Writer: Laura Bernheim
Editor: Lillian Castro
Reviewer: Cristian Lopez
You likely already relied on the company for registering your domain name, why not trust the GoDaddy website builder, too?
As the largest domain name registrar in the world, GoDaddy is extremely popular. The company boasts a ridiculously low price for hosting and a 1-month free trial for its custom site builder, making web design easier than you ever imagined.
However, is it right for you? Let’s take a look at the results of our team’s test drive of the GoDaddy website builder, as well as our list of potential alternatives and the biggest pros and cons you might encounter as a user.
GoDaddy Website Builder Overall Review: 4.8 / 5.0
Building a website today is all about who you know — not necessarily the most experienced and expensive developer who can do the job for you, but rather the reliable and affordable web host who will help you do it yourself.
We took GoDaddy hosting for a test drive and tried out the host’s popular website builder. The platform has been revamped in recent years and now does much better at integrating modern designs and an intuitive interface alongside the ecommerce, SEO, and marketing features we’ve all come to expect. Read our in-depth review below:
GoDaddy.com
Monthly Starting Price $0.00
- Get started for FREE, no credit-card required
- Easy-to-use interface with tons of customization
- GoDaddy InSight™ provides tailored action plans
- 99.9% uptime with an award-winning support team
- Built-in marketing tools and expertise
- Get started on GoDaddy now.
GoDaddy uses a custom website builder and easy access to dozens of content management systems to offer a user-friendly site-building solution to customers. Most of GoDaddy's hosting plans include these options at no additional cost. Go to full review »
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 days | Unlimited | New or Transfer | 5 minutes |
See our highest-rated website builders »
3 Alternatives to the GoDaddy Website Builder
Although GoDaddy has its strengths and is trusted by more than 16 million customers around the world, the website builder is not as robust or feature-rich as some competing platforms. The lack of snap-to-grid functionality makes perfecting design a tedious process, particularly for non-developers or designers (the bulk of the GoDaddy customer base). We prefer to recommend a host with a more nuanced website builder, and you’ll find a few of our favorites below.
1. Wix.com
Monthly Starting Price $0.00
- No coding skills needed with drag-and-drop builder
- 100s of templates with niche-specific designs
- Add features via the App Market and Wix Events
- Easily create ecommerce functionality easily
- Great way to build small sites on a budget
- Get started on Wix now.
Website building is where Wix shines. The thousands of templates, the intuitive editor, the industry-leading designs that cater to a variety of specific fields and use cases — all these facets represent a platform that excels at facilitating easy web design for the non-tech-savvy user. Go to full review »
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 14-day FREE trial | 2 GB - Unlimited | FREE (1 year) | 4 minutes |
2. IONOS.com
Monthly Starting Price $1.00
- No coding skills necessary with MyWebsite Creator
- Free domain name or transfer your existing site
- FREE social media and marketing widgets
- Pro templates with pre-filled text and images
- Multilingual support and tools for SEO
- Get started on 1&1 IONOS now.
If you're in need of a one-stop shop for designing and launching a website, you should be pleased to hear that 1&1 IONOS offers its own custom website building tools for both desktop and mobile devices. In addition to a free domain and email address, along with unlimited storage space, the 1&1 IONOS MyWebsite platform includes all the essentials for starting a site from scratch. Go to full review »
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 days | 10 GB - Unlimited | FREE (1 year) | 5 minutes |
3. Hostinger.com
Monthly Starting Price $2.69
- Drag-and-drop design from custom tools
- FREE access to hundreds of specialized templates
- Built-in eCommerce and payment processing
- Easily switch among widescreen, desktop, tablet, and mobile previews
- Support for 31 languages and 99.9% uptime
- Get started on Hostinger now.
Whether you're taking your first foray into website hosting or are a developer looking to save some time, a strong website builder can dramatically streamline the creation process and enable users to launch a website in five minutes or less. Fortunately for customers, Hostinger has invested heavily in crafting an impressive visual editor sure to appeal to users of all levels of experience. Go to full review »
| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 days | 100 GB SSD - 200 GB NVMe SSD | FREE (1 year) | 3 minutes |
See other website builder options »
Top 5 Pros of GoDaddy’s Website Builder
All that said, there are a lot of things the GoDaddy website builder gets right. The integrations with social media, online stores, marketing, and other functionalities like managing appointments and in-depth analytics are just a few reasons to consider GoDaddy’s site builder. Here are a few others:
1. Intuitive Interface and Helpful Tools
The tool’s drag-and-drop portal is incredibly easy to use and lets users of the two higher-end plans seamlessly switch between desktop and mobile versions of their site. The highest-tier Business Plus plan also includes a one-click social media manager and SEO tools to get your newly built site noticed.
We’re also especially fond of GoDaddy InSight, the company’s artificial intelligence wizard that gives customers data-driven advice on how to improve their online presence — even factoring in social media and email marketing.
2. More Than 300 Themes and Templates
Like many of the best site builder hosts, GoDaddy bundles hundreds of theme options with their site builder plans, all tailored to your specific needs. Seriously, there are multiple templates for plumbers. Sort the themes by categories, such as education, food, personal, photography, and travel, to find your favorite.
Once you select a theme, GoDaddy will automatically populate the theme with the information you enter. You can edit text, change colors and fonts, add or delete pages, and upload your own pictures or videos.
3. Step-By-Step Tutorials Included
GoDaddy’s beginner-friendly website builder offers step-by-step explanations of how to set up and fine-tune your website. Whether you’re adding a button or making a photo gallery, GoDaddy has a guide for that.
4. Get Help from Support 24/7
Yet another perk of going with a hosting company as well-known as GoDaddy, their support team is one of the most reputable in the industry. If you get stuck at any point, you can contact their experts 24 hours a day, seven days a week via phone, email, or live chat.
5. Hosting is Only $1
Let’s say the site builder isn’t your cup of tea. If you want to take the regular hosting route and build your site with a platform, such as WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla, it really doesn’t get more cost-effective than Go-Daddy’s $1 web hosting. With a domain name included for free with the purchase of an annual plan, you can still create your site for next to nothing by using a free theme.
Top 5 Cons of GoDaddy’s Website Builder
While we love GoDaddy for their perks, no host is perfect at everything. Here are five potential drawbacks we’d like to change:
1. Clunky Ecommerce Tools
GoDaddy has spent a lot of time bringing its site builder platform up to date with competitors on this front, but there’s a still a little more work to be done. The main site builder doesn’t include anything for ecommerce, but you can use a separate online store builder — for twice as much as the premium site builder plan. If you’re looking for a site builder host that’s a little more friendly to online businesses, check out our favorite ecommerce site builders.
2. Very Basic Design
Even though you have so many themes from which to choose, they all kind of blend together after a while. While very clean and modern, GoDaddy’s website builder interface is best for very basic designs. That’s good for many, but try one of 2024’s best website builder plans if you want something a little more intricate.
3. You Can’t Switch Between Themes
One unfortunate caveat to GoDaddy’s 300+ themes is that you can’t switch between them without losing your content. This might be more annoying than a deal-breaker, so be sure to choose your theme carefully before you fully commit.
4. Their Uptime Guarantee Isn’t Great
GoDaddy leads the web hosting industry in a lot of things: domain hosting, affordability, and page loads, but their uptime guarantee of 99.9% isn’t quite up to par with some of our top hosts. For many users, however, that extra tenth of a percent won’t make much of a difference.
5. No Password Protection
Not being able to password-protect certain pages of your website is a major faux pas in the web hosting world these days, so GoDaddy’s lack of password-protected pages functionality is the only other thumbs-down feature we can think of — but again, this won’t matter much to many users.
Bottom Line: We Like It, But Don’t Love It
Like we said at the beginning, it pays to know a host that’s so prominent and respected in the industry. It’s hard to go wrong by trusting your website needs to GoDaddy’s hosting and website building interface.
Many of the faults we found with GoDaddy’s tool might be quite inconsequential to you, making them an excellent option. If you want to keep shopping, you could compare GoDaddy to our top 10 recommended builders.
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