GoDaddy is ubiquitous when it comes to anything on the web. It’s the world’s biggest domain registrar, and it has held that title for a long time. GoDaddy Websites + Marketing is a expansion of that strength; if you’re already getting a domain name from GoDaddy, why not get a website to go along with it? What used to be the GoCentral website building tool is now an 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. Sadly, there’s only one e-commerce plan available if selling products online is your focus.
Plans and Prices
If you’ve used the old GoCentral website builder, there’s good news: your account has been automatically updated to GoDaddy Websites + Marketing. You don’t need to do anything on the back end. If you’re new to GoDaddy’s web builder, however, you can build a GoDaddy Websites + Marketing site for free. That said, it’s only a trial period; after a month, you must break out a debit or credit card.
GoDaddy Websites + Marketing has four pricing tiers that are designed to appeal to people with different 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. In a nice touch, GoDaddy doesn’t place a strong cap on your site’s storage or data transfers totals; in fact, a GoDaddy representative stated that the totals are so high that most sites won’t reach them (and if they do, they can call GoDaddy to have the caps raised). It’s essentially “unlimited” storage and data transfers.
The entry-level Basic plan ($14.99 per month) lets you connect one social media platform, create five social media posts and responses per month, and send 100 marketing emails per month. The Standard package ($19.99 per month) is similar to Basic, except that it ups the social media listings to three, social posts to 20 per month, and marketing emails to 500 per month. The Premium plan ($24.99 per month) builds upon Standard with its unlimited social media platforms and posts, and 25,000 marketing emails per month. This tier also includes free Bing, Google, and Yelp ad credits ($100, $100, and $300, respectively), as well as the ability to book recurring events and classes, accept online payments, and other features.
The Ecommerce plan ($29.99 per month) is GoDaddy’s top-level website builder tier. Like the Premium plan, Ecommerce has unlimited social media platforms and posts. It also includes the ability to add and edit product listings, set up shipping options, sell items through an online store, manage promotions and discounts, sell on online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, and more. If you’re serious about selling products online, the Ecommerce plan is the one for you. That said, we don’t like that online store creation is exclusive to this tier.
GoDaddy Websites + Marketing’s pricing is comparable to the competition’s premium tiers: Editors’ Choice pick Wix starts at $13 per month, Editors’ Choice pick Duda starts at $19 per month, and Squarespace starts at $12 per month. Note that you can subscribe to GoDaddy Websites + Marketing on a month-to-month basis, but there is a 15 percent discount that comes with signing up for a year. Unfortunately, there are no ad-supported free accounts like those offered by Weebly and Wix.
Getting Started
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, through Facebook, or by signing up using an email address and password. Before you choose a template, GoDaddy Websites + Marketing’s startup wizard asks you what your site is going to be about and what name it should have. For our test site, the wizard picked a template that featured a typewriter, based on our desire for a writer-focused site.
The template designs are modern and attractive. The template previews have button to show the site in desktop and mobile versions, so you have some idea 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. It’s worth noting that once you’ve picked a template, you seem to be locked into it for your site. There are themes, but these are small changes on the overall template.
Building a 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. There’s a dedicated social media section that lets you add Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, and Houzz accounts. GoDaddy Websites + Marketing accounts start with a yousitename.goddadysites.com URL, but you can connect a domain name you already own, or pick up a custom domain with a GoDaddy Websites subscription. If you go the latter route, the custom domain is free for the first year.
Clicking “Edit Website” takes you into the website builder proper. You’re treated to a view of your website, with sections highlighted as your scroll over them. Compared to some website builders, you’re severely limited in that you can only insert predesigned sections; you can’t just drag a new element in from a list. Instead, you have to scroll over a section and click the big plus icon to add a new section. Then you’ll be 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 want control over 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 a bit 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. There aren’t many image editing options either. GoDaddy Websites + Marketing lets you zoom images, rotate them, and flip them from color to black and white. Most site builders include at least some of this type of image-editing functionality, and many integrate the excellent Aviary online image editor. Here, there’s next to nothing.
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 start adding content sections to it. The newly created page is completely empty, save for a header, footer, and center section where you can start adding sections. You can now make individual pages, but not the entire site, private by requiring a membership sign in.
Just about every edit you make in GoDaddy Websites + Marketing is automatically saved. At any time during editing, you can hit Preview to see what the site looks like in its current state. The preview shows both desktop and mobile views.
A Small Business Website Builder
There are a few ways to start your website bringing in cash, both in the form of page sections: You can upgrade to the Online Store account level, add a PayPal donation button, or display ads using Google AdSense (which is frowned upon on today’s web, and doesn’t produce much income).
When we upgraded to the Online Store account level, we discovered that a Shop page was 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. There’s also excellent help with inventory and shipping options, with UPS and USPS integrations. You can get paid through Stripe and PayPal, both excellent services. You get professional-looking shopping cart and checkout pages, and you can even have text messages sent to you about incoming orders. One thing you cannot do is sell downloadable files.
All account levels include a spiffy email marketing tool. This lets you blast a template-based email out to all those who signed up for membership on your site. You get choices of sales campaigns, events, and standard newsletters. It’s a flexible and customizable tool, letting you track responses and schedule 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 absolutely 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—actually editing your site from a mobile device—is an extra advantage of GoDaddy Websites + Marketing. You can do just about 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 starts you off with making your site look 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 most likely won’t appear in web search results until you’ve verified the site with the search engines.
Knowledgeable Customer Service
As such a huge company, GoDaddy does excel in terms of support. It has 24/7 phone support and 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—we asked about the free trial length, and it took approximately 2 minutes to get an answer—but we did get a suitable answer.
Excellent Uptime
Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. If your site is down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services. You do not want that.
We used a website-monitoring tool to track our GoDaddy-hosted test site’s uptime over a 14-day period. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings the test website and sends an email if it is unable to contact the site for at least 1 minute. The testing data reveals that GoDaddy Websites + Marketing is remarkably stable; in fact, it didn’t go down once in the two-week testing period. So, you don’t need to worry about extended downtime.
A Well-Rounded Site Builder
GoDaddy Websites + Marketing is one of the simpler site-building options available, and it can deliver good-looking sites for both 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. The lack of photo editing and mobile customization may put off some would-be site creators.
This iteration of the service is still fairly new, though, and may continue to grow in time. Though GoDaddy Websites + Marketing is excellent, our website builder Editors’ Choices picks—Duda, Gator, and Wix—offer richer offerings and more customizability.
For more on getting started building your site, read How to Create a Website and How to Register a Domain Name. Check out our website SEO tips, too.
Editor’s Note: Michael Muchmore contributed to this review.
