Yola and Weebly are not only easy drag-and-drop website builders, they also offer free web hosting. Small businesses can build and maintain their business websites themselves with a little effort. It’s a one time effort but is a huge savings forever.
Choosing the right provider that can cater to your needs can be crucial. In this article we describe the key differentiators between Yola and Weebly that will help you make the decision. Both Yola and Weebly are good choices for building a web presence for your business. You can can create a great looking website easily and even host the site for free. Yola and Weebly follow a Freemium business model. Most of the basic features are free. If your needs are met with the free features, you don’t need to pay them any thing. If you require one of the premium features, then you will be looking at paying about $4 a month. Here are the top 10 differentiators of critical features for businesses offered by Weebly and Yola:
- Custom Domain Name: Weebly allows using your custom domain name for your site for free. With Yola, this is a paid feature.
- Mobile Site: Weebly automatically creates a mobile friendly site for your visitors to access from mobile devices. Weebly provides it for free. Yola does not create a mobile site.
- Download: Weebly lets you download your site any time you want. If you would like to move to a different host, you can simply publish your site at a different host. Yola does not provide an option to download your site. So, if you need to migrate to a different host, you have to recreate your site.
- Themes and Design: Yola provides decent templates for free users. Paid users with Yola get even better themes. Weebly’s templates lack the punch. Weebly templates require you to bring on some additional creativity for making the site more appealing.
- Collaborated Editing: Weebly lets you assign different administrators and authors to administer your site. Yola has no such option. This can be very critical when you are seeking third-party help or when multiple people update the site.
- Support: Yola has an excellent support system in place. There is a very strong and vibrant Yola Community support. Yola also offers 24/7 phone support. Even the most complex issues are addressed actively. Weebly’s support is mediocre. There is some level of community support with Weebly. Any of the generic issues gets addressed very quickly. But if there are issues specific to your site, Weebly could take much longer to address them. Also, Weebly does not offer phone support.
- Sub-Menus: Weebly offers multiple levels of sub-menus for free users also. Yola limits the sub-menus to paid users only.
- Password protected pages: Yola offers password protection for selected pages for free. Weebly offer this for paid users only.
- Flexible Design: Yola offers plenty of options to style your site easily and lets you be more creative with design. Weebly’s design options require the knowledge of editing style sheets and the syntax which can be very taxing if you are not tech savvy.
- Copying Site: Weebly lets its users create a duplicate copy of their live site. Especially useful for trying out new features and functionalities before publishing them live and also for maintaining a backup. Yola does not offer Copy site feature.
Each business has its own priorities with respect to features. Some businesses may see Mobile Site as a critical requirement. Some other businesses would rather prefer a great design and elegant appeal. Check the Descriptions of features offered by Yola and Weebly and their criticality for making right choice for your business website. It would be ideal to first make a list of what you would like to see in your site and have a rough idea of how you want your site to look before choosing one or the other. For example, if you need SSL and private IP for processing credit cards and managing e-commerce orders, neither of them may be suitable. Make sure all your needs can be met with the provider of your choice.