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GoDaddy is a simple yet reliable website builder that our researchers praised for its streamlined set-up, intuitive software, and an ever-evolving suite of AI features. Its AI-site builder is so easy to use, and helped one of our user testers create a site in under 30 seconds, making it one of the best website builders for beginners looking to get a site live fast.
However, if you’re an established business with more complex site needs, GoDaddy may not be able to cut the mustard. Compared to more premium like Wix and Shopify, GoDaddy’s feature package is pretty limited, specifically when it comes to tailored themes, and advanced marketing and ecommerce capabilities.
We’ve tested all the top website builder brands on the market, pitting them against a series of quality and ease-of-use assessments. This guide covers everything you need to know about its features, price points, support options, and more, to help you decide if GoDaddy is a good fit for you. We even help you get started with GoDaddy, so you can be sure you’re getting the best price.
GoDaddy is one of the biggest website builder and domain hosting companies in the world with 17.5 million users and 76 million domains hosted. Unlike most of the competition, GoDaddy has 24/7 phone-based customer support on offer. It also boasts an efficient design with the features any small business needs, and a high useability that can walk newbies through their own website design and SEO.
GoDaddy: At a Glance
Not sure if GoDaddy is right for you? To save you from digging through the details, here are some important things you should know about the popular website builder off the bat:
- Pricing: GoDaddy’s entry-level plan costs $9.99 per month, and the website builder doesn’t currently offer a free plan. You can give the platform a spin for free with its 30-day free trial, though.
- Quick set-up: GoDaddy’s AI site-building features let you set up a website in under 30 seconds, making it one of the best options out there for setting up a site quickly.
- Features: GoDaddy’s feature package is more stripped-back than premium website builders like Wix, making it a solid option for businesses with basic site needs.
- GoDaddy Airo – GoDaddy has recently ramped up its AI offering with GoDaddy Airo, an AI solution that lets you create unique logos, generate text, launch email campaigns, and more.
- Design – All of GoDaddy’s ~200 templates are customizable, but builders like Squarespace and Wix offer better design functionality and are better at creating mobile-optimized websites.
- Customer support: GoDaddy’s phone lines are open 24/7, but the platform doesn’t offer support via online chat or email, making it less suitable for users wanting to resolve queries via text.
Is GoDaddy Right For You?
GoDaddy’s low learning curve and wealth of AI-enabled features will make it a great choice for a wide pool of businesses. However, the builder isn’t perfect, and won’t be right for everyone.
Who should use GoDaddy?
- Businesses that want to set up a site quickly, because GoDaddy’s AI features streamline the set-up process allowing you to build a site in under 30 seconds
- Businesses building a site for the first time, because GoDaddy’s platform is easy to navigate, and won’t overload users with unnecessary features
- Businesses that offer services, thanks to GoDaddy’s streamlined appointment and booking capabilities
- Businesses that prioritize super-fast site speeds, such as GoDaddy received a perfect score in our site speed analysis
Who shouldn’t use GoDaddy?
- Established businesses with complex site needs, because GoDaddy’s sales and website building features aren’t as sophisticated as alternatives like Wix, and it doesn’t have an app store
- Content-focused businesses like blogs, as GoDaddy lack some pretty standard blogging capabilities like analytics, blog comments, content search bars, and blog SEO.
- Creative businesses like designers, because GoDaddy’s tools are slightly more generic and basic than alternatives like Squarespace
- Businesses looking to build a site for free, as GoDaddy doesn’t currently offer a free version
GoDaddy Test Summary
When I tested out GoDaddy’s software, I was impressed with how simple it was. The setup process was extremely speedy, and all I had to do was answer a couple of questions about my website, and the rest was handled for me.
Every step and feature was well-signposted too, leaving little room for error. The builder’s stripped-back nature will favor users with little tech experience, and those that are able to get by with a relatively simple business profile.
However, I found that a lot of functionality – including marketing and appointment features – wasn’t part of the front end. This forced me to switch between the front and back end quite a lot which got a little bit annoying.
GoDaddy Website Builder Features
GoDaddy has come far in the past few years. Thanks to vast improvements being made to its website building and design capabilities, the website feature has been able to climb our rankings in recent years. Here are a few top features worth mentioning.
Drag and drop builder
Like most of the best website builders for small businesses, GoDaddy has a simple drag-and-drop style editor that helps users customize the look and layout of their site to their liking. The builder lets you add different elements to your page, move them to different places, and add and edit images, photos, and text.
GoDaddy’s drag-and-drop editor let me add text, and move it to wherever I wanted on the page. Source: Tech.co user testing
We were pretty impressed with how easy it was to customize the look of our site using GoDaddy’s drag-and-drop editor. However, compared to Squarespace’s Fluid Engine editor, which uses a flexible grid format to enable greater design flexibility, GoDaddy’s editor is lightly ridgid.
Learn more about the design-friendly solution in our Squarespace website builder review.
GoDaddy Airo
GoDaddy Airo is the website builder’s new versatile AI-powered solution. It offers a number of different capabilities, including AI-assisted domain suggestions, AI logo creation, and AI content creation
GoDaddy’s AI builder asks you to fill in information about your website, before creating a customizable mock-up based on your requirements. Source: Tech.co user testing
GoDaddy Airo’s site builder made the initial site creation process simple too. During the setup process, the builder asked me to fill in some information about my website, including its name, a brief description, its function, and a few of the website elements I’d like it to include. The AI builder then produced a fully customizable mock-up site for me, featuring a pre-selected template, and AI-generated content based on my business details.
GoDaddy’s AI features generated this business description, based on the information I entered. Source: Tech.co user testing
If you don’t like anything it’s no problem, either. It’s easy to edit the website to fit your liking, whether you want to switch up the template or use GoDaddy’s AI-text generator to play around with its copy. If you haven’t got your own imagery, GoDaddy lets you choose between its library of stock images, but it unfortunately doesn’t offer its own AI-image generator like Wix.
GoDaddy’s AI-powered marketing calendar let me create tailored social media posts and schedule content ahead of time. Source: Tech.co user tester
GoDaddy Airo even provides a marketing calendar that lets you plan out social media posts and also offers content suggestions. The feature could provide a lifeline to businesses who are keen on developing a marketing strategy and don’t know where to start, especially if they haven’t got loads of time to invest.
Booking & appointments
If you sell services, GoDaddy’s appointment feature has you covered. The platform lets you create an online appointments website element, so customers can book directly through your site. You can specify the services name, add a duration and image, and group it to a category. You can also add a brief description of the service to offer customers additional context.
GoDaddy let me add service appointments to me website in a couple of clicks. I could also add an image, duration, and use AI to create a summary. Source: Tech.co user testing
What separates GoDaddy’s appointment from the herd, is its AI description suggestion feature. The tool creates content for you, based on your services image and title. This will be a huge time saver for users struggling for inspiration and will be especially useful if you plan on adding a broad array of services to your website.
Design templates
GoDaddy offers over 200 different website templates for users to choose between. All templates are fully responsive, and can be fine-tuned to align with user preferences. The themes are tailored for a variety of different business types, including fashion, restaurants, home and garden, and more, so will be able to meet the needs of most businesses.
However, GoDaddy lacks templates for niche specialisms like weddings, education, and pet stores. Therefore, in comparison to Wix, which currently gives users over 800 website templates to choose from, GoDaddy’s selection is quite limited.
After I created my website using AI, I could choose between different themes to have control over the look of my site. Source: Tech.co user testing
You’re also able to browse GoDaddy’s selection of templates after you’ve created your site using AI. We found this useful because you were able to see how the different templates would influence the look of your website after it contained all of your businesses’ information.
Ecommerce
While GoDaddy isn’t our best-rated website builder for online stores – that accolade goes to Shopify – the builder offers a decent raft of sales features to help you out at the start of your ecommerce journey. First up, its AI product listing feature, powered by GoDaddy Airo, makes product uploads a breeze. All you need to do is upload a picture of your product, and the AI tool generates a product name and description and even produces a price recommendation based on the price of comparable products.
GoDaddy’s Airo feature used AI to fill in product and pricing information for me, based on an image of my product. Source: Tech.co user testing
GoDaddy also offers a number of sales-focused features designed to encourage repeat buying, including conversion tracking, revenue reports, marketing campaign ROI rundowns, and abandoned card recovery. However, while GoDaddy integrates with popular online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and Etsy, if you want to sell via social media, you’d be better off using an ecommerce-focused builder like Shopify, or Wix.
It was easy to display a pricelist and edit prices using GoDaddy. Source: Tech.co user testing
Domain Hosting
We’re reviewing GoDaddy’s GoCentral website building platform in this article, but the company also offers a domain hosting service – domains are, basically, the website URL that your browser visits. For example, “tech.co” is our own domain. GoDaddy will also host WordPress domains, and you can even get a GoDaddy expert to build a tailored site for you.
With the right deal, you can get a website domain for $1.99 a month for the first year, although the price jumps to $8.99 a month after the year’s over. Visit GoDaddy through our link here to get that special deal.
Help and Support
GoDaddy does have excellent 24/7, on-the-phone support, which will suit users who like to get in touch with people to resolve queries.
However, the builder lacks other support options that have become standard practice for other website builders. For instance, GoDaddy’s knowledge base is also lacking in depth when compared to other website builders, and there is no online chat or email support, so if you prefer to hash out issues without talking to someone the solution might not be for you.
| Plan | Price paid annually The price per month you'll pay if you choose to be billed annually | SEO | Ecommerce | Social media integration | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Basic | Premium | Commerce | |||
| $9.99/month | $14.99/month | $20.99/month | |||
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Does GoDaddy have a Free Plan?
Unfortunately, GoDaddy no longer offer its free forever plan. Instead, it now offers a free 30-day trial of all their plans.
No credit card information is needed for the trial, and it offers full functionality, so it’s a great way to dip your toe into the GoDaddy world. Plus, you’ll have access to the company’s 24/7 support as well. If you like the plan, you’ll have right up until the 30th day of your trial to add your card information and start paying.
Does GoDaddy have Hidden Costs?
Yes, GoDaddy’s pricing plans all come with a big catch: Only the first year is available for the advertised price. After that, the plans’ monthly costs will increase when they’re automatically renewed.
GoDaddy increased its second-year prices in 2022. Before, second-year pricing increased the non-ecommerce plans by 30%. Now, those percentages are higher, although Commerce’s price increase remains at 40%.
Basic increases 21% after the first year, making it $11.99 per month, up from $9.99. Premium increases 46%, and will be $21.99 per month, up from $14.99. Commerce, the plan you’ll need for any starter ecommerce operation, increases 46%, kicking it from $16.99 per month to $24.99 per month.
If you plan on operating your website for longer than a year, you should factor these prices into your budget.
How Does GoDaddy Compare with Other Website Builders?
GoDaddy is a reliable website builder, but unless you’ve got simple site needs there might be a better alternative out there. Wix has plans starting from $17 per month and offers stronger marketing and customization features than GoDaddy, as well as an app store that can connect businesses with 800+ integrations.
If you’re a creative business like a designer or graphic designer, you’d be better off going for Squarespace. Squarespace’s website templates are designed slightly better than GoDaddy’s, and they’re also easier to edit and more responsive on mobile. In fact, Squarespace’s learning curve is even lower than GoDaddy’s in general, so if you have little or no technical know-how it might be worth giving this builder a spin instead.
There are tons more options out there, however, each with its own strengths. Our research team has taken a number of the world’s most popular website builders out for a spin – take a look at some the competitors below to make sure you make the right decision for your website building needs.
| Overall Score All Tech.co research categories, condensed into one score | Ease of Use How simple, intuitive, and flexible is the software? | Price From | Free Plan | Best for | Pros | Cons | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Squarespace | Shopify | GoDaddy | Hostinger | |||||
| 4.7 | 4.5 | 4.2 | 4.2 | 4.0 | ||||
| 4.0 | 4.7 | 4.1 | 4.0 | 4.5 | ||||
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| Best SEO features overall | Best for mobile optimization | Best for unparalleled ecommerce success | Best for SEO guidance | Best for uptime reliability | ||||
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How Do We Review Website Builders like GoDaddy?
We take our impartial research and analysis seriously, so you can have complete confidence that we're giving you the clearest, most useful product recommendations.
After conducting an initial exploration to identify the most relevant, popular, and established tools in the market, we put them through their paces with hands-on testing to see their real strengths and weaknesses. In this case, we put 16 website builder products to the test across 398 areas of investigation.
Based on years of market and user needs research, we've established a website builder testing methodology that scores each product in six core categories of investigation and 33 subcategories; this covers everything from customer feedback to design, ease of use, and more.
Our main testing categories for website builders are:
- Website Features: the capabilities and functionalities offered by a website builder, e.g. blog functionality, SEO capability, and marketing capacity.
- Design Functionality: the aesthetic appeal and visual layout of a website created using a website builder. It encompasses aspects such as page templates and customizable themes.
- Customer Satisfaction: external customer opinion. This is the feedback and ratings given by customers who have used a particular website builder – the market position and reputation a website builder holds.
- User Experience: how user-friendly and intuitive a website builder is for people with varying levels of technical expertise.
- Value for Money: the balance between the cost of a website builder and the benefits it provides. It considers factors such as pricing plans, subscription models, and available features.
- Help and Support: the assistance and resources available to users when they encounter issues or need guidance while using a website builder.
When it comes to calculating a product's final score, not all testing areas are weighted evenly, as we know some aspects matter more to our readers than others, which are simply "nice to have." After hundreds of hours, our process is complete, and the results should ensure you can find the best solution for your needs.
At Tech.co, we have a number of full-time in-house researchers, who re-run this testing process regularly, to ensure our results remain reflective of the present day.
Verdict: Is GoDaddy Worth It?
GoDaddy is a solid website builder, and a standout option for smaller businesses that want to get a website up and running fast, efficiently, and with as little technical know-how as possible.
If all you want from a website builder is the ability to construct and operate a website and the capability to talk to a support agent on the phone, whatever the hour, GoDaddy is for you.
That said, GoDaddy isn’t the only option. Wix and Squarespace are a few stellar options that just might fit your operation even better.
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