GoDaddy Websites + Marketing Website Builder Review: A Well-Rounded Site Creator – PCMag Australia

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GoDaddy Websites + Marketing Website Builder Review: A Well-Rounded Site Creator – PCMag Australia

The GoDaddy name is synonymous with web hosting. The company is the world’s largest domain registrar, and it has held that title across the many years I’ve covered this category. GoDaddy Websites + Marketing is an expansion of that strength; if you’re already getting a domain name from GoDaddy, why not get a website to go along with it? The company’s website builder is a useful, all-in-one service that includes a domain name, email marketing and e-commerce tools, and several social media hooks. And, since my last review of the service, GoDaddy Websites + Marketing has beefed up its AI offerings. That said, Duda and Wix offer even more robust feature sets, so they remain our Editors’ Choice winners for website builders.

Plans and Prices

GoDaddy Websites + Marketing has three paid tiers designed to appeal to people with varying hosting requirements. All plans include an SSL certificate, a mobile-friendly site design, a PayPal button, a free business phone number for a year, 24/7 support, and a handful of other features. In addition, it has unlimited storage and data transfers across the board. GoDaddy also offers a free plan that includes a single website with hosting, 24/7 customer support, and limited social and email marketing. Not all competitors have free tiers, so that’s a nice option for casual users.

The entry-level Basic plan ($16.99 per month or $9.99 per month, billed annually) lets you connect one custom domain, provides an email account that matches your domain (free for one year), offers advanced website analytics, and allows you to send 100 marketing emails per month. The Premium package ($29.99 per month or $14.99 per month, billed annually) is similar to Basic, except it lets you create, launch, and boost social posts, and send 25,000 marketing emails per month.
The Commerce plan is GoDaddy’s top-level website builder tier. Like the Premium plan, the Commerce plan ($34.99 per month or $20.99 per month, billed annually) includes unlimited social media platforms and posts, unlimited product selling via an online store (or Amazon, eBay, or Instagram), shipping options, managing promotions and discounts, and sending 100,000 marketing emails per month. If you’re serious about selling products online, the Commerce plan is for you. That said, I don’t like that creating an online store is exclusive to these tiers.
GoDaddy’s pricing is comparable to the competition’s premium tiers: Wix starts at $17 per month, Duda starts at $19 per month, and Squarespace starts at $25 per month.

Website Creation and Templates

You must create an account before you can start building or see any site templates. Signing up can be done via Amazon, Facebook, or by entering an email address and password. Before you choose a template, the startup wizard asks you about the site’s subject matter, where you would like to sell products, and the site’s name. During testing, the wizard selected a template for our test site featuring a typewriter, reflecting our desire for a writer-focused site.
The template designs are modern and attractive. The template previews include a button to view the site in desktop and mobile versions, giving you an idea of how your site will look. Upon choosing one, you see a page showing how a sample site built with the template looks on both desktop and mobile. There are more than 100 templates in total. You can change some themes, but these are minor changes to the overall template. However, you can switch entire templates without rebuilding the site, something very few website builders offer.

Editing Pages, Adding Images, and E-Commerce

The back-end interface is clear, simple, and uncluttered. The dashboard icon takes you to promotion options, such as adding a Facebook Page, creating a blog, and configuring SEO settings. Clicking Edit Site lets you tweak the site’s name, rearrange site sections, and customize other features. A dedicated social media section lets you add Facebook, Google, Instagram, and X/Twitter accounts. GoDaddy accounts start with a yousitename.goddadysites.com URL, but you can connect a domain name you already own or pick up a custom GoDaddy domain.

Clicking Edit Website takes you to the website builder proper. You’re treated to a view of your website, with sections highlighted as you scroll over them. Compared with Duda and Wix, GoDaddy is limited in that it only lets you insert predesigned sections. You can’t just drag a new element in from a list; instead, you must scroll over a section and click the big plus icon to add a new section. Then, you’re given a searchable list of the content that can be placed in that spot. You can’t simply add a photo or text box wherever you like. GoDaddy Websites + Marketing is a good fit for people who don’t feel confident controlling the look of their site and would rather have all the design choices made for them.
In fact, simply adding an image or other item feels unintuitive, as you can’t do it at all in certain section types. You can upload multiple images at once, and once they’re uploaded, you can use them in any photo space on the site. Any uploaded image can be used in photo galleries, too. Unfortunately, there are set positions where the photos live on the live page. As for image editing, GoDaddy lets you zoom in on images, rotate and crop them, flip them from color to black and white, add shapes, and make other tweaks. Most site builders include at least some of this type of image-editing functionality. Here, GoDaddy’s site builder integrates with GoDaddy Content Creator design tools (previously GoDaddy Studio). Every edit you make is automatically saved. During editing, I hit Preview to see how the site looked on desktop and mobile.
You add a page via the Website menu icon on the right-side panel. There are dedicated menus for About, Contact Us, Photo Gallery, and other sections. You just give the page a name and then add content sections. The newly created page is empty, save for a header, footer, and center area where you can start adding sections. You can make individual pages, but not the entire site, private by requiring a membership sign-in.

There are a few ways to make your website bring in cash, both in the form of page sections: You can upgrade to the Online Store account level, add a PayPal donation button, enable appointment bookings, or display ads using Google AdSense (which is frowned upon on today’s web and doesn’t produce much income). GoDaddy also lets you create a Payable Domain, a custom domain that serves as a direct and secure payment link for customer checkouts.

When I upgraded to the Online Store account level, I discovered that a Shop page had been added to our site. With it, you can add products in a simple interface that allows a photo, name, price, sale price, custom categories, SKU, and description. You can also specify color and size options, as well as physical versus digital goods. In addition, GoDaddy offers excellent help with inventory and shipping options, as well as UPS and USPS integrations. Payments come via Apple Pay, PayPal, Square, and Stripe, all excellent services. GoDaddy POS hardware connects your online store with offline sales. The Online Store also comes with a professional-looking shopping cart and checkout pages, and the ability to text you about incoming orders.
All account levels include a useful email marketing tool. This lets you blast a template-based email to everyone who signed up for a membership on your site. You get choices of sales campaigns, events, and standard newsletters. It’s a flexible and customizable tool that tracks responses and schedules mailings.

AI Tools

GoDaddy now offers Airo, a collection of generative AI tools to help make the building process faster and easier. After you answer a few questions and enter a prompt, it generates everything from pages with pictures to products with descriptions to customer service messages to social media ads.
Airo tools come bundled with your regular subscription, with 50 free credits per month. But you can also sidestep the traditional GoDaddy tiers and subscribe to Airo as its own standalone builder. For $20 per month, you can publish one site and receive 150 credits per month to spend on AI tasks. For $200 per month, those numbers increase to 50 sites and 750 credits. Airo could save time compared with starting from scratch, though I still recommend avoiding AI site builders in general because they lack vital humanity.

Mobile Site Editing and SEO

GoDaddy Websites + Marketing creates a functional, good-looking, responsive mobile website based on the desktop site you build, but you have no control over the mobile presentation. Even the responsive-design-focused Squarespace lets you tweak mobile site presentation, and many site builders, such as Wix, let you customize the mobile view considerably. Then again, none of this may matter to you; our test website looked quite good and functioned as expected.
The other side of the mobile coin—editing your site from a mobile device—is a feather in GoDaddy’s cap. You can do almost anything in a phone browser that you can do in a desktop browser, including changing the theme and adding sections and images.
A search engine optimization option helps you make your site appealing to web search engines. Simply click SEO in the Marketing drop-down menu, and you’ll be taken through a wizard. The wizard proposes keywords and phrases and populates your page title and metatags. It also proposes content areas into which you should add the keywords. If you’re new to site building, be aware that your site won’t appear in web search results until you’ve verified the site with the various search engines.

Customer Service and Uptime

GoDaddy excels in support. It has 24/7 phone support and an online chat option if you need personal help, but there’s also a huge Help Center knowledge base, how-to videos, and a full community forum. I jumped on chat to ask a question and was connected to an agent in under a few seconds.

Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. If your site is down, clients or customers cannot find your products or services, and you do not want that. GoDaddy promises 99.9% uptime, so your store should be available to customers at all hours.
GoDaddy Websites + Marketing is an excellent site builder with attractive templates, AI-powered site design, and generous storage and monthly data transfers.
Read Our Editorial Mission Statement and Testing Methodologies.

The Technology I Use

As a member of the App & Gaming team, I use a wide variety of apps and services. Google Drive is an essential file-syncing service for moving documents between team members in this work-from-home era. Scrivener has been an invaluable writing tool as I rework my fiction manuscript. YouTube Premium and YouTube TV deliver hours of entertainment (though I only use the latter service during the F1 and NBA playoff seasons).

In terms of hardware, I use a Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 laptop for work and an Origin PC tower for playing PC games. I also have a Steam Deck, which lets me play my favorite titles under a shade tree. Of course, I have a smartphone, and the Google Pixel 9a is my handset of choice.

My main input devices are the Das Keyboard 4 Professional and Logitech MX Vertical Ergonomic Mouse, though I bust out the Hori Fighting Commander Octa or Hori Fight Stick Alpha when mixing it up in fighting games. I have a thing for arcade sticks. I collect Neo Geo AES games, too, but only if I can find the carts on the (relative) cheap.

For video and music consumption, I fire up my Lenovo Tab P11; it has a sharp screen and great Dolby Atmos-powered speakers. My Kindle Paperwhite has received much use, too. I have a standalone, Sony Blu-ray player connected to a TCL television when it’s time to go full cinephile. I’m also a vinyl guy, so the Bluetooth-enabled Audio-Technica AT-LP60XBT keeps the wax spinning.

My first computer was a Commodore 64. Long live BASIC and retro computers!

Since 2004, I’ve written about consumer tech for many publications, including 1UP, Laptop, Parenting, Sync, Wise Bread, and WWE. I now apply that knowledge and skill set as the managing editor of PCMag’s apps and gaming team.
As a member of the App & Gaming team, I use a wide variety of apps and services. Google Drive is an essential file-syncing service for moving documents between team members in this work-from-home era. Scrivener has been an invaluable writing tool as I rework my fiction manuscript. YouTube Premium and YouTube TV deliver hours of entertainment (though I only use the latter service during the F1 and NBA playoff seasons).
In terms of hardware, I use a Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 laptop for work and an Origin PC tower for playing PC games. I also have a Steam Deck, which lets me play my favorite titles under a shade tree. Of course, I have a smartphone, and the Google Pixel 9a is my handset of choice.
My main input devices are the Das Keyboard 4 Professional and Logitech MX Vertical Ergonomic Mouse, though I bust out the Hori Fighting Commander Octa or Hori Fight Stick Alpha when mixing it up in fighting games. I have a thing for arcade sticks. I collect Neo Geo AES games, too, but only if I can find the carts on the (relative) cheap.
For video and music consumption, I fire up my Lenovo Tab P11; it has a sharp screen and great Dolby Atmos-powered speakers. My Kindle Paperwhite has received much use, too. I have a standalone, Sony Blu-ray player connected to a TCL television when it’s time to go full cinephile. I’m also a vinyl guy, so the Bluetooth-enabled Audio-Technica AT-LP60XBT keeps the wax spinning.
My first computer was a Commodore 64. Long live BASIC and retro computers!
Read full bio

The Technology I Use

I use the newest Android and iOS smartphones for testing, but I currently use an iPhone 14 as my personal phone. I just hate that we gave up headphone jacks.

I’ve always favored gaming laptops over desktops. On that note, I have a 16-inch HP Envy with an Intel Core i9-13900H CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU. No matter what machine I’m working on, an alarming amount of my personal and professional life revolves around cloud-synced Google Drive files.

For food subscriptions, my household sticks with CookUnity and HelloFresh for meals. Video streaming is a bit more complicated. While there are too many services to list, we’re subscribed to most of the major ones. These days, I find myself drawn to HBO Max’s movies and shows, as well as Peacock’s reality trash.

I’ve been a lifelong Nintendo fan, and I sincerely believe the Nintendo Switch will go down as one of the best gaming consoles of all time. It has an unbelievable library of new and old games from Nintendo and third-party companies. The handheld/console hybrid approach makes playing games so much more flexible, a legacy that continues with the Nintendo Switch 2 and Valve’s Steam Deck.

My PCMag career began in 2013 as an intern. Now, I’m a senior writer, using the skills I acquired at Northwestern University to write about dating apps, meal kits, programming software, website builders, video streaming services, and video games. I was previously a senior editor at Geek.com and have written for The A.V. Club, Kotaku, and Paste Magazine. I’m the author of the gaming history book Video Game of the Year: A Year-by-Year Guide to the Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games from Every Year Since 1977, and the reason everything you know about Street Sharks is a lie.
I use the newest Android and iOS smartphones for testing, but I currently use an iPhone 14 as my personal phone. I just hate that we gave up headphone jacks.
I’ve always favored gaming laptops over desktops. On that note, I have a 16-inch HP Envy with an Intel Core i9-13900H CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU. No matter what machine I’m working on, an alarming amount of my personal and professional life revolves around cloud-synced Google Drive files.
For food subscriptions, my household sticks with CookUnity and HelloFresh for meals. Video streaming is a bit more complicated. While there are too many services to list, we’re subscribed to most of the major ones. These days, I find myself drawn to HBO Max’s movies and shows, as well as Peacock’s reality trash.
I’ve been a lifelong Nintendo fan, and I sincerely believe the Nintendo Switch will go down as one of the best gaming consoles of all time. It has an unbelievable library of new and old games from Nintendo and third-party companies. The handheld/console hybrid approach makes playing games so much more flexible, a legacy that continues with the Nintendo Switch 2 and Valve’s Steam Deck.
Read full bio
PCMag.com is a leading authority on technology, delivering lab-based, independent reviews of the latest products and services. Our expert industry analysis and practical solutions help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.
For over 40 years, PCMag has been a trusted authority on technology, delivering independent, labs-based reviews of the latest products and services. With expert analysis and practical solutions across consumer electronics, software, security, and more, PCMag helps consumers make informed buying decisions and get the most from their tech. From in-depth reviews to the latest news and how-to guides, PCMag is the go-to source for staying ahead in the digital world.

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