now edit your website in mobile preview. In the latest version of Squarespace, you’re able to edit your mobile layout independently from your desktop layout. This includes editing mobile text, moving blocks, and organizing sections – a key feature Weebly doesn’t offer users.

Weebly also has a drag-and-drop editor, but it’s more restrictive. You’ll get essential customization options like adding elements or changing fonts, but Squarespace’s design options surpass that. For instance, Weebly only has 5 different sections to choose from, while Squarespace has 19.

Weebly’s limited design features means that Squarespace comes out on top for creative control. Whether you’re designing a professional creative portfolio or want to represent your business well with a visually appealing design, Squarespace is the ultimate choice.

The Winner

Squarespace offers countless ways to customize your website

When using Squarespace’s Fluid Engine, you can make use of blocks, sections, and site styles to update the look of your website.

Want to take your website to the next level? Then you’ll want to add different features to your website. If that’s the case, we recommend Squarespace. The website builder scores 4 out of 5 in our research thanks to the wide number of features available, including email marketing campaigns, an app center, ecommerce, and solid SEO tools.

Ecommerce

If you’re keen to sell, both Weebly and Squarespace will let you build an online store.

However, do note that after Square’s acquisition of Weebly, you will be directed to Square Online’s platform if you sign up with Weebly and choose its ecommerce option. Definitely something to keep in mind.

Meanwhile, Squarespace’s sales features continue to grow. In 2023, it rolled out Squarespace Payments, its own payment processor, that lets you accept and manage payments from your dashboard. But do note that you must have a Business or Commerce plan to buy and sell your goods through it.

Other great sales features Squarespace currently offers include:

• POS systems to sell products in person. Once you’ve connected a Squarespace account and a reader, you can collect in person transactions via the Squarespace iOS and Android app.
• A Digital Products Add On where you can design, promote, and sell online courses. This feature comes included with the Business plan and above, but you can also pay extra each month to access better features.
• A number of shipping options to choose from. This covers UPS, USPS, DHL, and FedEx.

Unlike Squarespace, Weebly lets you open an ecommerce store for free. But as mentioned earlier, your store will come with ads and a ‘.Weebly’ attachment to your domain. It’s not only unprofessional, but it will also clash with your store’s personal branding.

Overall, Weebly’s ecommerce is effective for small businesses – giving you robust tools to track your inventory, sales analytics, and shipping with – but it won’t be enough if you’d like to scale up. For that, you’re better off using an ecommerce website builder like Shopify known for its great ecommerce inventory tools.

Email Marketing

To build and maintain a dedicated following, it’s worth investing in email marketing. Giving you a head start, both Squarespace and Weebly offer email marketing tools, but how do the website builders compare?

At an additional cost, starting from $5 per month, Squarespace offers professional email campaigns. As expected, these designs are visually appealing and you can tweak them via the drag-and-drop editor. A key benefit of this feature is that it keeps your branding consistent, since you can also pull in existing design elements from your website. Other features include a contacts panel to view your subscribers from, email automations, and analytics.

Weebly has a similar tool named Weebly Promote. It’s free to try for your first two emails and also offers a drag-and-drop editor, email lists, and analytics. The main difference from Squarespace is that it’ll generate seasonal templates for you based on current holidays – a handy way to keep your marketing efforts relevant.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Website visibility is no joke. If you’d like your page to show up on search engines, then you’ll need to put some effort into an SEO strategy. At first glance, Weebly does let you edit your website’s basic SEO like alternative text and meta titles, but there are some pitfalls.

Since Weebly doesn’t let you edit your mobile layout, it’s much tricker to provide mobile visitors with a user-friendly experience. Google uses Mobile-First Indexing, meaning that mobile websites are crawled before desktop websites. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile, then this can lead to lower rankings in search results.

To add more fuel to the fire, many of Weebly’s helpful SEO resources have been removed, making it tricker to find specific SEO information for your website.

Because of these pitfalls, Squarespace is the best for SEO. Like Weebly you can edit your website’s essential SEO, but you also have the addition of great mobile optimization, keyword analytics, up-to-date resources on all things SEO, and a Squarespace AI tool that generates SEO friendly copy.

App Stores

If you need additional features, Weebly and Squarespace both have app stores to explore. Out of the two, Weebly has the largest number of apps overall, with over 300 apps to choose from. These apps span sales, traffic, and social media, and you can find free and paid options depending on budget.

Squarespace only has 40+ apps to download, but its app center is constantly being updated. During Squarespace Refresh 2023, the platform unveiled a new selection of five business tools, including soona for professional ecommerce photography and Xero for sales automations.

The Winner

Squarespace has a wider range of built-in features overall

From its professional email marketing platform to its ecommerce capabilities, Squarespace offers a great range of features to grow your website with.

So you’re stuck. Now what? If you encounter an issue and need help fast, you’ll need a combination of strong customer support and in-depth resources to get you back on your feet. This is especially true if you’re new to website builders and need additional support along the way.

Because of the Square merger, Weebly’s help and support is not as reliable as it used to be. You can access the Knowledge Base to find articles covering topics like domains and email marketing, but these pages aren’t frequently updated. During testing, we found that external links to the Weebly Blog and Inspiration Center also no longer work, redirecting you back to your dashboard instead.

If you’re really struggling, you can access an automated Support Assistant from the Weebly Support page, answering questions about billing, domains, ecommerce, and account management.

By comparison, Squarespace’s help and support goes above and beyond. Inside its Help Center, you’ll find up-to-date articles, video tutorials, and webinars telling you all you need to know about the platform.

Additionally, email support is available seven days a week and you can access a live chat from Monday to Friday (4am – 8pm). The mix of updated resourced and accessible customer support makes Squarespace far more reliable than Weebly.

The Winner

Squarespace’s learning resources and customer support provide the help you’re looking for

Since Weebly’s help and support is outdated, Squarespace is the clear winner here. You get to access a series of helpful learning resources and email contact or live chat if a burning question pops up.

Security breaches aren’t fun for anyone, so it’s worth checking if a website builder will keep your data safe and secure. As far as Squarespace and Weebly go, the platforms do offer necessary website security features protecting you against external threats:

• In-built SSL Certificates that ensure your website runs on a secure server.
• DDoS protection that prevents attackers from flooding your website with fake traffic (this can cause your page to crash).
• Password protected pages where only certain users can access specific areas of your website.
• PCI compliance that allows both builders to securely store credit card information – most useful if you’re using either platform to sell online.

However, Squarespace has better security measures overall. It offers two-step verification, while its 24/7 Security Operations Center constantly monitors the platform and identifies any external threats. This comes in stark contrast to Weebly which is far less secure than it used to be because of the lack of updates.

One thing to note about Squarespace is that it doesn’t have a strong fraud detection feature. Instead of using an in-built fraud detector like other top ecommerce builders Wix or Shopify, Squarespace relies on third-party payment gateways to pick up on any fraudulent transactions. Keep this in mind if you intend to sell a large number of goods on the platform.

The Winner

Squarespace is the safest option for your website with around the clock security measures

Security is a priority with Squarespace. Its 24/7 monitoring, two-step authentication, password protected pages, and in-built SSL certificates offer an (almost!) foolproof way to secure your website’s data and account details.

Still confused about the Weebly and Square merger and what it means for Weebly accounts? Here’s a quick explanation.

Before being acquired by Square in 2018, Weebly was its own website builder. After the merger, Square used Weebly’s software to create Square Online, a shiny new ecommerce platform. When signing up with Weebly today, you’ll be redirected to Weebly if you want to build a standard business website, or redirected to Square Online if you want an online store.

However, the results of this merger aren’t all hunky dory. Most of the focus is on Square Online now, which has left Weebly trailing behind. If you’re looking for a consistent stream of website builder updates, you won’t find it with Weebly anymore.

Based on your unique needs, you’ll want to look out for certain website features most suitable for you. This could include a great resource center if you’re new to website building, or template generators if you need to set up quickly.

Below are a few pointers to help you get started:

Will the builder help me save money?

• Free plans
• Free templates
• Free apps
• Variety of price plans
• Great number of features per plan
• Good transaction fees

Will the builder help me set up fast?

• Editor that’s easy to pick up
• Speedy customer support response times
• Pre-built templates
• AI tools to speed up the process

Will the builder fill in gaps in my knowledge?

• Resource center with up-to-date articles
• Video tutorials
• Strong customer support lines
• Intuitive interface

Will the builder provide my brand with a professional look?

• Variety of professional templates
• Customizable designs
• Image and video integration

Will the builder keep my data secure?

• Fraud protection for transactions 
• SSL certificate
• Two-step verification

Curious about our expertise? If that’s the case, here’s a quick explanation. To provide you with an accurate verdict on both Squarespace and Weebly, we’ve relied on our rigorous website builder research that complies hands-on testing.

We’ve also examined key criteria to come to our conclusions. This includes the kinds of things users are looking for in their ideal website builder, such as value for money, design functionality, sales features, and security. With our findings, we can make sure you choose the best website builder for your needs.

Now that you’ve viewed key comparisons between both website builders, here’s the final verdict. Squarespace is the best choice, scoring 4.8 out of 5 overall. This final score takes into account Squarespace’s reasonable pricing, simple-to-use editor, and design-centric templates that will wow visitors.

Unfortunately, many users have outgrown Weebly due to the lack of investment in the platform. With key features being uploaded less and less, it’s hard to imagine Weebly keeping up with its competitors in the long run.

However, if you require a cheap and hassle-free way to build a small business website, Weebly is a fair option. Its low price plans will save you money, while you’ll receive everything you need to create a standard website, online store, blog, or portfolio.

To examine both website builders in more depth, check out our Squarespace review and Weebly review.