GoDaddy Website Builder Reviews

Web design is the art and science of making an immersive, usable website that can grow. It would be best to have a website builder for functional web design, such as GoDaddy. It provides you with suitable website templates; all you have to do is pick one and fill in the blanks with your information. In addition, GoDaddy helps you find a domain name and market it when you make a website. But, is the GoDaddy website builder good enough to make websites that can satisfy the modern internet user? Read the GoDaddy Website Builder review and find out!

GoDaddy – Free website builder

GoDaddy is a US-based internet services platform. It has a massive product catalog, offering 50+ products that cover three distinct areas of web design:

In theory, you only need the GoDaddy website builder to have a functional website. However, in practice, you will have to use at least a dozen products across all three areas to learn how to make a barely passable website. In addition, you’ll likely have to use external tools to overcome GoDaddy’s limitations or even hire web design experts to help you out. It just so happens GoDaddy offers bespoke website design. That will surely come in handy if you get frustrated by the GoDaddy website builder’s limitations.

Domain names

A catchy, easy-to-type domain name is worth a fortune, especially if it can be turned into a verb. When you think of a fine name, GoDaddy will likely inform you it’s already owned and offer a couple of closest alternatives. Still, you can bid for a domain name or register up to 500 web domains at once. You can also buy and resell domain names for a profit.

Website building

A website that looks clean on the surface is typically messy behind the scenes. The more advanced technology it uses, the more effort it takes to make and maintain it, which is a 24/7 ordeal. GoDaddy Website Builder’s selling point is that it provides access to advanced technologies while taking care of your messiness. The goal is to help you focus on website design.

Marketing tools

Marketing is making your product or service the most popular in the niche. Most customers go for whatever everyone else is already using, regardless of quality. Without marketing, your website can have the best quality globally and still wane in the dark. GoDaddy offers plenty of resources on creating a website that attracts traffic and generates a positive buzz, no matter the niche.

How to create a website with GoDaddy?

The entire process of making a website comes down to two steps:

Within 30 seconds, the website is ready to be published, but you can hammer away at each page until it is slightly more to your liking. However, there is a catch — finding the GoDaddy website builder is anything but intuitive.

How to use GoDaddy website builder?

Once you log in to your GoDaddy account, you’re automatically redirected to the product dashboard. I scoured all the options here but couldn’t find a way to make a website. This is because GoDaddy assumes you’ll buy a little bit of everything; this dashboard comes in handy then.

I realized I needed to log in and visit the GoDaddy home page by typing in the website address “godaddy.com” in the browser’s address bar. Once there, click “Websites” on top of the page and then “Website Builder.” A created website will appear in the dashboard, so you only have to do this process one time for each website.

Your websites in the GoDaddy dashboard have their dashboards with drop-down menus and options galore. Click on the cover image of your website, and you’ll get sent to its dashboard, with a detailed overview of options and handy checklists to help you fine-tune them. It’s easy to get lost here, so click the GoDaddy logo anytime to get back to the top dashboard.

Anyway, once you’re inside the website builder, clicking the “Preview” button on the top left shows what your website looks like on desktop and mobile devices. The free GoDaddy URL is accessible immediately, though there isn’t much to do about it. Clicking the “Publish” button shows three options:

The first option is when you’ve already got a domain name. The second option is buying a domain name from GoDaddy. The third option is your website name attached to the GoDaddy domain.

The left-hand side hosts the work area in the website builder, where a teal border appears around whatever you’re pointing at with your cursor. Click the left mouse button, and you’ll get options to edit the section inside the teal border. This ranges from selecting one of five font sizes to changing text formatting and choosing a new image.

GoDaddy Website Builder Features Explained

On the right-hand side of the GoDaddy website builder, there are three tabs:

Each section is intuitive and holds a wealth of buttons and toggles. There are nested menus here, where each change should prompt a “Done” button to pop up. Clicking it takes you back to the default view of this tab. If it doesn’t pop up, click the tab’s name, and you’ll return to its default view.

Having the website builder open in multiple tabs in your browser may cause them to refresh as you use them, wasting a few seconds. If you create a few websites in the same niche, the GoDaddy website builder adds tiny variations to look different but recognizable.

Website tab

Here you can add, remove or reorder pages. They are all linked to the Home page. To add a new page, click the “+,” select the page type, enter the page title and click “Create the page.” To link to it, you need to click one of the existing sections with an action button, click “Action Button,” and choose it from the “Page” drop-down menu.

Clicking on the header lets, you enter a different text, change the cover image, or upload your logo. Clicking on icons in the “Website Add-ons” section opens up the corresponding section in that website’s dashboard:

Note that some actions will create a pulsing button, which seems to be part of the page, but it’s a GoDaddy prompt. If clicked, this button takes you out of the website builder and back to the website dashboard.

Theme tab

You can adjust your website’s colors, fonts, and buttons here. Clicking the “Try a new look” button takes you to a page of themes, slight variations of the template you’re already using. The “Colors” button opens a menu to input your custom color and even change its brightness.

“Fonts” opens two drop-down menus, one for the primary and the secondary font. There are 51 fonts for the text, with no option of uploading your own. The font is chosen randomly at website creation, with plenty of serifs and sans-serif variety. They all seem to be Adobe-family fonts. Theme color presets range from beige to brown, and even when you do spruce them up, they have a negligible impact on the page.

Finally, “Buttons” lets you set what the builder calls “primary” and “secondary buttons,” used for dominant and supportive actions. These are stylistic variations of the buttons, such as rounded corners or buttons with a background shadow.

Settings tab

All the technical tidbits related to your website are found in this tab. For example, you can put in the basic info so that search engines can categorize your website. You can also link your social media accounts, and the website will automatically set up the links. The cookie banner is controlled from this section, too; luckily, you can turn it off.

There’s the option of making a backup of your website, though you can’t download it. Whatever you make through GoDaddy’s website builder stays on GoDaddy for good.

GoDaddy Studio

From the GoDaddy home page, click “Marketing Tools” at the top of the page and then “Content & Photo Creator.” This takes you to GoDaddy Studio, a dedicated drag&drop graphics editor. It’s pretty, useful, and accessible. You can also undo and redo your actions here! Upload your images or use stock photos and edit them to your liking. There are 11 effects at your disposal, such as blur, shadow, and blend. If you add more objects, you can move them to the background or the foreground.
You can inspect each layer separately by clicking the stacked squares icon in the top right corner. Users can download finished images by clicking the “Export” button next to the layer icon.

GoDaddy Website Builder Cost

GoDaddy payment plans are a bit confusing, so bear with me. There are four payment plans:

The renewal length goes from one month to 5 years, though there is no discount beyond the one offered for plans over one year. Even then, the wording on the discount implies it’s only for the first year, which I’m sure is buried somewhere in the fine print. You can make a new GoDaddy account by logging in through Gmail, Facebook, or with any e-mail address. Your free 30-day trial automatically activates when you create a new website.

Godaddy website builder pricing plans

You are automatically assigned to the “Standard” plan when you make a GoDaddy account, though this is not shown in the dashboard. Instead, it shows your websites are on the “Websites + Marketing Standard Intl.” After the free 30-day trial expires, you’re asked for your payment details to continue working on the website. All plans of 12 months or more have a 30-day money-back guarantee. Plans lasting less than 12 months have a 48-hour money-back guarantee.

The difference in features between the four plans is massive. The Basic and Standard plans have a pathetic feature set and only offer core functionality. They provide no e-commerce capability, and neither does the Premium plan, which is restricted much more than I would expect.

The Premium plan allows sending only 25,000 e-mails a month. The Ecommerce plan raises an eyebrow in a good way, letting you set up an online store as you would expect. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find which web design features, if any, are unlocked after buying Premium or E-commerce plans. Those two plans state, “Content creator with templates, fonts, and graphics: unlimited features,” but I have no clue what that means.

Alternatives to GoDaddy Website Builder

The five biggest alternatives to GoDaddy’s Website Builder are:

WordPress

WordPress has been chugging along and changing the web publishing world in its wake, a humble titan in the web design space. WordPress.com hosts a web design platform, while WordPress.ORG hosts software for making a self-hosted website. So we’re talking about the former.

You can log in through a Google or Apple account or by using an e-mail address. The gist of WordPress is that you use a blogging template and then expand its functionality through plugins. They are free or paid functionality that massively improves your WordPress website by checking SEO or helping with e-commerce. You can make your plugins, and once you upgrade to a Business plan, you can use them on your WordPress website.

Click on “Add new site” in the sidebar and then:

If you pick the free plan, there are severe limitations, and WordPress will show ads next to your content. You do get 3GB storage, though.

Squarespace

Squarespace is the easiest website builder for beginners — visit SquareSpace.com and click “Get Started” in the top right corner. Making your website goes like this:

You’ll get up to a dozen template matches for your website idea, and once you click one, you will need to log in with Google, Apple, Facebook, or any e-mail address. Past that, you’ll be able to fiddle with the page in the Squarespace editor on a 14-day free trial.

The sidebar is smooth and well-animated but suffers from the same accessibility issues as GoDaddy’s website builder — there are no keyboard shortcuts. However, it has a decent pack of features, some of which are paid.

Squarespace offers four pricing plans at $12–40 a month when billed annually or $16–54 a month when billed monthly. An interesting offer is an ability to buy add-ons from SquareSpace partners. One add-on drew my attention; Unfold is a marketing company specializing in Instagram stories so that you can make a custom marketing campaign cheaply.

Weebly

Visit Weebly.com, click “Websites” and the “Start for free” button. Fill in the forms and make an account. It will ask if you need an online store or a website. The process differs slightly, but the gist is that you choose a fitting template and start editing.

The editor is a slick but ill-conceived drag&drop interface. You can swing the elements around and rearrange them, but only as the editor allows, which can feel like threading a needle in a tornado. For example, you can move a text box only within an area the editor feels is appropriate.

Going against the editor’s wishes angers it greatly. It pauses for a second and violently snaps the element back to its old position, interrupting my train of thought and the creative process. However, However, I did find a way to break free and escape the editor’s tyranny. Dragging an image placeholder or a text box from the work area to the right edge infinitely expands the page. This is by far the jankiest website builder I’ve seen. Of course, there is no right-click menu, keyboard shortcuts, or undo.

Weebly payment plans are $5–38 a month when billed annually or $8–46 billed monthly. The cheapest plan gives a whopping 500MB of storage, about 15 minutes of 1080p video content. All plans are on a 30-day money-back guarantee.

HostGator

This is a Houston-based web design company. Unfortunately, the website builder isn’t accessible unless you subscribe to one of three pricing plans. They cost $2.75–5.25 a month if paid three years in advance and only on the first invoice. According to a helpful article, HostGator’s website builder is a lightweight program that uses templates.

GoDaddy Website Builder vs. Wix

Both GoDaddy and Wix are do-it-yourself web design platforms. They share several features:

The difference is that Wix is much more hands-on, providing you with analytics reports, access to the app market, and other goodies when you log in. Apps function much like WordPress plugins, with some offering a free trial. Pricing plans for the website range from $4.50–17.50, with the cheapest one displaying ads on your website.

Wix charges separately for a set of marketing and business tools called “Ascend.” These cost up to $49 a month, with their selling gimmick being that you can have an entire team on Wix. There is a free Ascend plan, activated by default. After that, a 14-day money-back guarantee covers all plans.

Once you’re in the dashboard, website building is done through the “Edit Site” button. After a bit of loading, you’ll discover an advanced website builder. Here you can code your website as you’d like. There are even keyboard shortcuts and an undo button!

GoDaddy Review Conclusions

The GoDaddy website builder offers bare-bones web design at a premium price. It feels like an afterthought, a product to fill the gap between domain name sales and marketing tools. It is an app for beginners with limited functionalities, even on a paid plan, unless you fork out for the most expensive pricing tier. I can’t recommend the GoDaddy website builder because it can create one for you, but it can’t teach you how to make a website.