Weebly Websites – is WordPress better?

Voiceover for the partially sighted

In the last few months we have had a lot of enquiries about Weebly – it’s as though suddenly Weebly just optimised websites really badly.  We cannot confirm this of course, but many companies have reported a drop in ranking as a result.

After looking at said websites, Weebly seems to do various things REALLY badly.  Here are a few:

Lack of Weebly Image optimisation

Whereas WordPress (or at least many of the themes available) resizing images on the fly, so when you add an image to a page, you can set it to Medium and it will display it at a preset ‘medium’ size, and load at that size.  So f the original is 1500px, and Medium is 350px, it will literally load a 350px image.

Weebly appears not to do this.

So Google sees your images as “not optimised”.  This is a very bad thing, as it means you are not providing your customers with a first class website service.  You are asking them to download several HUGE images.

Understand Header Tags – and default settings

One of the Kings of SEO are with Header Tags.  Like H1, H2 and so on.  If you don’t understand their meaning, then your website is flawed from the start.

WordPress websites generally defaults the H1 correctly.  Certain themes make this a dream to operate.  Sadly, Weebly doesn’t appear to do this.  We even saw an instance recently (naming no websites!) where the Blog page had all the article title names as H1.  The ‘Blog’ title should be H1, and then the post names should all be H2.  This has no Blog Title, just the post names – and they were all H1 tags.

Multi Header tags

But when you clicked on that post, it came up with the post title as a H2, and a sub title as a H1 – and both were hyperlinking to the page you are already on.

We do not believe this was caused by the user.  We feel this was the theme at fault.  But what a major Weebly SEO flaw there.

Weebly SEO Image Alt Tags

When we develop a website page, we ensure all the SEO is correct, not just the image names but the Alt Tags too.  If you Google ‘What is an alt tag in SEO’, you will find out.  WordPress SEO is genius.

Upon checking the websites we have seen in the last few months, it appears that Weebly defaults the Alt Tag as ‘Picture’.  So if you have 15 photos on a page, and you want it to rank well, and they all default to ‘picture’, it’s not clever!  Trouble is, as a user, you may not know the purpose of an alt tag, and how much it helps within SEO.

These are just a few of the Weebly SEO problems we have come across lately.

Migrating to WordPress

Migrating your website from Weebly to WordPress takes a little while.  We can do the whole process for you, from setting up your new hosting, installing WordPress and a theme, migrating your website over, and cleaning it all up.  We can get it very close to your Weebly website design format too.

So if you are suffering from Weebly web design issues, and you are fed up, or the ranking has dropped, do get in touch.  We can really help.  We can migrate your Weebly website to WordPress.

Training to use WordPress

If you are completely unfamiliar with WordPress, there are online tutorials, but also we can provide WordPress Training for you.  Training is provided throughout the UK, but with costs for travelling, most clients more than a few hours away tend to look online for video tutorials.

If you want to get in touch about your Weebly website, please call 01775 894479, use our livechat, or pop us an email over: