GoDaddy Review, Pricing & Features

What is GoDaddy?

GoDaddy is a website building platform with over 20 million users. While most customers use it to purchase and host domains, it also includes a website builder with features like a WYSIWYG blog editor, ecommerce functionality, SEO tools, social media tools, email marketing, and analytics reports. These features let you create a compelling website and market your brand.

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Table of Contents

GoDaddy Review Summary

GoDaddy was founded in 1997 by Bob Parsons – GoDaddy’s current CEO is Aman Bhutani. GoDaddy’s mission is to empower its customers and entrepreneurs everywhere by giving them all of the tools they need to grow online. Today, GoDaddy has over 7,000 employees and is based in Scottsdale, Arizona.

GoDaddy is a no code website building software that helps its customers build their websites and brands. Its platform offers a website builder, a WYSIWYG blog editor, ecommerce functionality, SEO tools, social media tools, email marketing, and analytics reports. Overall, GoDaddy is best for those who want one platform to build a simple website and send basic email campaigns.

GoDaddy is an affordable solution relative to alternatives., Its most expensive website building plan is priced at $19.99 per month, and its only ecommerce plan is priced at $24.99 per month. Overall, we find GoDaddy’s pricing reasonable considering the features and functionality it offers.

We spoke with Shantay Williams, a realtor in Birmingham, Alabama, who uses GoDaddy to build her website, Shantay205. She specifically mentioned how user-friendly the platform is and that a major advantage GoDaddy has over other competitors is the ability to insert a social feed, like your Instagram feed, directly into your website.

Overall, GoDaddy is an easy to use, basic website building platform that includes digital marketing tools. However, it should be noted that its platform is not as feature-rich as its competitors like Wix and Squarespace.

  • If you want a highly customizable website builder that is accessible for beginners, then we recommend looking into Wix
  • If you want more control over your website’s design and functionality, then we recommend looking into WordPress
  • If you want the best website builder for design and showing off visual work, then we recommend looking into Squarespace

GoDaddy Pricing & Cost

GoDaddy's pricing ranges from $14.99 to $29.99 per month. It offers both website and ecommerce plans. You can also save up to ~33% if you pay for the annual subscription upfront.

You can currently use GoDaddy for free. You can also try a 30-day free trial of any of GoDaddy’s paid plans.

Plan TypePricing
Basic$14.99 per month
Standard$19.99 per month
Premium$24.99 per month
Ecommerce$29.99 per month
GoDaddy Pricing

GoDaddy Features

In our review, we will walk through the features offered by GoDaddy. We’ll discuss Godaddy’s usability, customer support, and describe the major benefits and drawbacks of the software. We’ll also show real images of the software to give you an idea of what it’s like to use the tool.

Website Builder

GoDaddy includes a builder that lets you customize your website’s design and edit its pages. Overall, GoDaddy’s website builder will help you build a standard website, but has below average usability. A major disadvantage of GoDaddy’s website builder is that it is not drag & drop.

GoDaddy Website Builder

GoDaddy lets you upload a wide variety of site elements – including images, videos, files, and audio. Unfortunately, it is difficult to add simple site elements with GoDaddy’s builder. For example, to add a standalone image, you would have to choose one of the image layouts that includes text and then delete the text elements.

Search bars and site navigation elements are also only available in certain templates. You also cannot place different site elements in the same line – each site element is a separate section on your pages. This limits design flexibility.

Creating & Managing a Blog

Blogs are informal or conversational articles that are written to demonstrate expertise or share an opinion on a specific topic. There are several reasons why blogging is beneficial for your site. This includes:

  • Driving traffic to your website
  • Converting visitors to leads and customers
  • Giving you or your company a voice

GoDaddy includes a "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) editor, commenting, and the ability to organize your posts by date. However, these features are much more basic in GoDaddy than alternative platforms like Wix and Squarespace. If blogs are a priority for you and your business, we recommend using another solution.

WYSIWYG Blog Editor

A WYSIWYG editor lets you edit your content as it will appear when published. The biggest advantage of this editor is that you don’t need to have any programming knowledge in order to design your blog. Overall, GoDaddy’s WYSIWYG blog editor is easy to use, but that’s because the feature itself is basic.

GoDaddy Blog

GoDaddy only lets you add images, videos, and dividers to your blog articles. Also, unlike other solutions, you cannot tag your blog posts in GoDaddy. This makes it harder for your readers to look up certain content and for search engines to understand your content.

GoDaddy does not offer key SEO customizations like editing a post’s URL slug, title, and description. You can only write an SEO description for your post’s featured image.

Enabling Comments on Blog Pages

Enabling comments on your blog posts has many benefits. These include:

  • Providing social proof that your content is engagement-worthy
  • Helping you understand what your readers want you to write about
  • Deepening your relationship with your readers through back-and-forth dialogue
  • Increasing the likelihood that readers will engage with your site in other ways like subscribing to an email newsletter

GoDaddy integrates with Disqus, a comment hosting service. With it, readers can comment, like, reply, and attach files to their comments. Through GoDaddy’s own platform, you can enable anonymous commenting and view how many times a post has been commented on.

However, in order to moderate your comments, you would need to create a Disqus account. In addition, Disqus comments are likely to slow down your website.

Displaying Your Most Recent Posts on Your Website

Displaying your recent posts on the front page of your website introduces new content to your visitors. This can help increase your blog traffic and overall page views.

GoDaddy Recent Posts

GoDaddy offers a "blog" site element that displays your blog posts based on the date they were posted. However, this feature does not let you choose specific posts to display.

Ecommerce

In addition to building a website, GoDaddy can be used to run an eCommerce business. GoDaddy offers key ecommerce features including inventory management, order management, payments, tax calculations, shipping rate calculations, coupons, and abandoned cart recovery.

Inventory Management

GoDaddy lets you add physical and digital products to your ecommerce store, and track your inventory. Overall, GoDaddy’s inventory management feature is above average, but its inventory tracking feature is average.

GoDaddy Inventory Product

To start adding products to your store, you choose the product type, and enter a name, price, and SKU number. You can also:

  • Write a description
  • Edit a product’s URL slug
  • Add variations of a product
  • Categorize your products

GoDaddy offers useful filters that you can use to view specific products – including those for most popular, price, alphabetical order, and quantity. GoDaddy also includes a search bar that you can use to look for specific products.

GoDaddy Inventor

GoDaddy lets you track your products by stock amount. GoDaddy also lets you send yourself "low stock" email notifications if a product’s stock hits a certain inventory count.

Order Management

GoDaddy lets you view your shipped and completed orders. Overall, this feature is robust in GoDaddy and intuitive to use.

GoDaddy Order Management

As you can see above, GoDaddy displays the order number, date of purchase, name of customer, total cost, payment status, and fulfillment status. GoDaddy also lets you search for orders based on these criteria, and view orders between certain dates.

Payments

Being able to accept a wide range of payments will typically increase your website’s conversion rate and revenue. Below are the payment options that GoDaddy lets you accept from customers. It should be noted that certain payment options also come with processing fees.

Payment TypeProcessing Fee
Credit & Debit Cards2.9% + $0.30
PayPal2.9% + $0.30
Stripe2.9% + $0.30

Tax Calculations

GoDaddy lets you calculate taxes for different countries and specific regions. You can also choose whether your tax is added at checkout or included in your prices. This feature is basic, but easy to use. A disadvantage of this feature is that GoDaddy does not offer automatic tax calculations.

GoDaddy Tax

Shipping Rates

Calculating your shipping rates can be difficult, especially if you are new to owning an online business. Luckily, GoDaddy lets you input your own shipping calculations and automatically calculates shipping rates for USPS and UPS. This feature is overall easy to use.

GoDaddy Shipping

GoDaddy lets you add free shipping, or calculate flat and weight-based shipping rates. A disadvantage of this tool is that you cannot take into account different package sizes when calculating your rates.

Coupons

GoDaddy lets you create coupons that can be applied towards your products. These help promote your products, and increase your sales. This feature in GoDaddy is sufficient and easy-to-use.

GoDaddy lets you choose if your coupon is a dollar amount, percentage, or redeemable for free shipping. You can also:

  • Name your coupon
  • Limit your coupons to only apply to certain products
  • Choose a start and end date
  • Limit how many times it can be used
  • Require a minimum order total in order to use

Abandoned Cart Recovery

Recovering abandoned carts is a guaranteed way to increase sales. GoDaddy lets you automatically send an email to customers to remind them that their cart is currently abandoned. Unfortunately, GoDaddy does not let you customize the email sent to your customers.

GoDaddy Abandoned Cart

GoDaddy also offers dashboard information about the abandoned carts you’ve recovered. This includes the:

  • Total revenue recovered
  • Number of carts recovered
  • Number of abandoned carts emailed
  • Total percentage of carts recovered

Marketing & Driving Traffic to Your Website

After you’ve created your website, you want to make sure that your content actually reaches an audience. GoDaddy offers marketing features that help build relationships with readers and drive traffic to your website. This includes SEO tools, social media marketing, testimonials, contact forms, and email marketing.

Online Search & SEO Optimizations

Unlike other solutions, GoDaddy offers an in-platform SEO tool that generates keywords you can use to optimize your website pages. Overall, this feature is very basic. However, it is a nice introduction for those who are unfamiliar with keyword research.

GoDaddy SEO

In order to use this tool, you need to input 1-2 keywords that you think best describe your website. Afterwards, GoDaddy will generate other keywords that you can choose from. You can then include these keywords in your page title and description in Google Search, and to your website’s content.

If you’re interested in SEO, we recommend exploring our list of best SEO tools.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is one of the best methods to connect with your audience and increase brand awareness. GoDaddy’s social media marketing features are more advanced than those found in Squarespace and WordPress.

GoDaddy Social Media

You can create posts that can be shared on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google. Unlike other solutions, GoDaddy offers a content creator that is similar to a simplified version of Photoshop.

You can use templates for Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and Google Ads posts and add images, text, and shapes. You can then download these images and share them on the platforms listed above. The only downside with this feature is that you cannot create or post videos.

Testimonials

Testimonials are a form of social proof that build credibility and trust with website visitors. They provide an objective point of view and humanize your brand.

GoDaddy Reviews

GoDaddy offers a "Reviews" site element that you can insert easily into your website pages. You can add them manually or source them externally. You can also arrange the order of your reviews, choose a background image, and choose their accent colors.

Contact Forms

Contact forms are one of the easiest and most effective ways to win new subscribers and capture detailed customer information. GoDaddy offers a wide range of customizable contact forms.

GoDaddy Contact Form

You can customize a total of 14 different form fields – including name, email, phone number, and attachments. You can also activate an email opt-in checkbox and send a thank you message to those who fill out your form. However, you can only receive your form fill-out notifications by email.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is another key marketing channel for website traffic and customer engagement. GoDaddy’s email marketing features are advanced relative to other website builder platforms. If you’re interested in email marketing, we recommend exploring our list of best email marketing tools.

GoDaddy Email

GoDaddy lets you create four different types of email marketing campaigns – including sales campaigns, event invitations, custom campaigns, and traditional newsletters. You can add images, text, and buttons to your campaigns. You can also add campaign recipients manually or with a subscribers list.

GoDaddy also lets you track how your campaigns are performing. You can track who clicked your links and who viewed your links.

Analytics

Once you’ve created and marketed your website, it’s important to understand how your website is performing. Your site’s data can help you make website improvements that increase engagement.

Unfortunately, GoDaddy’s traffic dashboard is incredibly basic – it only displays how many visits your website has received. However, unlike alternatives like Squarespace and WordPress, GoDaddy does offer reports with information about your sales, and customers.

Sales Report

GoDaddy offers a sales report that lets you compare two sales periods. Overall, this feature offers basic sales information.

GoDaddy lets you filter your results by product, order, and customer type. You can also view your revenue generated and the revenue difference between the two sales periods.

Customer Reports

GoDaddy also offers basic reports that provide information about a customer’s purchasing habits. You can use this report to learn how to better target your customers and recommend the best products to them.

As you can see below, GoDaddy lets you see how much a customer has spent and the products they have purchased.

Mobile

GoDaddy offers Android and iOS mobile applications that you can use to manage and edit your website. Unfortunately, GoDaddy’s mobile app is not user-friendly and not as informative as other mobile apps like Squarespace’s.

GoDaddy Mobile

While GoDaddy’s mobile app lets you edit your website pages, we do not recommend using it for this purpose. We found this functionality confusing to navigate, and not intuitive. GoDaddy also only provides basic information about the number of orders and page views your website and online business have received.

Legal & Security

Having proper website and data security is essential in protecting your site from DDoS attacks, which make a network resource unavailable by disrupting the services of a host connected to the Internet. It also protects against malware and prevents perpetrators from gaining access to your and your visitors’ confidential information.

Therefore, it’s important that your website building software complies with certain legal and security standards.

FeatureOffered by GoDaddy
SSL CertificateYes
Two-factor AuthenticationYes
International CompliancesYes (GDPR)
FirewallYes (WAF)
PCI ComplianceYes

GoDaddy Customer Support

Overall, we found GoDaddy’s customer support to be above average. This is because GoDaddy’s customer support is quick to respond, and GoDaddy offers a wide range of customer support outlets.

GoDaddy’s help articles contain a lot of detailed information and are written very succinctly. GoDaddy also increases the readability of its articles by bolding certain terms, inserting videos, and editing images to highlight the specific features they are referencing.

Customer Support ChannelsLive Chat, Phone Number, Chatbot
Customer Support Availability24/7
Other Support ResourcesCommunity Forum, Knowledge Base, FAQs
Platform Update NotificationsYes
Application Status PageYes

GoDaddy vs. Competitors

In terms of usability and feature functionality, GoDaddy is similar to Wix. Compared with Squarespace and WordPress, GoDaddy is less advanced, but easier to use.

The top GoDaddy competitors are:

Is GoDaddy Right For You?

Overall, GoDaddy is an easy to use, basic website building platform that includes digital marketing tools. However, it should be noted that its platform is not as feature-rich as its competitors like Wix and Squarespace.

  • If you want a highly customizable website builder that is accessible for beginners, then we recommend looking into Wix
  • If you want more control over your website’s design and functionality, then we recommend looking into WordPress
  • If you want the best website builder for design and showing off visual work, then we recommend looking into Squarespace

If you are interested in trying GoDaddy, sign up for a 30-day free trial.

Amy Yang

Amy Yang is a Junior Research Analyst at SoftwarePundit, where she conducts in-depth analyses on software markets and products. Amy has expertise in content production and managing digital and social platforms. She has a Bachelor of Science in Communication & Media, and a Minor in Web Programming and Applications from NYU. You can connect with Amy on LinkedIn.

Amy is an expert in several software categories including:

  • Course creation software
  • Electronic signature software
  • Social media software
  • Website builder software