Jimdo for personal blogging

So…Jimdo has no blogging capabilities. Its ADI software has still yet to add dedicated blogging capabilities, which is really quite disappointing. You still could still set up a personal blog through editing afterward, but you would be giving yourself a lot of extra work. In all honesty, it’s not worth it since there are many other builders that are specifically designed for blogging.

At Website Builder Expert, we’re proud of the research we conduct into different online industries, including the blogging space. And as far as blogging goes, Squarespace came out on top with its strong aesthetic abilities and ease of setup. It lets you easily link your blog posts to other social channels for marketing purposes, and get analytics to see how your posts are doing – a blogger’s dream!

Jimdo for small businesses

If you’re a small business that wants an online presence, Jimdo is perfect. You can get a professional-looking site up in a matter of hours to help advertise your brand.

There are a good amount of features and lots of third-party apps, which we’ll get into later. These can help you with anything from advanced analytics to running solid email marketing campaigns.

If you’re a large business, you may be better suited to something like Wix. With over 800 design templates, you have a huge amount of creative freedom to really make the site unique to your brand.

Jimdo for ecommerce

If you’re looking to start selling online, Jimdo offers an array of ecommerce features to get your store off the ground. You’ll have access to a professional domain, plus the ability to add product galleries, and you can hook up worldwide payment methods such as PayPal or Visa.

Jimdo’s standout ecommerce feature is its “no commission fee” policy. Any sale you make, the platform doesn’t impose any sneaky fees – so you get to keep 100% of your hard-earned money!

However, we’d definitely recommend Jimdo for advertising products, rather than selling them. It’s a great platform if you own a cafe, for instance, because its category and product gallery elements let you display food menu items, locations, and opening hours really well.

Whereas, if you’re a retail company and your primary focus is to sell clothing online, you’d be better off with more powerful platforms like Shopify or BigCommerce.

Jimdo for portfolio

As we mentioned above, Jimdo is ideal for displaying images and creating beautiful galleries, but it’s good to note that the templates are limited for someone in the artistic industry.

Photographers, graphic designers, and stylists should look at something like Squarespace. With templates tailor-made for creative types, Squarespace is perfect for any kind of online portfolio.

You might see the name “Jimdo Dolphin” swimming about (excuse the pun!), which is essentially Jimdo’s ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) website builder. Dolphin uses ADI to create a website for you based on how you answer a series of questions. This way, your design process is more streamlined and specific to your needs!

With this in mind, Jimdo – and more specifically the Dolphin ADI product – is great for users with basic computer skills, or for those who don’t have a lot of time on their hands but still want to achieve an awesome online presence.

How Does Jimdo Work?

When you sign up to Jimdo, you’ll be asked a series of questions such as:

• Who you’re creating a website for 
• What the website is for – e.g. a personal project, event or established business
• What your website goals are – e.g. to promote content 
• What your website is about, such as fashion or PR
• Which styles and colours you most prefer out of the given combinations 
• Which pages you’d like to add

Jimdo Starter Quiz

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Jimdo gets you started with an easy question on the path to customization.

Jimdo offers varied choices for business category.

Jimdo asks you to consider the goals of your website, so it can help you design and build the right website for you.

Once you’ve answered these questions, Jimdo has a better insight into your online requirements and business goals, which allows it to design your perfect website accordingly.

It still gives you the option to add or delete blocks of content as you go along. This is super helpful if you want to continue customizing your site off the back of what Jimdo initially creates for you.

What’s great about this building process is that you can pull things from social media or existing websites onto your new site pretty instantly. The downside, however, is that the platform is pretty limited in terms of how much you can actually edit yourself.

In terms of producing a ready-made website in just a few minutes, AI website builders are generally really easy to use. This is because they eliminate the time investment that comes with the “drag and drop” interface, taking the world of website building to a new level.

After you answer a few questions and select styles and colors, Jimdo will create your website in just a couple of clicks. If you choose to add more elements, you have the option to select “add block” and pick anything from text, images, and multiple-grid slideshows.

Jimdo helps you easily create websites, blogs, or online stores

Visit Jimdo Site

With that said, we did put Jimdo to the test against other website builders out there to draw up some comparisons. 

We tested this by getting everyday people to build their own website using Jimdo, before gathering feedback. We found that some users still felt as though they had the creative freedom to execute their ideas, but this was only the case at a basic, starter level.

It’s clear from our research that Jimdo’s ADI platform was more helpful than restrictive for users, and still holds onto the “fun” of editing whilst doing a lot for you initially. Although it’s really easy to use, Jimdo is definitely a website builder that eliminates a lot of the creative processes behind designing a website because of the more structured format of the ADI tool.

If you still want to add your own touch to your site, we would recommend adding different blocks and elements to help jazz it up. Jimdo recently introduced Smart Apps, allowing users to embed content from a number of the web’s best-loved sites. From Calendly, Pinterest, Airbnb, and Twitter, you can include and customize these extras to suit your needs, giving you a great level of personal touch to your site. 

Overall, Jimdo scored 3.4 out of 5 for ease of use during our in-house research. A middle-of-the-road score, it falls behind the likes of Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy, which all scored above a 4 out of 5.

Pricing is Jimdo’s most competitive category, earning 4.8 out of 5 in our research! Jimdo plans happen to vary depending on region – and so do the price tags, for that matter. In the US, the platform offers two paid plans:

• Start Plan ($9 per month)
• Grow Plan ($14 per month)

Wix, for example, costs $16 per month for its lowest plan and so we awarded it a 3.4 out of 5 for its value of money. Sure, you get a lot more with Wix – it has the best features of any builder we’ve tested – but its higher price tag means a reduced value score when compared with Jimdo’s much cheaper plans.

Additionally, we want to mention Play – Jimdo’s free plan – which is a great way of getting started on the website builder. It’s really easy to test out for yourself and offers basic design templates to create a simple site for you in no time. Anything beyond that, we’d recommend going for a premium-paid plan.

The Play plan comes with Jimdo advertising in the footer of your website, and a not-so-attractive Jimdo subdomain. This isn’t something you’ll want when trying to achieve a professional site to showcase your best work – but the free plan is an option to consider if you just want to test out the platform.

It’s important to note that help and support features are a lot more restrictive on the free plan compared to Jimdo premium plans. You’ll be looking at a 1-2 business day turnaround when placing a help request – which isn’t the best when you need a quick fix to your problem.

It’s safe to say, you get what you pay for – or, in this case, what you don’t pay for!

Try Out Jimdo's Free 'Play' Plan Today!

Take Me to Play

To really get the most out of your website-building process, we’d suggest upgrading to one of the two premium plans that Jimdo offers.

If you choose to level up to Jimdo’s Start plan for $9 per month, you’ll get all your Play plan features, plus:

• Free domain 
• Ad-free website 
• Up to 10 website pages 
• Access to image library
• Customer support within 1-2 business days 
• Advanced SEO tools
• Mobile optimization

Jimdo seems pretty reasonable with its premium plan prices compared to other competitors on the market. Squarespace, for example, starts its pro plans at $14 per month but comes with a 14-day trial for users to explore.

Jimdo’s Grow business plan is its best-seller at $14 per month – you get access to all of the above Start plan features, and more, including:

• 50GB of storage
• 50 web pages
• 5 forwarding emails
• Help and support within 4 hours.

While a 4-hour support turnaround is better than waiting 1-2 business days, it’s not much of an improvement, especially in the help and support area. Builders like Wix and Squarespace can offer 24/7 support across all plans. In our research, Jimdo earnt a 2.5 out of 5 for its support.

Jimdo also has its ecommerce plans; the Business and VIP plans

• Business Plan ($18 per month)
• VIP Plan ($24 per month)

The Business Plan is much like the Grow Plan, except with a larger focus on the ecommerce side. The VIP Plan is Jimdo’s most feature-heavy plan, offering unlimited bandwidth, web pages, and customer support within the hour plus being added to the Business Listings, helping visitors across the web find your site.

Overall, we’d always suggest you try before you buy, but once you’ve built your site – before putting it live – we recommend you consider upgrading to one of Jimdo’s premium plans.

Want to See What Each Plan Can Offer You?

Check Out All the Features For Yourself!

Jimdo Pricing Plans

Opinions definitely varied across the board. The majority of Jimdo users enjoy how much the platform does for you with its virtual assistant, but it still remains limited and basic in terms of personalization.

We reached out to various Jimdo users to get an insight into their own experience of using the website builder to grow their online presence.

User Review

Tony Martins

Tony is the founder of the media platform ProfitableVenture.com, and specializes in entrepreneurship and investment.

Jimdo offers a lot of different themes to help you make your site look professional. The templates have already been selected for you; all you have to do is modify the style. Although this is acceptable, the page editor lacks flexibility in terms of layout and personalization. It would be great if the platform was more versatile. However, it is a good platform overall.”

Jimdo used to have over 100 templates but has since cut back to a much more manageable 19 (plus a blank template). This is likely due to the swap to an ADI-based builder. Each template lines up to a specific sector with the ADI making adjustments based on the user’s answers.

The good news is that each of Jimdo’s templates looks tremendous! All of the designs are slick in their own way and provide a good range of different styles and aesthetics.

What’s even better is Jimdo’s integrated Mobile Editor. All of Jimdo’s templates are mobile-ready, meaning it scales seamlessly whether on a desktop or mobile (both portrait and landscape).

Being viewable on mobile is increasingly crucial as more and more online traffic is being done from the comforts of our mobile devices, so Jimdo’s got a slight edge on the competition with this feature.

While all of this sounds great, the truth of the matter is that Jimdo doesn’t particularly hand over too much control over the templates it provides you. In our research, we could only give Jimdo a 3.1 out of 5 for design. The lack of true design freedom reinforces the belief that the ADI should be the solution to all your problems.

If you’re just looking for something that looks nice and does the job, then Jimdo is a very viable option. But if you want more control over how your site looks and want to stand out from the crowd, we recommend a more design-focused builder like Squarespace.

When testing out Jimdo’s free website builder, we were impressed to see how easy it was to add block elements such as slideshows and banners, and change up the design as we went along.

We created a demo site for the Real Estate industry, named “Zara Living,” to put Jimdo tools and features to the test. You can see below how the building process unfolded.

Jimdo Creative Gallery

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The block design tool on the left hand side gives you the ability to change the layout of your page as you go along.

Our demo website end result!

Here you can see that Jimdo lets you use a range of images from either social media, your personal library or the Jimdo media gallery

Using the free editor, you’re able to add block elements to build a page format as you go along. Jimdo offers access to slideshows, banners and various column layouts to give you creative control over the design process.

When you upgrade to Jimdo’s bestseller business plan, Grow, you’ll receive a free custom domain, SEO tools, social marketing, and personalized support within four hours of sending a help request through.

If you don’t see a specific feature that you need, you can always search for it through an independent company called POWr Plugins. It partners up with Jimdo to provide plugins with your site.

Here you can check out our free demo site created with Jimdo with the help of its ADI editor.

Domains

Jimdo offers a free custom domain for one year on any of its premium plans.

You do get a subdomain with Jimdo’s free plan, but you’ll have a tacky “.jimdofree.com” hanging off the back of your URL – hardly professional if you ask us! 

It’s always worth getting a custom domain if you’re looking to enhance your online presence. Not only does it inspire trust in your brand, but it just looks pretty awesome, too.

It’s also possible to transfer over an existing custom domain if you already have one. You’ll just need the authorization code, or auth code, from your previous domain host to transfer it over in the Jimdo editor. Jimdo offers a full breakdown of how to transfer a domain in case you get stuck during the process. The domain transfer itself usually takes 1-5 days to complete.

The annual cost of renewing a Jimdo custom domain after a year is $80 – the highest of any website builder we’ve tested.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

There’s no point in building a beautiful website if no one can find it, right?

That’s where SEO comes in. The better your SEO, the more likely you are to rank highly on search engines like Google.

With the Start and Grow premium plans, you can get your hands on advanced SEO tools to ensure your site is getting seen far and wide.

Jimdo uses smart technology to fill in a lot of your SEO settings for you, from meta titles and descriptions to image alt text. This means you don’t have to worry about these fiddly parts of the building process, and you can stay focussed on the creative side of things!

While Jimdo is pretty competent at SEO, there are still some issues. There’s currently no way to add alt tags, which is a big miss as far as SEO is concerned. Alt tags not only allow your site to be more accessible, they directly help search engines scroll and index your site, allowing them to be higher up the results page.

Additionally, Jimdo doesn’t have any dedicated internal marketing capabilities. If you are wanting to get involved with the marketing side of your website, we’d suggest another builder which has a better marketing framework, like Wix or Squarespace.

Jimdo got a disappointing 2.5 out of 5 for Help and Support in our research. Jimdo offers support via social media, a knowledge base, and FAQ sections but doesn’t offer phone, email, live chat support or a site restore option.

But what you do get are answers that are clear, concise, and to the point. Its knowledge base in particular is useful – it comes with a mixture of text, images, and videos to help solve your problems.

The Help Center is located in the top right-hand corner of the editor. Straight away, it opens up to a range of questions that users often need answers to. This is a huge time saver when you don’t want to go through the process of writing a big chunk of text and explaining the issues you’re having!

What stood out was the impressive, in-depth articles that appear when you click on any of the FAQs. You get a step-by-step breakdown of how to solve your specific problem, written in a way that is super easy to follow – plus a clear indication as to where to find all of the elements it mentions!

This form of support is ideal for users who want a quick fix to any website issues, and want to avoid waiting up to an hour for an expert response.

The only downside is that the articles are only limited to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), so more complex, extensive issues will require getting in touch via Jimdo’s contact form.

Contact Form

Alternatively, Jimdo offers you a small contact form to fill in with text and attachments, and an expert is expected to get back to you within a four-hour time frame (and within one hour if you upgrade to its premium plans). It’s pretty disappointing to see that Jimdo prioritizes its help and support center for customers that pay more per month, because this poses a struggle for the platform’s free plan users.

Jimdo is a simple, clean, and easy-to-use website builder.

It’s best for either personal or small business websites and comes with a host of great features and apps.

Jimdo’s pricing plans are affordable ($9 per month or $15 per month), and with such a range of choices, you won’t have a problem finding one that works for you.

It isn’t for everyone, though, and medium to large businesses who need a powerful online store would be better off looking at Shopify. For creative industries, Squarespace is better.

If you’re looking for a nice, “out-of-the-box” website, you could do a lot worse than Jimdo.

Why not try it for free today and decide whether it’s right for you?

Visit Jimdo

Upon booting up GoDaddy is that it 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”.

This is the first step of GoDaddy’s ADI software which can build a personal template from scratch. Simply tell GoDaddy the name and industry of your new website and its AI will do the rest, generating a unique template designed for your specifications. In our testing, these templates were unique every single time, even when given the same prompts.

Other website builders, like Wix, have ADI too – but none are as forefront in the initial onboarding as GoDaddy. In comparison, GoDaddy’s ADI is slightly weaker than Wix’s. GoDaddy has fewer templates to draw from, covering a smaller range of industries and leading to generated templates that can feel generic and outdated.

Once complete, you’ll be prompted to choose a 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. 

Once in, a pop-up checklist of ready-made features you can now instantly add appears. I thought 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. This was fine, but other builders like Wix and Hostinger offer step-by-step tutorials where it actually teaches you how everything works – GoDaddy just drops you in.

Luckily, there’s not much to understand with GoDaddy’s editor. GoDaddy is a block-based website builder, so I could add new sections by clicking the “Add Section” button. Then, I make my choice from the menu and GoDaddy inserts it into 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. Don’t expect to be able to change the minute details of the sections or features you add, and unlike Squarespace or Wix, there’s no drag-and-drop, so they’re rigidly attached to the page. This keeps everything neat, but also looks rather boring.

GoDaddy is our best-rated website builder for value for money in our rankings. The reason for this is its very affordable plans. Each one exists between the $10-$20 per month range, and typically only charges extra for one particular feature, whether it be SEO, Booking, or Ecommerce. 

Compared to other builders, this is a steal. In Wix’s pricing, the cheapest plan, Light, begins at $16 per month, but it comes with so few essential features that we’d recommend the $27 per month Core plan instead, which is better value for money.

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

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: $12.99 per month
• Premium plan: $22.99 per month
• Commerce plan: $26.99 per month

I was a little disappointed to see the prices go up rapidly after a year. Thankfully, if you just want to test out GoDaddy without committing to a full year just yet, then there’s 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 con for small businesses. But this free plan is great for testing your website out and playing around without having to commit any money.

Are There Additional Fees I Should Know About?

GoDaddy has a number of additional fees to consider, as well as the initial plan subscription. Some of these are avoidable by going to other providers, and some are inevitable, especially if you wish to use GoDaddy’s ecommerce capabilities.

Domains

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 for $12.99 per month (billed annually) if it’s a regular .com domain. More sought-after domains may have more expensive renewal fees.

Email

As well as a free domain, GoDaddy offers a free professional email from Microsoft 365 across its plans. The renewal price for this is $7.99 per month (billed annually) for the Basic plan, $9.99 for added security features, and $14.99 for the full Microsoft Office 365 plan.

Processing and Transaction fees

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 translation fees on all sales.

• Transaction fee: 2.3% +$0.30 on each transaction
• Processing fee: Between 2.6% + $0.10 and 3.5% + $0.49, depending on credit card carrier

GoDaddy tends to rely on its ADI 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.

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

If you prefer the old-fashioned way and want a non-AI-built template, GoDaddy has over 200 templates to choose from. On top of that, each template has 20 Theme Customizer options which gives you different layout options. It’s a nice choice to have, and it certainly makes the creative side of building your website super fast, but this will disappoint the creatives out there who want to design the website themselves.

On top of this, GoDaddy doesn’t have a mobile-friendly preview option in the editor. This means that to see how your website looks on cell phones, you’ll have to physically open it up on one and then go back to the editor. This is a major hassle, and certainly not user-friendly – especially when mobile users make up over 60% of all internet traffic.

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. It has blog functionality, image galleries, embedded video and music, Google Maps integration, contact forms, promo banners, call-to-action buttons, GoDaddy Insight scores, and more.

But, unlike Wix, these features are not to the same standard of quality. They get the job done, but users looking for a real specialty in GoDaddy won’t find it. This is 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. I’ve put a special highlight on what features GoDaddy does best:

Social Media (Branded Content Creation)

Where GoDaddy succeeds is in getting your website’s name out there. And nowhere is better for getting your name out nowadays than social media.

GoDaddy offers integration with both Facebook and Instagram, letting you synchronize posts and content across both platforms. I was very impressed that I was able to track all the likes, comments, and analytics from both platforms, seeing what posts were doing well and which ones weren’t – all from the GoDaddy dashboard.

GoDaddy’s greatest tool however is its GoDaddy Studio app. With this mobile 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.

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. I saw that I was 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 too, 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.

SEO

When using GoDaddy’s SEO for website builders, I loved how easy it was to 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 descriptions
• Change URL slugs
• Add image alt text
• Receive keyword support
• Use mobile responsive themes
• Added custom headers and URLs

Booking

GoDaddy has restructured its pricing plans since 2023 to make its Booking and Appointment tools a feature of its plans. While you can have one-time appointments on all plans, you’ll have to upgrade to the Premium and Commerce plans to have recurring bookings and appointments.

When I tested the full package, I saw GoDaddy has really pulled out all the stops to make this a key feature of the platform. From client management tools, two-way calendar syncing, group events (that integrate with social media), and even text and email notifications.

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.

GoDaddy has set itself up as a solid option for online booking websites, like a yoga instructor or therapist. Its booking tool is on par with what I would expect from Wix, and nothing makes this more evident than the fact you can accept card payments – without having to pay for full ecommerce capabilities.

With the Premium plan, small business owners (who use appointments) can start earning by only paying $14.99 per month (billed annually), which is a great deal.

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 added Chat GPT support to help you brainstorm the perfect one.

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
• Domain Chat GPT – Used to help users find the perfect domain name

Recently, GoDaddy announced its new feature, GoDaddy Airo, which uses generative 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 $4000 and roughly 300 hours of work. Handy!

GoDaddy Airo is not available globally but is open for US users. In my personal opinion, GoDaddy reached for the stars, and GoDaddy Airo offers some of the best website builder integration I’ve seen – truly showing how useful this technology can be. Here’s what you can expect from Airo:

• Logo designs – this helps your business become recognizable online
• Create a coming soon website – 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 – thanks to GoDaddy’s partnership with ZenBusiness
• Create email marketing campaigns – helps your business engage with your target audience
• Generate a social media calendar – know important holidays and the best times to post
• AI-powered SEO – optimize your site for search engines
• Generated responses to customers – using GoDaddy Airo, collect and reply to all customer interactions from across all your platforms

Full ecommerce tools are only available on GoDaddy’s Commerce plan. You’ll be able to sell unlimited products to customers, ship them out, and (hopefully) receive a lot of cash in return.

On the Commerce plan, you get:

• SSL Security to protect customer payments and transactions
• Abandoned cart recovery
• To accept payments from PayPal, Google Pay, and Apple Pay
• Promotions and discounts
• Free and paid shipping options
• Site performance tracking

Compared with Shopify or Wix, GoDaddy’s ecommerce tools are not 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 more complete ecommerce provider.

If you want a full, detailed breakdown of GoDaddy’s ecommerce, check out our full GoDaddy Ecommerce Review.

GoDaddy offers a fair amount in regards to help and support for customers, including:

• 24/7 phone and live chat
• Social media
• Knowledge Center
• Community forum
• Specialist support
• Courses, webinars, and podcasts

With GoDaddy being so streamlined to use, I rarely had to use these at all, but it’s reassuring to know they’re there. The one issue I found was wondering where certain features were. For example, I went to the knowledge center only to find an article for a feature GoDaddy didn’t have.

This was confusing, and GoDaddy should do a better job of separating them from the actual guides.

For this in-depth review, I took a magnifying glass to GoDaddy and brought you a comprehensive run-down of all of its most relevant features. I have Website Builder Expert’s excellent research methodology to rely on, collected by our team of researchers and writers like myself. Each year, we test each builder across a number of metrics and categories, build with and test each builder ourselves, and then collect it all to form the scores you see on this piece.

For GoDaddy, I knew that I wanted to highlight its particular strengths to new users; that being its super easy and quick builder and its impressive list of business features. In tandem together, GoDaddy makes for a great website builder for those who need a business website but have limited technical knowledge.

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!

Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial so you can get familiar with the platform and its settings before spending a cent. No card details are necessary – simply sign up with an email address and get testing. Unlike Wix, Squarespace doesn’t have a free plan, so the trial period is the only chance you get to explore the platform.

Once you’re ready to upgrade, Squarespace has four premium plans to choose between: Personal, Business, Commerce Basic, and Commerce Advanced.

Squarespace’s pricing ranges from $16 to $49 per month (billed annually) – you can save up to 30% by paying annually instead of every month.

Save 10% on your Squarespace plan by using our exclusive code “WBE10” at checkout.

Squarespace is one of our top-rated website builders, sitting just behind our first choice, Wix, in our ranking of the best website builders of 2024. Not only is Squarespace the easiest website builder to use, thanks to its intuitive interface and drag-and-drop editor, but it performed exceptionally well in our value for money research.

With Squarespace, users can expect a suite of impressive features from the cheapest plan, including mobile-optimized sites, stunning templates, a free custom domain for the first year (with any annual plan), and unlimited storage space.

While GoDaddy remains our best value for money website builder because of its incredibly affordable premium plans (starting from $10.99 per month), Squarespace is more cost-effective than other top platforms, such as Wix or Shopify, which score low ratings in our value for money tests.

Squarespace’s Personal plan is the cheapest option available. As the entry plan into Squarespace’s website builder, you’ll unlock the following features:

• SEO tools, including an SEO checklist to guide you through optimizing your site, a search preview tool so you can see what your website looks like in the SERPs, and integration with Google Search Console
• Unlimited bandwidth and storage space – in comparison, you’ll have to pay for Wix’s most expensive plan, Business Elite ($159/mo), for unlimited storage
• Up to 30 minutes of video storage so visitors can stream video content directly on your site
• 24/7 support through live chat, email, and a detailed Help Center
• Drag-and-drop editor using Squarespace’s Fluid Engine – we particularly love the grid structure which helps you align elements to keep your pages looking professional
• 2 contributors – this is useful if you have multiple employees or you’re outsourcing work
• Basic website metrics to monitor your site’s traffic and performance
• Free SSL certificates
• Access to Squarespace’s AI tools to help generate or tweak site content, such as blog posts
• Install third-party integrations, such as Mailchimp and Printify, through Squarespace Extensions
• Custom merch – start designing products with Squarespace (but you’ll need to upgrade to a higher plan to start selling)
• Audience management tools to help track and engage your target audience

Who Do We Recommend the Personal Plan For?

All of these features create a great starting point for anyone looking to get online or build a website, but it’s not ideal if you want to sell products due to the lack of ecommerce functionality. We recommend the Personal plan for simple sites, digital portfolios, and creatives that don’t need the added features of the more expensive plans. If you’re simply looking to showcase work and share information, the Personal plan is the right choice.

The Business plan, which costs $23 per month (billed annually), is Squarespace’s best value plan, according to the builder. It’s also the cheapest option if you’re looking to sell products online – this is more affordable than Wix’s first ecommerce plan which costs $27 per month.

The Business plan is only a slight step up in price from the Personal plan, but it delivers plenty of additional features, including:

• Squarespace ecommerce features, including a secure checkout page and the ability to sell unlimited products
• 3% transaction fees for physical products and services – you can’t reduce or minimize the fees unless you upgrade your plan
• Advanced website analytics – get additional sales data with the Business plan
• Unlimited contributors
• Receive a branded Google email address so you can send professional correspondence
• Advanced customization for the tech-savvy with CSS and Javascript
• Add promotional pop-ups and banners to your site to alert customers to news, updates, and upcoming events
• Provide customer accounts for a faster checkout experience
• Generate and sell courses, memberships, and online videos

Who Do We Recommend the Business Plan For?

We recommend the Business plan for small businesses or side hustles getting started online, especially if you only sell a few products. Due to the high transaction fees (3%), Squarespace will be more cost-effective long-term if you upgrade your plan or you could choose an alternative builder like Wix or Shopify since these offer native payment solutions that remove transaction fees entirely if used. Serious businesses with large or growing inventories should opt for one of the two Squarespace Commerce plans instead.

The first of two dedicated ecommerce plans, Commerce Basic costs just $27 per month (billed annually). The plan provides additional support for selling online and eliminates transaction fees – something that’s still included in the Business plan.

With the Commerce Basic plan, you’ll unlock the following benefits:

• 0% transaction fees when selling physical products or services
• Powerful merchandising tools to help you showcase products, such as low-stock labels and product waitlists
• Sell online or in-person with Squarespace’s Commerce app and accept payments through Square
• Highlight product reviews on your site – customers trust other customers, so we highly recommend adding reviews when you can
• Start selling on social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram

Who Do We Recommend the Commerce Basic Plan For?

The Commerce Basic plan is ideal if you run a small business looking to sell more than 10 products. It costs the same as Wix’s cheapest ecommerce plan but is more affordable than other ecommerce options, such as Shopify’s Basic plan, which costs $29 per month. That being said, Wix’s $27 per month plan includes abandoned cart recovery and automatic discounts – you’ll need to upgrade to Squarespace’s Commerce Advanced plan to unlock these features.

For larger or more complex online stores with many products to sell, you’ll want to upgrade to Squarespace’s most expensive plan, Commerce Advanced. Pricing starts from $49 per month (billed annually). The Commerce Advanced plan introduces advanced ecommerce functionality, such as:

• 0% transaction fees when selling physical products or services
• Advanced shipping tools so your store can offer free shipping and customized shipping rates
• Abandoned cart recovery – this feature is available for a cheaper price point with Wix’s Core plan ($27/mo)
• Offer unique discounts
• Sell subscriptions – let customers buy products on a weekly or monthly basis with a recurring payment
• Build custom commerce APIs to help you manage and grow your online store

Who Do We Recommend the Commerce Advanced Plan For?

With the Commerce Advanced plan, you can take your store to the next level thanks to the advanced ecommerce features. It’s ideal if your online store is growing rapidly or looking to expand in the future – but there’s nowhere up from here. Other website builders, like Shopify, offer greater scalability to help your business succeed in the long run.

Plenty of other website builders come with hidden costs in addition to the regular website builder plan. For example, you’ll need to pay for a custom domain separately with Shopify which can cost an extra $20 per year. With Squarespace, you’ll get a free custom domain name for one year (if you choose an annual plan), but it’ll cost around $20 per year – the same as Shopify – once it’s time to renew.

Besides the custom domain name, there are no other hidden fees with Squarespace, just optional extras. There are plenty of add-ons available with Squarespace that you can integrate into your website builder, such as:

• Acuity Scheduling – use this if you’re looking to offer bookable services to customers (pricing starts from $16 per month, billed annually)
• Squarespace Email Campaigns – use this to engage with your target audience and customize emails, newsletters, and more (pricing starts from $5 per month, billed annually)
• Squarespace Members Area – use this to help monetize your content and build a community online (pricing starts from $9 per month, billed annually)
• Digital Products Add On – use this to sell digital products like courses, lower transaction fees, and increase your site’s video storage capacity (pricing starts from $9 per month, billed annually)

Like most website builders, you’ll also face transaction fees with Squarespace. What you pay depends on your plan:

If you’re considering selling products online, we recommend choosing either the Commerce Basic or Commerce Advanced plans to remove transaction fees. This will eliminate the extra cost and help you avoid losing too much money as you make more sales.

We know that setting up a website or establishing an online business can quickly make a dent in the budget, but there are ways to keep the costs low with Squarespace:

• Select an annual plan instead of paying monthly – save up to 30% if you pay for the year
• Choose the right plan for your needs – you can stick with the cheapest Personal plan ($16/mo) if you don’t need to sell products or offer services
• Limit your extra features – make sure you’re only paying for what your website or business needs, such as scheduling tools or the ability to sell digital products

We also recommend checking out our guide to Squarespace’s promo codes for all the latest deals and offers. And, remember, you can get 10% off your Squarespace plan with our exclusive code “WBE10”.

How do we determine if Squarespace is good value for money or not? Our in-house research team has clocked over 200 hours of data collection and testing to help us bring you accurate and up-to-date recommendations.

Our research process reviews six core research categories, covering user experience, website features, and more.

When reviewing pricing, we focus on our value for money category. This examines whether a website builder offers a free trial or plan, the quality of features for the price you pay, and the average costs of plans. We also assess how much you have to pay for standard features, such as SEO and unlimited storage.

We then award each website builder a rating out of five for each research category – for example, Squarespace receives a score of 4.2 out of 5 in our value for money category.

Squarespace is the easiest website builder to use, offering beginners and designers an intuitive editor, stylish templates, and affordable plans. Its four premium plans range from $16 to $49 per month, but you can test out the builder yourself with Squarespace’s 14-day free trial.

Because of Squarespace’s reasonable prices and ease of use, Squarespace’s Personal plan is the ideal starting point for straightforward sites or portfolios. We especially recommend the builder if you’re a creative looking to build a visual-heavy site, such as an artist website.

However, if you want to sell products online, you’d be best off with either the Commerce Basic or Commerce Advanced plan. With these, Squarespace removes transaction fees which is great if you’re selling a lot of products regularly, and you’ll unlock advanced features such as abandoned cart recovery and product reviews.