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by dublinben 3913 days ago
One of the significant drawbacks to every proprietary drag-and-drop website builder is that you cannot easily export your website. Any time you spend building your site with their tool just further locks you into their hosting platform.

I've seen some very nice personal webpages built on Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, etc. by non-technical and non-design users, but I would never recommend it to a business client.

2 comments

What about for say a small non-profit that isn't tech-savvy that will have at most 10 pages of content?

I could see where this could really be an issue if there was a lot of content or integration with the website being made. And I suppose too preserving old URLs (if that's something the client cares about)

If they have old URLs you can use the redirects under "Settings" -> "SEO". Oddly placed, but hey, the functionality is there. And for non-techies I think Weebly is wayyyy better than WordPress.
What happens when the organization outgrows the features offered by Weebly, and wants to move their site to another host?
There is an export site functionality which gives you everything: HTML, CSS, images, uploaded files, etc... I'd never actually tried it until now, so thank you :-)
Sounds like a perfect use-case for weebly. Weebly is much easier to setup than Wordpress.. in fact there is no setup at all
For a website like that, I would recommend a simple Wordpress site on a basic shared hosting provider. It's quick to get set up with the most important information, and then easy to keep updated by multiple non-experts.
You can export your site with Weebly.