Last updated on January 26th, 2024 at 08:49 am
GoDaddy is one of the most popular web hosting and domain registration companies here in the UK.
In addition to hosting, GoDaddy also offers website builder tools that allow small business owners and individuals to easily create websites without needing coding skills.
The GoDaddy website builder includes designer-made templates along with drag and drop editing features to customize the content and layout. This makes it relatively simple for novices to put together a good-looking site.
Key things the GoDaddy website builder in the UK offers:
- Ready-made templates for different types of sites
- Intuitive drag and drop editor
- Integrated ecommerce capabilities
- SEO tools
- Responsive designs that adapt for mobile
- Email marketing integrations
- Domain registration and web hosting
With these features, GoDaddy aims to provide an all-in-one solution for small businesses, online stores, portfolios and blogs to get online. This article evaluates if the GoDaddy website builder delivers on its promises.
Ease of Use
One of the main advantages of using GoDaddy website builder in the UK is it doesn’t require any coding knowledge or web design skills.
It offers an intuitive drag-and-drop WYSIWYG interface that is easy for novices to understand.
Getting started
When you first sign up, you can choose one of GoDaddy’s professionally designed templates based on site type or industry. Categories include:
- Blog
- Portfolio
- Online store
- Restaurant
- Wedding
- Photography
- Real estate
There are both free and paid premium templates to select from.
Once selected, you go into the main editor dashboard which has menu shortcuts for main tasks:
- Pages – Manage site structure and create new pages
- Design – Change themes and customize template
- Content – Text, images, videos etc
- Store – For ecommerce sites, manage products
- Marketing – Email marketing, SEO
It doesn’t take long to get familiar with the interface and start building out pages.
You don’t necessarily have to know where things are located to start since the menus and options are well organized.
Adding and editing content
GoDaddy uses an easy drag-and-drop builder for editing pages.
You can directly add text boxes, images, buttons or other elements by dragging them from the left panel into the page.
Formatting options for text include:
- Headings – Heading 1 to Heading 6
- Bold, italics, underline text
- Lists
- Quotes
- Dividers
You can also easily rearrange sections by clicking and dragging the elements.
For anyone familiar with WYSIWYG editors in WordPress or other platforms, this will feel very intuitive.
There are also handy widgets you can add like photo galleries, calendars, opening hours, calls-to-action and embed third-party content.
Overall, GoDaddy keeps the interface clean and focused on the most important features for DIY site-builders in the UK.
So it rates high on usability and ease of getting started.
Customization capabilities
Each template has defined areas where you can add your own content.
If you want more advanced customizations like changing layouts or adding new sections, the options are more limited unless you know HTML and CSS.
GoDaddy offers guidance tips showing where each element can be edited in the template.
It does support some custom CSS overrides which can help tweak certain styles.
But any complex design changes would be difficult without web development knowledge.
Ecommerce features
For online stores, GoDaddy in the UK integrates with its own payment and fulfillment services which simplifies the setup process.
The store editor lets you quickly add products, shipping rates and tax rules without coding.
There are also apps and extensions that integrate useful functions like reviews, wishlists and one-page checkout.
While more advanced users might find GoDaddy limiting for anything highly customized, it gets all of the basics right for an intuitive first experience putting together a website.
The learning curve is small for getting up and running.
Expanding the site’s design and features outside GoDaddy’s ecosystem requires greater effort.
Design and Themes
GoDaddy provides professionally designed templates across different industries like fashion, photography, nonprofit, restaurants etc.
All the templates are mobile-responsive and follow modern web design standards. They are kept up-to-date and refreshed periodically.
Template categories
Some of the categories include:
- Blog / Magazine / News
- Online store / Retail
- Portfolio / Photography / Art
- Wedding / Event
- Fitness / Sports
- Services / Consulting
- Real estate
- Church / Nonprofit
This covers most common small business and personal site types users would want to build.
Visual styles
The visual styling focuses on clean, minimalist designs with ample whitespace. This creates a modern, uncluttered look for showcasing your brand and content.
You can choose templates with brighter colors for a lively feel or more neutral palettes for a sophisticated style. There is enough variety to suit most tastes.
Imagery is given top billing with large banner images and featured photos throughout. The typography and iconography is professional and easily readable.
Customization options
Each template has 20+ style variations that change aspects like:
- Colors
- Fonts
- Icon styles
- Layouts
- Patterns
The whole style can be refreshed with a couple clicks to find a design that fits your brand.
For deeper customization, you can manually adjust:
- Typography – Font face, size, color
- Colors – Main color scheme
- Layout – Column widths, alignments, padding
- Backgrounds – Colors, images, patterns
The custom CSS option helps tweak specific elements that templates don’t expose like text styling and button shapes. But it requires CSS knowledge.
Quality of templates
GoDaddy has clearly invested in creating versatile, professional-looking themes tailored to different industries and site objectives.
For the average user, there is enough variety to get a unique look and feel without needing to manually code designs from scratch.
If you value a streamlined process for building an attractive site quickly over extensive control down to the smallest details, GoDaddy templates deliver on that.
Power users or perfectionists may feel too constrained. But for most small business cases, the built-in customization hits a sweet spot.
Features and Capabilities
The GoDaddy website builder in the UK is designed specifically for small commercial sites rather than complex web apps.
The features cater to typical user needs around showcasing products/services, taking orders and building audience engagement.
Pages and Structure
As a basic CMS (content management system), GoDaddy allows flexible page structure and site navigation through its Pages menu.
You can easily create new pages and sub-pages, rearrange the order and build multi-level hierarchies.
Common content types like text, images, buttons and dividers live inside structured Sections that maintain uniform styling across pages.
There are also dozens of modular Widgets for specific elements like Menus, Galleries, Showcases, Maps, Bookings and more.
These building blocks enable intuitive site shaping without coding skills. But there are naturally limitations creating highly complex page structures compared to developers working directly with frontend code.
Design and Customization
As covered in the Design section, GoDaddy offers strong visual personalization of templates via Style editing tools and manual CSS overrides.
You can tweak various aspects like colors, fonts, spacing and backgrounds to craft your own look and feel without replacing the entire theme.
Certain layout changes are constrained to the template structure. Still, clever use of sections, widgets and CSS can achieve quite tailored designs.
Just don’t expect full positioning freedom that open source themes provide.
Blogging
The Godaddy website builder in the UK incorporates a flexible, user-friendly blogging engine for news, editorial and magazine-style sites. You can use this or integrate WordPress for blogging which allows transferring existing WP sites into GoDaddy.
Handy features include global blog templates, audience engagement widgets like comments/sharing, integrated image galleries and subscriptions.
SEO is served by built-in meta fields for search optimization. There is also automated sitemap generation and integration with Google Search Console.
Ecommerce
The integrated GoDaddy Online Store powers ecommerce capabilities like product management, cart and checkout, shipping, taxes and reporting. It keeps the user experience within one system for efficiency.
The inventory and orders integrate with Fulfillment by GoDaddy including warehouse storage, packing and shipping services. So you can scale order processing seamlessly.
For payment processing, GoDaddy Payments offers competitive card rates tailored for small businesses. It also works with external gateways like Stripe and PayPal.
There are rich options around coupons, gift cards, reviews, wishlists and subscription products as well. Comparing with dedicated ecommerce software, features are light but cover essentials well for most basic online retail scenarios.
Email Marketing
GoDaddy Email Marketing in the UK enables creating email lists, automations like welcome/nurture sequences and broadcasting campaigns.
Pop-ups and subscription forms help capture emails from site traffic to build your audience.
The tool connects your domain and website builder directly for unified data and tracking.
But you can also export email lists if migrating to a different ESP later.
For complex behaviors like IFTTT-style multi-step triggers or advanced personalization, standalone tools like MailChimp provide richer capabilities.
But Email Marketing packs helpful basics natively into GoDaddy’s suite.
Verdict
The website builder aims squarely at core small business needs – presenting information, enabling transactions, engaging visitors.
It favors broad integration over specialized depth in any one area.
But the included capabilities should satisfy most common use cases and provide ample room to grow online.
Advanced developers may feel confined compared to working directly with front-end code and APIs.
However, the value for non-technical users is clear in streamlining website creation and avoiding piecemeal solutions.
GoDaddy delivers a cohesive, professional-grade platform combining essential tools for getting online.
Performance
Beyond just features, website performance factors like speed, uptime and responsiveness also determine success engaging and retaining visitors.
This evaluates how GoDaddy stacks up across essential performance criteria:
Page speed
Fast page load times are vital for good user experience and SEO rankings.
GoDaddy sites leverage a global content delivery network (CDN) and optimized hosting infrastructure to accelerate performance.
Specific technical enhancements include:
- Caching dynamic content
- Compressing images
- Minifying CSS/JavaScript
- Browser caching of static assets
This helps minimize initial requests and payload sizes for faster rendering.
GoDaddy also offers integration with Cloudflare, a popular CDN and web optimization service. You can enable Cloudflare through GoDaddy Domain Settings for further speed gains.
Mobile Optimization
All GoDaddy templates are mobile-responsive using flexible containers and grids adapting to smaller screens.
You can preview these responsively before launching sites.
The website builder also creates optimized mobile experiences standalone from desktop sites.
You can customize mobile headers/footers, menus and content individually.
Dynamic serving of correctly sized images plus browser caching improves mobile load efficiency.
Uptime and reliability
GoDaddy website builder in the UK guarantees 99.9% average uptime on managed WordPress hosting plans that power their sites.
Considering the typical small business site is low-medium traffic, this provides excellent reliability.
The underlying infrastructure utilizes load balancing across global data centers and multiple failover points.
So network outages rarely take down sites completely.
Maintenance is also rolled out progressively to avoid large failures.
For mission-critical sites requiring highest availability, dedicated managed hosting at higher price tiers can customize uptime SLAs (service-level agreements) further.
But GoDaddy standard accounts still outperform most budget hosts on reliability.
Technical support
GoDaddy provides 24/7 tech support via live chat in the UK for website issues where response times typically average under 5 minutes in testing.
They can help diagnose and resolve backend problems.
For frontend editing challenges, GoDaddy offers an online knowledge base with tutorials, documentation, and webinars for the website builder and other products.
There is also an active community forum to learn from other customers.
Considering GoDaddy serves mainstream small business clients rather than just developers, customer support channels cater well to less technical users.
Final Take
The performance and architecture decisions focus on stability and speed for typical small site scenarios.
While higher-traffic or complex web apps may need greater resources and customization, GoDaddy delivers rock-solid foundations for most use cases.
Coupled with knowledgeable support teams, you can be reassured your website will stay up and running smoothly.
Costs
GoDaddy website builder in the UK pricing follows a freemium model with free basic plans and paid upgrades unlocking additional capabilities.
There are four main plans to choose from:
- Basic from £6.99 /mo
- Standard from £8.99 /mo
- Premium from £11.99 /mo
- eCommerce from £12.99 /mo
The website builder and online store come with a free domain for one year included. And you can install on existing domains registered with GoDaddy as well.
How pricing compares
Compared to DIY site builders like Wix and Squarespace, GoDaddy delivers strong value with more features and capabilities in the base plans for lower monthly rates.
The free tier unusually includes the full website builder rather than just previews.
So you can launch a complete small commercial site without paying initially.
For advanced stores with higher product volume, Shopify at $29/month offers dedicated ecommerce focus including POS.
But GoDaddy provides better all-round support for informational sites with optional ecommerce.
Considering the breadth of web design, hosting, email marketing, SEO and security functionality built into one system, GoDaddy pricing remains affordable for small businesses on a budget.
Worth paying for?
The main limitations of free accounts are around stock media, email marketing volume and ecommerce fees.
These can be worthwhile upgrades once sites start gaining traction.
Compared to DIY open source tools, GoDaddy solves the time and technical skill needed to integrate separate site building, hosting, security, marketing, payments and other components.
There is real value having an end-to-end ecosystem, even for starters on free plans.
For individuals and early-stage businesses, you can go quite far before needing paid upgrades based on built-in capabilities alone.
While premium add-ons deliver incremental benefits, GoDaddy makes the barrier-to-entry very accessible for getting online quickly.
Key Takeaways
In Summary – the Key Advantages of Using GoDaddy Website Builder in the UK Include:
- Intuitive drag and drop editor needs no coding expertise
- Mobile-friendly templates professionally designed
- Integrated store capabilities for selling online
- Email marketing automation bundled with sites
- Reliable managed WordPress hosting performance
- Domain registration included free for first year
- Affordable pricing compared to competitors
- Exceptional features even on free plans
For DIY site builders in the UK without web development skills, GoDaddy empowers easily creating well-designed commercial websites, stores and blogs.
While advanced customization and complexity depends on upgrading technical capabilities, entry-level users benefit tremendously from such an approachable platform covering essential website elements out-the-box.
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