Imagine spending years building a website for your business, organization, or personal project.
Then you get an announcement from your website builder telling you that the service is being wound down in your country.
Your website isn’t disappearing immediately. But the company is telling you that the platform you’ve built it on is no longer going to be available where you live.
What’s Happening With Weebly
Weebly announced that it is winding down its services in 67 countries by September 20, 2026, citing regulatory changes and a desire to simplify its global operations.
Weebly says the 67 affected countries are:
Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, United Arab Emirates, Thailand, South Korea, Iceland, Barbados, Colombia, Chile, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Costa Rica, Vietnam, Serbia, Egypt, Ecuador, Peru, Cambodia, Jordan, Kenya, Bahamas, Uruguay, Oman, Morocco, Tanzania, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mauritius, Bahrain, Aruba, Zambia, Bangladesh, Georgia, Laos, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, French Polynesia, Azerbaijan, New Caledonia, Zimbabwe, Armenia, Paraguay, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Montenegro, Uzbekistan, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Russia, Belarus, Algeria, Andorra, Benin, Suriname, Palau, Gabon, Ghana, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Ethiopia, Tajikistan, Uganda, Guinea, and Congo.
Affected websites will remain active for 90 days and then be unpublished on September 27, 2026. Customers will still have account access until December 26, 2026, giving them time to move their websites, domains, and data. Starting June 29, affected customers can no longer publish new pages.
So, no, Weebly is not shutting down worldwide.
But if you’re one of the customers affected, that probably isn’t much consolation.
Your website still has to go somewhere.
Can You Actually Move a Weebly Website?
No, not without recreating your website.
Weebly does provide tools for downloading your site data and creating an archive of your site. But there’s an important catch: you can’t simply take that archive, upload it to a new server, and have your Weebly website running again.
Weebly says its site archive cannot be imported back into Weebly. It can be used as a backup or as a starting point for recreating the site somewhere else.
Blog and store pages aren’t included in the standard site export, and some Weebly features may not work outside the Weebly editor.
In other words, the archive can help you preserve some of your site’s content, but it doesn’t give you a complete, portable copy of your website that you can simply move to another host and put back online.
Is Weebly Getting Out of the Website-Builder Business?
That’s harder to answer.
Weebly is still operating, and its website builder remains available in many countries. The company has also previously said that it had no plans to discontinue the Weebly site builder, while encouraging new sites to use Square Online.
Weebly’s role has clearly changed since it was acquired by Square, now Block, in 2018.
There’s a much bigger question here for anyone who builds a website on a hosted website-building platform:
What happens when the company running your website decides it no longer wants to operate that service in your market?
This Is Bigger Than Weebly
Any proprietary hosted platform can change.
A company can change its pricing, discontinue a feature, merge products, change ownership, or decide that a particular service or market no longer fits its plans.
That’s simply part of how software businesses operate.
We’ve covered many of these topics:
- Wix Forums App Removed: What Happened, and What’s the Best Alternative?
- When “Helpful” Automations Become a Headache: A Look at Wix’s Latest Surprise
- The Wix Redesign Trap: Why Starting Over is Their Business Model, Not Yours
- Wix’s Price Hike: Is it Time to Consider a Downloadable Solution?
- Webflow’s 2026 Price Hike: When “Premium” Means Less Bandwidth
- Webflow’s Client Seats Complicate Ownership – How UltimateWB Gives Control Back
- Webflow’s Shifting Focus: A Blow to Membership Sites and a Rise in Costs
The question is what happens to your website when they do.
If your website exists entirely inside a company’s proprietary platform, moving will be much harder – whether you decide you want to move or you are forced to move. You can’t simply download your website files and database, move them to a new server, and keep going. You have to work within whatever export and migration options the platform provides.
If you have direct access to your website files and database and can choose where the site is hosted, you have considerably more options – but that’s not the case with a SaaS website builder.
That’s an important distinction when you’re building something you expect to keep for years.
Even Wix agrees with us: Wix Says AI Website Owners Should Care About Portability. There’s Just One Problem.
Your Website Should Outlast Your Website Builder
A website can become a valuable business asset.
It can build up search rankings, content, customers, products, accounts, orders, images, and years of history.
You may expect that website to be around for a very long time.
The company that provides the service, however, may have very different plans.
That’s why it makes sense to look beyond the features and price when choosing a website builder.
Ask:
What happens if I need to leave?
Can you take your website with you?
Can you access the files?
Can you access the database?
Can you move it to another host?
Or does leaving mean rebuilding the site somewhere else?
With downloadable website-building software such as UltimateWB, you can host your website where you choose rather than being limited to UltimateWB servers.
That gives you control over the underlying website and more flexibility if you ever need to change hosting or move the site.
You can also have the convenience of managed hosting and setup by hosting with UltimateWB. And even if you start with UltimateWB Cloud, you can upgrade to the downloadable version and host your website with UltimateWB or on your own server that meets the system requirements.
That’s the important difference.
You can have the convenience of managed hosting without giving up control of the website itself.
And when you’re building a website that you expect to be around for years, that control matters.
Ready to design & build your own website that you can host where you want? Learn more about UltimateWB! We also offer web design packages if you would like your website designed and built for you.
Got a techy/website question? Whether it’s about UltimateWB or another website builder, web hosting, or other aspects of websites, just send in your question in the “Ask David!” form. We will email you when the answer is posted on the UltimateWB “Ask David!” section.