GoDaddy Review: Should You Go For It?

Is GoDaddy the right website builder for your business? Read our review to find out…

GoDaddy has a stellar reputation for helping businesses host and build websites. Year after year, they smash industry records and win new customers.

Naturally, you’d expect great things from GoCentral, GoDaddy’s browser-based website building software. And, by and large, it doesn’t disappoint. GoCentral is an excellent, easy-to-use product. We built a site with it in less time than it took to write this GoDaddy review. I’ll show you just how easy this was. I’ll also explain why GoDaddy’s website builder won’t be to everyone’s tastes.

GoDaddy Website Builder Features and Benefits

GoCentral has all kinds of things going for it that make it one of the best quick-start website builders around. Here are a few of our favourites:

✔ Sleek templates

There are thousands of sleek website templates for different industries. Whether you run a construction company, a jewellery store or a restaurant, you'll find templates to match.

✔ Superb SEO 

GoDaddy has an expert SEO team who really know their stuff. Don’t believe us? Kick things off with a free phone consultation with one of their staff, and we bet you’ll be impressed. Site audits, competitor research, analytics; you name it, they do it. Not only do you need a website for your business, you need customers to find it more easily, and that's how GoDaddy's SEO tools can help.

✔ Excellent ecommerce features

It's easy to add ecommerce features to your site. You just select the ones you need and GoDaddy guides you through setup. The popular open source ecommerce software, Magento, is also available as a 1-click install.

✔ Strong web security

GoDaddy's web security is one of the best in the business, so you don't have to pay extra for third party guarantors. Sitewide SSL encryption and certification is included with your business subscription.

✔ Embed Google Maps and more

You can embed widgets from Google Maps, Youtube, Soundcloud, and more. With these options, you can improve your customers' on-site experience.

✔ Impressive email marketing

You can segment customer email addresses to help you target different customers with different emails, and send newsletters using GoDaddy's email software (available at an extra cost).

It's always important to understand how much it costs to build a website for your business. GoDaddy’s Personal Plan is for small websites with low traffic. The Business tier is best for entrepreneurs and small businesses – the unlimited bandwidth is great, but you should be aware that they tier pricing by the number of visitors to your site. So, you can go wild building the best website ever, but make sure you budget for increased hosting costs as more people discover it.

Business Plus is best if you’re trying to build an email or social media following through your site. Gyms, restaurants and businesses that rely on customer bookings will benefit the most from the online appointment scheduling that comes with this plan.

If online retail is your jam (and, given the importance of e-commerce UX), GoDaddy’s Online Store justifies the extra spend. In our experience, offering more on-site payment methods keeps customers from clicking away to your nearest competitor.

All these plans come with a 30-day free trial, which we tested for this GoDaddy review. It makes sense to try before you buy, and in GoDaddy’s case, you’re able to put their website builder through its paces before you commit to anything.

What is GoDaddy's Customer Support Like?

As the largest hosting company in the world, GoDaddy has the scale and resources to serve customers in ways that few can. The result?

• 4,700 customer support reps
• 24/7 phone support in 30 languages.
• Online chat support
• 99.9% server uptime (the amount of time that your website is live)

In particular, 24/7 phone support is a rarity in the world of web hosting. When we called their US support line for this review, we spoke with a knowledgeable and friendly customer service agent. Their chat help reps also gave me helpful, speedy responses to my questions.

In general, we found speaking with GoDaddy’s staff more useful than surfing GoDaddy’s website for answers.

Bluehost vs GoDaddy

GoDaddy and Bluehost are close competitors for your bandwidth. But, when it comes to website builders, they really don’t compare. GoDaddy has the edge. That’s because GoDaddy offers their own website builder, while Bluehost doesn’t.

But, that doesn’t have to stop you from powering your dream website with Bluehost. It just means that you’ll need to use another company’s website builder to create it. For example, you can design your site in Weebly’s website builder, and use Bluehost’s servers to run it. Bluehost also works closely with WordPress to offer the best WordPress hosting rates of any top web hosting company. One-click installs of Page Builder and countless other WordPress add-ons make it simple to set up a site with Bluehost.

But, for simplicity and speed of use, GoDaddy is in a league of its own. The learning curve with WordPress Bluehost is steeper, so unless you’ve used it before, it’s trickier to create a site from scratch.