GoDaddy is a familiar name in the web hosting industry and you probably know them as a domain registrar company. They offer a number of services, one of which provides platforms for creating websites. Is GoDaddy website builder good for starting an online business? I took it for a test run and wasn’t too impressed.
How Does It Work
Like most website builders, the setup is meant to be intuitive. It uses a swipe-and-style design interface and feature sections as the building block. During the signup process, you’ll be asked to select a theme based on your business category before starting on the site editing process.
Here’s a quick review of their pricing plans for this platform;
- Personal – $5.99/month
- Business – $9.99/month
- Business Plus – $14.99/month (<< this is the package that I’ll be discussing)
- Commerce – $29.99/month
What I Like
1 – Until last year, their themes weren’t responsive in design, but I am glad to see that this is not the case anymore. There are about 300 themes to choose from and although they aren’t as gorgeous as those on Squarespace, they still look professional.
2 – Their design interface isn’t as cluttered as others, which gives more space to imagine the type of layout that you want.
3 – Once the site is published, it integrates easily to create a Facebook page for your business – a feature that’s quite unique for a simple website builder.
4 – Another bonus is the email marketing system, something to take advantage of if you already have a list of client’s contact details.
5 – All of the four plans come with 1 month free trial and canceling the account is easy.
What I Dislike
If you have been reading some of website builder reviews in the past, you’ll know that I am not a big fan of using such platforms. Here are more reasons why I wouldn’t encourage you either.
1 – You are limited by what you can write on a page, specifically the number of words that you can type to create your content. I only used two paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum before I saw this message.
That’s not cool, especially when you have a lot to share about your business or even yourself.
2 – The website bears GoDaddy’s brand at the footer area and there’s no way to opt out of this. Not ideal if you want to build a solid brand for your business.
3 – You only get one menu for navigation which can display up to 5 pages. Beyond that, you can’t create any submenus even if you create more pages.
4 – While the subscription feature is nice to have, you are only limited to 500 subscribers and since this is an in-house service, it’s going to be very difficult to integrate with volume-based autoresponders such as Aweber or Mailchimp when the list gets longer.
5 – There’s no blogging feature on this platform – at all – and for me, that’s a huge disadvantage if you are trying to reach out to more online customers. You could incorporate external blogging platforms such as Google Blogger or Tumblr, but from what I read in the help section, it is a very frustrating process.
6 – Speaking of the help sections, they do have a lot of resources, but when it comes to very technical questions, the support from GoDaddy staff isn’t helpful at all. You can read all sorts of complaints on the thread.
7 – GoDaddy boasts that their new website builder is “designed for Google”, yet the only content that you can optimize is the homepage. If you want to rank on Google, you need to know what type of keywords to use AND produce helpful information/content based on those keywords. Unfortunately, this knowledge is not available on their resources.
8 – What’s more frustrating is that there’s no way to change/customize a theme once you’ve built a site. If you feel like you’ve landed on the wrong theme, you need to rebuild the site all over again (along with the content) on the new layout.
In situations like this, you’d expect GoDaddy to provide some kind of auto backup system, but after reading a number of complaints, this service appears to be non-existent for this platform.
Now, you know why I don’t like using website builders. Their simplicity and fancy designs almost always fail to provide features that are important to market a business online these days.
Fortunately, there’s a free trial for this one.
So, Is GoDaddy Website Builder Worthy of Your Time?
I like to put it this way. If you are like me, 2 years ago, who know nothing about creating a website, this platform can give some good visual impression on what you need to know. Once you understand what an online business truly needs, you’ll want more functions and that’s where the website builder isn’t an ideal choice anymore.
Whether you are a small business owner or a niche blogger, I would always recommend to start with WordPress. It’s one of the best platforms to get online traffic because it allows you to create massive content that attracts both the audience and the search engines. Now, GoDaddy does provide for WordPress hosting, but I have a better site to share with you.
At Wealthy Affiliate, you’d not only learn how to use WordPress from zero, but also get access to training that can take your business/blog to greater heights. Here is a glimpse of the tools and resources provided within the community.
I hope this comprehensive review has showed you what the GoDaddy website builder is capable (or not) of doing and that you’ll consider using WordPress instead for the long term benefits.
Hey, if you have any thoughts or questions, just leave them in the comment below and I’ll be more than happy to hear about them.
You may also be interested in;
How to Move A Website to WordPress
Rick says
In contrast to Go Daddy, I was just reading about how the WordPress account we get with a Wealthy Affiliates account allows us to have 25 Siterubix websites and 25 of your own domain websites – sorry I can’t really explain the difference but 50 sites on GoDaddy is going to cost a heck of a lot more for sure.
Also you get daily back up of your sites. Future SSL encryption (which will be required at some point) included with WA.
Your sites are double hosted. If one goes down then the second copy will be put up immediately. I can understand the support information given to me. Sometimes the offloaded support teams are hard for me to understand and I just read GoDaddy offloaded.
To me the advantage to go with Wealthy Affiliates, WordPress, and SiteRubix hosting is clear.
isaac says
Great review as always, Cathy.
GoDaddy really wants to make money from this. If the business plus plan has all of these disadvantages, I can’t imagine what the personal plan would be. The cap on word count is a deal breaker for me though. Not sure how you can rank on Google with such thin content. For me, the free WordPress platform is still the best =)
Adriana says
Hey, thank you for the review.
I was considering hosting my website with GoDaddy because they have great prices for domain names and was thinking about just saving money there, but seems like it would cost even more learning how to work things out. I would also eventually want more than 500 subscribers. This makes me think twice about using their services.
Rickprog says
I tried GoDaddy too. I got nowhere with it. When I tried to set it up, it wasn’t user friendly either. Also, it seemed that the business packages were too high for the amount of support available.
I ended up canceling after two months. They were prompt but I had to insist over the phone.
I’m a Wealthy Affiliate Premium member now, going on one month. The amount of support is over the top and the main reason is because of WordPress.
Now, I have a WordPress website that looks good and is built right – because of the amazing support they provide. This is certainly the way to go, I agree completely.
ririj says
When I first started my ideas and the names of my businesses which was like early last year or maybe the winter before, I had no idea what to look for in terms of a good website building platform. I knew nothing about keyword research and SEO. I got a site from GoDaddy and literally never accomplished anything besides making content that barely went anywhere because I didn’t know how to use keywords to my advantage.
If you can’t include at least 1,000 to 1,500 words in a post, you will not make it with GoDaddy, period.
I really enjoy how Wealthy Affiliate makes the whole process super easy so that I don’t have to worry about anything except writing great content.
Thank you for continuing to spread the word!
Derek Marshall says
Hi there Cathy,
I stopped using GoDaddy and most certainly never will ever use any of their products or services period after they dropped their free customer service via email in exchange for, well having to call them, which is actually fine for most people, but not being based in an English speaking country faced with expensive international call charges to Singapore!
It is in my opinion very amateurish of them to brand automatically your site with their logo with no way for small business owners to remove it – heck even with WordPress you can remove the “powered by WordPress” rather easily!
And with WordPress, and the whole variety and marketplace for premium (as well as free) and customizable themes – even have a theme made for you for a small fee, begs the question – why do we really need website builders?
Cathy says
Good question Derek.
I personally think that website builders are for those who are looking for cheap and easy-to-set-up solution. Things like events, portfolios or personal galleries could benefit from them. But if you are a brick-and-mortar business or a niche marketer who values good quality traffic, content management system like WordPress is definitely the next platform that you should be using regardless of its learning curve.
An online branding strongly depends on this foundation and I believe that you can never go wrong with WordPress – whether you are a solopreneur or a large scale company.