Weebly.com: How to Build Your Square Website Successfully

No one wants to wait for a webpage to load. A fast speed will keep website visitors engaged and will improve the organic search ranking. 

Ultimately, what’s great for user experience and great for conversions and sales, so it’s important to get it right.

We've already written a full guide a full guide to page load speed and how to improve it. But in essence, this can be achieved with Weebly.com as follows:

Use CDN Servers

A Content Delivery Network is a system of distributed servers that deliver web content and resources to users based on their geographical location. Weebly offers a CDN option (as do we), and this can be found in the Advanced tab in the Weebly settings panel. Activate it. CDNs generate your website from the website nearest to website visitors, slashing load times considerably.

Compress Images Yourself

Both the file size and display size of images affects page load speeds. And while Weebly will automatically compress oversized images, this often leads to a noticeable dip in quality. Instead, use a compression plugin in your photo editing tool, or alternatively use a free service like TinyPNG or Compressor.io that will compress images without reducing quality.

Choose Simpler Weebly Themes

At TWIPLA, we’re not huge fans of Weebly’s themes (or templates as they’re otherwise known). They’ve saved the themes with advanced optimized code for premium subscribers, and these are supposed to boast loading speeds.  But most of the default options are outdated, with bloated code that will significantly slow down loading times. By contrast, minimalist themes are lighter in weight and typically load faster.

Restrict Weebly App Integrations

Weebly’s App Center is a large marketplace that offers users different apps, plugins, and services to enhance a website. There are over 200 to choose from but each one adds weight to the website, and slows down performance. They’re also built and maintained by different companies, and pose additional data security risks for website owners. So be selective, and only choose those that will substantially enhance the site.

Websites need visitors, it’s rare the owner doesn’t want to attract traffic (though it does happen). But visitors don’t arrive by accident. It’s necessary to build a following on social media, as well as to play search engine algorithms at their own game. 

Unlocking website traffic potential is a slow but steady process, and you’ll start seeing growth over the next few months by adopting the following routines: 

SEO Pages to Attract Organic Traffic

Ultimately, you’ll want strangers stumbling upon your website during search engine sessions. The website also needs to appear high up in the results to have any realistic chance of attracting them in large numbers. It’s a gradual and cumulative process, but integrating SEO into most content creation - and we've created a handy SEO infographic that introduces this process - is a gateway to the limitless website traffic potential available from search engines.

Build a Social Media Personality

Social media marketing needs no introduction. As digital social watering holes, they’re obviously a great place for businesses to advertise themselves. But social media users are there to be entertained, and have a short attention span for standard product advertisements. It’s far better to approach social media as a place to build a community around the website. And beyond wider social media best practices, this means targeting areas most likely to be interested in your website, and posting human, fascinating content that will spark interest in some way or another.

Contact Users via Email

Despite the ever-increasing sophistication of digital technologies, email remains a highly reliable marketing channel for online business, particularly when using some simple email marketing best practices. Given the strong ROI, it should be priotized by any business but particularly those just starting out. For when compared with alternatives, email makes it far easier for users to find earlier messages. It’s quick, intuitive, and it’s one of the easiest ways to personalize marketing.

Each Webpage is an Invitation to Connect

Businesses use blogs, articles, and downloads to get their message across to potential customers. They act as the ammunition for outreach that people will hopefully find interesting enough to engage with. But one of the goals of this content to persuade them to explore the website further, and maybe to purchase something. This means that the content has to be integrated into a website that enables them to find what they want easily. 

Weebly as a platform has many integrated security features, but they’re not enough to protect the website from the dangers spread out online. 

Security requires both software and good in-house processes to maintain good security practices. As such, it’s good to follow a few Weebly.com security best practices:

Passwords

Adopt a strong password and update it regularly. Websites can quickly become populated with sensitive information, making unauthoized access a risky proposition. But since losing access is an even bigger worry, use a password manager tool to jelp generate and store complex passwords.

Scrutinize Apps

Only install apps that have extensive, strong reviews. The number of active installations is another good indication of an app’s functionality, reliability, and trustworthiness. But ultimately, it’s important to do proper research before integrating any new app, to read reviews, and to research its history and suitability with your needs.

Backups

To backup your website, enter the site editor and navigate to the “Settings > General” section. Enter your email id under the “Archive” section and click on the “Email Archive” button. The backup process will take some time depending on the size of your site. However, doing this regularly will ensure that you don’t lose your content.

By building a website and also installing third-party software, webmasters open themselves up to a world of data privacy restrictions.

Meeting the demands of GDPR and its like takes effort, but this work can be reduced significantly by adopting the following processes:

Limit Third-party Apps

It’s important to remember that it is the website owner, not the third-party app provider, that is responsible for the website visitor data they collect. Each new third-party integration is a potential problem in the future. As such, be selective when it comes to app selection. Research their data storage practices and reputation for data security, and keep integrations to a minimum.

Prioritize Privacy-focused Apps

Many tech companies are developing software that is outdated, collecting website visitor data that is now strictly controlled by data privacy laws. This gives website owners a wide range of compliance responsibilities that aren’t created by privacy-focused tools like TWIPLA. These tools don’t collect personal data, and have been built with “privacy by design” to ensure they don’t impede on website visitor rights, regardless of where they live in the world.

Obtain Consent for Data Practices

Ultimately, data privacy laws set rectrictions on what data you can collect on visitors, the purpose of this data collection, and how the data is stored. Given the nature of website building and your wider digital activities, this can all be happening without your knowledge. It's important that you build and maintain an accurate understanding of your data practices, and that this is mirrored in your privacy policy, cookie policy, email consent, and so forth. Crucially, internet users also need to be able to access any data held by your website, and to edit or delete it on request.

Weebly is one of those wonderfully designed pieces of software that takes something complex, and makes it easy for people without knowledge or experience. 

As such, our advice on building a website using Weebly doesn’t include anything complex. 

Instead, it’s about sticking to digital marketing principles, creating something that works as expected, and looks professional. It’s also about keeping everything secure and legally compliant.

So integrate these insights into your Weebly.com website construction activities, and you’ll soon see it rise above the digital noise.

And if this platform forms part of a wider venture, we’ve written a comprehensive Resource Hub elsewhere on How to Start an Online Business.

Of course, website intelligence is vital if you're to collect the actionable, data-driven insights required to grow your website effectively and build a user experience that your visitors will love. TWIPLA can be easily integrated into any Weebly website and we offer a free forever plan so sign up today and see what our website analytics solution can do for your business.

How can I improve my Weebly website?

Weebly is a highly user-friendly website builder, and its drag-and-drop system makes it easy to build pages. More broadly, improving your Weebly website encompasses aspects of design, functionality, content, and performance optimization. Each aspect can be tackled over time, as you become more adept at website construction and digital marketing.

How do I make my Weebly website look professional?

Ultimately, creating a professional appearance for your Weebly website involves a combination of design principles, consistent branding, content quality, and user experience optimization. Other specifics include using a custom domain name, adding business credentials, and linking it to review sites for social proof.

Is Weebly SEO friendly?

Yes, Weebly is SEO friendly, but no more or less than any other website builder. It offers all the tools you need, but SEO is very much determined by what the user does. Effective Weebly SEO means building a strong SEO strategy and consistently integrating the various aspects into everything you publish.

Can you make a free website on Weebly?

Yes, absolutely. Weebly has a free-forever tier. However, this comes with limitations. The site will have only 500MB storage, “Weebly” in its domain name, advertisements from Square, and a maximum file size of 10MB. As such, the free plan is great at the beginning, but you may quickly find that your website grows too big for the bowl.