Weebly vs WordPress

2021. Automattic acquires analytics company Parse.ly



Automattic, the for-profit company tied to open-source web publishing platform WordPress, is announcing that it has acquired analytics provider Parse.ly. Parse.ly gives creators, marketers and developers the tools to understand content performance, prove content value, and deliver tailored content experiences that drive meaningful results. WordPress and Parse.ly already work well together, but the plan is to make WPVIP (enterprise hosting and support to publishers) features available to Parse.ly customers while also making more Parse.ly data available to WPVIP publishers. And there are also opportunities to add more commerce-related data to Parse.ly, since Automattic also owns WooCommerce.


2018. Weebly brings more e-commerce features to mobile



Website builder Weebly announced a number of new e-commerce features for the Weebly mobile app. Those features include the ability to ship and print labels, to respond to customer questions (via Facebook Messenger, which can be embedded on Weebly sites), to approve customer reviews, to create branded coupon codes and to edit every aspect of your store, including product listing and pricing — all from the app. Much of this functionality already existed on desktop, so the announcement is about moving these capabilities onto smartphones. In a blog post, the company outlined a vision for the mobile phone to become “the new back office.”


2018. Weebly launched Photo Studio service



Weebly launched new service - Photo studio - for entrepreneurs who want beautiful, professional product photos for their online store. It works as follows: you ship your product (or products) to Weebly, then Weebly Photo Studio shoots professional product photos for you, you get a link to download product photos, they ship your products back to you. For now Weebly offers 3 professional product photos for $10 per product.


2017. Weebly adds Square integration


Square is a great tool for independent businesses, but it used to be difficult to maintain an offline inventory with your Weebly storefront. New Weebly + Square integration allows to process credit cards online or in person and provides more tools to combine your online business with offline sales. Now you can import your products and sync your online and offline inventory and keep them automatically up-to-date, making it easy to share and track products between systems. Payment processing with Square is now available all paid plans, along with Square product import and inventory sync and special offers including a free credit card reader giveaway and lower transaction rates.


2017. Weebly launches new image editor



The ability to quickly upload, edit and publish photos from your phone or camera can help your business stand out from the crowd while keeping both new visitors and returning customers engaged. That’s why Weebly built a brand new Image Editor to help you create better imagery for your site and take control of photo editing directly from your browser. The new Image Editor is much faster than the previous version and provides an entirely new set of powerful image editing tools. New Image Editor features include: image cropping, 29 new filters, text on images, undo button and more.


2016. Weebly platform combines websites, eCommerce and marketing


The new version Weebly 4 brings a complete platform to help you grow with fully integrated Websites, eCommerce and Marketing. This is a huge upgrade to the entire Weebly experience, with new features to make your site more modern and beautiful, a more powerful eCommerce platform to increase sales, and integrated email marketing and SEO tools  to help engage and attract new customers. The new features the Weebly 4 upgrade has to offer include next generation web design, completely rebuilt eCommerce engine, improving the most important features you need to create a successful online store, unique email marketing features focused on engagement and intelligent user interaction.


2016. WordPress.com turned on HTTPS encryption for all sites



WordPress.com is adding HTTPS support for all of its sites without having to do anything. Each website now has an SSL certificate and will display a green lock in your address back. The nice side effect to the enhanced security is that Google tends to favor websites that support HTTPS over HTTP-only website. So your WordPress.com website should rank higher in Google search results.


2016. Website builder Weebly adds marketing emails



Website building service for small businesses Weebly launched Promote, a platform for building marketing emails. Email marketing is the number two concern for small businesses behind their website,” CEO David Rusenko said. However, more than half of Weebly users aren’t taking advantage of existing email marketing tools, because “it’s confusing and hard for them. So Promote allows them to build those emails using the same drag-and-drop tools they use to build their websites. Weebly Promote is currently limited to users of the existing Weebly platform, but the plan is to make it available to everyone soon. Pricing starts at $8 a month.


2015. WordPress.com goes Open Source and gets a desktop app



WordPress.com, the fully hosted version of WordPress, has a received one of its biggest updates. First, WordPress.com is now fully separated from the WordPress core. It is now an admin interface that interacts with the WordPress core just like any other third-party interface and app out there. It uses a REST API to fetch your posts, publish new ones, upload photos and more. Second, the team behind WordPress.com switched to an entirely new stack. Instead of using PHP and MySQL, the developers built everything using JavaScript and API calls. It means that when you go to the website, the server will distribute a fully working WordPress client that mostly runs in your browser. Finally, everything is open source and on GitHub. You can also download a new Mac app to access WordPress.com. In many ways, this app works like the Slack desktop app. It leverages web technologies and desktop features so that you get more or less the exact same thing as on the WordPress.com website, but with a few goodies, such as notifications. Windows and Linux apps are in the works.


2015. Website builder Weebly adds App Center



Weebly, the tool for building websites and online stores., is launching the third generation of its product today, which it calls Carbon. Specifically, Carbon includes an App Center with about 40 partner apps to start, tackling some of those other business needs that he was talking about — for example, businesses that need help with shipping can use the Shippo app. The apps can also be integrated with a redesigned dashboard. These integrations could allow customers to see all the stats that are relevant to the business — not just website visits, but data from apps like Weebly’s customer support service SimpleChat.