Replacing a Weebly site you stopped updating
Most Weebly sites that get replaced are not broken. They are four years behind the business, and nobody can face starting the whole thing again.
A real Clay site — built from a Google listing
You know the one. Built over a weekend, and the hours on it have been wrong since the winter you changed them. There is a photograph of somebody who left in 2019. The number goes to a phone you no longer carry. It still loads, so nothing has ever been urgent enough to fix it — you just send people to Instagram instead.
Clay does not import that site, and there is nothing worth importing. It builds a new one out of the listing you have actually kept current — this week's hours, the photographs customers took, the reviews, the map, the number that rings. You type your business name and nothing else, and it is live at an address you can send somebody before you have made an account.
The domain, and an afternoon
Your Weebly site stays up the whole time. Build the Clay one, look at it for a week, and switch the domain when you are sure — you point an A record at our IP yourself, press verify, and the certificate is issued once DNS has caught up. That part is not instant and nobody can make it instant.
The address you lose is the deep one. Clay's pages are /visit, /menu, /shop, /about, so a link somebody bookmarked to /about-us-1 will not survive the move. In practice almost all of your traffic is people searching your name, and that lands on the front page either way.
Almost nothing, and that is the point
There is no importer. Every builder that offers one produces a page of broken boxes you then spend a day tidying, and for a five-page business site there is very little in there anyway.
What you would have retyped comes from Google instead: up to eight photographs, sorted and cropped, the opening hours including the odd Sunday, the reviews with the stars on them, the map. The one thing worth carrying by hand is the paragraph about who you are — copy it out of the old site and paste it in.
What you get
The listing does the typing
Photographs, hours, reviews, map, phone and category come off your Google Business listing. You fill in one field: your name.
Eight photographs, already chosen
Your Google photos are scored, de-duplicated and colour-graded as one set, and the best eight are placed on the page.
The phone page is its own drawing
Not the desktop narrowed — a separate design in one column, which is where the old Weebly theme usually shows its age.
Orders, not card payments
The shop's basket hands the order to WhatsApp or email. Nothing is charged on the page, and the page says so.
Clay vs Weebly
Three of these rows go to Weebly, and two of them are the reasons not to move. Read those first.
What you get
- A real page about your business before you make an account
- Free on your own name.clay.site, with a small badge
- Editing is the live site — tap the band, change the field
- Four themes, swapped without touching a word of content
- Written in your own language, from Dutch to Bahasa Indonesia
- Nothing to update, back up, or log into twice a year
Questions
Can I import my Weebly site?
No. There is no importer and there is not going to be one. The photographs, hours, reviews and map come from your Google listing, which is more current than the Weebly page anyway, and the only thing usually worth moving by hand is a paragraph or two of your own words.
What happens to my Weebly blog?
Clay has no blog and does not plan to have one. If you have posted twice since 2018, let it go. If you genuinely publish, keep the blog where it is and use Clay for the page people land on when they search your name — those are two different jobs.
Can I keep the domain I bought through Weebly?
Yes. You point an A record at Clay and press verify; the certificate is issued once DNS propagates, which takes a few hours and is not something we can hurry. It is a paid-plan feature, and your clay.site address keeps working either way: how domains work.
I take card payments through Square. Should I move?
Probably not, if the till is the business. Clay's shop takes orders rather than payments — the basket opens WhatsApp or an email and you reply with the total, and stock is a switch rather than a count. That is right for a bakery with eight things and wrong for a shop with a stockroom: what the shop does.
What happens to my old address?
Whatever you decide. If the domain is yours you point it at Clay and it keeps working; if the site lives on a weebly.com address, that stays where it is until you close it. Nothing is moved for you, and nothing of yours is deleted by us.
Replacing a Weebly site you stopped updating
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