moving off weebly: wordpress or a free static host? what the archive zip actually allows

quick context. weebly is winding down in 67 countries, not everywhere. sites there were unpublished on 27 sep 2026, and login (and with it the export) ends on 26 dec 2026. the us, uk and eu aren't on the list. details are on weebly's notice.

i already wrote up the hand-fix route for a static host. the question i keep getting after that one: should the archive go into wordpress instead? so i opened a real archive and checked what each route can do with it.

what's actually in the zip

this is a real site archive from a small 4-page test site, exported on 8 oct 2026. one top-level folder with a long id for a name (17027946326ac7e6d662b26/), and inside it:

• index.html, about.html, gallery.html, contact.html
• uploads/1/5/6/4/156416411/ with about 20 images, most in two sizes (berry-tart.jpg and berry-tart_orig.jpg)
• files/main_style.css, plus files/theme/files/ with custom.js, plugins.js, manifest.json and a few theme images
• apps/audioPlayer2.swf, a flash audio player

that's it. no favicon, no xml, no csv, no database dump. no blog or store either, and that's by design: weebly's back up your site page says blog and store pages aren't included because they rely on its database, that the contact form and slideshow may not work outside the editor, and that the zip can't be imported back into weebly.

two more things from the html itself. each page loads weebly's shared css, fonts and scripts from cdn2.editmysite.com and cdn11.editmysite.com, with 11 http://cdn references per page. and the contact form posts to ///weebly/apps/formSubmit.php, which only ever worked on weebly.

that list decides most of what follows.

the wordpress route

there's no weebly importer. the wordpress.org importing content page covers blogger, tumblr, movable type, rss, another wordpress site (via a WXR file) and plugins for a bunch of other systems. weebly isn't on it, and the archive has nothing those importers read. it's plain html files.

so moving this zip to wordpress means rebuilding. wordpress.com's own html site guide says to copy only the main text of each page, since pasting the whole page brings unwanted html along, and to add your images separately.

what comes over: the text (by copy-paste), the images (upload them from uploads/ to the media library) and your page structure. what doesn't: the look, since main_style.css is a weebly theme and not a wordpress one, the form, the flash player, and of course the blog and store that were never in the zip.

what you get back is an editor, a real blog going forward, form plugins, and woocommerce if you want to rebuild the store. if you post or edit often, that matters more than keeping the old design.

cost: the wordpress.com free plan is a wordpress.com subdomain with ads and 1 gb of storage, and connecting a domain you already own needs a paid plan (pricing, connect a domain). self-hosted wordpress is free software, but you pay for hosting and you keep it updated.

the static host route

here you upload the html you already have, so the site keeps its look. on cloudflare pages direct upload you drag in a folder or a zip. drag and drop allows 1,000 files and 25 MiB per file, and a direct upload project can't be switched to git later. on netlify drop you drag in the folder, but log in first: a drop without signing in sits behind a temporary password until you claim it. both have free plans, and my test archive (46 entries, about 4 mb) is nowhere near the limits.

"as-is" isn't quite as-is, though. on https those http://cdn links get blocked as mixed content. and the pages ask for files/theme/plugins.js and files/theme/custom.js while the files sit one folder deeper, in files/theme/files/. so on a phone the menu won't open until you deal with it. the earlier post has the find-and-replace for both.

i also ran this archive through the free browser tool i made for this. on this zip it upgraded the links to https, saved the editmysite css and fonts into assets/vendor/, stripped the theme's scripts and added its own small mobile menu (assets/ats/nav.js), left out the .swf, and swapped the contact form for a note saying it can't send. it does not fix the theme script paths. it removes those scripts instead, so if your theme leaned on them for more than the menu, check that by hand. i wrote up what to do with that output for each route, including the wordpress copy-paste steps, here.

the catch with static: there's no editor. changing a phone number means editing html, and there's no blog going forward unless you add a static site generator.

gotchas for both

blog and store. neither route recovers them, because they aren't in the zip. copy posts out of the editor while you can still log in, and export the store separately.

forms. dead either way. on wordpress add a form plugin, on a static host use a form service or a mailto: link. export your old form entries first.

domains. if you bought it through weebly, start the transfer from the weebly dashboard before 26 dec. the notice also says a domain can't be transferred within 60 days of registration. if it lives at another registrar, add it in the new host first, then change dns (cloudflare pages custom domains, netlify external dns). on wordpress.com that's the paid-plan step above.

flash. audioPlayer2.swf won't play on either. modern browsers dropped flash.

so which one

if it was a brochure site you rarely touched, a static host gets it back online today, free, looking the same. if you blog, sell, or someone non-technical edits it every week, go wordpress and treat it as a rebuild, with the zip as your source of text and images.

either way, download the archive before 26 dec. neither route works without it.

Written with AI assistance and checked against a real Weebly site archive and the Weebly, WordPress, Cloudflare and Netlify docs.