SquareSpace vs Weebly – Web Hosting Comparison 2021

Both Weebly and SquareSpace are 2 of the best site builders, widely-used by millions of people. In addition, the 2 items share a lot of similarities and have many differences, making a large number of people don’t know which is the better choice for creating a website. Therefore, we made a comprehensive comparison Weebly VS SquareSpace to list their main similarities and differences, aiming to help you know more about them and choose the one suiting your needs better.

Before writing this comparison, we have carefully read all information at the official sites of the 2 site builders. Besides, we have browsed a lot of user reviews on the web to make clear how the real users think of the 2 items. Besides, we have hosted 2 same-sized sites built with the 2 programs for about 6 months.

According to the information we got online and our experience, we have developed this comparison from several aspects, including hosting, features, SEO, usability and technical support. Now, move on to learn the details.

Hosting

Weebly provides millions of people an extremely easy way to create a unique site. In addition, Weebly offers a free plan with $100 Google advertising voucher, 3% transaction fee, unlimited pages and a drag & drop builder. Besides, they have released 3 paid plans integrated with much more features, named as Starter, Pro, and Business, charging for $4/mo, $8/mo and $25/mo.

All the 3 solutions come with $100 Google advertising credits, unlimited pages, favicon, expanded stats and much more. Note that Starter and Pro include 3% transaction fee.

As for SquareSpace, this site item comes with 3 hosting solutions named as Personal, Professional and Business. The price of the 3 plans starts from $8/mo, $16/mo and $24/mo respectively. No matter which annual term you choose, you are offered a free custom domain name and allowed to build a mobile website.

Besides, if you choose Professional, you are able to create a site with 20 pages, galleries and blogs with 500 GB monthly bandwidth, 2 GB storage and 2 contributors. However, if you choose the other 2 solutions, you are capable of getting unlimited sources.

Features

To ensure users are able to build a site easily, run the site smoothly and stably and make the site search engine friendly, the 2 companies both offer a lot of easy-to-use features. In below, we have respectively listed the main highlighted features of the 2 site builders. Now, proceed to the details.

Main highlights of Weebly:

• eCommerce: shopping cart and checkout, search engine optimized stores, filtered product search, flexible shipping options, etc.
• Business: powerful publishing and content features like business templates, engaging with forums, blogs and SEO, and so forth.
• Domain Names: free domain registration, domain name search, a free subdomain, and the import of an existing domain.
• Website Statistics: real-time stats showing how many people visited your site, which pages they visited and what search terms they used to find your site.

Main highlights of SquareSpace:

• Design: modern templates, template switching, customizable content layouts, hundreds of customizable settings, free Google fonts, etc.
• Image Manager: responsive image loader, CDN service, progressive image loading, image focal point control, image SEO, etc.
• Site Control: direct editing, announcement bar, custom CSS, favicon, code and redirects, sitewide password, etc.
• Commerce: post-checkout code injection, flexible product variants, speedy sign-up, simple pricing, 3rd party integration, etc.

SEO

By using sitemap, proper HTML formatting, meta description, automated pinging of new content, Weebly helps your create a site that is extremely search engine optimized. In addition, they also use many other advanced SEO settings, such as page-specific description and alt tags. Moreover, they have worked out many tips to teach you how to get your site highly ranked in search results.

On the other hand, SquareSpace produces all pages with clean HTML markup which is easily indexable by the popular search engines, generates and links a suitable sitemap.xml automatically. What’s more, Facebook open graph support and Google author rank support are integrated with this site builder, helping you make you site more search engine friendly. Besides, using this site builder to create your site, you are allowed to fully control the ordering of your page titles.

Usability

Usability is one of the most tempting features of Weebly, because even people with no hosting knowledge are able to use this site builder to create a site easily. In addition, the powerful publishing elements and design enables you to concentrate on your site management without being distracted.

On the other hand, SquareSpace is not as easy-to-use as its competitor is, because it doesn’t offer pure WYSIWYG or drag & drop editors that offered by many famous site builders like Wix. Therefore, if you choose this site builder, you are unable to see the changes you have made immediately when you are editing your site, and you have to jump between different pages to implement the edits.

Support

Technicians and engineer of Weebly and SquareSpace have worked out a pile of helpful articles and useful video tutorials to teach users how to create, configure and manage a site. In addition, they also allows users to contact them through email 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The difference is that SquareSpace offers live chat support during weekdays from 11am to 7 pm EST.

Summary

According to the aspect-to-aspect comparison above, we can get a conclusion that both Weebly and SquareSpace are able to help you make your site search engine optimized. To be specific, the former offers cheaper hosting and more user-friendly editor, while the latter provides better technical support. Therefore, we suggest you to go with Weebly. However, if you think the hosting from Weebly is expensive, we suggest you to find a cheap web host offering this web site builder to create a site, such as HostGator, BlueHost and iPage.