Weebly Running Slow? Here's How to Make Weebly Faster in 2023

Here's How to Get Weebly Running Much Quicker in 2023

‍In general, Weebly is one of the faster website builders out there.

But certain factors can sometimes cause it to work in a less responsive manner than what we would like. If you're going through a frustratingly slow Weebly editing experience, with the entire editor freezing up or just acting unresponsive, this article is for you.

Weebly is a great website builder, but having a slow builder that constantly lags makes for a horrible design experience. It can throw off your productivity and make building your site much more painful.

Luckily there are several strategies you can use to improve the speed and smoothness of your Weebly editor. I’ll go over them in this post. These strategies help 99% of users. Treat these as diagnostics—go through them one by one until your problem is fixed.

1 - Check Your Browser! Make Sure You’re Using the Right Browser

Since Weebly is simply in-browser software, your website browser is the “engine” that powers the editor. Weebly is just a series of programs—it’s up to your website browser to actually run the website.

I always recommend using a Chromium-powered website browser. This includes Google Chrome, and Microsoft Edge (which runs on the Chromium engine, so the two are quite similar). I don’t recommend using Safari simply because I’ve noticed its engine doesn’t work as well with Weebly.

Firefox is okay, but I’d highly recommend either Chrome or Microsoft Edge. If you’re already using one of these, try downloading the other to see if it fixes your problem.

(Given all the jokes we used to make about Internet Explorer, I never thought that I’d actually recommend a Microsoft-built browser to anyone, but here we are. Edge is pretty good).

2 - It Might Be Your Theme

Some of Weebly’s themes are a little heavy on Javascript, so if you’re using a default Weebly theme it could be the cause of the slow editing experience. They not only have a lot of non-optimized JS, but they also reference old libraries like an outdated version of jQuery. Definitely doesn’t do the website editing experience any favors.

Here’s where we come in. Our Premium Weebly Themes not only look incredible, but they also contain a ton of under-the-hood optimizations to the Javascript. This ensures a smooth and responsive Weebly website experience, and a much more optimized website leading to SEO improvements and a better user experience. Our themes run on the latest smooth frameworks to ensure a safe, secure, and smooth experience. Many of our customers have mentioned that their Weebly experience got much better after installing one of our themes. Definitely check them out!

3 - Make Sure You Aren’t Running an Excessive Number of Weebly Apps

Weebly Apps are great. But if you have too many of them, your editor experience (and website) will definitely slow down.

Weebly Apps add additional load to the Weebly editor, which in turn translates to more load on your website browser. Even simple Weebly Apps can cause a significant increase in load. I recommend going through each App one-by-one and asking yourself if it’s really something that you need to be installed.

By the way, our Weebly themes have a ton of features that can actually replace the need for many Weebly Apps. Since these features are built-in natively into our themes, you won’t experience the same sluggish effect. Our Weebly themes come with features like header slideshows, parallax sections, onepage scrolling abilities, and much more. So a good way to reduce your Weebly App usage is by simply installing one of our themes.

4 - Make Sure You’re Not Using Huge Website Assets.

By website assets, I mean stuff like images and other website content.

It’s important to optimize every piece of content you upload to your site, such as images, videos, and more.

Large unoptimized images and videos can wreak havoc on your website's loading speed. Not only will they slow down your Weebly experience, but they’ll also slow down your website’s PageSpeed, which in turn will lead to search engine penalties. We don’t want that!

When it comes to videos, I highly recommend uploading the videos to a streaming platform like YouTube or Vimeo first, and then embedding the videos into your Weebly website via the Embed HTML widget. Do this instead of just uploading the videos right onto your Weebly website.

I recommend this because it will significantly improve your website loading speeds, reduce the bandwidth used, and help with SEO.

5 - If You Wrote Any Custom Code in Weebly, Double Check It

If you didn’t write any custom code, then feel free to skip this section.

But if you did, there’s a chance the custom code may cause the editor to slow down.

Review all the custom code you wrote, especially Javascript. If you have an inefficient Javascript function, it can severely slow down your Weebly website and editor.

Weebly’s editor is generally more sensitive to Javascript than the live website. There are a lot of technical reasons for this that I won’t get into, but it’s an important thing to keep in mind.

Here’s a tip: You can actually prevent certain Javascript functions from running in-editor but keep them running on the live website.

Weebly has a DIV ID by the name of “#icontent” that is present in the website editor but not in the live website. Therefore, you can do a simple IF statement to see if this div is present, and if so, to not run the code (as it means you’re in the builder). We use this to “pause” non-essential code in editor but keep running the code on the live website, to help ensure a smoother Weebly experience for our customers.

If you need help writing the code that does the above, I’d recommend asking ChatGPT. It does a phenomenal job of writing code. Absolutely crazy what AI can do these days.

6 - Try running your browser in incognito mode to see if this fixes the problem.

Here’s another common fix to the sluggish Weebly browser problem.

A lot of the time, background cache can cause the browser to render Weebly quite slowly.

The best fix for this is to run your website browser in Incognito mode. In this mode, log in to Weebly as usual and see if it fixes the problem. In most instances, this will definitely speed up the browser editing experience.

If you notice that incognito mode fixes your issues, then the culprit was likely one of these:

• Browser extension that is taking up too many resources.
• Cache and cookies.

Reach Out if You Still Can’t Speed Up Your Browser! We’d Love to Give You Some Weebly Help.

If you’ve tried these strategies and you still can’t get Weebly working normally, feel free to reach out and contact us. We’d be more than happy to help you out. Hope you get your Weebly editor running smoothly again!