GoDaddy Website Builder Review
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- Date Established
- 1997
- Location
- Scottsdale, AZ
Pros
- Very easy to use
- Mobile responsive
- Free plan available
- 24/7 customer support
Cons
- Limited design customization
- No free year of domain service
- Limited features
Overview
Ah, GoDaddy: the web hosting giant with a 13-point list of controversies in its Wikipedia entry. With a brand image that evokes professional wrestling, the Super Bowl, cleavage, and auto racing, it is perhaps the most existentially American of tech companies. Best known for its registrar and web hosting services, GoDaddy also offers its own website builder, which is the subject of this review.
The GoDaddy website builder (formerly known as GoCentral) has received repeated overhauls in the last several years. What was once a dated non-mobile responsive builder with little business functionality has been thoroughly modernized and now provides an easy, contemporary website building experience. However, the product still carries significant limitations, most notably in the areas of design customization and eCommerce.
Let’s take a closer look at GoDaddy’s website builder and see how it all works.
Table of Contents
GoDaddy Website Builder Pricing
GoDaddy now offers a limited free website builder plan along with four paid subscription plans. The GoDaddy pricing given here is for month-to-month billing, but keep in mind that you can get up to a 47% discount by signing up for an annual plan.
Free plan
- One website with a GoDaddy-branded URL
- Built-in marketing
- 24/7 support
Basic
GoDaddy Website Builder’s Basic plan costs $14.99/month and includes:
- SSL security
- Connect a custom domain
- On-the-go editing
- Free business email address for one year
- PayPal button
- GoDaddy InSight analytics
- Book one-time appointments online
- One social media/listing platform
- Five social posts/responses per month
- 100 email marketing sends/month
- Basic content creator features
Standard
GoDaddy Website Builder’s Standard plan costs $19.99/month and includes everything in the Basic plan, plus:
- SEO
- Three social media/listing platforms
- 20 social posts/responses per month
- 500 email marketing sends/month
Premium
GoDaddy Website Builder’s Premium plan costs $24.99/month and includes everything in the Standard plan, plus:
- Book recurring group events & classes
- SMS alerts for new appointments
- Email & text appointment reminders
- Accept online payments for services
- Unlimited social media/listing platforms
- Unlimited social posts/responses per month
- 25,000 email marketing sends/month
- Unlimited content creator features
eCommerce
GoDaddy Website Builder’s eCommerce plan costs $29.99/month and includes everything in the Premium plan, plus:
- eCommerce
- Add & edit product listings
- Set up flexible shipping options
- Sell products directly through your online store
- Sell on marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, and eBay
- Sync orders and inventory across channels
- Manage discounts and promotions
Extra Costs
Here’s what you can expect to pay for GoDaddy’s website services in addition to the cost of a subscription.
- GoDaddy Domains: GoDaddy hosting is included for free on a GoDaddy-branded domain. Naturally, GoDaddy also offers custom branding-free domains, though unlike many other website builders, the company doesn’t offer an initial free year of domain use. Instead, you’ll get a discounted rate the first year. For instance, a .com GoDaddy domain will cost you $11.99 the first year and $17.99 each subsequent year.
- GoDaddy Online Bookkeeping: With an eCommerce site builder plan, you can use GoDaddy’s Online Bookkeeping service to create professional invoices, track sales, and simplify your taxes. The three Online Bookkeeping plans run from $4.99/month to $14.99/month.
Web-Hosted Or Licensed
GoDaddy’s website builder is entirely web-hosted.
Hardware & Software Requirements
There are no hardware requirements per se. Software-wise, GoDaddy is compatible with all the major browsers.
Business Types Supported
In the site creation process, you’re prompted to enter the sort of business you’re in, and GoDaddy then generates a site for you, complete with images relating to your field and content sections that fit your industry.
Once you’ve seen the site created for you, you can then change the template if you want to arrange your content differently. The website creation system’s appeal is universal and can be used to support any business under the sun, though it is particularly well-suited to restaurants and online stores.
Ease Of Use
GoDaddy’s website builder is extraordinarily easy to use. You’re given a template for your site, which you can swap out for another template should you want to change the look of your site. You can then work within your chosen template to add new text, images, and features. The heavily-structured nature of the editor means that your site-building experience will be as easy as humanly possible.
While the website builder is stellar on the ease-of-use front, it doesn’t provide you much of an opportunity to tailor the look of your site to your own specifications. The pre-designed sections of your template can’t be fundamentally altered. You can swap out the existing content for your own and choose not to display certain elements, but you can’t reconfigure the template. If you have a particular vision for how you want your site to look, you’re likely to find this editing scheme far too limiting.
GoDaddy Website Builder Features
GoDaddy’s website builder has never been known for providing an overabundance of features. Let’s see what they now offer the aspiring website jockey.
- Blogging: GoDaddy’s in-house blogging tool is quite solid. The company has updated the blog for functionality recently, and it now features the ability to organize your blog posts into categories, thus allowing you to display certain blog posts on one of your pages and display a different set of posts on another page. You can also add videos and enable comments. Unfortunately, there are only three blog layouts to choose from, and you can’t add anything fancy to your blog posts like a form.
- eCommerce: GoDaddy Website Builder’s eCommerce is only available to eCommerce plan subscribers — a $29.99/month package ($19.99/month with an annual plan). You get a healthy number of features for your online store — you can set color and size options on your products, get a healthy set of shipping and inventory options with UPS and USPS integrations, and even send out promotional emails to your contacts promoting your store. Thankfully, GoDaddy has added the ability to sell digital products and offer discounts and promotions. You can also sync with your other sales channels on Amazon, eBay, and/or Etsy. However, you can’t host the checkout page on your domain or offer customized receipts. Overall, it’s a weaker eCommerce package than that offered by the likes of Shopify and Wix.
- Social Media: When you add a Social section to your site, you get a set of icon links displayed horizontally across your page. You can’t customize the layout of these icons in any way, nor can you remove any of them. Not ideal!
- Contact Form: GoDaddy’s contact form isn’t quite as customizable as I like to see. While you can add up to 14 form fields, rename the fields, choose from three different input types, allow for file attachment uploads, and choose whether or not to make the specified field required, you can’t do such things as add radio buttons.
- GoDaddy InSight: GoDaddy InSight is a tool that gives you site performance metrics along with suggestions as to how to improve those metrics. It also syncs with your social media accounts, allowing you to respond to social media comments from your dashboard.
Other features include Google Maps, a PayPal button (nice if you want to sell an item without an eCommerce subscription), online restaurant ordering, and reservations. Overall, however, it’s not the most robust feature haul.
Web Design & Editing
As stated earlier, GoDaddy Website Builder sports limited design customization. Let’s explore how you can customize your site.
- Templates: With GoDaddy Website Builder, the site creation process doesn’t direct you to choose from different categories of prefabricated templates. Instead, based on the sort of business you specify at the beginning, GoDaddy puts together a site for you, with content sections matching what your business is likely to require. A stock image relating to your field is also inserted into your header.
- Mobile Editor: GoDaddy offers an iPhone app that allows you to do just about everything you can do with the desktop editor. It’s great for when you need to tweak your site while on the go.
GoDaddy Customer Service & Technical Support
Customer support comes in the following forms:
- 24/7 phone support
- Live chat
- A community forum
- A knowledge base/FAQ
I’ve found the direct support to be helpful and fairly quick. Sadly, the live chat is not offered 24/7, only from Monday to Friday, 5am-6pm.
User Reviews
Negative Reviews & Complaints
The biggest complaint heard about GoDaddy Website Builder is the limited design customization. You simply aren’t given much creative freedom, nor can you add code to tweak your site.
Other complaints include the lack of an app market, the limited eCommerce, and the lack of aesthetic flair in the provided templates. On the whole, the GoDaddy website builder just isn’t seen as being on par with its primary competitors.
Positive Reviews & Testimonials
On the positive side, GoDaddy’s site builder has been lauded by reviewers on the following points:
- Very easy to use
- Generates nice mobile sites
- Affordable pricing
GoDaddy’s customers, with some exceptions, tend to praise the quality of live customer support.
GoDaddy Integrations & Add-Ons
GoDaddy’s website builder integrates with Google Maps, Google Analytics, Google My Business, YouTube, Vimeo, OpenTable, and SoundCloud, as well as PayPal and Apple Pay for payment processing. Unlike Wix and Weebly, GoDaddy doesn’t have an extensive collection of third-party apps on offer to fill in any feature gaps.
GoDaddy Security
All GoDaddy websites come with SSL security. If you sell products on your website, your customers’ payment information will be protected.
Final Verdict
As the world’s largest domain registrar, GoDaddy is a company with plenty of resources at its disposal. As such, I’m glad to see that GoDaddy has invested in improving the functionality of the website builder. The editor is truly one of the easiest means to getting a business website up and running that you’ll come across. And with such features as online ordering and appointment booking, GoDaddy Website Builder has a lot to offer businesses of a certain type.
Unfortunately, GoDaddy Website Builder’s shortcomings — limited template customization options, a limited form builder, basic eCommerce — currently hold it back from 4-star territory. We’re keeping the score at 3.5 stars.
Jason Vissers
Jason Vissers is a writer and cereal chef from San Diego. He graduated with a Political Science degree from San Diego State University in 2001. He's been writing about website builders, crowdfunding sites, online lenders, and credit cards for Merchant Maverick since 2015. Additionally, Jason can't eat raisins.
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Hello! I go through here to warn you that, unless you ABSOLUTELY NOTHING of web pages, this Builder website is a total disaster. This service is super limited in any of its modalities.In addition, to sell you the product, they offer you a free design service of the website at the hands of professional designers, which in addition to taking several weeks to even answer you, make you the delivery of a bad (or nonexistent) product.Finally, the customer service after the sale is null, there is no kind of tracking and the sellers do not respond to the emails. This follow-up is also null for technical assistance.So after you have no answer and the tools that this Web Builder gives you, you decide to create your own website by watching tutorials on how to use WordPress, in which you lose a lot of time and money because, after the sale, FORGET that they reimburse you for the money you paid for a very bad product.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Garbanzo Bar
Oops. Made a big mistake by trusting Godaddy. Shoulda known better when I kept getting different pricing from various reps. Then… no blog, no subpages? Wow. A good solution if you only have a side business. If you actually need to look professional, these guys simply won’t work. Even WIX is better! Even WEEEBLY! I use SetMySite now – they did the design for me and I’m extremely pleased because I didn’t “do it myself” finally. Basically… If you really need a flexible solution that allows you to make the most out of your website, your branding, your blog and content marketing, you know, actually make a difference when it comes to your visibility online… this is not the solution for you. They sucker you in with their nice looking samples and slick talking sales reps. But trust me, these guys under deliver to a massive degree. Very mediocre design. Very uninspiring customer support (they don’t know what they’re talking about, they have no actual technical experience). GoDaddy has always been really good at one thing: domain names. That’s all. Everything else is an unnecessary upsell. Please take my advice – business owner to business owner – you want more out of your website than their builder provides (again, no blog, no menu dropdowns, limited tools, difficult support). You can find better solutions at similar prices – I have tried many. just search this website or Google. You will find thousands. Be smart. Avoid this solution at all costs!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.
Organization Name: Successtaurant Restaurant Consulting
As a restaurant marketing consultant, I love the new GoDaddy GoCentral product. To address your “they got rid of the yelp review widget” and menus from locu issues…Yeah, but who the hell wants a negative yelp review feeding to their website? And the menus from Locu were replaced by a much more functional feature – menus and online ordering by ChowNow. The SEO help engine is extremely useful for small business users who mostly don’t have the time, or the knowledge, to properly build their site for search. The free access to stock images puts this lightyears ahead of Squarespace, especially for small business customers who generally don’t have high quality imaging for their restaurants.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.