Everybody knows GoDaddy as a hosting provider and domain registrar, but it also offers a fully-fledged website builder. Is it good, and should you invest your money into it? Well, let's find the answers in this GoDaddy Website Builder Review.
What is GoDaddy Website Builder?
As for my first impressions of this builder overall, it's good, but I think GoDaddy would be best for business landing pages or small personal projects. For larger or more complex websites, not so much. It's an easy tool to use, but it comes with some restrictions, which I will cover a bit later on.
First, I want to give a big plus for having a trial and a free subdomain. Digging a bit deeper, it's not a trial—it's a fully working free plan. In fact, you can follow along and publish a website without paying anything. You don't even need to add your credit card or other nonsense.
What makes it even better is that you get seven days of premium features to test out, and then you can decide: upgrade to a premium plan or stay with the free one. Talking about premium options, I've left my exclusive deals in the description below.
GoDaddy Pricing
GoDaddy's website builder has four premium plans in total, starting from around $10 a month and mostly offering marketing tools and e-commerce options. Is GoDaddy WordPress Hosting worth it? Well, I might say yes, since you're not limited by bandwidth or storage space. Looking at the industry standard, this monthly price is quite good.
There are cheaper builders, but the plans here have all you need. I would even call GoDaddy's 2023 website builder pricing customer-friendly. Why? First, the plans offer unlimited resources. You can host a site for free. On top of that, the renewal pricing increase is minimal. The cheapest plan increases by just a few bucks a month after the initial period is over, which is much better than the two- or three-times price jumps I’ve seen elsewhere.
GoDaddy Templates
Next in this GoDaddy Website Builder Review, let's talk templates.
With most builders, you start from the template selection. When you first register with GoDaddy's website builder, it will offer free templates based on the info you’ve entered. But when creating a site, you can also start with the regular template selection. It offers more than 100 different options, and to be fair, most of them are modern and look nice.
Personally, I miss the bright colors that some hosting or builder themes offer, but I recommend GoDaddy WordPress Hosting for small business or portfolio sites.
GoDaddy also has themes. Yes, it might be a bit confusing, but templates are the structure of your site, while themes change up your design a bit. You can choose from around 20 different themes. While they’re nothing magical—mostly changing colors and the look of a few elements—they’re useful for beginners who want a quick way to stylize their design.
GoDaddy Website Builder Editing
Now, is GoDaddy's website builder good for editing? This part of the review is probably the shortest because everything is super simple. You don’t work with individual elements; instead, you select pre-made sections.
While you can adjust the structure of these sections, there aren’t many options to experiment with. You can change colors, fonts, and themes to spice up your design. There’s enough here to create a modern-looking business site for beginners, but if you want a specific design or something more complex, I’d recommend checking out other builders.
GoDaddy Business Tools
After using this builder for a while, I can say it’s really good for small business owners or personal projects. The reason? GoDaddy makes it super simple to set up your online store.
However, you will need a premium plan to start selling online. The management side of your store is simple: you can add basic product information, discounts, and basic analytics, and even start selling in-place.
Is it as robust as Shopify? No. GoDaddy's e-commerce tools might feel limited for advanced users, but for new businesses, it’s likely enough.
As for marketing, GoDaddy excels here. You get a step-by-step guide to improving your website. If SEO feels intimidating, GoDaddy’s guided SEO wizard will optimize your content. This is especially valuable for beginners who want to be found online.
You can also use templates to create great-looking social media posts or email marketing campaigns—all from within the GoDaddy dashboard. Adding these tools together makes GoDaddy a useful and straightforward suite for promoting your site and increasing sales.
GoDaddy Performance
Finally, let’s discuss performance in this GoDaddy Website Builder Review.
We know GoDaddy is simple, but does this translate to faster loading times? To test it, I built a site and ran it through GTmetrix.
Before I reveal the results, note that Google recommends loading times under 2.5 seconds for the best SEO results. For web builders, I consider 3-4 seconds acceptable. GoDaddy exceeded expectations, fully loading in just 1.2 seconds.
That’s impressive. GoDaddy may lack flashy features or complex functionality, but if you don’t need those, you’ll have a fast-loading website.
Conclusion
Is GoDaddy WordPress Hosting good? Yes, it’s a simple yet effective website builder. While limited in design options, it offers a lot of beginner-friendly business tools. The free plan makes it an excellent choice for those just starting out.
