Theo vs Weebly for a small business website (October 2026)

The scorecard

Tally: Theo 4, Weebly 2, split 2. Each round asks who does the work after launch, what the owner keeps or what it costs each month. Weebly's and Square's prices, plan tables and help articles were read on October 20 and 21, 2026, and Theo's figures come from the pricing page. The verdict turns on Round 3, who does the search and growth work.

Round 1: Who builds the site

Weebly is a drag-and-drop builder. You pick a theme and place each element on the page yourself. Square bought Weebly in 2018, and Weebly accounts now sign in through Square. Weebly's help center says there are no plans to discontinue the Weebly builder at this time, but it encourages new sites to be built on Square Online. Square has since renamed that builder "websites". Trying Square's editor adds a second site to the account, and the Weebly site stays as it was.

Theo builds from a chat. Describe the business, or give Theo the address of your Weebly site and ask it to keep the look. Theo reads the live pages and drafts a preview from them, usually within minutes, and you refine it by typing what should change. The first build costs nothing and comes before you choose a plan, so an owner whose Weebly site went up years ago sees the rebuilt version before paying for anything.

Round result: Theo.

Round 2: Who makes changes after launch

On Weebly, every change after launch is made by hand in the editor, by you or someone you invite to help: a new price, a new photo, a new page. Weebly's phone app is no longer offered for download, and only devices that already had it installed by December 15, 2025 can still use it.

Theo has no editor to learn. On every plan, you, or a collaborator you invite from the site's settings, type the change in plain English, and Theo makes it. Those changes draw on the month's chat credits: 1,500 on Basic, 4,500 on Starter and 7,000 on Pro, and any top-up credits you buy roll over without expiring. On Starter and Pro the weekly search work also starts without being asked, while a Weebly site changes only when someone opens the editor.

Round result: Theo.

Round 3: Who does the SEO and growth work

Weebly's search tools are mostly fields for the owner to fill in. Weebly makes the sitemap file (the list of a site's pages that Google reads) on its own. Its help center then has the owner submit it in Search Console, Google's free report on how a site does in search. The same help center sends you to Settings > SEO for a site description and keywords, to each page's advanced settings for the same, and to a redirect tool for old addresses.

Weebly's SEO guide is a list of jobs for the owner: show your name, address and phone on the pages, give each photo a short description (alt text) and earn links from other sites. Square's help center, which covers Square Online, says Square does not provide SEO consultation and recommends consulting an SEO expert. No Weebly plan includes anyone doing that work.

On Starter and Pro, Theo does that work every week. It looks up the searches your competitors show up for and you do not, drafts service pages, posts and landing pages to answer them, and fixes the technical problems it finds. On every plan, connecting Google submits your sitemap. New drafts wait in the Growth tab (Theo's list of every page and fix) for your approval unless you turn on auto-publish, and a weekly email counts the pages, posts and updates added. The growth work uses no chat credits, and no one can promise a ranking, Theo included.

In Theo's audit of 6,861 small business websites, 53 percent of the 66 Weebly and Square Online sites with search data got an estimated zero visitors a month from Google search (The State of Small Business Websites 2026). The report counts the two builders as one group, and the 66 sites are a small sample of owners who chose to run the free audit.

Picture a lawn care company whose owner built its Weebly site a decade ago. It has a home page, a services list and a contact form, and the description and keywords were filled in once at launch. On Theo Starter, the Growth tab holds a page on core aeration in the company's home town one week. The next week it holds a post on the best months to aerate in that state. Each waits for the owner's yes. Even in home services and trades, the audit group a lawn care company falls in, 36 percent of the 440 sites with search data sat at an estimated zero.

The aeration page will not fill the schedule in its first month. Search traffic builds over months, not weeks. In the first 30 days, expect the site live, the first pages published and the sitemap submitted so Google can find each new page. Search Console should begin to count the times your pages show up in Google results, and calls and clicks follow as those pages climb.

Round result: Theo.

Round 3, continued: a page that work produces

Brinkhorst Lawn Care, a lawn care site built by Theo, shows both kinds of page that weekly work writes. Theo's search work added a post, When to Aerate Your Lawn in Iowa, and a Core Aeration in Ankeny, IA page that explains what aeration fixes, when to book it and what it costs by lot size. Pictured below: the part of the Ankeny page on what aeration fixes. See the live site.

Round 4: Sticker price

Weebly lists a Free plan and three paid plans, each priced by the month on one of two billing terms: billed annually, or month to month at a higher figure. Its pricing page shows no separate renewal price, every subscription renews on its own until canceled, and Weebly's premium plans carry a 30-day money-back window, on request. Square Online is priced inside Square's own plans, by the month for each business location, and a site on your own domain needs Square Plus or Premium. Theo bills monthly with no term. All figures are as of October 2026.

Round 4, continued: reading the price table

On the sticker, Weebly comes in under Theo. Its Free plan costs nothing, and Personal and Professional cost less than Basic at $29.99 on either term. Weebly Performance, at $32 or $36 a month, and Square Plus, at $49 a month per location, cost more than Basic.

Round result: Weebly.

Round 5: The site plus the work, per month

This round prices the weekly pages and fixes done for you, month after month, not the tools to do them yourself. No Weebly plan includes that work, and Weebly's pricing page lists no service that does it. Square's answer is hired help: its help center recommends an SEO expert, and its Square Online page points to Square Specialists for SEO among other jobs. The specialists are outside experts, not Square employees, and no price is published for either. A Weebly owner who wants the work done pays the plan, plus whatever that outside help charges.

On Theo the work comes inside Starter, at $69.99 a month and free for the first 30 days, with hosting and chat changes on the same bill. Nothing is added on top for the pages, posts and fixes.

Round result: Theo.

Round 6: Online store

Weebly puts a store on every plan, the Free plan included, with payments taken through Square. Items export from the dashboard as a CSV file (a plain spreadsheet), though Weebly's site archive leaves store pages out.

Theo runs no checkout of its own. A Shopify or Wix store connects on any plan, and its products, prices and stock appear on the Theo site with a cart, while the buyer pays on the store. That store is a second subscription: Shopify Basic is $39 a month, or $29 a month on yearly billing, as of October 2026. Bookings are separate from the store: if you take them in Square Appointments, they stay there, and the Theo site links to them.

A Weebly store owner has three routes. The first, which Theo recommends, is exporting the items as a CSV and moving the store to Shopify, which connects to the Theo site directly (how the Shopify connection works). The second keeps the Weebly store running at its own address, such as shop.yourdomain.com, on a paid Weebly plan, with Theo on the main domain linking to it. If both are too much, the Weebly site and store stay where they are and a separate Theo site goes on a subdomain such as blog.yourdomain.com.

Round result: Weebly.

Round 7: Domain and email

Weebly's annual Professional and Performance plans come with credit for a standard-priced domain's first year, provided the domain is registered within 45 days of buying the plan. Monthly billing and the Personal plan carry no such credit. Email is sold through the Weebly account as Google Workspace, for a domain bought from Weebly or pointed at it, and the help article gives no price. On Square Online, connecting your own domain takes Square Plus or Premium.

Theo includes neither a domain nor email. If you have no domain yet, you can buy one inside Theo, registered in your name and yours to keep if you leave. A domain registered at Weebly stays there: you change its website records in Weebly's Domains page to point at Theo and leave the email records untouched. Weebly's own help article gives the same advice for moving to another host: change only the website records. Changing the domain's nameservers (the setting for who runs the whole domain) takes the website and email offline. Where the website and email share a record, Theo lists the extra records to add so mail keeps arriving.

For an owner buying a first domain, an annual Weebly Professional or Performance plan covers a standard-priced domain's first year and Theo does not. For an owner whose domain and Google Workspace mailbox already sit in a Weebly account, both stay exactly where they are. The round splits between those two cases.

Round result: split.

Round 8: Ownership and leaving

Weebly's editor can email you a zip archive of the site from Settings > General. Weebly calls it an offline backup, for safekeeping or to recreate the site at another host. It cannot be imported back into Weebly, it leaves out blog and store pages, and parts such as the contact form and slideshows may not work anywhere else. Weebly's help center also points to Download My Data, under Account Settings > My Data, for a copy of your site content and data. A site published on your own domain needs a paid Weebly plan. When the plan lapses, the site comes off the domain, and it goes back up only on a paid plan or a free weebly.com address.

Leaving Weebly takes care with the cancel button. Deactivate My Account cancels every paid service in the account and takes published sites offline, which would include a domain or Google Workspace bought there. Canceling only the site plan from My Services stops it renewing and keeps it running to the end of the period already paid for.

On Theo the pages, words and photos are yours on every plan, the ones the weekly work wrote included, and you can save the text and images whenever you like. Pro adds read-only GitHub access to the site's code, which you can copy. There is no term: cancel at any time, and the site stays live until the paid period ends, on the date the cancellation confirmation shows.

Round result: split.

How to move from Weebly to Theo

Theo rebuilds from the live Weebly address, so the move does not depend on Weebly's archive. The pages on moving to Theo set out the general steps.

1. Run the free audit on the Weebly address to record its estimated search traffic, the number the new site has to beat. Then give Theo the same address, ask it to keep the look or try a new one, and refine the preview in chat.
2. Keep the Weebly plan running while you work. Weebly page addresses end in .html, such as /services.html, and the old ones that still earn search visits need redirects to their new pages. Once Search Console is connected, SEO repair on Starter and Pro sets those up. On Basic, ask for each redirect in chat.
3. Point the domain at Theo, the root and the www version, with forwarding and parking off. For a domain registered at Weebly, change those website records in Weebly's Domains page and leave the nameservers and email records alone. Visitors see the Weebly site until the records update, usually within a few hours.
4. Once the domain is live, sign in with Google, and Theo connects Google Analytics and Search Console. That connection submits your sitemap on every plan, and on Starter and Pro it starts the weekly search work.
5. Cancel the Weebly site plan last, from My Services, and keep any domain or Google Workspace you hold there. Deactivate My Account would cancel those too.

The bottom line

Theo wins the tally, four rounds to Weebly's two with two split, and it wins Round 3, the round that decides the verdict: who does the search and content work after launch. On Starter and Pro, Theo researches what people search for, drafts the pages and posts and fixes what it finds, every week, holding each new page in the Growth tab for your approval. Weebly hands that work to the owner in its settings, and Square points owners to an outside expert. An owner with an aging Weebly site who wants it to bring in work belongs on Theo Starter or Pro, and one who wants the site rebuilt, hosted and changed by chat belongs on Basic. Prices and terms as of October 20, 2026.

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