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Craft a stunning-looking website for your business.
Started in 2005 as a simple domain name registration tool, GoDaddy is an all-in-one web hosting provider.
With more than 16 million customers and 70 million domain names under its management, GoDaddy is the brand name to reckon with in Internet business, despite competing with other heavyweights in the space.
Still, if you strictly go by customer and other reviews, chances are that you'll be left confused, given the highly polarised opinions.
So, should you go with GoDaddy or not? Well, I know this can be a difficult decision for you to make. That's why we decided to do a definitive review of its website builder and other important features. So, by the time you finish reading this article, you'll have a broad idea of its various features and how it stacks up against other players.
We considered GoDaddy as a web hosting and domain registration company. Well, during my research we got impressed with its improved website builder as well as marketing features. Known earlier as GoCentral, they have now officially have a new builder called Websites + Marketing. The earlier version was too restrictive in terms of usage.
Though it's still a work-in-progress, having hundreds of easy-to-use templates for various needs, more than 25 readymade categories along with a wide range of bespoke features, private pages, calendar, appointment booking, and WhatsApp chat button deserve appreciation.
Although the app market is not there, you can find some built-in integrations. Even setting an online store on GoDaddy is not difficult.
GoDaddy's website builder is quite easy-to-use and you can edit it easily through a central dashboard. The page section allows you to add and edit with the help of the visual editor. You can even edit your site on a mobile device.
Honestly speaking, GoDaddy lags seriously in this area. Their themes are, at best, ordinary when compared to WordPress that offers a wide range of visually stunning themes. That said, GoDaddy's themes are clean and responsive. Since this is not a drag-and-drop website builder, you cannot control everything related to layout and design. However, there are sufficient options when it comes to colour, images, fonts and columns. On the whole, GoDaddy needs to go a long way in this area.
Unfortunately, SEO options are extremely limited in the basic plan. Even standard and premium plans offer only limited features. GoDaddy needs to fix some SEO issues quickly. For instance, the URL changes automatically whenever you change the page title of your website. That's really not good for technical SEO!
If you're not the demanding sort and love simplicity, GoDaddy's blog may serve your purpose. The interface is simple and intuitive, but it does not offer a wide range of possibilities. It lacks sufficient formatting options and some other critical features relevant for SEO ranking.
Basic: $10/month - Own domain, no GoDaddy ad, limited SEO features
Standard: $15/month - Basic+ email sending, and some advanced SEO features
Premium: $20/month - Standard + other features such booking appointment and accepting payment
ECommerce: $25/month - Create an online store with credit card payment and abandoned cart recovery.
This is the area where GoDaddy reigns supreme. You'll love its 24*7*365 customer support, supported by powerful live chat, and an international call support in a number of languages. GoDaddy has improved a lot recently by retiring its old chatbot that let you choose the problem category. Now you can directly connect with its international technical support agent.
Uptime is a measure of how much time your website remained online. High uptime is a critical factor for consideration while choosing a hosting service provider. This is not particularly an area of strength for GoDaddy compared to its competitors such as Dreamhost, Cloudways, Kinsta, WPEngine and Bluehost.
However, 99.90% uptime is not that bad when, realistically, no hosting provider can guarantee 100% uptime always.
A worrying trend, however, is GoDaddy's uptime data performance which has continuously gone down from Nov 2018-Oct 2020.
Cybersecurity-related news hits the headlines frequently. GoDaddy offers its own security tools and features such as automatic malware scanning, uninterrupted security monitoring, Web Application Firewall (WAF), and scheduled data backup. It also safeguards against dangerous DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service.
Advanced features like Sockets Layer certificates start from $69.99 per year and these are quite critical for a financial institution's website. We also found that many other prominent hosting service providers such as Bluehost and SiteGround are not fully transparent, leaving you to do a lot of guesswork regarding various security-related issues.
Page load speed is a critical SEO ranking factor for Google. An analysis by Hosting Facts found that, with an average load time of 500 milliseconds, GoDaddy page load time was very much competitive with other hosts. So, you've nothing to worry here.
GoDaddy is a beginner-friendly website builder and they still have a long way to go in many important areas such as templates and themes, third-party app integrations, and SEO capabilities. If you need a simple website backed by reliable hosting, customer support and Cybersecurity features, you can sign up for GoDaddy's website builder.
