GoDaddy Review: Live Fast, End up Furious?

GoDaddy offers the fastest way to get a new website live on the internet – but lacks certain business features and template variety. It scored 4.1/5 in our rigorous testing, far outperforming website builders like Hostinger, Weebly, and Site123.

We ran GoDaddy through dozens of individual tests, and calculated scores across six categories (all ratings are out of five):

In this review, we’ll go through GoDaddy’s pricing, pros and cons, key features, customer reviews, and how it compares to similar products on the market.

The unique selling point of GoDaddy’s website builder is it helps get your website live really fast. But we’re going to look into whether or not that speed will be enough to make it worth choosing GoDaddy.

How much does GoDaddy cost?

GoDaddy is in the mid-range of website builder products, with pricing between $18 and $37 a month (after your first discounted year). There are four price plans, only one of which is for selling online. GoDaddy is one of the few providers to hike its prices after the first year of your contract.

Compare each price plan by clicking the arrows:

GoDaddy is OK value for money, with the following basic features in all of its price plans:

• Edit website on your phone or desktop
• Email marketing (max 100 per month on cheapest plan)
• Social media post creator (with templates)
• Web visitors can book appointments

You’ll have to subscribe to a pricier plan for more marketing emails and better booking features. Honestly, GoDaddy provides a sparse set of features for a mid-range price. 

GoDaddy’s Premium plan costs almost the same as Wix Business Unlimited, but Wix gives you full online selling abilities, whereas GoDaddy doesn’t. But you won’t get any email marketing on Wix’s cheaper plans (such as Wix Unlimited), like you do with GoDaddy.

Weebly’s plans are cheaper than GoDaddy, but again, you won’t get email marketing. Though Weebly gives you an online shop with every price plan, unlike GoDaddy.

Pricing isn’t everything, however. So let’s look at the quality of GoDaddy’s features before making a final judgement on its value.

Pros and cons of GoDaddy

✅ Super speedy start

If you’re short on time and need your website live ASAP GoDaddy is the fastest website builder tool. Answer just two questions (“What kind of website do you want?” and, “What’s it called?”) and you land straight in the editing workspace. From there you’re straight into altering the preset layout, images, and text to suit your tastes.

This is a major reason it’s rated one of the best website builders in our industry round-up.

✅ Helpful editing guidance

If you get stuck during the web design process, the “Next Steps” checklist in the top righthand corner of the editor ensures you stay on track. You can approach any of the steps as you feel ready, so you’re not forced into one course of action.

✅ Very reliable hosting

Unlike competitors such as Squarespace or Wix, GoDaddy is known first and foremost as a domain registrar and hosting service. That means it’s famous for providing website URL names and the physical servers for keeping websites online. GoDaddy guarantees 99.9% uptime (or you get a discount on your next month) – so your website should almost never come offline due to technical failures.

❌ Limited design options

With GoDaddy, there’s less focus on tweaking website design to make it exactly match your vision. No wonder it scores a measly 3.3/5 in the ‘Design Functions’ research category. There are just 22 templates (Wix has roughly 900), limiting the range of visual layout possibilities. You have to edit design elements within pre-defined sections and you can’t click-and-drag text or images to specific positions.

❌ Less sophisticated business features

GoDaddy lags behind competitors like Wix, Shopify and WooCommerce in the breadth of its website features. GoDaddy scores just 3/5 in our ‘Website Features’ research category. There’s no app store (unlike Squarespace and others), meaning limited business integrations are available. And the in-built business features aren’t exactly comprehensive, either. For example, GoDaddy confirmed in a March 2023 community post that there aren’t currently plans to include print on demand services within its website builder.

GoDaddy’s Website Builder Key Features

1. Simple website creation: go live in an hour

Since content is automatically generated for your website based on the type of business you run, much of the work is already done for you. For example, we selected “life coach” for our test website, and found an “About Me” page already full of zen imagery and persuasive text.

The content is ready-made, saving your brain precious creative energy. Not to mention the time saved. All we needed to do was make a few tweaks to make the placeholder text more specific.

The risk is your website ends up with a generic look and feel: with some 55,000 Canadian websites using the GoDaddy website builder. But that might not matter to you or your customer base. After all, a business website is a tool to attract leads, sign up new clients, and showcase your products or services. It’s not the Mona Lisa.

2. Fast-loading websites: Speedier than WordPress and Wix

Nobody likes a slow webpage. But did you know people hate it so much they’ll leave your website if loading takes longer than four seconds?

In our testing, GoDaddy scored 90/100 in our testing for its overall site speed performance (on desktop). That’s better than Wix (85/100), WordPress.com (81/100) or Weebly (75/100). That means the GoDaddy server responded quickly to the website’s request to appear on the reader’s screen.

What that really means is visitors are less likely to abandon your website while it boots up. They’ll have a better user experience, becoming psychologically influenced to like your website. Happy users are more likely to take the action you want them to: sign up for your emails, download your brochure, buy your products, book an appointment, and so on.

3. Basic marketing functions: no third-party app support

If you want to connect your existing marketing software with your GoDaddy website, you’re going to struggle. This is a serious hurdle for many business types, so we reckon it’s worth shouting about. While you can easily get an app that synchs your WooCommerce user data with your HubSpot account, there’s no such integration available for GoDaddy and HubSpot, for instance.

This means your website marketing activities are limited to the tools already in GoDaddy. There are some basic functions you can add to your website, such a form to collect subscriber email addresses or creating a pop-up message. You’ll get 100, 500 or 25,000 email marketing sends per month (depending on your price plan). But if you have a Microsoft Office 365 subscription through GoDaddy, you won’t be able to synch that with HubSpot Sales Office 365.

4. Questionable SEO (search engine optimisation) support

Your knowledge of search engine optimisation techniques – basically, how high up on lists of search engine results your website will appear – may be limited. But that doesn’t mean it’s not critical to the success of your website.

If your business is reliant on web traffic from search engines such as Google (the online equivalent of people walking into your shop because they saw it on the high street), you need good SEO. This applies to almost all websites, but particularly those from competitive industries such as electronics sales, legal services, private healthcare services, fashion retailers, and more.

Because GoDaddy’s website builder is designed as a really simple tool for non-experts, there’s a limit to the amount of control you have over the technical elements of your website. While GoDaddy offers a mini quiz tool to set you up for targeting keywords, it’s incredibly basic.

For instance, three keyword suggestions we got for a business offering financial services were: “Financial Service, financial service, service finance”.

But search engines don’t care about whether you use capital letters in words. So the GoDaddy keyword engine shouldn’t have suggested the same phrases with variations of capital letters. And it’s not particularly insightful that the keywords suggested are… the keywords we wrote in the first place. You don’t get any information as to how you should select your keywords, either. Realistically, you should know whether they are competitive and how many people search for them.

The tool takes you through adding your top three keywords to your homepage’s title tag, meta description, and H1 (main heading). This is quite a good intro to SEO for beginners. But it’s a very simplistic and old-fashioned view of SEO. Those who are a bit more search-engine savvy will know there’s more subtlety to targeting results pages than simply copying and pasting keywords into several places.

Search engines may re-write your meta description for its own purposes, so it may not matter that you included your target keywords in it. Also the scroll function for homepage preview didn’t work, so I couldn’t even see the sections of text I was editing on the live site.

While it may be expecting a little much of a beginner-level website builder tool to give you quality SEO advice, competitor products are already doing it better. Wix has a dedicated dashboard for updating your SEO settings, including troubleshooting through Google’s URL Inspection API. There’s also several video explanations on various aspects of SEO right in the Wix dashboard.

Overall, we don’t rate GoDaddy’s SEO capabilities. Given that SEO services can easily cost upwards of $1,500 per month, it makes sense to try and tackle at least some of this work yourself. But it seems you may not have the easiest time doing this with GoDaddy, as your access to SEO-related functions (such as the robots.txt file) are somewhat limited.

5. Help and support: Better than Wix

GoDaddy’s customer support options are healthy: there’s a phone line, with the company readily publishing their number online. By comparison, Wix makes it a bit awkward to talk to someone on the phone; you’ll have to click through online options and request a callback. Squarespace doesn’t even have a customer service number.

Customer care with GoDaddy is more equal than if you were to go with Wix, where you’d have to upgrade to a higher pricing plan to get VIP phone support. You also have a fair chance of getting real help on the GoDaddy community forum, too. This stands in stark contrast to the Wix equivalent, which is full of spam comments on its posts.

What kind of business is GoDaddy best for?

GoDaddy is suitable for a wide range of businesses, particularly those whose leaders are not tech wizards. It’s definitely not for ambitious online merchants that need scalable sales tools. For that, we’d recommend looking into our general guide on the best ecommerce platforms.

Here are some examples of business types that’d get along well with GoDaddy:

Service-based businesses: Hairdressers, pet grooming, fitness classes, online consultation

If you want customers to be able to book appointments with you online, GoDaddy is a good choice. Your website can create a Zoom meeting for visitors that book appointments with you. Or you can add your own link if you prefer to use a different online meeting service. That’s really handy for consultants, coaches, and therapists who rely on video calls to meet with clients.

But bear in mind you’ll only be able to take payments for appointment bookings at the Premium subscription level, which renews after the first year at $27.99 per month. Still, GoDaddy’s lack of transaction fees is appealing for local businesses for whom every penny counts. That’s one reason GoDaddy is one of our top picks of ecommerce platforms for small businesses.

Time-poor entrepreneurs: If you have no interest in complex web design

The main appeal of GoDaddy is how accessible it is for people with no real interest in technology. Twenty years ago, you had to be pretty clued-up to create a website and get it live on the web. Nowadays, beginner-friendly options like GoDaddy exist to get people online who’ve never written a line of code.

If you work in a busy industry like the care profession, youth work, animal rescue or similar, then time is a luxury you can’t afford. GoDaddy is a real boon to people like this. If you can edit a text box (we’re talking as simple as double-click and type), then you can edit a GoDaddy website.

How does GoDaddy compare to its competitors?

We’ve touched on a few points of comparison above, but it makes sense to look at GoDaddy’s subscription packages in direct comparison with its rivals:

As you can see from the table, GoDaddy’s pricing (you should focus on the renewal cost after your first year) is very similar to competitors’. You’ll get unlimited storage and bandwidth on your GoDaddy website, same as you will with Weebly and Squarespace. That’s a distinct advantage over Wix, which is worth bearing in mind if you want to upload videos and large images to your website.

The lack of transaction fees with GoDaddy is also appealing, but by no means unique (it’s also the same with Wix and some Squarespace plans). There’s also fewer payment provider options with GoDaddy than Wix, which could put off some customers from making purchases with your business.

Does GoDaddy have good customer reviews?

By and large, yes, it’s easy to find loads of positive reviews about GoDaddy all over the web. That being said, it does depend on who exactly you ask. GoDaddy is currently rated 4.7/5 on Trustpilot, but we found other ratings on American business sites as low as 1.9/5 and 2.6/5.

Our test users made the following comments:

😊 “GoDaddy is good for people who don’t want to fiddle around a lot with their website.”

😊 “[The editor] was good at keeping things neat and tidy. It was easy to keep my site clean.”

🤨 “The help and support content isn’t savvy, it takes quite a bit of digging to find what you’re actually looking for.”

🤨 “I didn’t see any features that were unique to GoDaddy. There was nothing different or interesting.”

Overall, the above comments are pretty fair representations of what it’s really like to use GoDaddy. It’s a basic tool to build a low-fuss website. If you’re into web design, there’s little to get excited about. But if you’re into time-saving and efficiency, GoDaddy is worth a look.

How We Reviewed GoDaddy