Bluehost Web Hosting Help

Weebly Upgrade FAQ

We have chosen to upgrade to the newest version of Weebly to provide everyone who hosts with us the latest and best tools available for building your website at no extra cost. To better educate on how this process works, we’ve included the following list of frequently asked questions.

When is the upgrade happening?

The upgrade will start on 3/13/2017 and will continue until all upgrades are complete.

Customers that are new to Weebly now have access to the newest editor using Weebly basic, and will have access to Business and Professional soon.

Will my site be offline during the upgrade?

No. Weebly sites will remain online even throughout the upgrade period. However, access to the Weebly editor will be suspended while the upgrade takes place. If the system detects that you have accessed the Weebly editor within the last 30 minutes, the upgrade will be put on hold until after you have been inactive for at least 30 minutes.

Will I be able to edit my site during the upgrade?

No, the Weebly site editor will be temporarily unavailable during the upgrade. You will be able to edit your site again after the upgrade is complete.

Does this change the price?

No. Weebly will still be available for free to all Bluehost customers. The eCommerce and Pro features will continue to be billed at the same price.

Can I keep my old theme?

Yes. Existing activated themes will continue to function as-is. Old themes will not be receiving any updates and may not include all the features of the new Weebly upgrade. If you do choose to update your theme, the old theme will still be available in your “recently used” section for six months. The mobile theme editor tool available with older themes will no longer allow you to edit the mobile site directly. Instead, all content (branding, header, footer) will be pulled from the desktop view of the site.

New Features

Custom headers and page sections — Choose between six different header types and control each one by adding images, logos, slideshows, menus, buttons, etc. Customize your page by including a site menu, social icons, contact form, logo, and more! Every custom section you drag onto the page works like its own mini-site and can contain multiple design elements like color, backgrounds, text, images, and video.
New commerce system — Sell your products online and provide a consistent shopping experience across all devices. Select sophisticated storefront themes and choose from a variety of payment options including Stripe, PayPal, and more. New product and category elements provide you with the flexibility of designing and laying out your online store. You will have full control of the entire process from product creation, to shipping configuration, payment processing, and order management.
Store Design Elements — Easily drag and drop products or categories anywhere on your site to create beautiful stores, and drive sales.
Bulk Importing and Exporting — Quickly make bulk edits to your products, import and export batches of information, and implement key SEO terms to get found online.
Tax Setup — Save time with one-click tax rates for the entire US, guidance for international rates plus easily set by region, price or manually.
Shipping Management — Save time by using our shipping management tools, which enables you to easily configure shipping rates based on quantity, setting a flat rate per item or order, and offering free shipping based on order price or weight.
Optimized One-Page Checkout — Get your customers through the checkout flow easier than ever with a simplified one page purchase process.
New membership system — Build a membership-based website that allows users to login to access special content. Add members, build groups, and manage access all from the admin area. Further, you can add a “Register” button to the site allowing visitors to sign up to become members. The options will then be available to manually review each case for approval, simply automatically approve everyone, or even upload a csv file with all the data for your member database.
New blog system — Create blog posts with all of the same tools you have in the main editor. Other blog features such as archives, categories, RSS feed, comments, and more are at your fingertips. You can even schedule your posts to publish at a future date.
New fully responsive themes — Create and manage a website that works everywhere for everyone. All Weebly themes have been optimized to automatically resize so they look great on any device your visitors use to access your site.
No more mobile-only theme editor — With the update to all new themes being fully responsive, the mobile-only theme editor is no longer necessary. Instead, for all tablet and mobile devices, your site will look very similar to the desktop version, only intelligently resized and optimized to look great on any screen.
No more dedicated column element — Instead of creating columns from the tools menu, simply drag elements beside one another to create columns automatically. From there, you can wrap or resize to your liking.
New spacer element — Add blank space anywhere on the page with a new “spacer” element.
No “text + image” element — Add an image to text by simply dragging and image into a text box.
Page management in sidebar — Pages are now created and managed via the sidebar interface that won’t hide the page you are currently editing. Moving between pages, editing, and setting up the framework of your site is now done effortlessly.
New image editor — New image editor includes features such as image cropping, filters, focus, and other adjustments like brightness and saturation. It is HTML-5 based and a huge update from the previous flash-based editor.
New page type icons — After selecting which type of page you’ll be adding to your site, you can select an icon which best represents how you would like that particular page to be laid out. This icon will always show in the “pages” tab for reference.
Open access to the HTML/CSS editor across all plans — For those comfortable with HTML/CSS code, this feature allows you to modify the source code of your site. Another way of doing this is to use the element called “embed code” where you can actually copy/paste any kind of 3rd party tool or custom code into a specific page on your site. This includes Youtube videos, opt-in forms, etc.
New element options user interface — All drag and drop elements have an updated option interface making setting element options much easier. Adjust spacing, add borders, link, align, caption, and more!
Theme options — Additional customization options to many of the new responsive themes. Examples include navigation placement, header overlay settings, page width, etc.
Theme gallery — An updated theme gallery user interface makes it easier to find and preview themes, view recently used themes, and manage custom themes.
Custom color palettes — Color palettes allow you to choose both a primary and accent color to better personalize and brand your site. If you want, you can create default palettes that have primary and accent colors already defined. You then get to decide where those colors are used throughout the page.
Video Backgrounds — Impress your visitors with high quality video backgrounds. Choose from Weebly’s free video library or upload your own unique video to make header images and sections pop.