Weblium Review

Full review

Anyone can quickly create a website with the tools provided by Weblium, whether you are a small business, online retailer or individual with a personal website. It’s all included in the package – website builder tools, hosting and website maintenance.

We looked closely at the package offered by Weblium to find out about the advantages and disadvantages of this particular online creation offering.

Sign up

Weblium offers three plans. The first plan is free. The second "Pro" plan is $8.25 per month if paid annually or $15 per month on a monthly basis. The third and final "Landing Pro" plan is a $196 one-off fee.

The free plan includes 200 templates to you to choose from, unlimited storage and SSL certicate included.

The "Pro" plan includes all of the above, but also comes with event tracking, free domain name for 1 year and SEO & Marketing tools including Google Analytics. But most importantly it comes without Weblium Ads.

The "Landing Pro" plan is the same as "Pro", but instead of unlimited storage you get a limit of 150MB and their is no free domain name.

Design Options

Find a template for your site from the gallery of ready-built designs. It’s easy to pick a style for your website with the search feature – search by category, type, colour or keyword. Once you have chosen your template you move into the editing stage but there are not many customization options. Only with the higher-priced plans can you get access to the library of stock photos. Only if you choose the Turnkeys 2.0 plan do you have control over your own website – with this plan you can update the CMS and if you don’t extend your licence after one year you don’t lose everything.

Widgets

We didn’t find a lot to get excited about in terms of widgets and add-ons on Weblium. However, you can add a blog using the basic blogging platform and use it to update your visitors on the latest news and views. Add an MP3 player, YouTube videos, play-lists or podcasts.

Features

Ecommerce –Make your site ready for accepting payments by adding the “buy now” PayPal button. The Weblium system also includes the option of a shopping cart for purchasing multiple items.

SEO –The site’s HTML, meta tags and page names are ready set up for easier indexing and searching by the search engines. You can add a meta description to help people find your website more easily.

Hosting & domains

You’re limited to the Weblium domain name unless you opt for the more expensive Turnkeys 1.0 package. Here you can choose your own domain name (depending on availability) included in the price. Sites are hosted by Weblium.

Ease of use

While Weblium is reasonably easy to use it is not the simplest or the least stress-free on the market. Sometimes the changes take a long time to kick in, and waiting for the desired change results in quite a lot of downtime. You need to reload the page many times in order to arrive at your final end result. The system is a little fiddly although the interface is well laid out and clear to read.

Help & support

No 24-hour, seven-day-a-week support is available although you can contact the team during the week using a ticket system or the online chat service. FAQs and other resources are rather limited although the answers are detailed and everyone we were in contact with was responsive and helpful. The webmaster support (which you need to pay for) is designed for customization issues, web design, general queries and optimum functionality.

Overall

Having to pay extra for webmaster support that you may not have needed had the system been easier to use acts against Weblium. We don’t think the product is the best value for money, although it does have its good points.