Is GoDaddy good value for money for small businesses? We’ve pored over its figures, features, and flaws to find out.
GoDaddy Basic — £7.99 per month
GoDaddy Premium — £11.99 per month
GoDaddy Commerce — £13.99 per month
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GoDaddy is one of our best website builders for small businesses — offering some of the most affordable plans on the market. With easy-to-use drag-and-drop tools, built-in marketing features and reliable customer support, it’s a solid choice for businesses looking to get themselves online quickly.
GoDaddy’s cheapest plan starts from just £7.99 per month, while its ecommerce plan offers more premium features at £13.99 per month.
We tested GoDaddy’s website builder first-hand to evaluate its ease of use, features, and how well it performs compared to other platforms, and relative to its pricing to determine its value for money.
Below, we’ll outline the various pricing plans that GoDaddy offers and the pros and cons of each, and dive into its billing cycles and other fees.
This article will cover:
GoDaddy’s pricing plans
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Features
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GoDaddy offers small businesses excellent value for money. The table below shows exactly what features are present in each plan, including ecommerce tools (shown at the bottom).*
| Feature | Free plan | Basic plan | Standard plan | Premium plan | Ecommerce plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Templates | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Site analytics | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Social media integration | One | One | Three | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Website security | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Custom domain | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| On-the-go editing | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 24/7 support | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| SEO optimisation | – | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Marketing emails per month | – | 100 | 500 | 25,000 | 25,000 |
| Social media posts per month | – | 5 | 20 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Branded content creator | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Product listing | – | – | – | – | ✓ |
| Accept payments | – | – | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Shipping | – | – | – | – | ✓ |
| Discount and promotion features | – | – | – | – | ✓ |
*All of GoDaddy’s pricing plans are based on annual subscriptions.
GoDaddy Basic – £7.99 per month
Let’s get the simple stuff out of the way. Unlike GoDaddy’s free plan (more on that below), on GoDaddy Basic, you don’t have any GoDaddy branding on your site, including text, and you can connect a custom domain. For small business users, this is a must-have if you want your site to look professional.
You’ll also unlock some basic website features and design elements, including:
- Site analytics
- Free professional email
- Live chat and contact forms to connect with customers
- Custom domain connection
These features make the Basic plan a great choice for freelancers, as a good way to host a portfolio or CV where you need a slick, professional look without too many bells and whistles.
Plus, the addition of a PayPal button and marketing features is a good way to encourage interaction and early-stage brand building.
But, as you’re probably already thinking, this doesn’t give you a lot of other, nice-to-have website traits that can help your business grow. As the name implies, GoDaddy is a good way to get your foot on the web builder ladder, but you’ll need to climb higher to get your online business off the ground.
GoDaddy Studio is a design app that allows you to build stunning, high-quality content for use on your website, social media profiles, and marketing emails. Here’s a quick overview of what it includes:
- A platform to design graphics, social posts, videos, logos, and more with pre-made templates or blank canvases.
- Tools like background removal, colour palettes, font customisation, layers and video editing with royalty-free assets.
- A mobile app and web platform with project syncing, so you can start on your phone and finish on your desktop.
GoDaddy Standard – £9.99 per month
Put simply, this plan is GoDaddy Basic with added search engine optimisation (SEO) functions.
This might sound like a small aspect of your online business, but it’s actually a very important growth area, crucial to ensuring that you’re ranking highly on search engines and attracting new customers.
You can purchase these SEO tools as an add-on to GoDaddy Basic, but it’s significantly more expensive, so it makes sense to upgrade your entire plan. You’ll also get:
- 500 marketing emails per month
- 20 social posts per month
- Content creation with GoDaddy Studio
While these additions are certainly helpful, they’ll likely not be enough for your business in the long term as you try to build up a social media presence.
GoDaddy Premium – £11.99 per month
This plan is where users get the biggest leap in terms of website builder capabilities. Along with all of the features included in the Basic and Standard plans, you get:
- Unlimited integrations with social media platforms
- Unlimited social media posts and replies from your GoDaddy dashboard
- Maximum of 25,000 marketing email sends (per month)
On top of these added perks, your customers will also be able to book more types of appointments on your website – an excellent attraction for service businesses.
GoDaddy Premium can enable recurring appointment bookings, one-time group event bookings, and service payments, and you’ll even be able to set up text appointment reminders.
Compared to other top platforms, this is impressively generous. If you build your website with Wix and Squarespace, for example, you’d need to install a special third-party, paid-for appointments app – on top of the monthly subscription fees you’re already paying for your website.
GoDaddy Ecommerce – £13.99 per month
GoDaddy’s Ecommerce plan is the only paid-for tier that lets you launch a fully fledged online store. For an extra £2 per month, users get everything included in the Premium plan as well as:
- Product/services listings
- Ability to accept payments for products, appointments, and services
- Ability to sync and sell your website products across multiple channels (including Amazon and eBay)
- Shipping options such as free shipping and flat rate shipping
- Discounts and promotional features, like sale price adjustments
- Zero GoDaddy sales commissions for purchases on your site
If you’re specifically interested in an ecommerce website builder, GoDaddy covers all the basics – and it also doesn’t charge commission on your sales, which means you won’t be losing out even with a large product inventory.
However, while GoDaddy Ecommerce is also slightly cheaper than industry giants like Wix and Squarespace, it doesn’t have the same number of features and functions. To find out more, read our guide to the best ecommerce website builders for small businesses.
Magpye is a vegan pie delivery business. It launched when husband and wife team, Chris and Sarah Fryer, spotted a gap in the growing market for some traditional-style plant-based comfort food. They started serving luxurious pies and mash from a converted horse box trailer at events and venues around the North East, before deciding in 2020 to offer their pies for delivery in their local area.
Chris Fryer, co-owner of Magpye, said: “We needed a way to advertise our delivery services to customers and to allow them to order from home. We had registered a domain name with GoDaddy, but had not yet created a website to go with it.
“We noticed they were offering a free 30-day trial of their Website Builder + Marketing tools, and within half a day we had created a whole site with order and payment systems that we were really happy with – it was professional and had all the functionality we needed. A week later we opened the virtual pie shop and the orders started rolling in!
“Following the success of local delivery via our new website, we realised we could expand the service to cover the whole country. We utilised the tools provided as part of our GoDaddy package to help us to market to the bigger audience we needed to reach. We found the Social, Content Creator and Email marketing features invaluable, and as with the website builder, incredibly efficient to use – enabling us to put our hours into making pies!”
Does GoDaddy have a free plan?
Yes! GoDaddy does have a free plan, through which you can trial the software and get to know all its bits and bobs before investing in anything more high performance.
In fact, if you’re purchasing any website builder or ecommerce plan with GoDaddy, you’ll need to start with the free plan before you can upgrade.
Not many website builders have free versions available, and GoDaddy’s offers about as much as you can get for zero cost. Besides one website with hosting, GoDaddy Free users get access to all of GoDaddy’s templates, site analytics, and 24/7 customer support.
However, as with many zero-charge plans, you’ll also have to display GoDaddy branding and advertisements on your web pages, and you’ll be unable to create or connect to a custom domain.
We think it’s a good trial option, but not a long-term solution. If you try it and decide that you like the platform, GoDaddy Standard is the best low-cost bundle for small business users.
GoDaddy costs: billing cycles, ongoing costs, and hidden fees
While we think GoDaddy is a good platform for small business users, and ranked it highly for value for money, there are some areas of the platform that you should take note of to avoid being hit with hidden fees.
Deal expiry date
Like a lot of website builders on the market, GoDaddy advertises a range of incentives to get new users signed up, including some generous discounts for your first year of usage.
It’s important to make sure you don’t miss your plan’s renewal date, so that you can reassess the pricing plan you’re on at the end of the first 12-month period and make sure it still fits within your budget parameters.
Billing cycles
GoDaddy’s plans are billed annually, which means you pay for a whole year upfront. For example, the basic plan starts from £7.99 per month, so it’s important to note that you’ll have to pay £95.88 upfront for this plan. This will then renew at £155.88 after your first 12-month period.
Custom domain
GoDaddy does not offer a free custom domain. Instead, you’ve got to connect a custom domain if you don’t want to have GoDaddy in your website’s URL (and let’s face it, if you’re a small business owner, you definitely don’t).
The costs vary for a custom domain. In the first year, it’s free for all, but after that you’ll be billed an additional amount based on the domain you choose.
Make sense? Here’s an example. Let’s say you have a cupcake shop called Tilly’s Cupcakes.
- For tillyscupcakes.co.uk you’ll pay £11.99 per year
- For tillyscupcakes.com you’ll pay £17.12 per year
- For tillyscupcakes.co you’ll pay £26.99 per year
How does GoDaddy compare to other platforms?
As you can see by the chart below, GoDaddy is one of the cheapest website builders when compared to its closest rivals on the market. It’s equaled only by Hostinger (which renews at £10.99 per month when billed annually).
However, I think GoDaddy offers slightly better value for money than Hostinger, as it has more functions and features than the latter to the slightly higher prices on its more advanced plans.
Lizzy Eaton is owner of award-winning events agency Oddity Events. Eaton told us: “When the pandemic hit in March 2020, I felt it was time to revamp my website to make sure I stayed relevant and visible to my clients while I diversified my offering. I designed my website myself very easily, using the website builder tool. The templates available made it really slick, functional and professional-looking.
“GoDaddy’s Websites + Marketing service helped me level up my online presence without the cost of outsourcing to a developer or designer. As an owner of a service-based business, my website is my ‘shop front’ and it’s helped me demonstrate my expertise in a way that makes me credible and creative. The customer service team genuinely cares about the success of the businesses that use their service, and this comes across in the calls and communication I’ve had with them.”
Methodology: how did we determine GoDaddy’s value for money?
To establish GoDaddy’s value for money, we explored the platform first-hand. We carried out extensive testing, exploring the platform’s features, ease of use, and functionalities to give us a better understanding of how well it supports small businesses, and whether it truly delivers on value relative to its prices.
We also compared GoDaddy to other platforms to see how it measures up in terms of performance and customer support — giving us a clear picture of where its price plans stand in the website builder market.
Our combination of thorough research and hands-on testing allows us to offer an honest and transparent review of the platform, in turn helping small businesses to determine whether GoDaddy is the right fit for their needs and budget.
GoDaddy verdict
I think GoDaddy is a brilliant and low-cost website builder, which makes it an ideal choice for SMEs – thanks in particular to the charitably low PayPal fees it offers for specific bookable services.
GoDaddy Standard costs just £9.99 per month and has a generous offering of SEO tools, making it a good way to get yourself online quickly and simply. You’ll need to upgrade to GoDaddy Premium for the more sophisticated website building tools, but the higher tiers are still very wallet-friendly, and will likely align naturally with your business growth plans.
As an ecommerce builder, GoDaddy is competitively designed. There are strong sales features, along with generous allowances for marketing and lead generation, but it will cost you a little more than rival platforms.
If you’re a small business, I’d recommend starting out with GoDaddy Standard for £9.99 per month. From there, you can upgrade to GoDaddy Premium for larger feature allowances.
Or, you can start out with GoDaddy Free and begin work on your website today for zero charge.
If you’re looking for the best free website builder that will suit all your business requirements, read our full guide to the top five free website builders for SMEs.
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