GoDaddy Comparison and Review

Pros:

• Low monthly cost
• Offers 24/7 phone customer support
• Live chat support available
• Includes free registration of a .com, .co, .net or .org domain

Cons:

• Can't edit HTML of the website template
• No ability to accept online payments with this plan
• Must upgrade to build a mobile friendly site

Conclusion:

GoDaddy is best known for the domain registration services (and racy commercials), but their website builder is a solid product and offers a very good value. The Personal plan includes an adequate number of good looking templates to chose from and the builder is pretty easy to use. The templates aren't quite as modern as some of their competitors (like Weebly), but, for the price, GoDaddy's website builder is hard to beat. One other thing to consider is that websites built with this plan aren't mobile friendly. You'll need to upgrade to the Business plan ($9.99/ month) to get a mobile friendly site. GoDaddy is unique in that they offer free phone support for all their website plans, including the Personal plan.

Ease of Use

GoDaddy’s Pers plan received 4 out of 5 stars for Ease of Use. When first signing up for GoDaddy, you'll see a short video that explains how to use the website builder and how to set it up. While they do provide you with an initial setup wizard that will gather preliminary information to include on your site, navigating through the builder can be somewhat difficult. For example, if you're editing your website and decide to change the theme you have chosen, there is no easy way to get back to the page where you can change that option. That said, once you understand the basic structure, editing elements of the site is quite easy. GoDaddy’s website builder lets you directly edit content blocks and drag and drop content blocks, which makes building your web pages easy. Adding a block of content or an image takes only a few clicks and the system is rather intuitive. GoDaddy provides an image library of 8,700 stock photos that you can use free of charge while building your site, or you can choose to upload your own images.

GoDaddy's Personal plan offers 50 website templates from which you can select and customize. Unfortunately for advanced users, GoDaddy does not allow users to edit the HTML of the templates. We found the overall flexibility of the builder to be average for the industry. It's easy to add elements to the page, but once you've selected a template, you'll need to stay within the structure of that template. GoDaddy also provides a metatag editor for the purpose of optimizing your sites for search engines. You can also add different types of content to your GoDaddy site, including social share icons, YouTube clips, photo galleries.

Customer Support

GoDaddy received 4 out of 5 stars for Customer Support. Phone support is offered 24/7 so that you can contact a representative about your account, no matter the time of day. During testing, we found GoDaddy’s phone support to be high quality and their support techs to be very knowledgeable. GoDaddy also offers live chat support and email support. Although GoDaddy includes tutorials and a searchable knowledgebase, those features weren't particularly helpful. Also, GoDaddy does not have a user forum. 

Account Features

GoDaddy provides one year of a Microsoft Office 365 email address service associated with your domain (i.e. yourname@yourdomain.com) with the Personal plan, which equates to a $48 savings. Privacy Protection from the WHOIS database, a publicly searchable database containing information such as a registrant’s name, address, telephone number, and email address, is available for an extra $7.99 per year. GoDaddy will replace your information in the WHOIS database with their own, which can help  protect from unwanted marketing, spam, or identity theft. SSL (getting an https:// in front of your domain instead of http://) is available for $69.99 per year.

Pricing

The Personal plan costs $71.88 for the first year then $5.99 per month thereafter.  One free domain registration is included for free with your account for the initial term for which you signup (GoDaddy currently charges $14.99/ year for .com domain names, so this is a $14.99/ year value). GoDaddy now offers a 30 day free trial to test their services.

Upgrades

GoDaddy's Personal package is their least expensive option. They also offer Business and Business Plus plans ($9.99/ month and $14.99/ month with no contract, respectively) that include more options, a mobile friendly site, more hosting space (for images, videos, etc), and some limited Search Engine Optimization help. GoDaddy also offers an Online Store account for $29.99 per month (no contract). These accounts include everything in the Personal Package plus an online store, Paypal checkout, customer ratings and reviews, mobile friendly web store, a Facebook store and more. Online Store accounts do offer a 30 day free trial.