GoDaddy Website Builder Review

GoDaddy – is a market-leading website hosting provider and a domain registrar. Aside from this, the company offers a robust website-building platform. Since 2019, GoDaddy customers can use its improved version of the site builder instead of the old GoCentral editor. The new version is more focused on providing reliable help to small businesses and entrepreneurs who want to grow their presence in the virtual sphere. With quite powerful growth-oriented tools, you get everything necessary for establishing a responsive, secure, and professional-looking website whether it is an online store or a personal blog.

Despite having some features that may lack a little depth, GoDaddy offers an array of amazing tools. The GoDaddy Insight feature, for instance, is a smart learning system that delivers authentic data to guide you towards your business goals. Overall, the company’s website and marketing tools together give a perfect solution for any small business in a search for a dependable way to move the business online while avoiding the long-winded hassle and fuss.

If you are interested in building a great website with GoDaddy, our impartial review based on independent research is at your disposal. But first, let us introduce the basic advantages and downsides of the website builder:

Website builder, hosting and domain name provider; Works well for entrepreneurs; Offers advanced feature set to cover versatile tasks.

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Ease of Use

GoDaddy isn’t designed for tech-savvy users. On the contrary, the main focus is on ordinary users with no website building experience or skills. It’s one of the easiest website builders in the market completely available for beginners. Apparently, you can set up a new website within a couple of minutes just after signing up at GoDaddy. You don’t actually need the help of a professional. Like many other beginner-oriented website builders, GoDaddy supports the drag-and-drop website editor. It works for almost any element present on the site. Moreover, as you drag, you can see precise guides appear instantly to help you find what you need to do with the dragged element even easier.

GoDaddy also offers the highly convenient Undo/Redo feature. This means you shouldn’t worry about making any mistakes while building a new site. You can always undo the applied change without the need to go back to the initial step of the website building process unlike with many quite reputable services.

After signing up at GoDaddy, you will be offered to try the service for free. Just pick up the main goals of your future website (to sell goods/services, promote yourself, share information about your business, let your visitors book appointments, or just start with a basic website), choose the niche of your site depending on the previous choice, and give a name to your project. In a matter of seconds, you will have a perfect template pre-chosen and a site pre-built per the choices you have made. The process of building a site mostly follows a question-and-answer format in the beginning. This is especially convenient for beginner-level users.

The interface of the platform looks crisp and professional. By clicking any element on the screen you open all the available variants to perform with the element on the right-hand menu. Using them, you can change the basic structure of the site’s appearance. For instance, by pressing the “Theme” button, you can instantly change the theme. With a new theme, you will have new locations of specific site elements including the headings, images, buttons, and text.

Overall, there are 25 categories of ready-made content blocks to add to any page of your site. This applies not only to the selected page of the site but to all its pages. From one side, this is great for people who simply want to get a good website. On the other hand, though, for creative scrupulous users who want everything to look to their liking, such type of website customization may appear to limit the amount of their control.

The customization of the website also presumes changing its color. Thanks to the Slider tool you can change not only the color of the site but also set the exact shade you want. Furthermore, change the fonts, and the sidebar buttons. Whatever change you make will instantly be applied to the mobile version of the site. Apparently, the approach of GoDaddy to keep the design control at a minimum is that the more small things a website has, the tougher it is to keep that website perfectly responsive. And GoDaddy strives to make every website created perfectly responsive across a variety of desktop, tablet, and mobile screen sizes.

GoDaddy Features

GoDaddy Websites plus Marketing offers amazing features to help your website get found on search engines easier, engage your customers and readers, thus increasing sales. Here we shall review the most essential ones of all:

• Search engine visibility tool: This feature, that’s included in all plans, will help you optimize your site title, keywords, header text, and meta description.
• Email marketing: GoDaddy includes a certain number of email marketing messages in every plan. The cheapest plan, for instance, offers 100 emails per month. The most expensive one, meanwhile, lets one send as many as 25,000 emails every month. Import the subscriber list you already have via a CSV file or add them manually.
• Custom action plans: GoDaddy has a unique feature of analyzing the target industry and your site goals to give you specific recommendations to improve the functioning of the site. To use it, choose several business goals and see a perfect custom action plan to get generated.
• Insight score: GoDaddy provides a numerical Insight score that provides reliable data on how the website is performing in terms of visitor engagement, usability, outreach, and social media presence. Even if this feature doesn’t work for the website user owner, it is definitely a great help.
• Built-in integrations: Unlike many other website builders, GoDaddy doesn’t offer an app market. Instead, it offers built-in integrations that can raise the overall functionality of the website. This way you get rid of the need to handle any third-party integration. The available incorporated integrations are:
  • Reviews on Zillow;
  • IDX/MLS real estate listings;
  • OpenTable for making restaurant reservations;
  • ChowNow for making online food orders;
  • Posts from Instagram Business Profile;
  • On the other hand, users can’t get any third-party integrations for enhancing forums, live chats, etc, that other services quite often offer for free.
• GoDaddy App: Would you like your website available to modify wherever you are? If yes, the GoDaddy App is at your disposal. Regardless of the operating system, your gadget works on, the app will be accessible to edit. Even though certain fine-tuning options can’t be accessed on the app, most of the site’s customization tools and settings are available.
• Fundraising and Donations: With GoDaddy, you can give a charity alignment to your website. Thanks to the service’s GoFundMe tool and donations through PayPal, your nonprofit organization will be a safe platform for donators.
• Appointment booking: With this feature, GoDaddy website users can schedule recurring or one-time appointments.
• Private pages: If your website is to have some pages which must be visible only for subscribed members, you can achieve that with the Private Pages feature.
• WhatsApp chat button: If you want to have WhatsApp direct messaging support on your website, GoDaddy allows its users to add a WhatsApp chat button.
• Calendar: Linking Google, Office 365, or any other calendar with an iCal URL on your website, you will display a public calendar to your website visitors.
• External review: Does your business have a good reputation on the net? If you are sure about it, GoDaddy suggests displaying reviews from Google MyBusiness, Facebook, Yotpo, and Yelp.
• SEO: GoDaddy has a series of SEO tools to get your website ranked higher on search engines. The array includes the following tools:
  • Meta title;
  • Meta description;
  • Responsive design;
  • SSL certificate;
  • XML sitemap;
  • Robots.txt;
  • Google Analytics integration;
  • FB Pixel integration.
• Flexible payments: If you build an online store with GoDaddy, you can let your customers choose one of several available options to make payments for purchases/orders. Your online store can accept credit cards, Apple Pay, PayPal, and Google Pay payment options. The transaction fees depend on the selected payment option while GoDaddy doesn’t charge any extra fees. Furthermore, PayPal offers some of the most affordable fees at GoDaddy in comparison to other eCommerce platforms.
• Product listings: With GoDaddy, you can add and edit various product listings, fill them up with images, descriptions, and prices.

Indeed, the tools that GoDaddy offers its users aren’t too many. However, the available ones are well-executed. Accordingly, depending on the type of business you run, this website builder may appear either highly convenient and quick to use or very limited. And yet, this company caters to all popular types of businesses of a small size. All the tools are presented via sections, hence they are added to a website in a linear way.

GoDaddy Website Design and Templates

GoDaddy features more of an off-the-shelf assortment than a customized service. It opens with a pre-schemed theme that can be changed, though. Apparently, GoDaddy features a huge collection of templates all of which are responsive and of good quality. The templates here are created by the company’s developers and they meet the modern niche requirements. Overall, there are around 305 templates separated into 22 categories, including:

• Home services;
• Education;
• Health & fitness;
• Music;
• Travel;
• Personal blog;
• Sports & outdoors;
• Real estate;
• Automotive and cars, etc.

Regardless of your template choice, it will be available for a preview in both desktop and mobile modes. If you are searching for a specific template, GoDaddy suggests simplifying the search with the search filter option. All the templates are free from ads (except for a small footnote which can be removed, though).

GoDaddy allows you to undo the previous change you have applied to the website. However, if you decide to change the theme, all the submitted content will get lost. Hence, you’d better make a final choice regarding the template, and only then start modifying the theme to your liking.

GoDaddy allows modifying the project in a limited way. The available actions include adding and customizing new sections, replacing stock images with others or those from your own PC, changing the fonts, integrating media files, and so forth. No multi-language support is available.

Having created a website with as many pages as you may find necessary, you will have to go over the prefilled text and alter it with what you want to deliver to your readers. To do this, simply click on the pre-written text and type what you want like you normally do in a doc file. The text can be italicized or made bold, ordered or unordered lists can be added. All other changes are accessible from the right-hand menu.

Customer Support

When dealing with a website builder for the first time, it’s highly important to know you can get help once necessary. GoDaddy features a strong customer support team available through the “Help Center” (can be found on the right-hand toolbar). It’s available round the clock via phone (1-866-938-1119) or chat. Clicking on the chatbox, you are to pre-select what interests you – buying a product or getting tech support. Then type your issue and wait for a GoDaddy representative to answer you back within minutes.

GoDaddy is a clear and simple website builder. Even a beginner can make out of the service on their own through the Knowledge base or Community. Here you will find numerous videos that will guide a user through all the stages of the web design process.

GoDaddy Pricing

GoDaddy offers 7 days of a free trial period during which you can make use of all the available features. Once the trial term is over, you will get several plans to choose from. All of them include free domain registration. However, no plan includes an online store for free. It should be purchased separately.

Anyway, here are the suggested GoDaddy website builder plans:

1. Basic Plan: Priced at only $6.99 per month, the plan offers 1GB of SSD storage, 150 GB bandwidth, 50 themes to choose from, 100 emails per month, on-the-go editing possibility, guidance, and analytics.
2. Standard Plan: Costing $10.49 per month, this pricing tier offers 500 emails per month, 20 social posts, SEO tools, custom domain connection, 500GB bandwidth, 10GB storage, and all the themes GoDaddy has created.
3. Premium Plan: At the price of $13.99 per month, you get 25,000 emails per month, unlimited social posts and responses, SEO tools, SSL certificate, custom domain, guidance, and analytics.
4. eCommerce: Costing $14.99 per month, you receive everything from the Premium Plan plus eCommerce features such as product listings, flexible payments, discounts & promotions, flexible shipping options.

GoDaddy Website Builder Competitors and Alternatives

GoDaddy is a major hosting company and domain name registry worldwide. The company offers its users a wide array of services, including website hosting, domain name registration, SSL certificates, and website building. In terms of website building, GoDaddy has few competitors since its platform is robust, reliable, and powerful. However, several names in the niche can still compete with GoDaddy. These are Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, and WordPress.

Wix offers users reliable data security, post-management, multi-store, and product categorization. Overall, it has 76 features, most of which can be found at GoDaddy. WordPress, meanwhile, is the world’s number one website building platform. Even though it is not the best option for beginners, since some coding knowledge is still required to operate the platform, WordPress is catered to all businesses regardless of the size.

Another powerful competitor of GoDaddy is the eCommerce platform Shopify. It helps users create an online store with all the bells and whistles, as the service claims itself. In addition, Shopify offers more than 70 professional-looking themes, complete control over all functions the website has, and a series of other benefits. The same goes for Squarespace. The latter is an all-in-one solution for anyone searching for a robust platform for building an online store. It has eCommerce, domains, galleries, hosting, analytics, and round-the-clock customer service.

Competitors

GoDaddy Website + Marketing doesn’t take leading positions in web building niche. Using GoDaddy will be more convenient for those users who have already chosen it as a hosting provider, no more. To be unbiased we have prepared comparisons with top serivces to prove that GoDaddy isn’t a better alternative. Here they are:

Verdict

GoDaddy is, beyond any doubt, a reliable platform to build any website regardless of the niche. What strikes the eye the first is how simple this website builder actually is. Thanks to the moderate power, simplicity, and affordable pricing, GoDaddy appears to be a great option for many small businesses which aim to support their work with a robust website and basic marketing solutions. GoDaddy ensures lovely websites which, however, take a somewhat linear path. If you are searching for a platform to build a custom website from scratch, most probably you had better look for a more powerful builder with more opportunities than GoDaddy. However, if you own, let’s say, a stationery store, why would you need to spend multiple days to make sure the website looks over-the-top fantastic?! In most cases, good enough is actually good enough, and GoDaddy is of this opinion, too.

One of the most important things to consider before choosing a website builder is whether the builder can effectively grow alongside the needs of your business and website. While GoDaddy is great for small and local businesses, real estate agents, restaurants, and businesses that set appointments with customers, it is not powerful enough for perfectionists, advanced web stores, and medium to large businesses.