GoDaddy Review: Still a Good Option for Small Businesses?

GoDaddy slipped down from third to fifth place in our latest round of website builder testing, but it remains one of the best website builders for small businesses, especially those looking to get online quickly.

Speed has always been the name of the game for GoDaddy, and the introduction of AI tools, such as an AI website builder, has only made it easier and faster to create a website. Its free plan, which includes comprehensive booking and scheduling tools, also sets GoDaddy apart from the competition.

That said, the design of GoDaddy’s website templates can look a little dated, and the absence of an app market for easy integrations limits this website builder’s scalability.

In this review, I’ll go over my experience creating a website with GoDaddy, assess its pros and cons, explain its pricing, and discuss its key features. But first, here’s a quick summary.

Getting Started With GoDaddy

When signing up for GoDaddy’s website builder, I was directed straight towards its AI website building tool, which isn’t wholly surprising since rivals Wix and Hostinger also heavily push users towards using AI.

To create a website with AI, I had to answer a few prompts about the purpose of my website and what type of business I was running, after which GoDaddy’s AI builder generated a website in a few seconds. The overall process was a little faster than when using Wix’s AI builder, but slower than when I tested newcomer Hostinger’s AI builder.

I was generally pleased with the results. The website matched what I had in mind (a website for a wellness spa in Los Angeles), although it wasn’t the most inspiring or unique design.

I also couldn’t figure out how to make the AI assistant generate an alternative design based on the same prompt. Instead, GoDaddy directed me to choose from preexisting templates if I wasn’t happy with the initial results. I found this a little frustrating, since rivals Wix and Hostinger both let me generate as many website variations as I liked using AI and the same prompt.

My experience with GoDaddy’s editor

Once GoDaddy’s AI website builder has created a website for you, it takes you directly to the website editor.

The editor is quite simple to use, allowing you to add or edit elements by clicking on them directly on the page and also by using the sidebar menu. I particularly liked the fact that GoDaddy’s editor included suggestions for what to add on the page. For example, when I clicked on the “plus” sign to add a new section to my page, I was taken to a sidebar menu featuring suggestions based on my stated website purpose, as well as suggestions based on what’s popular among users.

That said, GoDaddy’s editor is a little restrictive, since it’s not possible to change the layout of on-page elements by dragging them to a new spot. This is something you can do on Wix and Squarespace, and it makes GoDaddy websites less easy to customize, since you’re confined to the layout of your chosen template.

GoDaddy’s Pros and Cons

Here’s what I liked and didn’t like about GoDaddy:

✅ Quick and easy to set up

GoDaddy is generally a fast and easy way to set up a website, so it’s a good choice if you don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to designing your website. Its AI website builder assistant makes things even faster and easier. It can create a basic website for you in just a few steps, and under 30 seconds, and the website will come pre-filled with stock images and text that match your prompt.

GoDaddy also provides plenty of guidance throughout the editing process in the form of tours and design suggestions, making it an accessible website builder for novice users. I found it easier to use than popular alternatives such as Wix and Shopify.

✅ Built-in marketing content creation tools

Besides Wix, GoDaddy is one of the only website builders we tested to include content creation tools, such as an email campaign, a social post creator, and even a logo maker.

These all sit in the GoDaddy Studio, which gives you access to a range of templates for a variety of post and campaign types. You can also create designs from scratch, or use AI to quickly draft ones for you, based on your existing website.

✅ Excellent built-in booking and scheduling tools

Along with Squarespace, GoDaddy has some excellent built-in booking management tools. This makes it a great option for small service-based and appointment businesses, such as salons, spas, studios, or even gardeners.

Users can list a variety of services, categorize them, see a calendar of upcoming events, and set custom business and staff availability, among other features.

❌ Website designs can look a little dated

Although GoDaddy’s template designs are perfectly usable, they can sometimes look a little dated and uninspired. Most don’t have the same flair as Squarespace templates.

With GoDaddy, there’s less focus on tweaking website design to make it exactly match your vision. This means your website can sometimes look quite generic. As I’ve noted in my overview of using the GoDaddy editor, you can’t move specific design elements to unique places, which makes it difficult to create a unique website that stands out from the millions of other GoDaddy websites out there.

❌ SEO support needs improvement

GoDaddy doesn’t offer the best SEO support, especially when compared to rivals Wix or Shopify. While its AI bot can offer SEO guidance, I felt it was quite generic and could easily lead users to overuse “keywords”, something search engines penalize.

Additionally, GoDaddy is missing more advanced SEO functions, such as “canonical tags”, which you might not miss, but any experts you hire to help with SEO will.

❌ No app market

Although GoDaddy has plenty of built-in content creation tools, it’s one of the few website builders we’ve tested that doesn’t have an app market. This limits the number of apps you can integrate into your GoDaddy website to expand its capabilities beyond built-in tools.

This isn’t great for businesses looking to scale up or who have niche needs. Great alternatives that offer large app stores are Wix and Shopify.

How Much Does GoDaddy Cost?

GoDaddy is in the mid-range of website builder products, with pricing between $9.99 and $34.99 a month. If you pay upfront for the whole year, you’ll get a significant discount on your first term. GoDaddy also has a free plan, which is useful for trying GoDaddy out before committing to it.

GoDaddy’s paid plans start at $16.99 (not counting the discounted first year), a similar starting price to rivals Wix and Squarespace. GoDaddy pricing caps out at $34.99 per month, less than Wix and Squarespace’s most expensive plan.

That said, newcomer Hostinger offers cheaper plans than GoDaddy, with its most expensive plan only costing a maximum of $13.99 per month.

As you can see, GoDaddy occupies a middle ground when it comes to pricing. If you’re looking for an easy-to-use tool with extra content creation features, then GoDaddy is a good option. However, if you’re looking for a more high-tech website, you’ll get better value for your money on one of Wix or Squarespace’s mid-tier plans.

GoDaddy’s Key Features

I’ll go over GoDaddy’s key features in more detail in the following sections, from its booking to marketing and SEO tools:

Bookings management

One area in which GoDaddy shines is its comprehensive booking management features. You’ll be able to accept one-time and recurring appointments, and group classes.

GoDaddy’s booking tools can be accessed via the GoDaddy dashboard. From there, you can categorize services and add new ones, enable customer accounts, and add staff profiles and availability.

You can also send automated text or email reminders to your customers, and there’s a calendar view where you can track upcoming appointments.

You can also integrate your GoDaddy booking software with social media platforms, allowing customers to book appointments directly through them. Wix and Squarespace offer similar features to GoDaddy. However, their basic booking tools aren’t available on a free plan.

One thing that sets GoDaddy apart from the competition is that its AI assistant is capable of generating services in the backend, based on the type of business you run and services you’ve previously entered into the system. Obviously, these won’t be accurate one hundred percent of the time, and they need to be edited, but it does save you time compared to creating each service from scratch in the backend.

Social media and email marketing

Along with Wix, GoDaddy is one of the few website builders we tested to include built-in tools for creating email marketing and social campaigns.

Its content creation app, GoDaddy Studio, can be accessed from the GoDaddy backend or from an app on your phone. From there, you can get access to a library of templates for social media posts and email marketing campaigns, or GoDaddy’s AI assistant can create instant designs for you. There’s also a logo creator, also offered by Wix, which allows you to create branding for your business without the need to hire a graphic designer.

For socials, GoDaddy integrates with Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Yelp. You can track your social media posts’ engagement, and even reply to customers from the GoDaddy platform (the number of replies is limited on the lower tier plans).

Besides email marketing campaign creation, GoDaddy’s email marketing also gives you access to email scheduling and automations, and analytics.

Plus, GoDaddy’s AI assistant can plan out a marketing strategy for you, filling your marketing calendar with suggested actions. For the best results with marketing, however, it’s always best to hire an expert.

GoDaddy’s main drawback when it comes to marketing is its lack of third-party integrations, since it doesn’t have an app market. This means that you won’t be able to connect more advanced marketing tools such as HubSpot or Mailchimp to your GoDaddy website. This isn’t the case with platforms like Wix or Shopify, which have very large app markets.

SEO

As I’ve noted in my overview of GoDaddy’s pros and cons, GoDaddy’s SEO tools need improvement.

SEO stands for search engine optimization, and refers to tactics used to get a website to appear high in search results on search engines like Google.

GoDaddy offers core SEO features, such as the ability to create custom meta titles and descriptions, edit URLs, and image alt text. These are all factors that Google uses to classify pages and can help them rank higher in search results.

On top of this, GoDaddy offers AI-powered SEO guidance, something Wix and Hostinger also offer, but Squarespace doesn’t. That said, the advice given by GoDaddy’s AI assistant is quite basic, and some of it might even lead to SEO errors. When testing, we noticed GoDaddy’s SEO AI-bot tended to use “keyword stuffing”, a practice of overusing key terms, which Google now penalizes.

Additionally, GoDaddy doesn’t provide any SEO support or advice for blog pages, unlike Wix, Squarespace, and Hostinger, so it’s not the best option for creating a website with a lot of long-form content.

It’s also missing tools to manage and edit more advanced aspects of website SEO, which you might not use, but any SEO expert you hire to work on your website will miss. These include schema markups, and the ability to add hreflang.

Finally, although GoDaddy websites automatically adjust their formatting to fit mobile screens, this process isn’t perfect and can result in usability issues. It’s also not possible to edit the mobile layout, something Shopify allows users to do.

GoDaddy’s Ecommerce Features

You can only run an online store with GoDaddy if you choose the $20.99 to $34.99 per month Commerce plan.

Compared to dedicated ecommerce platforms like Shopify, GoDaddy’s ecommerce offering is pretty basic. You can list products, run discounts and sales, and accept payments from multiple payment methods, including Google and Apple Pay, on your GoDaddy online store. You can also integrate with online marketplaces, such as eBay and Amazon, to expand your reach.

However, unlike dedicated ecommerce platforms, such as Shopify, GoDaddy doesn’t have in-depth sales and inventory tracking or the ability to accommodate third-party integrations, such as accounting tools or shipping apps. You also can’t customize your checkout page on GoDaddy, sell product bundles, or create automatic discounts that don’t require a code, all features that competitors Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify offer.

That said, GoDaddy does offer its own payment processing service, GoDaddy Payments, which has transaction fees of 2.7% + $0.30 for online payments, less than competitor Wix charges for its Wix Payments service. GoDaddy is also among a growing number of website builders to offer POS equipment for selling in-person, although its POS system isn’t as advanced as the ones offered by rivals Shopify and Square.

Overall, GoDaddy’s ecommerce tools will be enough for small online retailers or service-based businesses who want to give their customers the option to pay online in advance.

But if you want a simple online store that integrates seamlessly with a complete POS system and doesn’t cost the moon, Square is a cheaper option, while Shopify is one of the best ecommerce platforms for small businesses looking to grow.

GoDaddy’s AI Tools

GoDaddy, like its competitors Wix, Squarespace, and Hostinger, has been expanding its AI toolkit, incorporating AI into a variety of areas besides initial website creation.

I tested GoDaddy’s AI website builder, and was generally pleased with the results, although like GoDaddy’s pre-made templates, the designs the AI website builder comes up with aren’t the most unique or modern-looking.

Other AI tools GoDaddy offers include AI-generated social posts, email marketing templates, and even a marketing calendar planner. These aren’t features offered by most competitors, besides Wix.

When it comes to the quality of the results, it’s a bit hit or miss. When I tested GoDaddy’s AI email marketing campaign creator, I noticed that, while the text was more or less reflective of my stated aim, the images the AI bot chose were not. I wanted to create an email campaign promoting my spa, but the images the AI bot chose showed construction workers.

GoDaddy also has an AI writer that can be used not just to write copy for emails and social posts, but also for your website. Like most AI writers, the copy GoDaddy’s AI bot produces generally matches the prompt you give it, but it can be a bit boring.

The AI writer can also only be used to write short-form copy, such as headings or small paragraphs. It can’t produce longer pieces of writing, such as blog articles or a lengthy “About Us” page. If you need a website builder with a more powerful writing tool, we recommend Hostinger or Wix.

Finally, GoDaddy has an AI SEO assistant and an AI help and support bot. As I’ve noted in my section assessing GoDaddy’s SEO tools, its AI bot is only capable of giving basic advice, so it shouldn’t replace a professional SEO expert.

Getting Help and Support With GoDaddy

GoDaddy’s customer support options are quite standard. There’s a phone line, with the company readily publishing its number online, a live chat, and a knowledge center with videos and tutorials.

The fact that GoDaddy makes its customer support number readily available is a plus, since 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.

That said, GoDaddy’s knowledge center isn’t as well-stocked as Wix or Squarespace’s. It doesn’t, for example, feature as many articles on SEO or optimizing your website for mobile. This means it’s not the best option for businesses that prefer to troubleshoot issues themselves.

You also have the option of hiring an expert directly through GoDaddy, with its network including website developers, SEO specialists, and marketing experts. This isn’t unique to GoDaddy, with rivals Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify offering the same service, but it’s an invaluable tool for businesses looking to grow their online reach.

How Does GoDaddy Compare to 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.

• Wix: Wix is a great alternative to GoDaddy if you want a website builder that offers similar built-in content creation tools, but offers a wider range of more modern-looking templates and a large app market for integrations. But be warned, Wix isn’t quite as easy to use as GoDaddy. Read our Wix review for more details.
• Squarespace: If your aim is to create a visually stunning website, then Squarespace should be your go-to choice. It has the most attractive templates of any website builder, plus with its newly introduced AI tools, it’s easier to use than ever. Like GoDaddy, it also has great booking tools. Read our Squarespace review for more details.
• Hostinger: If you want to create a website quickly with the help of AI tools and don’t want to spend a lot of money on it, Hostinger is a great alternative. In our most recent round of testing, it beat GoDaddy as the fastest way to build a website, plus it’s very user-friendly. That said, it doesn’t have as many content creation tools as GoDaddy. Read our Hostinger review for more details.
• Shopify: If you’re an ecommerce business, you might want to consider Shopify over GoDaddy if you plan on growing and expanding. Shopify is much more scalable than GoDaddy, and it offers a native POS system, allowing you to integrate and manage online and in-person sales from the same software. Read our Shopify review for more details.

Methodology: How We Tested GoDaddy