Is Your Law Firm Domain Registered Through Weebly? That’s a Paddlin’
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August 7, 2017
Full disclosure: This post is more of a public service announcement than a typical “how to” post on improving your law firm’s online marketing.
Pros and Cons of Using Weebly as your Registrar
Pros: They do all of your DNS configurations for you!
Cons: You’re required to have them do all of you DNS configurations for you.
My Experience Using Weebly’s Support to Update DNS
I recently helped migrate a website from a shared hosting environment on Blue Host to a faster, cleaner hosting environment with WP Engine. A typical WordPress website migration for a site with less than 25 pages takes 2-3 hours. Most of this time is spent backing up, crawling, uploading files and verifying everything made the move without issues.
There are many things that can complicate a migration. If you have an overly complex DNS that isn’t setup well, things get complicated quickly. The likelihood that your DNS setup is configured well is 5%. If you’re domain is registered through Weebly, it’s 0%.
Since Weebly tries to make things as easy on you (the attorney) as possible, they don’t have a typical Cpanel or advanced DNS settings page to create and adjust normal DNS settings like GoDaddy, or Namecheap, or Blue Host, or Host Gator, or…
Unfortunately for my client and to make things worse, his Name Servers were pointed away from Weebly and over to Bluehost. Which is where he had configured his email settings (MX records).
This means that I had to move ALL of his DNS settings away from Blue Host over to Weebly, in addition to moving all of his Website files from Blue Host to the new hosting company: WP Engine.
Because Weebly does all of the DNS changes for you, I had to contact their support to make a whole lot of very important, highly technical DNS changes for me. Yikes.
This also meant that I need to carefully articulate what changes I needs made and when. Ugh.
This also meant that I have to repeat myself multiple times. Doh.
This also meant that I have to work on behalf of my client and not on behalf of me – the guy who knows what he is doing (no offense). Bleh.
This also meant that they need to change the Name Servers BACK to Weebly’s Name Servers, which takes 48 hours to update across the web AFTER they finally make the changes. Boo.
This also meant that I have to verify they don’t mess this up….For the record, they did not mess it up but they took nearly a week to update DNS settings from start to finish.
In short, if you can at all avoid registering your domain through Weebly, I highly recommend doing so. Especially if you think you’ll eventually become large enough to hand this off to your VP of Marketing.
For those of you who need help with this, I’m happy to talk: 206-209-2125.