Weebly and Square Online
A website does not have locations
Square sells its online store in three tiers, and prices every one of them per location1. That is not a slip. It tells you exactly what you are buying: point of sale software, with a website attached, sold to businesses that already have a till.
For a shop with a Square register that is a genuinely good deal, and this page will argue that case as hard as the other one. For everyone else it is the website arm of a payments company.
First, which one are you on
Two builders, one owner, three names
Almost nobody arrives at this page knowing the difference, and it changes the advice, so it is worth two paragraphs.
Weebly
A general-purpose website builder from 2006, bought by Square in 2018. Still live, still taking US signups, and visibly no longer where the engineering goes. It runs 0.4% of all websites and 0.6% of those with a known content management system7, against Wix at 4.2%.
Square Online, now Square Websites
The builder Square actually develops, bundled into Square’s plans rather than sold on its own: the plans page is headed “Get online store features included in any Square plan”1. The support articles have already started calling it Square Websites2, which is the third name this product has had.
About the shutdown you have probably read about
It is real and it is specific. Square is winding Weebly down in 67 countries: sites are unpublished on 27 September 2026 and accounts close on 26 December 20265. The United States is not one of them. Nor is Canada, the UK, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand or any major EU market — the list is mostly Asia, Africa, Latin America and eastern Europe.
I checked the full list before writing this, because the alarming version of this page would have sold more migrations and been false. What it does show is a company withdrawing a product from markets rather than investing in it. That is a reason to plan, not to panic.
Follow the pricing
The tiers are built around the till
Look at which column improves as you pay more, and which one barely moves3.
| Plan | Per location | Online rate | In person |
|---|---|---|---|
| Square Free | $0/mo | 3.3% + 30¢ | 2.6% + 15¢ |
| Square Plus | $49/mo | 2.9% + 30¢ | 2.5% + 15¢ |
| Square Premium | $149/mo | 2.9% + 30¢ | 2.4% + 15¢ |
The in-person rate falls at every step. The online rate falls once and then stops. Spend $100 more a month going from Plus to Premium and your website pays exactly what it paid before. A company that thought of itself as a website business would not build the ladder that way.
Which produces a useful number, free, whether or not you ever speak to me. On online sales alone the $49 plan does not pay for itself until $12,250 a month in revenue, because the 0.4-point rate saving has to cover the subscription first. Below that the free plan is cheaper despite the worse rate.
And the processor is not a choice
Square’s documentation puts it plainly: your website is automatically set up with Square’s payment processor to accept card payments at checkout2. The additional methods you can switch on are Apple Pay, Google Pay and Afterpay — all of which still settle through Square. There is no slot for a different card processor.
For most small merchants that is fine, and Square’s rates are competitive. It stops being fine the day you are quoted a better rate, or need a processor Square does not support, because then the only way to change processors is to change websites.
The case for staying
If you own a Square register, this is built for you
Every competing page skips this part. It is the most useful section here, and for a lot of readers it ends the conversation.
One catalogue, two counters
Inventory is managed across store locations and sales channels so you never oversell. Sell the last one at the counter and the website knows.
One customer record
Sales history and loyalty points sit in a single directory covering every channel, rather than in a website that does not know who walked in.
Collection and local delivery
Order online, pick up in store free, or have your own staff deliver. This is a physical-shop feature and it is built in, not bolted on.
Nothing to integrate
The website is included in a Square plan rather than sold separately, so there is no connector to buy, configure or watch break.
All four come straight off Square’s own feature list4, and all four presuppose a physical shop. That is the tell, and it is also the recommendation: if you have a counter, Square Online is doing something for free that a custom site has to be paid to do through Square’s API. I would rather tell you to stay than sell you a rebuild that makes your Monday harder.
Square also reports a 38% average revenue increase for sellers who added a website, measured across the six months either side of their first website sale in 20244. Treat it as directional rather than causal: merchants who decide to add a website are not a random sample of merchants, so some of that 38% is the kind of business that adds a website. It still points the right way.
The other reader
If there is no register, you are buying the side dish
Consultants, trades, clinics, agencies, restaurants that take bookings rather than card payments through Square, anyone selling a service rather than a stocked item: none of the four advantages above apply to you. There is no catalogue to sync, no counter to reconcile, no collection to offer.
What is left is the website on its own terms, and on its own terms it is the part of the suite with the least attention paid to it. You are on a builder whose roadmap is set by what helps people take card payments in a shop, which is a perfectly good thing for a company to optimise for and simply is not your business.
The same applies, more sharply, to anyone on old Weebly. A general website builder bought seven years ago, superseded internally, withdrawn from 67 markets, and running 0.4% of the web. Nothing is failing. Nothing is improving either.
Measured, not asserted
The slowest builder in the comparison
Share of origins passing all three Core Web Vitals for real Chrome users, August 2026, mobile6.
On other pages here I have refused to treat this metric as a verdict, because a framework population and a hosted builder are not comparable. This comparison is fair: all four are template engines emitting similar pages for similar businesses. Weebly loses by roughly thirty points. The specific failures are 46% on loading and 51% on layout stability, so about half of Weebly sites move under the reader as they load.
One omission worth declaring: the same report returns 0% for Square Online, alongside 0% on two of the three underlying metrics and accessibility figures identical to Weebly’s. That is missing coverage rather than a measurement, so it is not quoted here and you should distrust anyone who does quote it. Weebly’s row is internally consistent and is.
Square is not the only company selling a website as the smallest part of a larger subscription. HubSpot does the same thing at a different price, and that arithmetic is on the HubSpot page. If your shop is an embedded widget on somebody else’s page rather than a Square catalogue, the platform you are on is probably Ecwid, now Lightspeed, which has its own page here.
Everything here starts with one question that is not about websites: are you keeping Square as your point of sale? If yes, the new site talks to Square’s API so the catalogue stays in one place, and that integration is quoted on top. If no, the catalogue moves out and the checkout is rebuilt on a processor you choose.
The data itself is more portable than most platforms on this list. Weebly offers a full download of your site content from Account Settings, and the Square catalogue exports cleanly, so there is real material to start from rather than a crawl alone. Pages and layouts are still recovered from the live site, and every indexed URL is mapped one-to-one to its replacement before launch.
Domains are worth a separate note. If yours is registered through Weebly you will need the registrar lock disabled and an EPP code, and ICANN blocks transfers for 60 days after any change to the registrant contact details5. Start that early: it is the one step nobody can hurry.
What replaces it is a Next.js site on Vercel, hosted and secured here, in a repository you own. The sequence is on the migration page; a site that has to keep talking to Square afterwards is integration work.
Straight answers
Starting with the shutdown rumour
Not in the United States. Square is winding Weebly down in 67 countries, where sites are unpublished on 27 September 2026 and accounts close on 26 December 2026. I read the whole list before writing this: the US is not on it, and neither is Canada, the UK, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand or any major EU market. The affected countries are mostly in Asia, Africa, Latin America and eastern Europe. So if you are a US business your Weebly site is not about to disappear, and anyone telling you otherwise to sell you a migration has not read the notice.
That it is a product being managed rather than built. Square bought Weebly in 2018, put its development into Square Online instead, and now sells that under a third name again, Square Websites. Weebly runs 0.4% of all websites, against Wix at 4.2%. And it is the slowest hosted builder measured: 43% of Weebly sites pass Core Web Vitals in the field, where GoDaddy manages 84% and Squarespace 72%. None of that is an emergency. It is a platform you should expect to keep receiving exactly as much attention as it does now.
Quite possibly not, and this is the most important answer on the page. If your inventory lives in Square, your customers are in the Square directory, and you want online orders collected in store, then Square Online is doing something no custom site does for free: keeping one catalogue in sync across the counter and the web. Moving the website out means rebuilding that link through Square's API, which is real work with a real bill. The website is the weakest part of a system whose other parts you are genuinely using, and that is usually an argument for keeping it.
No. Square's own documentation says your website is automatically set up with Square's payment processor, and the additional methods you can switch on are Apple Pay, Google Pay and Afterpay, all of which still settle through Square. There is no option to put a different card processor behind the checkout. If you have negotiated a better rate elsewhere, or you need a processor Square does not support, the only way to use it is to leave the platform.
For online sales alone the crossover is $12,250 a month. The free plan charges 3.3% online, Plus charges 2.9% and costs $49 a month per location, so the rate saving only overtakes the subscription above roughly $12,250 of monthly online revenue. Below that the free plan is cheaper despite the worse rate, which is the reverse of what the tier names suggest. That calculation ignores in-person sales, where the paid tiers improve the rate at every level and may well justify themselves on their own.
Three to six weeks. A site that presents the business sits in the $2,500 to $15,000 web design range; a real catalogue leaving Square goes to Shopify instead, which is $5,000 to $15,000. Weebly offers a full data download from Account Settings, which is more than several platforms on this list give you, and products export from the Square catalogue properly. The pages themselves are recovered by crawling the live site, and every indexed URL is mapped to its replacement before launch. If you are keeping the Square register and only moving the website, budget separately for the catalogue integration, because that is the part that earns its keep.
Sources
Five of the seven are Square’s or Weebly’s own pages. The wind-down country list was read in full rather than taken from the headlines about it, which is how the United States turned out not to be on it.
- 1
Online store plans — Square. The tiers, and the words “per location”. Read from the live page, 21 September 2026.
- 2
Manage payment options for your website — Square. That the site is wired to Square's processor, and what else may be added. Checked 21 September 2026.
- 3
Square fees and processing rates — Square. Online and in-person rates by plan. Checked 21 September 2026.
- 4
Online store product page — Square. Square's own account of who the product is for, and its revenue claim. Read from the live page, 21 September 2026.
- 5
Upcoming Changes to Weebly’s Global Operations — Weebly. The wind-down dates and the full list of 67 affected countries. Checked 21 September 2026.
- 6
Core Web Vitals Technology Report — HTTP Archive. Field performance from real Chrome users, by platform. August 2026 data, read 21 September 2026.
- 7
Usage statistics and market share of content management systems — W3Techs. Platform share of all websites, surveyed daily and vendor-independent. 21 September 2026.
Current to September 2026. Square renames and repackages this product often — Weebly, Square Online, Square Websites inside eight years — so check the plans page against the names above before acting on any of it.
One question decides this
Do you take payments on a Square register? Answer that and the rest follows, including the version where the answer is yes and my advice is to leave the website exactly where it is.