Migrating away from Weebly to a custom Solidus store

What Weebly is, and who should stay on it

Weebly is a hosted website builder with a shop attached. You lay out pages by dragging blocks around in the browser, Weebly hosts the result, and a small store sits on top of it with products, a cart and a checkout. For a market stall that wants a tidy web presence, a club that sells a few items, or a founder testing whether an idea sells at all, that is a reasonable, low effort way to be online by the weekend without hiring anyone. If that describes you, and the shop is small and the builder does what you need, leaving it would be a waste of money. I will say that plainly before I say anything else.

I build custom shops on Solidus, the open source Ruby on Rails ecommerce framework, so you know where I stand. That is exactly why I start with the honest half. This article is not for the happy hobby shop. It is for the business whose online side has become the main event, whose checkout will not do the one thing the business actually needs, and whose owner has begun to worry that the whole shop lives inside a product its owner no longer seems to be investing in. If you have reached that point, read on.

This is a platform specific guide. The deep, platform independent questions, how customer records, products, orders and saved cards really move, belong to the data type guides in this series, and I link each one where it matters rather than repeat it. Start with the overview, what moves and what does not, and come back. Where Weebly sits against the fuller field, I set out in the platform comparison for a UK shop.

Weebly in 2026: owned by Square, and quietly folded in

The single most important fact about Weebly today is who owns it and where it sits in their plans. Square, now part of Block, bought Weebly in 2018, and in the years since it has folded the product into the Square account system: a Weebly login is now a Square login, and billing runs through Square.¹² More telling is the direction of travel. On its own support pages Square says it has no plans to discontinue the Weebly site builder at this stage, but in the same breath it points anyone starting fresh towards Square Online, its newer store builder, as the place to build new sites.¹ The Weebly mobile apps were pulled from the App Store and Google Play at the end of 2025, and the product has been quiet on new features for some time.¹ Square has also wound Weebly down entirely in dozens of smaller markets during 2026, unpublishing sites there on a published timetable.³

None of that means your Weebly shop stops working tomorrow. It does mean you are building a business on a product that its owner is steering away from rather than towards, and that is a real consideration for anyone whose livelihood runs through it. A platform that is maintained but no longer developed is a slow kind of risk: the thing you want it to do next may simply never arrive. For a shop that has outgrown the builder anyway, that tips the balance towards owning sooner rather than later.

What you own, and what Weebly holds

The useful way to look at any hosted builder is to ask what you walk away with on the day you leave.

On Weebly you own your business data, and you can get most of it out, which is to Square's credit and not true of every builder. Your products, your orders and your customer contact details can be exported. What you do not own is the machinery: the builder itself, the theme, the hosting, the hosted checkout, and the payment processing that sits behind it. Those are Square's, and they stay behind. None of that is a scandal. It is simply what a hosted product means, and the point of this article is to help you price it honestly before you decide.

On Weebly	What happens when you leave
Products (the item library)	Exports to a spreadsheet, and syncs with the Square item library, so it moves with mapping work4
Order history	Exports from the store as a CSV file, emailed to you as a download link5
Customer contact details	Come out through the orders and the Square Customers API, passwords never with them6
Saved cards	Held by the payment gateway as tokens, moving them needs the gateway's cooperation7
Checkout, theme, hosting, payments	Square's own, and they stay behind

The export and the data, honestly

The raw material of a migration comes out of Weebly without too much of a fight, and that is the good news.

Your order history exports from the store dashboard. You open the orders area, pick a date range or ask for all orders, choose the CSV format, and Weebly emails you a link to download the file.⁵ It is a flat export rather than a tidy relational one, so a single order can spread across more than one row, with the product lines and the customer details on separate lines, which means some reshaping before it loads cleanly into a new system. That is ordinary data work, not a wall, but it is worth knowing so nobody assumes a one click clean file.

Your products are the other half. Since the Square merge, a Weebly store and Square share one item library, so the catalogue exports from the Square Dashboard as an Excel or CSV file through the item library export, and the same template imports back.⁴ Two details are worth knowing. Square strongly recommends the Excel format over CSV, because opening a file full of SKUs in a plain spreadsheet editor can quietly corrupt them.⁴ And the export carries a Token column, an internal identifier tying each item to this account, which has to be handled correctly when the goal is to move the items somewhere else.⁴ That token is a small, honest sign of the coupling: your catalogue is portable, but it is stamped with the platform's own identifiers.

Customer records are the thinnest part. There is no rich, standalone customer export with the history a real CRM would hold. What you have is the contact detail that comes through on the orders, and, because payments and the account sit inside Square, the Square Customers API can retrieve customer profiles with name, email, phone and address.⁶ That is enough to rebuild accounts in the new shop, but it is not a loyalty history, and you should plan to carry across only what is really there.

One hard ceiling, the same on every platform and worth stating plainly: passwords do not come across. A customer profile holds contact details and has no password field to export, so a customer brought into the new shop is simply asked to set a password on their first visit.⁶ That is correct and expected, not a failing, and the customer accounts and addresses guide explains how I turn that reset into a planned relaunch message rather than a cutover day surprise.

One more operational trap specific to the Square merge: historical orders that were already placed and completed on the Weebly site do not all become manageable inside the Square order tools after an account is merged, so the honest plan treats the Weebly order export as the record of the past and does not assume the two systems present one combined history.⁵ Export early, keep the file, and verify it against what you can see in the dashboard.

The traps that are particular to Weebly

Every platform has a handful of places where leaving is harder than the clean export suggests. On Weebly these are the ones to look at first.

The builder is closed, and so is the checkout. Weebly is a visual builder, which is its strength for a small shop and its ceiling for a growing one. The design, the page structure and the checkout steps are only as flexible as the builder allows. A delivery slot step, a trade customer's negotiated pricing, an extra field your accountant insists on, a different flow for wholesale: these are the sorts of things a builder is not built to do, and no amount of effort inside Weebly will add them. On a shop you own, the checkout is your own application code and behaves exactly as the business needs.

Payments run through Square, and the saved cards are the gateway's. A Weebly store under Square takes card payments through Square's own processor, set up for you with no separate gateway to wire in.² That is effortless while you are inside the ecosystem and a question the day you leave. When a customer saves a card, that card is stored as a token by the gateway, not as a number you hold, and network tokenisation means even internally the real card number is replaced.⁷ You never hold the card data, which is exactly as it should be, but it means the saved cards do not simply fall out in an export. Moving them to a new processor is the hardest single part of the move and needs the gateway's cooperation. I treat it as the first question, not the last, and the payment tokens and saved cards guide walks through how to confirm what is possible for your shop, as does the wider warning in the hidden dangers of switching payment gateways.

The page structure is proprietary, and the URLs are Weebly's. How a Weebly page is built and marked up is the builder's business, not yours, and the addresses of your products and categories follow Weebly's structure. When you move, every one of those addresses has to redirect to its new home, or the traffic and rankings behind those pages drain away through a wall of 404 errors. Google's own guidance is to map every old URL to its new one, use permanent 301 redirects straight to the destination, and keep them in place for as long as possible.⁸ That redirect map is the least glamorous and most valuable deliverable of the whole project, and the products and catalogue data guide covers how it is built.

You are leaving a product in slow retreat. This is less a technical trap than a strategic one, but it belongs on the list. Because Square is steering new shops to Square Online and has stopped developing Weebly in earnest,¹ the longer you stay, the more you build on foundations nobody is extending. Moving to a shop you own takes that uncertainty off the table for good.

The honest move to a shop you own

A migration off Weebly onto a custom Solidus store is not a button. It is a project, and done properly it is a calm one, because Solidus is an ordinary Ruby on Rails application and a PostgreSQL database that you own outright, on servers you control, under a permissive open source licence, which you can hand to any Rails developer tomorrow.⁹

The sequence is the one I follow for every platform. In discovery we decide what actually moves, who on your side owns the data, and what happens to the saved cards. I build the new shop and write the import scripts against a copy of your real Weebly and Square export, running them again and again until the result is clean, including the reshaping that the flat order export needs. We run the two shops in parallel for a few weeks with the catalogue frozen, rehearse the final import at least twice, and cut over on a quiet weekday morning with the old shop left untouched for thirty days as a fallback. Each data type follows its own guide: products, customers, orders and payment tokens.

For Weebly, two questions carry most of the risk, and I settle them first. Can your saved cards move to a new processor, or do you keep a gateway connection alive for a while to let them age out as customers re enter them? And is anything about the old order data going to surprise us when it is reshaped, which is why I rehearse the import on real data before anyone fixes a date. If the answers are clean, the rest is careful work. For the money side of the decision over five years, build and hosting included, read the five year total cost of ownership, and for the deeper question of who holds your records and on what terms, who actually owns your business data. If you are weighing the lightweight builders against each other before deciding to own, the sibling guide to leaving Square Online, Weebly's stablemate in the Square family, and the one to leaving Wix cover the near neighbours.

A worked example

Let me make it concrete with an invented shop.

Headingley Hardware (headingleyhardware.example) is a small Leeds ironmonger that started selling online during a quiet winter and found it liked it. The website is a Weebly store, built years ago by the owner's nephew, and it now ships tools, fixings and a surprisingly popular range of cast iron doorware across the country. It turns over about £420,000 a year online, on top of the counter trade. It has been on Weebly for five years, and it works until it does not. The owner wrote to me after two frustrations. First, a growing number of builders and joiners wanted trade accounts with their own pricing and monthly invoices, and the Weebly checkout had no way to express that. Second, the owner had read that Square was pushing everyone towards Square Online, had noticed the mobile app disappear, and no longer trusted that the platform had a future worth betting the business on.

The export was the manageable part, as it should be on Weebly. The product catalogue came out of the Square item library as an Excel file, the Token column handled for a clean start, and the order history exported from the store as a CSV, which my scripts reshaped from its two rows per order shape into a proper order and line structure for the new shop.⁴⁵ The customer contact details came through the orders and the Customers API, and the passwords stayed behind, as they always do, so the plan included a service message to every account holder before cutover and a short welcome page that set a new password on first visit.⁶

The payment question carried the real risk, and we answered it before fixing a date. The saved cards were tokens held by the gateway, so the plan was to connect the new Solidus shop to the shop's own chosen payment provider for everything going forward, and, for the handful of repeat trade customers with a card on file, a short honest message asking them to add their card again on the new account rather than assuming the tokens would move.⁷ From launch the shop owned its payments outright.

The trade accounts that Weebly could not express became ordinary Rails code in the new shop: a price list per trade customer, an order flow that offers invoice terms to approved accounts, and a monthly statement, all tested like everything else. Headingley now owns its website, chooses its own payment provider, and runs the trade side on logic the business can see and change, on a platform nobody is quietly winding down. That is an invented shop, not a client story, but every step in it is a step I would take.

When you should stay, and when to move

I will end where I began, because the honesty is the point.

Stay on Weebly if the shop is small, if the builder does what you need, and if the online side is a pleasant sideline rather than the business. At that size the platform runs the whole thing for a modest fee and a published card rate, 3.3% and 30p per online payment on the free tier and 2.9% and 30p on the paid plans,¹⁰ and leaving would cost more than it saves. Plenty of small shops are right to stay exactly where they are, at least until something changes.

Move when the online side has become the business, when the checkout has hit a wall the builder cannot take down, when you want trade pricing, your own payment provider or a shop that looks like nothing else, or simply when you would rather not build your future on a product its owner is steering away from. If that is where you are, the move is a known quantity once the saved cards question is answered, and the result is yours.

If you want a second opinion on your own numbers, bring them to a free workshop, and the first two weeks of work are on me. We will go through what moves cleanly, what the saved cards really allow, and whether a move off Weebly actually pays for you. Sometimes the honest answer is to stay a while longer, and if it is, I will say so. My rates are on the pricing page.

Footnotes

1. Weebly, Weebly website builder support update (Square has no plans to discontinue the Weebly site builder at this stage, encourages new sites to be built with Square Online, and the Weebly mobile apps were removed from the App Store and Google Play at the end of 2025), accessed 14 November 2026, https://www.weebly.com/app/help/us/en/topics/weebly-website-builder-support-update ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. Square, Weebly and Square general FAQ (Weebly is part of Square, a Weebly login becomes a Square login, and a Weebly online store takes card payments through Square), accessed 14 November 2026, https://squareup.com/help/article/7182-weebly-and-square-general-faq ↩ ↩²

3. Khaleej Times, Weebly websites to shut down for UAE and 66 more countries from September (Weebly winding down services in 67 countries, publishing of new pages stopped on 29 June 2026, sites unpublished on 27 September 2026, account access until 26 December 2026, the United States and United Kingdom not on the list), 5 July 2026, https://www.khaleejtimes.com/business/tech/weebly-websites-shut-down-uae-66-more-countries-september ↩

4. Square, Import and export your item library (export and import as Excel or CSV from the Square Dashboard item library, Excel strongly recommended over CSV for SKUs, the Token column is required and must not be changed when transferring items to another account), accessed 14 November 2026, https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5153-import-items-online ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

5. Square Seller Community, exporting Weebly store orders (orders exported from the Weebly store dashboard as a CSV emailed as a download link, the flat export puts product and customer detail on separate rows, and historical Weebly orders are not all manageable in the Square order tools after an account merge), accessed 14 November 2026, https://community.squareup.com/t5/Online-Store/Unable-to-export-my-Weebly-site-items/m-p/842753 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

6. Square Developer documentation, Customers API overview (customer profiles hold name, email, phone and address and have no password field, so passwords cannot be exported), accessed 14 November 2026, https://developer.squareup.com/docs/customers-api/what-it-does ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

7. Square Developer documentation, Cards API overview (a saved card is stored as a token by the gateway and linked to a customer, with network tokenisation replacing the real card number), accessed 14 November 2026, https://developer.squareup.com/docs/cards-api/overview ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. Google Search Central, Site moves with URL changes (map every old URL to its new one, use permanent 301 redirects straight to the destination, and keep them in place), accessed 14 November 2026, https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes ↩

9. Solidus, solidusio/solidus repository and licence on GitHub (open source Ruby on Rails ecommerce under the BSD 3 clause licence), accessed 14 November 2026, https://github.com/solidusio/solidus ↩

10. Square, Our fees (online or invoice card payments at 3.3% plus 30 cents on Square Free and 2.9% plus 30 cents on the paid plans), accessed 14 November 2026, https://squareup.com/us/en/payments/our-fees ↩