The GoDaddy name is synonymous with web hosting. It’s the world’s biggest domain registrar, and it has held that title for a long time. GoDaddy Websites + Marketing is an expansion of that strength; if you’re already getting a domain name from GoDaddy, why not get a website to go along with it? The company’s website-building tool is a useful, all-in-one service that includes marketing and tools for promoting and monetizing your site. You get the domain name, the website builder, social media hooks, and email marketing all in one spot. That said, Duda and Wix offer even more robust feature sets, so they remain our Editors’ Choice winners for website builders.
Plans and Prices
GoDaddy Websites + Marketing has three paid tiers designed to appeal to people with varying hosting requirements. All plans include an SSL certificate, a mobile-friendly site design, a PayPal button, a free business phone number for a year, 24/7 support, and a handful of other features. It’s essentially “unlimited” storage and data transfers. GoDaddy also offers a free plan that includes a single website with hosting, 24/7 customer support, and limited social and email marketing. Not all competitors have free tiers, so that’s a nice option for casual users.
(Credit: GoDaddy/PCMag)
The entry-level Basic plan ($16.99 per month) lets you connect one custom domain, gives you an email account that matches your domain (free for one year), and lets you send 100 marketing emails per month. The Premium package ($29.99 per month) is similar to Basic, except it lets you create, launch, and boost social posts, and send 25,000 marketing emails per month.
The Commerce plan is GoDaddy’s top-level website builder tiers. Like the Premium plan, Commerce ($34.99 per month) has unlimited social media platforms and posts. It also includes selling unlimited products via an online store (or Amazon, eBay, and Instagram), setting up shipping options, managing promotions and discounts, and sending 100,000 marketing emails per month. If you’re serious about selling products online, the Commerce plan is for you. That said, we don’t like that online store creation is exclusive to these tiers.
GoDaddy’s pricing is comparable with the competition’s premium tiers: Wix starts at $17 per month, Duda starts at $19 per month, and Squarespace starts at $16 per month.
Setup Wizard and Templates
Before you can start building or even see any site templates in GoDaddy Websites + Marketing, you must create an account, which can be done via Amazon, Facebook, or by signing up using an email address and password. Before you choose a template, the startup wizard asks you about the site’s subject matter, where you would like to sell products, and what name the site should have. The wizard picked a template for our test site that featured a typewriter, based on our desire for a writer-focused site.
The template designs are modern and attractive. The template previews have a button to show the site in desktop and mobile versions, giving you an idea of what your site will look like. Upon choosing one, you see a page showing how a sample site using the template looks both on desktop and mobile. There are more than 100 templates in total. You can change some themes, but these are minor changes to the overall template. However, you can switch entire templates without rebuilding the site, something few website builders offer.
Building an E-Commerce Site
The back-end interface is clear, simple, and uncluttered. The dashboard icon takes you to promotion options like adding a Facebook Page, creating a blog, and implementing SEO settings. Clicking Edit Site lets you tweak the site’s name, rearrange site sections, and customize other features. A dedicated social media section lets you add Facebook, Google, Instagram, and Twitter/X accounts. GoDaddy accounts start with a yousitename.goddadysites.com URL, but you can connect a domain name you already own or pick up a custom GoDaddy domain.
(Credit: GoDaddy/PCMag)
Clicking Edit Website takes you to the website builder proper. You’re treated to a view of your website, with sections highlighted as you scroll over them. Compared with Duda and Wix, GoDaddy is limited in that it only lets you insert predesigned sections. You can’t just drag a new element in from a list; instead, you must scroll over a section and click the big plus icon to add a new section. Then, you’re given a searchable list of the content that can be placed in that spot. You can’t simply add a photo or text box wherever you like. GoDaddy Websites + Marketing is a good fit for people who don’t feel confident controlling the look of their site and would rather have all the design choices made for them.
In fact, simply adding an image or other item feels unintuitive, as you can’t do it at all in certain section types. You can upload multiple images at once, and once they’re uploaded, you can use them in any photo space on the site. Any uploaded image can be used in photo galleries, too. Unfortunately, there are set positions where the photos live on the live page. As for image editing, GoDaddy lets you zoom images, rotate and crop them, flip them from color to black and white, add shapes, and do other tweaks. Most site builders include at least some of this type of image-editing functionality. Here, GoDaddy’s site builder integrates with GoDaddy Studio’s design tools.
You add a page via the Website menu icon on the right-side panel. There are dedicated menus for About, Contact Us, Photo Gallery, and other sections. You just give the page a name and then add content sections. The newly created page is empty, save for a header, footer, and center area where you can start adding sections. You can now make individual pages, but not the entire site, private by requiring a membership sign-in.
GoDaddy now offers Airo, a collection of several generative AI tools to help make the building process faster and easier. After you answer a few questions and enter a prompt, the builder generates everything from pages with pictures to products with descriptions to customer service messages to social media ads. It may not be perfect, but it’s a good place to start that could save time compared with starting from scratch.
Every edit you make is automatically saved. During editing, you can hit Preview to see the site’s current state. The preview shows both desktop and mobile views.
There are a few ways to make your website bring in cash, both in the form of page sections: You can upgrade to the Online Store account level, add a PayPal donation button, enable appointment bookings, or display ads using Google AdSense (which is frowned upon on today’s web and doesn’t produce much income). GoDaddy also lets you create a Payable Domain, a custom domain that serves as a direct and secure payment link for customer checkouts.
(Credit: GoDaddy/PCMag)
When we upgraded to the Online Store account level, we discovered that a Shop page had been added to our site. You can add products in a simple interface that allows a photo, name, price, sale price, custom categories, SKU, and description. You can also specify color and size options and physical vs. digital goods. In addition, GoDaddy offers excellent help with inventory and shipping options, and UPS and USPS integrations. You can get paid via Apple Pay, PayPal, Square, and Stripe, all excellent services. GoDaddy POS hardware connects your online store with offline sales. You get a professional-looking shopping cart and checkout pages, and you can even have text messages sent to you about incoming orders.
All account levels include a useful email marketing tool. This lets you blast a template-based email to everyone who signed up for a membership on your site. You get choices of sales campaigns, events, and standard newsletters. It’s a flexible and customizable tool that tracks responses and schedules mailings.
Mobile Site Editing and SEO
GoDaddy Websites + Marketing creates a functional, good-looking, responsive mobile website based on the desktop site you build, but you have no control over the mobile presentation. Even the responsive-design-focused Squarespace lets you tweak mobile site presentation, and many site builders, such as Wix, let you customize the mobile view considerably. Then again, none of this may matter to you; our test website looked quite good and functioned as expected.
The other side of the mobile coin—editing your site from a mobile device—is a feather in GoDaddy’s cap. You can do almost anything in a smartphone browser that you can do in a desktop web browser, including changing the theme and adding sections and images.
A search engine optimization option helps you make your site appealing to web search engines. Simply click SEO from the Marketing drop-down menu, and you’re taken through a wizard. The wizard proposes keywords and phrases and populates your page title and metatags. It also proposes content areas into which you should add the keywords. If you’re new to site building, be aware that your site won’t appear in web search results until you’ve verified the site with the search engines.
Customer Service and Uptime
For such a huge company, GoDaddy excels in terms of support. It has 24/7 phone support and an online chat option if you need personal help, but there’s also a huge Help Center knowledge base, how-to videos, and a full community forum. We jumped on chat to ask a question and were connected to an agent in under a minute. The reply was a little slower than some services; it took approximately two minutes to get an answer, but we did get a suitable solution.
Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. If your site is down, clients or customers cannot find your products or services, and you do not want that. GoDaddy promises a 99.9% uptime rate, so your store should be available to customers at all hours.
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Verdict: A Well-Rounded Site Builder
GoDaddy Websites + Marketing is one of the simpler site-building options on the market, but it delivers good-looking sites for desktop and mobile viewing. In addition, GoDaddy gives you lots of room to grow by offering unlimited storage and monthly data transfers with all plans. That said, it only gives you limited control over your site’s appearance, which may put off some would-be site creators. Though GoDaddy is excellent, Duda (for SaaS integration) and Wix (for free use) are richer offerings with more customizability, so they are our Editors’ Choice winners.
GoDaddy Websites + Marketing Website Builder
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The Bottom Line
GoDaddy Websites + Marketing is an excellent site builder with attractive templates, AI-powered site design, and generous storage and monthly data transfers.
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About Jordan Minor
Senior Analyst, Software
