My Honest GoDaddy Website Builder Review: Worth It in 2026?

On this page

What are the Pros and Cons of GoDaddy?
1. What’s It Like To Use GoDaddy?
2. How Much Is GoDaddy?
3. What Are GoDaddy’s Templates Like?
4. What Features Does GoDaddy Have?
5. What AI Tools Does GoDaddy Have?
6. Can You Sell Online With GoDaddy?
7. What Support Is Available on GoDaddy?
How We Test
GoDaddy Website Builder Review – Summary

GoDaddy’s fast setup process, easy-to-use editor and handy marketing tools make it a great website builder for beginners who lack technical expertise. But, if you’re creating a complex website, you may find some of GoDaddy’s functions limiting.

In this review, I’ll go through each aspect of GoDaddy’s features, pricing and usability, to help you decide if it’s right for your business, right for your budget and whether it’s the best website builder for you.

I recommend GoDaddy for: / I don't recommend GoDaddy for:
Budget-conscious users with limited tech knowledge Services and appointments businesses Businesses wanting to market on social media	Building modern, design-focused websites Users who want to add third-party plugins Ecommerce stores with large inventories

 GoDaddy Review: Key Takeaways🔍
 
 GoDaddy has a free-forever plan but you’ll need the $20.99 plan to start selling.
GoDaddy has strong website features to help you grow, such as SEO, email marketing and social media integrations.
The platform offers over 200 templates and an AI website builder, though the AI designs are generic.
GoDaddy’s basic sales tools are only suitable for small ecommerce stores.

I’ve updated this page to reflect recent changes to GoDaddy’s premium plan fees. Previously, these cost between $9.99 and $20.99, but they’ve increased to range between $10.99 and $23.99. I’ve also highlighted improvements to its editor and GoDaddy Airo, and provided comparisons to its closest competitors, so you have the most up-to-date information to make your purchasing decisions.

What are the Pros and Cons of GoDaddy?

To help you decide whether GoDaddy is ideal for your business, here’s a quick rundown of its strengths and weaknesses:

Pros

✔️ Super-fast building experience

✔️ Great value for money

✔️ Strong marketing and appointment booking tools

Cons

❌ Websites built with the AI builder can look outdated and generic

❌ Lack of advanced editing features

❌ No app market for third-party plugins and integrations

As well as offering a website builder, GoDaddy is also a website hosting provider, known for its reliable 99.9% uptime rate. However, in this review I’m covering its website builder plans, which are solely focused on helping you build a website from scratch – without code or technical expertise.

1. What’s It Like To Use GoDaddy?

When booting up GoDaddy, I was asked what features I wanted for my website. I could choose between three options: “Sell with an online store”, “Book appointments online” or the ominously named “Something else”.

three options available for GoDaddy's ADI — I was greeted by this screen when opening up GoDaddy, which let me tailor my template based on the options shown. Source: Website Builder Expert

Can I Build With AI?

This is the first step of GoDaddy’s AI website builder which can build a personal template from scratch. Our testing found GoDaddy to have the simplest and fastest AI setup – generating unique template in under 30 seconds. Because of this, I recommended GoDaddy’s artificial design intelligence (ADI) for anyone completely new to building websites.

However, personalization suffers at the hands of this streamlined setup, and GoDaddy’s templates can feel generic and outdated. Alternatives like Squarespace’s Blueprint AI and Wix’s AI Website Builder add a few extra steps to the setup but provide a more developed and tailored starting template.

a finished GoDaddy ADI template — For my test website, I wanted to see GoDaddy ADI make a page for my imaginary restaurant “Wild West Hot-Dogs”. Source: Website Builder Expert

Once complete, you’ll be prompted to choose a pricing plan, but you can ignore it and continue on GoDaddy’s free plan for as long as you’d like – but be warned, features like SEO can’t be accessed unless you upgrade.

Editor Checklist

Once I’d made it into GoDaddy’s editor, a pop-up checklist of ready-made features I could add to my website appeared. This included:

Image Galleries: To display a carousel of high-quality imagery.
Reviews: I could connect my business website to Facebook and pull customer reviews onto the homepage.
Contact Us: A contact form alongside somewhere to display company details like emails, phone numbers and opening times if your business has a physical location.
Online Appointments: Add an online appointments section to your GoDaddy website where customers can book your services. However, you’ll need to be on the Premium plan to accept payments for these appointments.
Privacy Policy: Appearing near the bottom of your homepage, this is where you can clearly explain how your website uses user data and keeps it secure.
Subscription Forms: Where website users can sign up to your email list. Useful if your business has a regular newsletter.
Menu/Price Lists: Ideal for businesses with products or services, you can showcase your prices on your website in a sleek list.

I thought that this was a really nice touch since it saved time from having to find and add these features in the editor. You’re then able to “Take a Tour” of your new website, showing you exactly where the most important tools are.

an inner menu of GoDaddy's editor showcasing tis selections — Clicking on the “Add Section” button opened up GoDaddy's element menu, where I could pick and choose what features to have on my website. Source: Website Builder Expert

What’s GoDaddy’s Editor Like To Use?

With GoDaddy’s block-based editor, I could click the “Add Section” button, make my choice from the menu and see it inserted onto the page. In our group testing, my fellow writers also enjoyed how simple GoDaddy was to use. All of us were able to have a website live in around 30 minutes of editing.

While building a website with GoDaddy is simple, it’s also quite surface-level with limited customization. For a more visually exciting website, I recommend exploring Squarespace and Wix, which use a more fluid drag-and-drop editor and have plenty of design tools.

2. How Much Is GoDaddy?

GoDaddy has a free-forever plan as well as three paid plans, starting at $9.99 per month, when billed annually.

For context, Wix’s pricing starts at a much steeper $17 per month (billed annually). I was pleased to see that GoDaddy also brought back its free year-long Microsoft Email Essentials trial for those paying annually, which makes it even better value for money.

You can see the full breakdown of GoDaddy’s plans in this table:

	Plan name	Monthly price (paid monthly)

Basic	Premium	Commerce
$21.99	$39.99	$44.99
$9.99	$14.99	$20.99
close	close	check

Try GoDaddy	Try GoDaddy	Try GoDaddy

While these prices are good, they’re introductory deals. After a year they’ll renew at a higher price. Here’s a full list of the renewal prices:

Basic plan: $16.99 per month (billed annually)
Premium plan: $29.99 per month (billed annually)
Commerce plan: $34.99 per month (billed annually)

I was a little disappointed to see the prices go up rapidly after a year, though you can still test out GoDaddy without committing to a full year with its free plan.

I should mention the free plan has some limitations, such as banner ads advertising GoDaddy and no custom domain name – which is a big drawback for small businesses. But this free plan is great for giving the website builder a spin without having to commit any payments straight away.

Are There Additional Fees I Should Know About?

GoDaddy charges a number of additional fees on top of the initial plan subscription. Some of these are avoidable by going to other providers, or are waived for the first year of your subscription. However, selling fees are unavoidable.

Domains

Price: One year free, then prices start from $12.99 per month (billed annually)

GoDaddy is one of the biggest domain registrars on the web and offers those using its website builder a free domain for a year. Afterward, you’ll have to renew it. Regular “.com” domains are the cheapest, but more sought-after domains will have more expensive renewal fees.

Professional email

Price: One year free, then prices start from $7.99 per month (billed annually)

After your first year, you’ll also have to start paying GoDaddy to continue using your professional Microsoft 365 email. These plans are quite affordable, and worthwhile to have a branded domain email account.

Selling fees

Transaction fee: 2.7% +$0.30 on each ecommerce transaction
Processing fee: Varies between 2.6% + $0.10 and 3.5% + $0.49, depending on credit card carrier

If you’re planning on selling with GoDaddy, you’ll need to use GoDaddy Payments, which comes with the GoDaddy Commerce plan, a payment-processing service that charges both processing and transaction fees on all sales.

3. What Are GoDaddy’s Templates Like?

If you want to build a website without GoDaddy’s AI builder, GoDaddy has over 200 templates to choose from. Each template contains:

A mobile-friendly preview, which makes it easier than ever to ensure all of your site visitors have a positive experience – especially important since mobile users make up over 60% of online traffic.
22 Theme Customizer options which give you different layout variations. This speeds up the editing process and gives you some degree of choice, but this is as much creative freedom as you’ll get.

GoDaddy theme options showing both desktop and mobile versions — I had to leave GoDaddy's dashboard to view its template choices, which was annoying. However, the template choices themselves are attractive. Source: Website Builder Expert

Are GoDaddy’s AI Templates Good?

Primarily, GoDaddy relies on its AI website builder to make a custom template for you. While these templates are decent, and come with the benefit of already being specified to your answers, they can’t hide that, design-wise, GoDaddy is a bit outdated.

GoDaddy's theme optimizer, with a number of different options — GoDaddy offered different layout options for each template, both pre-made and ADI-generated. Source: Website Builder Expert

When I saw my own site, GoDaddy had filled it with images and text, giving me a really solid idea of what it should look like. However, when I tried to be a bit creative, GoDaddy’s design tools restricted me.

4. What Features Does GoDaddy Have?

If I were to describe GoDaddy’s features, I would call them “Wix-Lite”. Like Wix, GoDaddy has all the features a small business owner would need to run a successful website. These include:

Blog functionality
Image galleries
Embedded video and music
Google Maps integration
Contact forms
Promo banners
Call-to-action buttons
GoDaddy InSight scores

GoDaddy blog workshop in the dashboard — I found GoDaddy's blog tools in the dashboard. This let me better plan out my content without worrying how it would affect my site's design. Source: Website Builder Expert

However, while GoDaddy’s features get the job done, they aren’t as specialized as Wix’s — partly because GoDaddy has no App Market. If you need a specific tool or third-party plugin for your website, GoDaddy doesn’t have an easy fix for you, which dragged down its overall features score in our research.

But that doesn’t mean GoDaddy is useless. Far from it. Here I’ll highlight some of the features that GoDaddy does best:

📱 Social Media

With GoDaddy’s Studio app, you can use AI to create branded content for social media in the form of videos or ads for Facebook and Instagram. These are a great, creative way to get the word out about your website, as 92% of internet users consume online video in some form each day.

GoDaddy Studio for content creation — I was able to use GoDaddy Studio on both the mobile app and desktop. Here, I was able to create ads for social media and video content. Source: Website Builder Expert

On top of this, GoDaddy offers:

Facebook and Instagram integrations: This lets you synchronize posts and content across both platforms.
Post analytics: I was very impressed that I was able to track my posts’ performance – such as impressions and likes – all from the GoDaddy dashboard.
A social media calendar: Create, schedule and manage your marketing efforts from a user-friendly calendar.
Post planner: Get personalized AI post suggestions added to your social media calendar, based around holidays, celebrations and your brand

📨 Email Marketing

GoDaddy offers email marketing across all of its plans, letting you send promotional emails, welcome emails and even newsletters from the GoDaddy dashboard. You are able to send up to 100 emails per month on the Basic plan, and up to 100,000 on the most expensive Commerce plan.

Once sent, you can track their analytics like any email campaign. You can automate these emails and, if you’re on the Commerce plan, you’ll also get automated emails to confirm orders, or encourage customers to return to their abandoned carts.

📅 Bookings

GoDaddy has set itself up as a solid option for online booking websites, like those for yoga instructors or therapists. Its built-in booking tool performed as well in our testing as those on Wix and Squarespace, thanks to the following features:

Accept card payments, without having to pay for full ecommerce capabilities
Charge deposits and cancellation fees
Create group and one-to-one bookings
Share a schedule of recurring classes and events
Integrate to third-party calendars
Text and email notifications for both you and your clients

GoDaddy's booking page with metrics and analytics — GoDaddy has upgraded its bookings and appointments features to be accessed in the dashboard, with a full range of tools to use. Source: Website Builder Expert

What I noticed most of all was how integrated it was with GoDaddy’s other marketing tools – from emails to social media and texting. It also adds great organizational tools, like class lists and staff members.

While you can have one-time appointments on all plans, you’ll have to upgrade to at least the Premium plan to have access to recurring bookings and appointments. This means you can take appointments for as little as $16.99 per month (billed annually).

🔎 SEO

GoDaddy wasn’t the strongest SEO website builder we tested this year, but I loved how easy it was to use and understand. SEO can be a tricky skill to learn, and an even harder one to master – yet all new websites need to drive traffic to their pages.

Here’s what you can do with GoDaddy’s SEO tools:

Edit meta titles and meta descriptions: You can tweak these to change how your pages appear on search engine results.
Change URL slugs: Make sure that these URLs are SEO-friendly and clearly indicate the contents of each page.
Add image alt text: You can use this feature to describe the contents of your website’s imagery. This makes your website accessible for visually impaired users.
Receive keyword support: I could access GoDaddy’s SEO Wizard from the dashboard to generate relevant keywords for my website.
Use mobile responsive themes: This will enhance your website’s technical SEO and keep your website user friendly.

⌨️ Domains

GoDaddy is one of the leading domain registrars on the web, with 84 million domains and counting. The price for a domain is anywhere between $5.99 – $12.99 (VAT not included) to purchase a domain for one year, but competitive top-level domains like “.com” and “.ai” can go for more.

With over 84 million domains, GoDaddy may be your best bet on securing that perfect domain name. If you need a bit of help, GoDaddy has an AI-powered domain search tool to help you brainstorm the perfect one.

5. What AI Tools Does GoDaddy Have?

GoDaddy has really embraced the current AI website builder revolution. I’ve already mentioned a few of the AI features in this review, but here’s a quick recap of some of GoDaddy’s AI tools:

ADI – Artificial design intelligence used to build a custom template
AI branded content – Used in the GoDaddy Studio app to generate video content and social ads
AI domain search – Used to help users find the perfect domain name

GoDaddy Airo

GoDaddy Airo uses AI to help small businesses create an online presence even faster. This fully integrated feature will handle a lot of the work required in starting a new small business website, with GoDaddy’s research saying it will save new users $4,000 and roughly 300 hours of work. Handy!

Screenshot of domain search results using GoDaddy's AI tool, showcasing a "nickisnails.com" domain and its discounted pricing. — GoDaddy let me test out Airo's AI domain generator on the free plan. I typed in my test website's name to see which domain endings were free. Source: Website Builder Expert

GoDaddy came fifth in our AI website builder testing this year. While it doesn’t offer quite as many AI features as Wix or as high-quality AI designs as Squarespace, GoDaddy Airo is a low cost, beginner-friendly solution. Here’s what you can expect from Airo:

Logo designs: GoDaddy Airo can generate a unique logo for your business, which can help you get recognized online.
Create a “coming soon” website: Use this when you’re not ready to fully launch your business online yet.
Set up a professional email account and suggest social media handles: GoDaddy Airo bases these on your registered domain name, helping your business appear more professional within the market.
Generate product descriptions based on your uploaded product photos: This is similar to the Shopify Magic tool launched in 2023.
Register your business for a free LLC: All thanks to GoDaddy’s partnership with ZenBusiness.
Create email marketing campaigns: AI email templates can be automated which helps your business engage with your existing customers and target audience.
Generate a social media calendar and publish content: GoDaddy’s social media calendar tells you about important holidays and the best times to post. Airo can then fill the calendar with suggested ready-to-post content.
Create social media ads: GoDaddy Airo will help you build ads that can be placed on Google, Instagram or Facebook.
AI-powered SEO: This makes it easy to optimize your site for search engines.
Generated responses to customers: Using GoDaddy Airo, you can collect and reply to all customer interactions from across all your platforms.

GoDaddy Airo is being rolled out to users who purchase a GoDaddy domain and is currently available in English only.

6. Can You Sell Online With GoDaddy?

GoDaddy’s ecommerce tools are only available on the Commerce plan, costing $20.99 per month (billed annually).

the add a product page for GoDaddy — I was able to add physical products to my online store. I could also use AI to generate product descriptions. Source: Website Builder Expert

On the Commerce plan, you get:

To sell unlimited products
SSL Security to protect customer payments and transactions
To sell on social media and marketplaces
Abandoned cart recovery which sends reminders to customers when they’ve left an item in their cart
To accept payments from PayPal, Google Pay and Apple Pay
Promotions and discounts, such as digital gift cards or promotional banners
Free and paid shipping options
Site performance tracking from the dashboard’s built-in analytics

GoDaddy Poynt POS

Additionally, you can integrate your GoDaddy website with in-person sales. Once you’ve bought a GoDaddy Poynt Card Reader, which cost $99 each, you can start accepting payments from anywhere, be it your bricks-and-mortar store or a market stall. Just be aware that its in-person transaction fees are 2.3% per sale.

Quote

Are GoDaddy's sales tools any good?

Compared with other platforms on the market, GoDaddy’s ecommerce tools aren’t much to shout about. If you’re a small business and just plan to sell a few homemade products, then GoDaddy will be perfectly suitable. Anything more than that and you’ll need a powerful ecommerce provider like Shopify that’s better suited to businesses with a large or scaling inventory.

Emma Ryan Lead Writer

7. What Support Is Available on GoDaddy?

What happens when you get stuck? GoDaddy offers a fair amount of help and support for customers, including:

24/7 phone, text and live chat which is accessible from GoDaddy’s “Contact Us” page
Social media messaging, with GoDaddy’s business chat available from the official Instagram account
A knowledge center containing resources on account management, domains, marketing and other essential topics
A community forum, where you can ask other GoDaddy users for help
Additional video courses, webinars and podcasts

Screenshot of GoDaddy's 24/7 help page displaying contact options including phone, text, and live chat support. — When I had a problem with domains, I went to the "Contact Us" page and used the chat box to find help. Source: Website Builder Expert

With GoDaddy being so streamlined to use, I rarely had to use these help and support features at all, but it’s reassuring to know that they’re there. However, there were two issues:

Unclear feature signposting: For example, I went to the knowledge center only to find an article for a feature GoDaddy didn’t have.
Poor responses: In our testing, GoDaddy’s live chat had one of the slowest response times. And when I did receive a response, it took lots of back and forth before I got an adequate answer.

How We Test

For this in-depth review, I took a magnifying glass to GoDaddy to bring you a comprehensive run-down of its most relevant features and capabilities.

I have Website Builder Expert’s excellent research methodology to rely on, formulated by our team of researchers. They conducted over 300 hours of testing across six categories, with each category weighted uniquely based on its importance to business owners:

Website functionality: 30%
Design features: 25%
Pricing: 15%
User experience: 15%
Help and support: 10%
Reputation: 5%

Each year, we evaluate top website builders across these categories, building with and testing each builder ourselves, and collecting our findings to form the scores you see in this piece.

For GoDaddy, I was impressed by its particular strengths for new users; its super easy and quick builder, and its impressive list of business features. GoDaddy makes for a great website builder for those who need a business website but have limited technical knowledge.

Graphic breaking down Website Builder Expert's website builder testing into three steps: conducting business surveys to build a methodology, testing website builders, and finalizing scores

GoDaddy Website Builder Review – Summary

We recommend GoDaddy for anyone looking to build a website quickly without compromising too much on professionalism. For both entrepreneurs and small businesses, GoDaddy is an ideal choice. Its ADI editor makes building your site as easy as possible and also gives you options for customization.

GoDaddy’s website builder is great for selling online in small quantities, making it ideal for small businesses who are time-conscious and need a site live ASAP. However, if you want a personal website or your business is in an artistic industry, it may not be your best bet.

Let’s not forget that GoDaddy has made great headway in improving its SEO and site speed capabilities, so we can only expect it to level up from here – watch this space!

Curious to see where GoDaddy ranks overall? See our list of the best website builders.

Written By

Annie Angus

Annie Angus is a Writer for Website Builder Expert with a passion for shaping jargon-heavy research into digestible content. She has previously researched and written about industries ranging from tech to fashion, and now, after testing our top website builders such as Wix and Squarespace, she is enthusiastic to share her findings with our readers.

With first-hand experience in utilizing social media and online marketplaces to grow a small handmade clothing business, Annie understands the priorities and concerns held by SME owners, and knows precisely what they look for in a website builder. She combines this unique perspective with her knowledge of website builders to produce engaging content spanning all areas of the small business journey, from creating a strong website to growing and maintaining an audience.

You can read Annie’s articles below, or connect with her on LinkedIn.

More about

Reviewed By

Natasha Willett Lead Researcher

Natasha brings her expert credentials – a BSc, Ma, and MMRS – to Website Builder Expert. Natasha has qualifications in Advanced Statistical Analysis, MRS certificate in Market Research, Brand, Finding the Story in the Data, and Big Data: Measuring and Predicting Human Behaviour. These have allowed her to carefully analyze over 64 providers across website builders, ecommerce web builders, and hosting.

Natasha began building websites when studying sports science, originally using Weebly to create websites to help students learn in a more interactive way. During her first week at Website Builder Expert, she realized that website builders would become important in giving business owners full control over their websites. She began creating a rigorous methodology of research that centered around testing providers and products against a large set of mixed criteria turned into quantitative findings, comparing value for money, design, ease of use, and more. All to provide the most honest and objective insights rather than just looking at their claimed features.

In five years at Website Builder Expert, Natasha has attended multiple expos in her field, including ESOMAR, MRS, eCommerce Expo, Ad World, Digital Customer Engagement Summit, and IMRG, just to name a few. Natasha has also worked alongside website builders directly to share her research with them, so that they might improve their products for users.

She’s clocked an impressive 9,600 hours of product research and testing, pulling data from multiple sources and providing the Website Builder Expert team with the scores and product details they need to give you the best recommendations to succeed online.