Notes · 27 October 2026

What Weebly's archive leaves out: a 34-post blog, comments and uploaded files

Weebly has one export, and its help page says what is missing: “Blog and store pages aren't included in the export as they rely directly on our database.” (Weebly help). The archive is a ZIP of static pages. For most Weebly sites the blog is the part worth keeping.

So we read a public Weebly blog the way a visitor's browser does, then imported the result into a real WordPress to see what survived. The site is jess-ambers-blog.weebly.com, tested in October 2026. These are the numbers and the traps.

The inventory

None of this is behind a login. Classic Weebly renders everything on the server, so the HTML a visitor gets contains the posts, the dates and the comments.

1. Posts and pages look alike in the sitemap

Pages always end in .html. Posts don't: they live at /<blog>/<slug>, with no extension. That is the only reliable way to tell them apart from the URL list:

/about.html                      page
/blog/my-first-post              post
/blog/my-first-post-2            post

The sitemap is also not in date order. If you want the newest posts first, or a preview of what a site contains, you have to read the blog's listing page, which shows the latest entries, instead of trusting the order of the file.

2. Dates come in two formats

A post's date is printed as text in the site's own style: 7/15/2019 on one site and 15/7/2019 on the next, or July 15, 2019. For the first two, the day and month are ambiguous whenever both are 12 or less. What settles it is the share links on the page: they carry the old /N/post/YYYY/MM/ address, and that month tells you which number is the month. Without that check, posts silently move to the wrong month.

3. Comments are in the HTML, if you ask for them

Approved comments sit in the post's HTML (.blogCommentWrap, with author, date and the reply it answers). Weebly's archive ignores them along with the blog. Copying posts by hand loses them too, because they are not part of the post body. We read 28 comments across the 34 posts and wrote them into the WordPress file as real comments with their thread order, not as text at the bottom of the post.

4. Images: the resized copy and the original

Weebly stores uploads under /uploads/a/b/c/d/<id>/ on the site's own domain, and the files answer requests from a browser on another site. The picture in a post is often a resized copy, name.jpg; when you click it, it opens name_orig.jpg, the file as uploaded. The <a> around the image points at the original, so that is the address to save. Add a ?1563249199 cache-buster to the end and the same file looks like a different URL; strip it.

5. The uploaded files are the ones people forget

Posts also link to documents hosted on Weebly (here a zip, a spreadsheet, a PDF and a Word file). They are not images, so an image-only copy leaves five links pointing at Weebly's servers. We saved them to a files/ folder and added them to the WordPress file as attachments.

Result of the import into a real WordPress: 34 posts, 5 pages, 240 attachments, 28 comments, no “already exists” skips, and 0 links left pointing at weebly.com/uploads. On repeated file names, see the “already exists” trap in our first note.

6. Weebly is now two products

“Weebly” today also means Square Online, the newer builder. It draws the page in the browser, so there is no blog markup in the HTML to read. Everything above is about classic Weebly sites. If a site is on Square Online, tell the owner up front rather than returning an empty export.

A checklist before you copy anything

Decamp does all of this for classic Weebly sites and writes WordPress, Ghost, Webflow, Framer and Markdown files plus the redirects. See exporting a Weebly blog or Weebly to WordPress.

Paste a Weebly address to count its posts, pages and images for free.