Weebly vs WordPress: What Ireland's Wave of New Businesses Should Know First

Almost 15,000 new companies were registered in Ireland by the start of July this year, a rise of around 13% on the same point in 2025 and the highest figure on record, according to CRIF Vision-net data reported by RTÉ. Every one of them needs a website, and a fair few are about to make that decision the easy way: whatever came free with the card reader.

A prospect asked me almost exactly this on a call yesterday. Her card machine rep had thrown in a free Weebly site when she signed up for Square, and she wanted to know whether that was good enough to just leave running. It is a fair question. The honest answer depends on what she is actually trying to build.

What You Actually Get With Weebly

Weebly is a genuine drag-and-drop website builder, not a stripped-down demo. Square bought Weebly for around $365 million in 2018 and folded it into its small business tools alongside its card readers and point-of-sale software. That bundling is the whole point. Sign up for a Square reader and a basic Weebly site can be running before the reader arrives in the post.

Pricing sits across four tiers. Free costs nothing, but puts a Weebly-branded address on the site and switches off most of the useful features. Personal runs to roughly €11 a month billed annually, or €14 month to month. Professional, the tier most small businesses actually need for inventory tracking and abandoned-cart emails, comes in around €17 to €22 a month depending on billing cycle. Performance, the top tier, sits at €30 to €40 a month.

For a business that wants one page, a map pin, opening hours and a phone number, none of that is a bad option. The problem starts once the business wants to be more than one page.

Where the Bundle Starts Costing You

I recommended exactly this setup to a client myself a few years ago. A trades business wanted something online fast and cheap, and Weebly, bundled with the card reader they already had, seemed the obvious call. Eighteen months later they wanted a proper quote-request form and a blog for local search. Neither fitted comfortably inside the plan they were on. I would tell that client to start on WordPress today.

That pattern turns up constantly with growing businesses. Consider a preserves maker who sells at farmers' markets around Leitrim. She takes payments through a Square reader at every stall, and the free Weebly site bundled with it does what it needs to for the first few months: a photo, a price list, a contact number. Then a local café chain wants to place a standing wholesale order and asks for a proper enquiries page with delivery terms. Weebly's form tools cannot do what she needs without upgrading twice, and by the time she has, the buyer has already gone looking for a supplier who looked more established online.

The deeper issue is what happens if she decides to leave Weebly altogether. WordPress.com's own migration documentation is blunt about what an import from Weebly actually carries across: content and basic settings, not the design, not the layout, not the custom domain configuration. You are not migrating a Weebly site. You are exporting the parts Weebly is willing to let go of and rebuilding the rest from nothing.

There is a cost layer that rarely gets mentioned upfront, too. Several independent reviews put Weebly's standard transaction fee at around 3% on its Free, Personal and Professional tiers, on top of whatever Square or PayPal already charges to process the card. Weebly's own pricing page does not spell this out plainly, which is itself worth flagging before building an online shop on it.

None of this is a hidden trap exactly. It is closer to what free and cheap website builders generally do to a growing business: the entry cost looks small because the real cost is deferred until you try to leave.

Where Weebly Still Makes Sense

None of this means Weebly is a bad tool. It means it is built for a specific job, and it is worth being honest about which businesses that job actually fits.

• A single-stall trader who already runs Square hardware. If the entire online presence is a map pin, hours and a phone number, the tight Square-to-Weebly bundle genuinely saves a step.
• A short-term pop-up, or a business testing an idea before committing. A market stall running for one season, or a concept the owner is not yet sure will become a full business, does not need the overhead of a platform built for growth.
• Someone who will never touch the site again. If updating content, running a blog, or improving search ranking is never going to happen, the extra control WordPress offers is control that sits unused.

Outside those three situations, most growing local firms outgrow Weebly faster than they expect to.

WordPress and the Case for Owning What You Build

WordPress runs somewhere around four in every ten websites globally, according to W3Techs, the organisation that has tracked content management system usage across millions of sites for years. That is not a niche technical choice. It is the platform most businesses, publishers and organisations land on once they need something that will still be theirs in five years.

The complexity that used to make WordPress a hard sell for a non-technical business owner has largely gone. Web60's AI website builder takes a description of the business and produces a fully designed WordPress site in under 60 seconds, hosted on Irish infrastructure, with SSL, nightly backups and malware scanning included. You are no longer choosing between "easy Weebly" and "complicated WordPress." You are choosing between a site you rent and a site you own, and both can now be live in about the same amount of time. It is the same trade-off we found looking at why a site built in Canva is not really yours to keep: the tool is convenient, the ownership sits somewhere else.

That ownership is not a small distinction dressed up to sound important. If the preserves maker from Leitrim had started on Web60's €60-a-year, all-inclusive hosting instead of the bundled free tier, the wholesale enquiry form, the blog post announcing a new product line, and the domain she eventually wants printed on her packaging would all have been hers to build without asking a platform's permission first.

One thing worth being straight about: Web60 does not replicate Weebly's single-flick sync between a physical Square till and an online store out of the box. If a business has built its entire operation around Square hardware and wants stock levels to update automatically between shop floor and website, that connection needs its own plan, usually through a WooCommerce integration, rather than assuming it will appear the moment the platform changes. Worth knowing before committing, not after.

Platform	Typical Annual Cost	Can You Export Everything?	SEO Control
Weebly Free	€0	No, content only, no design	Page-level toggles only
Weebly Professional	~€200 to €265	Partial, content only, not design	Page-level toggles only
Web60 (WordPress)	€60	Full, content, design, everything	Full, plugin-based control

Moving Off Weebly Without Losing Momentum

If you are already on Weebly and can see the ceiling coming, moving across does not have to mean losing months of work.

Export. Pull every blog post via RSS and every product listing as a CSV before touching anything else. This is the only data Weebly hands over cleanly, so get it out first.

Rebuild. Treat the design as a fresh start rather than a migration. Web60's AI builder can produce a new WordPress site from a description of the business in under a minute, which is usually faster than trying to recreate a Weebly layout by hand.

Verify. Check every page, form and product listing against the old site before it goes anywhere near customers. A staging environment is the right place to do this, not the production site.

Deploy. Point the domain at the new site, redirect the old URLs where they exist, and confirm the new pages are live before telling customers or updating your Google Business Profile.

Web60 includes a free migration service for exactly this kind of move, which covers most of the heavy lifting in the first two steps.

Moving On From Whatever Came Bundled With the Card Reader

Weebly is not a bad product. It does the job it was built for, and for a genuinely small number of businesses, that job is all they will ever need done.

But most growing local firms are not planning to stay small. They are planning to take wholesale orders, rank for local searches, and build something with their name on it that lasts. For that plan, the platform matters more than it looks like it does in month one.

That decision is easier to make early, before six months of content and a growing customer list make switching feel like starting over.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I move my Weebly website to WordPress?

Only partially, and not automatically. WordPress.com's own import tool for Weebly carries across blog content and some settings, but not your page layouts, design elements or custom domain configuration. In practice, moving from Weebly to WordPress means rebuilding the design while keeping the content you can export, rather than a straight migration.

Is Weebly good enough for a small business in Ireland?

For a single page with a map pin, opening hours and a phone number, yes. Once a business wants a proper enquiry form, a blog for local search, or full control over how the site appears in Google, Weebly's page-level tools tend to run out faster than owners expect.

Does Weebly cost more than the pricing page suggests?

Often, yes. Weebly's paid tiers range from roughly €11 to €40 a month depending on billing cycle and features, and several independent reviews report an additional transaction fee of around 3% on the Free, Personal and Professional tiers for anything sold through the site, on top of standard card processing charges.

What is the real difference between Weebly and WordPress?

Weebly is a closed platform. Your site lives inside Weebly's system, on their terms, and only certain content can be taken out if you leave. WordPress is open-source software you can host anywhere, including through a managed platform like Web60, and you own the files, the design and the data outright.

Do I need technical skills to build a WordPress site instead of using Weebly?

Not any more. Web60's AI website builder produces a fully designed WordPress site from a description of the business in under 60 seconds, with hosting, SSL and backups included. The manual setup that used to make WordPress intimidating has largely been removed.

Can I still use my Square till if I move from Weebly to WordPress?

Yes, Square payments can still be accepted through a WordPress site using standard payment plugins, though the single-flick sync between till stock and website inventory that Weebly offers is not automatically replicated. That connection typically needs setting up separately through a WooCommerce integration.

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