Based on our experience building a website with GoDaddy, as well as our experience with other website builders, we rated GoDaddy on its usability, design, and customization. So how did it stack up?
We gave GoDaddy five out of five on usability because, frankly, GoDaddy’s website builder feels easier to use than any other builder we tried. Navigating its menus is a breeze, in part because GoDaddy doesn’t present you with a lengthy and confusing list of options. It has short, clearly labeled menus that make it easy to find what you want and to make changes.
And if you don’t like looking through menus, you can always just select elements on the preview window to edit them. That feature might not sound significant, but it meant that we always knew we were editing the right element—something we missed when using builders that made it hard to tell if we had selected body text or a header.
GoDaddy’s website builder feels easier to use than any other builder we tried.
That ease of use helped us build our website in just 38 minutes. That’s right—in just over half an hour, we created a website that had a home page, an about page, a contact page, a store with several items, and a blog with three posts. And frankly, we were taking our sweet time with things.
So if you want a full-fledged website for your business in a fraction of the time it would take on most website builders, then GoDaddy is the way to go.
Of course, that fast build time does come with some limitations.
While we loved GoDaddy’s usability, its design features didn’t blow us away. So we gave GoDaddy an average design score of three out of five.
Other website builders let you customize design on a granular level—you can make each page or section look completely different with different fonts, colors, and layouts. But because GoDaddy has limited customization options (more on that in the next section), site design mostly comes down to how GoDaddy’s themes look. It offers only 19 themes (more on that too).
And honestly, they’re not all winners. A couple themes come with default font choices that are almost unreadable, and some layouts definitely look more professional than others.
We disliked Organic and its unreadable default font
That being said, we genuinely liked most of GoDaddy’s themes. They looked just as professional as free themes from WordPress or other website builders, and they’re all mobile responsive, so they’ll look good on your customers’ phones.
On the other hand, we liked Trade’s clean, bold look
With our theme of choice, we created a clean, readable website that users would trust. So as long as you don’t choose an ugly, unreadable theme, you’ll be fine.
Plus, GoDaddy has such limited customization options that you really don’t have the freedom to mess up a good template. With some website builders, a poor choice of text color or position can ruin what started out as a nice theme. Not so with GoDaddy. As long as you use reasonably good images, your website will turn out looking good.
So GoDaddy has great usability and decent design. Unfortunately, it didn’t score so well in our final category.
GoDaddy has far fewer customization options than other website builders, so it earned only two out of five.
As we said, GoDaddy has only 19 themes. Other builders have anywhere from dozens to hundreds. And while quantity doesn’t necessarily mean quality, it does mean customizability in this case.
Our site in each of GoDaddy’s 19 themes
Regardless of the theme you choose, GoDaddy lets you choose various content types to go on a page. This makes it easy, for example, to create an about page by choosing content that features images with text underneath—perfect for team photos and names. And since you can choose different combinations of these content chunks, your template won’t lock you in to specific page layouts.
And while that sounds good, it’s all downhill from there. GoDaddy’s website builder doesn’t give you control over the little details. So you can choose an overall color scheme, but you can’t change the color, font, or size of specific blocks of text. Likewise, you can’t change other basic features, like how links look when you hover over them or whether your theme’s top menu appears as a list of links or a hamburger icon.
So with just a few themes and limited customization options, GoDaddy feels lacking when compared to other builders where you can change the size, color, and font of each and every word.
Plus, GoDaddy doesn’t have plugins or apps. Other site builders have plugins and apps for anything from customer chat to accounting to calendar scheduling. GoDaddy doesn’t. If a functionality isn’t built into its website builder, you simply don’t get it.
As we pointed out before, GoDaddy has the basics—you can blog, sell, create appointments, etc. You just won’t be able to customize your experience or your website through plugins.
Keep in mind, though, that GoDaddy’s low customization score shouldn’t necessarily scare you off. If you want a site that looks good with minimal fine-tuning from you, then GoDaddy’s limited customization might feel more like a bonus than a drawback. It definitely helps the building go faster. Turns out you save a lot of time when you stop obsessing over whether your H2s (headers) should be cornflower or azure.
Looking for a specific feature? Our table shows you how GoDaddy’s features compare to competitors Wix and Squarespace.
Feature | GoDaddy | Squarespace | Wix |
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Online store
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Blog
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Product limit
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Credit card payments
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SSL security
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Mobile-friendly templates
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Discounts and coupons
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Gift cards
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Shipping quotes
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Transaction fees on third-party apps
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24/7 customer support
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Themes
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Apps
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Data effective 12/11/20. At publishing time, pricing and features are current but are subject to change. Offers may not be available in all areas.