GoDaddy Websites + Marketing Review

GoDaddy's multimedia marketing blitz has made it a household name in the traditional web hosting arena, but the company also offers an easy-to-use website building tool.

The recently released GoDaddy Websites + Marketing, an update of the former GoCentral site builder, is an all-in-one service that includes marketing and ecommerce tools for promoting and monetizing your site.

The additions make the newest GoDaddy website builder worth considering, but limited customization and photo editing may reduce its appeal for some users.

Plans and Prices

If you've used the old GoCentral website builder, there's good news: your account has been automatically updated to GoDaddy Websites + Marketing.

You don't have to do anything on the back end.

If you're new to GoDaddy's web builder, however, you can start building a GoDaddy Websites + Marketing site for free.

That said, it's only a trial period; after a month, you'll need to break out a debit or credit card.

GoDaddy Websites + Marketing has four pricing tiers that are designed to appeal to people with different 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 a nice touch, GoDaddy doesn't place a strong cap on your site's storage or data transfers totals; in fact, a GoDaddy representative stated that the totals are so high that most sites won't reach them (and if they do, they can call GoDaddy to have the caps raised).

It's essentially "unlimited" storage and data transfers.

The entry-level Basic plan ($10 per month, billed annually) lets you connect one social media platform, create five social media posts and responses per month, and send 100 marketing emails per month.

The Standard package ($15 per month, billed annually) is similar to Basic, except that it ups the social media listings to three, social posts to 20 per month, and marketing emails to 500 per month.

The Premium plan ($20 per month, billed annually) builds upon Standard with its unlimited social media platforms and posts, and 5,000 marketing emails per month.

This tier also includes free Bing, Google, and Yelp ad credits ($100, $100, and $300, respectively), as well as the ability to book recurring events and classes, accept online payments, and other features.

The Ecommerce plan ($25 per month, billed annually) is GoDaddy's top-level website builder tier.

Like the Premium plan, Ecommerce has unlimited social media platforms and posts, but ups the ante with 25,000 marketing emails.

It also includes the ability to add and edit product listings, set up shipping options, sell items through an online store, manage promotions and discounts, sell on online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, and more.

If you're serious about selling products online, the Ecommerce plan is the one for you.

That said, we don't like that online store creation is exclusive to this tier.

GoDaddy Websites + Marketing's pricing is comparable to the competition's premium tiers: Wix starts at $13 per month, Duda starts at $19 per month, and Squarespace starts at $12 per month.

Note that you can subscribe to GoDaddy Websites + Marketing on a month-to-month basis, but you lose the 15 percent discount that comes with signing up for a year.

Unfortunately, there are no ad-supported free accounts like those offered by Weebly and Wix.

The New Stuff

With the name change from GoDaddy GoCentral to GoDaddy Websites + Marketing come new features.

GoDaddy Websites + Marketing has many tools designed to expand your site's scope.

Here's a quick rundown.

InSight: This is a tool with three parts.

The first is a score that measures how well your site performs compared to other sites in your space.

The second is a suggested course of action that's based on anonymized data from millions of other sites.

The third is a set of metrics that shows a breakdown of how the site is performing, including website views and social media engagements.

Marketplaces: The ecommerce-focused Marketplaces tool makes it possible to sell products on popular sites such as Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Walmart.com.

Your entire inventory can be controlled from the Websites + Marketing dashboard.

Templates: Websites + Marketing offers businesses more than 100 redesigned templates.

Connections/Composer: Everything that you can do in Websites + Marketing originates from this dashboard.

From here, you can launch email marketing campaigns, send appointment reminders, track purchase histories, and receive order confirmations.

Getting Started

Before you can start building or even see any site templates in GoDaddy Websites + Marketing, you must create an account, which can be done via Amazon, through Facebook, or by signing up using an email address and password.

Before you choose a template, GoDaddy Websites + Marketing's startup wizard asks you what your site is going to be about and what name it should have.

For my test site, the wizard picked a template that featured a typewriter, based on my desire for a writer-focused site.

Overall, the template designs are modern and attractive.

Upon choosing one, you see a page showing how a sample site using the template looks both on desktop and mobile.

There are more than 100 templates in total.

Site Building

The back-end interface is clear, simple, and uncluttered.

The Dashboard icon takes you to promotion options like adding a Facebook Page, creating a blog, and implementing SEO settings.

Clicking Edit Site lets you tweak the site's name, rearrange site sections, and customize other features.

There's a dedicated social media section that lets you add Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, and Houzz accounts.

You can also attach files for download, videos, calendars, image galleries, and buttons for social network shares.

You're severely limited in that you can only insert predesigned sections, however.

You can't simply add a photo or text box where you like.

GoDaddy Websites + marketing is a good fit for people who don't want control over the look of their site but would rather have all the design choices made for them.

GoDaddy Websites + Marketing accounts don't include a custom domain.

You can purchase one directly from GoDaddy or use your own.

You add a page via the Pages & Section menu icon on the right-side panel.

The service's previous version, GoCentral, lacked specific page types, such as About Us or Contact.

With GoDaddy Websites + Marketing, there are dedicated menus for About, Contact Us, Photo Gallery, and other sections.

You just give the page a name and then start adding content sections to it.

The newly created page is completely empty, save for a header and footer.

Naturally, you can add text and images.

You can now make individual pages, but not the entire site, private by requiring a membership sign in.

You can't just add an image where you like on the page.

You can select and upload an image, but there are set positions where the photos live on the live page.

Sadly, there aren't many image editing options.

GoDaddy Websites + Marketing lets you zoom mages and flip them from color to black and white.

Most site builders include at least some of this type of image-editing functionality, and many integrate the excellent Aviary online image editor.

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.

Just about every edit you make in GoDaddy Websites + Marketing is automatically saved.

Unlike some site builders, GoCentral gives you good control over when your site is actually published.

At any time during editing, you can hit Preview to see what the site looks like in its current state.

The preview shows both desktop and mobile views.

A Small Business Website Builder

There are a few ways to start your website bringing in cash, both in the form of page sections: You can upgrade to the Online Store account level, add a PayPal donation button, or display ads using Google AdSense (which is frowned upon on today's web, and doesn't produce much income).

When I clicked to add a Store section, a page with a GoDaddy phone number displayed, rather than simply letting me upgrade online.

You can, however, go back into your account page and purchase the upgrade online.

When I upgraded to the Online Store account level, I found that a Shop page was added to my site.

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.

There's also excellent help with inventory and shipping options, with UPS and USPS integrations.

You can get paid through Stripe and PayPal, both excellent services.

You get professional-looking shopping cart and checkout pages, and you can even have text messages sent to you about incoming orders.

One thing you cannot do is sell downloadable files.

All account levels include a spiffy email marketing tool.

This lets you blast a template-based email out to all those who signed up for membership on your site.

You get choices of sales campaigns, events, and standard newsletters.

It's a flexible and customizable tool, letting you track responses and schedule mailings.

Mobile Site Editing

GoDaddy Websites + Marketing creates a functional, good-looking responsive mobile website based on the desktop site you build, but you have absolutely no control over the mobile presentation.

Even the very responsive-design centric Squarespace gives you some options when it comes to your mobile site presentation, and many site builders like Wix let you customize the mobile view considerably.

Then again, none of this may matter to you; my test website looked quite good and functioned as expected.

The other side of the mobile coin—actually editing your site from a mobile device—is an extra advantage of GoDaddy Websites + Marketing.

You can do just about anything in a smartphone browser that you can do in a desktop web browser, including changing the theme and adding sections and images.

SEO

A search engine optimization option starts you off with making your site look appealing to web search engines.

Simply click SEO from the Marketing drop-down menu, and you're 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.

People who are new to site building should be aware that their site most likely won't appear in web search results until they submit and verify the site with the search engines.

Easy and Attractive

GoDaddy Websites + Marketing is one of the simpler site-building options available, and it can deliver good-looking sites for both desktop and mobile viewing.

That said, it only gives you limited control over your site's appearance.

The lack of photo editing and mobile customization may put off some would-be site creators.

This iteration of the service is still fairly new, though, and may continue to grow in time.

Though GoDaddy Websites + Marketing is excellent, at this point our website builder Editors' Choices, Duda and Wix, provide richer offerings—and more customizability—as does the highly rated Squarespace.

For more on getting started building your site, read How to Create a Website and How to Register a Domain Name.