With the slogan "No Skills? No Time? No problem?," Website Builder and GoDaddySites.com are targeting wedding planners, freelance photographers, small law firms, and anyone else who wants to make their website without having to hire a programmer. Read our GoDaddy website builder review below.
OverviewWith the slogan “No Skills? No Time? No problem?,” Website Builder and GoDaddySites.com are targeting wedding planners, freelance photographers, small law firms, and anyone else who wants to make their website without having to hire a programmer.
GoDaddy also offers an eCommerce shopping cart too for persons looking to set that up quickly. Partnering with PayPal and Stripe, they have made it so easy to set up a storefront, that one of their managers says, “If you can make a Facebook page then you can make an online store.”
Here we look at some of the details of their Website Builder website builder tool. They have no silly or clever name for it, like Whatsapp or Snapchat, so we just have to call it by the common name “website builder” albeit written as a proper noun with capital letters: “Website Builder.”
To given an overview of what Website Builder is, who it is targeted to, what limitations it might have, and what is the reputation of the company, we can start by saying that Godaddy Website Builder is recommended for people with no programming skills and small businesses.
They do not market to any particular business as the have templates for most companies, artists, weddings, and freelancers. However their eCommerce template is distinctly separate from the regular web template: the two are not integrated.
So some people might choose the eCommerce template as their only site. The market for that obviously would be a florist or someone else whose product speaks for themselves and only wish to set up a storefront.
Regarding technical limitations, the 50 GB storage including with their Business Plus plan is not a lot. And as we explain below in more detail, bandwidth is capped at different levels too depending on what plan you pick.
But ordinary customers are unlikely to exceed those thresholds unless they are building an eCommerce site with lots of product graphics. The combination of limited storage and bandwidth apparently means they want customers who wish to set up a genuinely large site to pick a different GoDaddy product, such as a website hosting account instead of the Website Builder aka GoDaddySites.com account.
Other limitations with their product would be the inability to add quickly-widgets beyond the very few that they have. While you can add HTML code to the website and JavaScript in the eCommerce site, you cannot add 3rd-party widgets with one click or even fit some of the most complicated ones at all.
For that, a company would need to use WordPress or Joomla or something else Again Web Builder is targeted to simpler websites and people without a lot of technical knowledge.
Regarding technology, scalability, and planning for growth, the company has their data centers, 9 of them located around the world, with their largest a large 320.000 square foot facility in Phoenix. And they have a content delivery network which is essential for speeding web page load times for people with customers around the country and world.
Regarding the company, GoDaddy has a solid reputation having been one of the top domain registrars for a long time. They have received not one but several awards as the Best Places to Work in 2015. It’s important to customers that their vendor’s employees are happy. It says a lot about a company that they have time to focus on their people instead of having to put regularly out fires.
Regarding security, while certainly some of their hosted sites have been hacked, there has been no significant data breach of GoDaddy’s internal systems. In other words, lots of their WordPress customers have been hacked, no doubt, but that is due to security problems in WordPress and WordPress plugins. If any of their Website Builder sites has been hacked, they would be due to security holes in that product. We presume those have been patched as the company has not said.
If you are a bit skeptical about whether you would want them to build and host your site, then you can sign up and bail out with a 45-day money back guarantee. There would be no way to export and save your work if you did that and moved it to another company.
But it’s hard to see that a company would give up on them unless they found a requirement that the site would not meet. For example, it would not be possible there to require that a company’s customers log in to their site, except the eCommerce part, to receive some premium content.
Now let’s look further into their offering.
Key FeaturesIn this case, the experts tend to agree with consumers. While GoDaddy offers a simple and straightforward website builder, it also comes with a lot of limitations. You have to invest in one of the most expensive plans just to have access to mobile site building tools. eCommerce tools also come with an additional price tag. Even with the most comprehensive plans, a blogging tool isn’t included.
Another complaint among both consumers and experts is that GoDaddy can be a little too aggressive with upselling strategies. This can create the impression that they are more concerned with turning a profit than taking care of their customers and ensuring the quality of the features that people are already signed up for.
In the end, critics are more apt to recommend GoDaddy for their web hosting services than their website building program. There are simply better options available at more affordable prices.
Even consumers who weren’t happy with the overall product were quick to praise GoDaddy’s customer service. Although the program can be rife with problems, consumers can get quickly get help with problems and informative answers to any questions.
In addition, some customers were satisfied with the program’s ease of use. They were looking for a simple website builder and GoDaddy delivered. Those who are looking for a straightforward website builder that doesn’t get bogged down with added features that can complicate things, will probably find everything they need in GoDaddy’s program.
Consumer reviews also mention the drag-and- drop editor. If you are totally new to web design, this is the tool you should be looking for among available standard features.
For the most part, consumer reviews of GoDaddy’s website builder trend towards the negative. A significant number of reviews mention the fact that it’s hard to customize your site. The program does not offer access to CSS or HTML, so you are limited to changes you can make. While the available templates may provide a solid start, users were disappointed with how little freedom they had to create a truly unique website.
It appears that there are also some technical problems with the website. Many users report frequent glitches and compatibility issues with certain internet browsers. Overall, the current version of the program seems to fall short when it comes to ease of use, which is a primary concern for most consumers.
Design & Customization| Feature | Overview |
| Website Templates | 50 or 300 templates are depending on which price plan you pick. They say that the demand from customers is so high for new themes that they hired one coder to do nothing but create those. |
| Free | Nothing is free. You cannot even get started testing it out without entering a credit card. So to write this review we had to pay. Fancy that. |
| Premium | There is not a whole lot of difference between the Personal, Business, and Business Plus plans, meaning there is nothing extra like an expedited phone support or free eCommerce package with the highest price plan. So they do not have something you would call Premium service. |
| Website Builder Interface | Yes, they use the drag and drop Website Builder tool. You can see that either they wrote it themselves, or they bought it from another company as when you go to the login page it shows the non-branded logo hosted at an entirely different site: https://login.websitetonight.com/ So their Builder looks like a cloud service that GoDaddy uses. |
| Page Style Customization | You cannot edit style sheets at the page level. All you can do it adjust the page width and height (meaning the page border), change the background colors and select a different template. |
| Site Navigation | There is a widget for creating menus. There you can add links to an external site, rearrange menus, and create submenus. Since their eCommerce site is different from their regular website, one of these menu options would be your online store. The domain for both can be the same, but the themes are going to be different. Of course you can adjust colors and graphics to try to make them look like they are all the same company, i.e., your company. |
| Content Management | They have no feature to allow multiple people to work at the same time or any version control. But it’s not meant to be that kind of product used to build a more complex site. |
| Photos and Galleries | There are a slide show and picture gallery. |
| Mobile Site Building | When you publish the desktop theme, it automatically creates a mobile version. When we looked for instructions on how to modify that it took us to the generic Website Builder login where we were unable to log in because it asked us for our domain name, which at that point would have been (site name).godaddysites.com, which when we entered did not work. So it’s pointing to the wrong place. So it’s not clear how to edit the mobile theme even though their support site says you can. There are no instructions on how to do that. |
| Social Sharing Integration | You can add a share icon to any page. As for linking to your social accounts they allow that using what they call their Social Media Manager. One thing you can say about GoDaddy is that this feature, as their security feature, is just a fancy name added to something that everyone else has too. |
| Design Services | Yes. You can hire them to provide you help. |
Features & Tools Here is a list of features that most people would need and whether or not GoDaddy has those.
| Feature | Overview |
| Setup | Their setup process is fairly straightforward. We gave it a test run to investigate what features it has. |
| Web Design | They have apparently purchased a web design tool from another company as the software is hosted on this site websitetonight.com which is branded to look like the GoDaddy site. Clicking there takes you to GoDaddy. |
| Custom domain name | Yes. After all, it’s GoDaddy, the domain registrar.
When you publish the site, you can also select the GoDaddySites.com domain, which is free, if you don’t want to buy your own. |
| Widgets and Apps | They have these widgets and apps: create new page, text box, add image, slideshow, photo gallery, navigation (meaning update menu), share (as in post Tweet, etc.), Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps, display RSS feed (blog posts) from another site, contact form, YouTube, HTML. Their apps are email marketing, Instant Menus and Price List (which are fancy ways of displaying those), and an eCommerce online store. |
| Monetization | They have an online store but no Adsense. Of course you could add that with some simple HTML. |
| Visitor Statistics | Yes. Very basic. |
| Photo, Video, and Audio | There is an image editor. Like many features, you need to upgrade to the business account to use that.
They have a photo gallery and slideshow. You can upload images, use stock images, or import those from Facebook or Instagram There is also an MP3 player. |
| Blogging | No. You can only add a blog feed, not make blog posts. |
| Google Maps | Yes. |
| HTML Editor | You can add HTML. It’s hard to find the widget to do that as the button to scroll down only works if you click it twice, which is not obvious, and the icon is way down at the bottom of the list. So it took a little while to figure out how to get there since we had zoomed in on their editor and the icon was hidden. Finding that worked better on Firefox than Chrome. |
| Social Media Integration | Yes. For Twitter, it shows your recent Tweets. Remember to turn off blocking on Ghostery FB and Twitter widgets so that it will work when you build your site.
You can also create a Facebook Business page from the GoDaddy page. So it exports one to the other. |
| Forms and surveys | Contact form only. |
| Storage Space | 1, 10, or 50 GB depending on price plan. |
| Newsletter Tool | No. Only email marketing. So you could presumably email your newsletter. |
| Forum | No. |
| eCommerce / Online Store | Yes. It is attached as a URL on your main domain and site. But since is has a separate theme it would look like a different site. GoDaddy points out that you can use your eCommerce site as your primary website. That would work for some businesses.
The shopping cart lets you accept credit cards and PayPal. GoDaddy does not say exactly what shopping card cloud service they use except they suggest it might be PayPal. The payment gateway is Stripe. TechRepublic characterizes it as a “Shopify competitor,” which it is not really as Shopify has a lot more features and a long lead in the market. The cart has all the necessary items: add a product, set up taxes, coupons, promotions, and product categories. One thing that some of the competitors cannot do is their shopping cart works with different countries and currencies. |
| Gateway Integration | Stripe is your merchant account. |
| SEO Friendly | Yes. It lets you enter the basic description and keywords you would need to facilitate that. |
| Site Limited Access (Password Protection) | No. There is no way to require a login to the site. |
| Google® Analytics | Lets you enter Analytics code. |
| Website Security | No specific details were given. They call their product “Sitelock,” but it’s not going to be any different than what other sites would have since they are all going to use the same core set of security hardware and software.
One thing you could say is that given that they are one of the world’s largest domain registrars they have an enormous responsibility to protect domain registration and payment details for many customers. So that high security would obviously benefit users of GoDaddySites.com. |
| Multiple Languages | Yes. We created our account from Chile, South America, and the interface came up in Spanish plus it lets us pay for the subscription in Chilean pesos. That would be significant for people in foreign countries who do not have international credit cards. |
| Mobile Optimization | This means whether a website switches the template when the user is using a mobile device. Yes, it does. |
| CDN Technology | Yes. They call it the GoDaddy Web Accelerator. They do not say if they use Akamai or which company actually to maintain that physical presence around the world or whether they do that themselves. Either way, as long as they have that then that is good for websites with global users. |
Plans & Pricing Discounts are given for 1, 2 or 3 years paid up front. SSL certificate extra. Get Found (listed) service for $12 per month extra. That’s a lot of money for a service whose value cannot be explicitly measured since GoDaddy cannot fool the Google Search algorithm and better than other people who are also trying to do SEO, which many would say does not work.
Their prices include what they call bandwidth.Technically speaking, bandwidth is an amount of data sent over some period. Since billing is monthly, bandwidth is capped at some amount per month. That is 150GB, 500GB, and, 1,000GB (1 Terabyte) for the Personal, Business, and Business Plus plans, respectively.
To understand this, consider that if you have a 1MB (roughly 1 million bytes) image on a page, and 1,000 people view that page then you used up 1 billion types or 1GB. (If an image is that large then you are not properly editing them for display on the web as an image does not need to be so dense.)
Still, 1,000 page views is a lot for, say, a law firm website, so it is not likely that GoDaddy is going to cut you off since you are not likely to use 1TB per month. But if you do you will have to pay GoDaddy for the additional bandwidth after they disable your page.
If you are going to run a big online store you should have looked for a larger eCommerce platforms: Shopify or BigCommerce. But it is not likely that you will hit the limit unless you have a lot of images.
Customer Support Here are their support options:
| Phone | Yes. 24 x 7, which it truly is |
| Support email | Yes. |
| Chat | Yes. We tested that. They are responsive. |
| Knowledge Base | The KB has support items grouped by topic and an option to search. (See comment below.) Like with most websites you can use Google search too. For example, you can write:
site:godaddy.com “something to search for.” One issue is you need to make sure that you click the Website Builder Help icon when you click for help and not the general GoDaddy help. That second one searches all the GoDaddy products. Since GoDaddy provides WordPress hosting too then, for example, a search of “eCommerce” provided instructions on how to add a plugin to WordPress to do that. This will thoroughly confuse the beginning-level user. It also left us hunting around for how to insert the eCommerce engine to our site. |
| Video Tutorials | In the setup, there is only an overview of the process. And there is an overview video too for setting up the online store. It is better to use Google to search for instructions as there is a 1-hour video on YouTube for setting up an online shop and a 1-hour video for creating a site with Website Builder. |
| Support Forum | No. |
| Additional Options | They have a backup and restore option.
The online store allows JavaScript. |
| FAQ. | Yes, Also the knowledge base is grouped by topic. There is an FAQ for the online store too. |
Ease of Use After you log in the first time, it is a little confusing where to go the second time you log in as the interface switches to the regular domain-management-type of the interface which GoDaddy domain-only customers use. To try to find where to go on our second visit we clicked “Get Started” and it added a new site to our shopping cart as if we wanted to pay for that again.
The necessary steps to set up a page were:
The editor saves your work so that if you leave the editor and come back later you do not lose anything. That is good if, which often happens, you close the browser window when you forget you are working on your page.
Their web page editor, while it provides most of the widgets that you need, could have a better interface. The way it works is you drag a widget on the screen and then press Settings to set it up. It would be more natural and intuitive if it is worked more like a guided widget.
Conclusion Given the company’s years of experience, GoDaddy Website Builder will work fine for most people. They should probably have hosted their product on another domain as it is sometimes confusing whether you are using the Website Builder area, i.e., GoDaddySites.com, or the GoDaddy domain registration page.
Their online store too has some issues and the main one being that it is meant to be a standalone product. It does not let you add a Buy Now button to your regular site but functions as a separate entity. Someone whose primary focus is eCommerce should probably use Shopify or any of the other major players in that market as they can find better terms with different banks and card processors (i.e., payment gateways.)
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