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Weebly is a great solution to build professional websites using a simply drag and drop interface. With all of the amazing features that Weebly has, there are still a few downfalls. One of the main downfalls, is the limited ability to make necessary tweaks to hosting and website speed.

This post sheds the light on how to make your Weebly website load faster and some common SEO tricks that will help as well.



Different Types of Optimization

There are two basic types of optimization for your Weebly website that you should focus on
  • On Page Optimization
  • Off Page Optimization

On Page Optimization

This type of optimization in regarding the things you do directly on your website. For speeding up a Weebly websites load time these things include

  • Fast loading themes
  • Optimized images
  • Organized HTML and CSS

With the proper tricks and some cleaning of the clutter on your Weebly website, you can do a lot to speed things up.

First, to ensure you have a fast loading Weebly theme you have to make sure that it keeps certain load time variables correct.

  • Keep things minimal if you can
  • Minimize the use of images and multimedia in general
  • Properly format images to desired size
  • Keep your HTML and CSS as clean as you can

Moral of the story, the more you have, the longer it takes to load. Following some simple disciplines in your websites creation can save you on load time.

Off Page Optimization

There are some simple on page factors and practices to follow when building your website. Off page optimization factors for a Weebly website are a little trickier. Weebly has its hosting tied in with all of the other services it provides. While Weebly offers a very efficient form of cloud hosting to customers it can still bog down on load times. Also optimization becomes difficult, because there is little you can do to tweak load time factors that have to do with your Weebly hosting.

The workaround I have found is to include your Weebly website into a content delivery network, or CDN for short. Content delivery networks make your website load faster by caching your website on their servers. This allows the CDN to more efficiently deliver your websites data and in-turn gives you a quicker load time. Again this is kind of a tricky little work around and I have not tried it with a domain that is registered with Weebly, but I will and I will report my findings here when I do.

What I did to make this work is

  1. I purchased a domain name from BlueHost. This gives you better control over your DNS options for your domain.
  2. I then used Weebly’s domain transfer tool to set my new domain as the default for my Weebly website.
  3. I then followed all of the on page optimization procedures that we already discussed and constructed the website.
  4. Next, I signed up for a CloudFlare free account, just for starters and went through the set up instructions provided by Cloud Flare.
  5. Activated desired features in Cloud Flare and after about 7 days I started to see better load times. Down from 20-10 seconds total load time to 15-5 seconds total load time.
To update name servers if your domain register is  Weebly. Simply click domains scroll through the options and update the necessary name servers.

What’s CloudFlare?

Cloud Flare is a CDN that as I described earlier stores your website and delivers it in a more efficient manner. Cloud Flare also offers great security features for any website. If you are interested in Cloud Flare for your website, I suggest getting started with their free account and if you have a need for their more advanced options you could upgrade to a better plan.

We hope this article helped you learn how to make a Weebly website load faster. You may also want to see our guide on how to use CloudFlare with Weebly.

If you liked this tutorial, then you may consider subscribing to our WeeblyTutorials YouTube Channel for Weebly video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.