GoDaddy vs WordPress: Website builder comparison

GoDaddy and WordPress are both excellent options for individuals and small business owners planning to launch a website.

We’ve tested GoDaddy, WordPress and a whole range of other builders to help you make a decision on which brand is best for you.

Of course, what you or your business needs might be different to the needs of others, so it’s important to consider closely the features that matter most to you.

On this page, we’ve provided an oversight of both GoDaddy and WordPress across a range of features. Read on to find out more.

GoDaddy vs WordPress: Key takeaways

Below, we’ve provided a quick summary of GoDaddy and WordPress to give you some idea as to each brand’s strengths.

Before you jump in though, it’s worth noting one important difference between GoDaddy and WordPress.

GoDaddy is a website builder that helps users to build a website quickly, easily and without fuss. On the other hand, WordPress is a CMS platform that offers a huge amount of flexibility for those who know how to use it well.

In short: Wix is an accessible, fuss-free platform while WordPress is a slightly more complex, but massively scalable, CMS.

From £6.99/month

GoDaddy: Value-for-money all-rounder

GoDaddy offers a similar experience to Wix and other builders. While it’s not quite so easy to use, it does come at a lower monthly cost. GoDaddy offers a strong catalogue of tools and digital services.

Review

From £3/month

WordPress: Flexible website solution

WordPress offers an enormous amount of flexibility that can make it the best choice for any online platform. However, it can be a more complex experience that may not suit newcomers.

Take a look at our best website builders page to compare GoDaddy, WordPress and a range of other options.

GoDaddy vs WordPress: Feature comparison

The information above might have been enough to help you make your decision. If not though, or if you just want more information, you can continue reading below.

In the next sections, we’ve focused on several key features, comparing how GoDaddy and WordPress perform across them.

You know best what you need from your personal or small business website, so make sure to focus most on the sections that matter most to you.

Ease of use

Ease of use is always an important factor for anyone planning to launch a website. If you don’t have much or any, experience with web development or design, ease of use is even more vital.

GoDaddy provides a website-building experience that is more or less comparable to other brands, including Wix or Squarespace. WordPress, on the other hand, offers a slightly more complex experience.

While GoDaddy allows users to build a website from the ground up using a range of in-built tools and features, WordPress offers a huge range of scalability but requires third-party tools and plugins.

Both GoDaddy and WordPress provide a drag-and-drop experience, but getting to that point is much more straightforward with the former.

They also both offer tools for SEO, ecommerce and other tools for those that need them – whereas with GoDaddy these tools are built into your plan, with WordPress you’ll need to engage with other providers for features and support.

If you want a simple experience – or don’t have much experience of your own – you may find GoDaddy to be the better choice. If you want a more bespoke website with advanced features, WordPress is a better choice, though is more difficult to get to grips with.

Prices

When it comes to value for money, GoDaddy and WordPress are both great choices.

WordPress is the cheaper option overall, with its Personal plan costing just £3 per month. For that price, you get an ad-free domain with a few basic features.

GoDaddy’s cheapest plan, the Basic plan, is just £6.99 per month. This makes it one of the cheapest pure website builder options, though it is double the price of WordPress Personal.

The GoDaddy Basic and WordPress Personal plans offer a range of basic tools and features that will help you get your website online. If you want to build a very simple online platform for as little money as possible, WordPress is the better option.

Of course, it’s not always that straightforward.

If you’re planning to build a website that drives organic traffic, you’ll need to opt for GoDaddy’s Standard plan. This costs £8.99 per month but provides access to SEO tooling.

At the same time, if you want to add any advanced features to WordPress, you’ll need to use plugins. To add plugins to your site, you’ll need to pay at least £20 per month for the Business plan.

You can take a look at the table below for a brief comparison of the cheapest and most expensive plans from each brand.

	GoDaddy	WordPress
Cheapest plan	£6.99/month	£3/month
Most expensive plan	£13.99/month	£51/month
Number of plans	4	5

If you’re looking for the cheapest possible option, and only need to create a very basic website, WordPress is the better plan.

Templates

GoDaddy offers a strong range of templates, with over 200 designer-made themes for users to choose from. Compared to other website builders, this is a large selection.

With so many options, it’s likely that you will be able to find a template that matches your needs, whether you’re launching a personal website, a business website or ecommerce platform.

With GoDaddy, you can also feel confident that the template you choose will be mobile-friendly and fast. These are two massively important factors for any website. You will also be able to edit your template to make sure the design and layout matches your brand.

WordPress offers a much larger selection of templates for users to choose from, with WPZoom estimating that there are as many as 30,000 themes to choose from.

With a website builder such as GoDaddy, you can only use one of the professionally-designed templates that they provide. With WordPress, on the other hand, anyone can create a template – if they have the skills to do so. This is why there is such a huge difference between the number of templates available.

The benefit of having so many templates to choose from is that, whatever your site does, there’ll be an option that suits. The downside is that you might feel spoilt for choice. Additionally, you may have to pay a monthly or annual fee for some templates.

The final consideration with WordPress is that you may need to pay closer attention to site performance. Because templates can be created by everyone, you’ll need to make sure that the one you choose works well with the plugins you use.

The last thing you want is a template that looks great but slows your website down.

As with some of the other features covered on this page, which of the brands is better for templates will depend on how easy you want your experience to be.

SEO

If you are planning to drive organic traffic to your site from search engines like Google, you’ll need to focus on search engine optimisation (SEO).

The SEO dashboard for GoDaddy sites sits within the Marketing space. To gain access to it, you’ll need to opt for at least the Standard plan, costing £8.99 per month.

Similar to other website builders, GoDaddy provides a step-by-step guide as you begin launching your site. As you begin, GoDaddy will prompt you to answer a series of questions. These questions cover your potential audience as well as the type of website you plan on running.

As you progress, you will be prompted to choose page titles for your homepage, along with page descriptions and other features.

You can continue making changes to your website following this set-up, but you can do so knowing that your site has a strong SEO foundation.

Your SEO experience with WordPress will be quite different. How you proceed will depend on what plugin you use.

Yoast SEO is among the most popular plugins for search engine optimisation. It provides the tools and features you will need to make your website rank. This includes functionality for editing metadata, automated sitemap generation, and a range of other features.

There is a free plan for Yoast SEO, however for the more advanced features you will need to pay for the Premium plan.

When it comes to choosing between WordPress and GoDaddy for SEO, bear in mind how different the experiences can be. If you want a platform that holds your hand through the optimisation process, GoDaddy is the right choice. For more flexibility, WordPress is better.

As a rule, the choice will be down to your level of experience. A newcomer is probably going to be better off with a website builders such as GoDaddy. An expert will probably go for WordPress.

Ecommerce

As with SEO, ecommerce operates differently on WordPress than it does on a website builder such as GoDaddy.

You will need to use a third-party tool, such as WooCommerce, to access ecommerce functionality. WooCommerce is a platform designed for WordPress. It provides a dashboard within your main WordPress dashboard where users can manage products, payment options, shipping and other features.

There are other ecommerce plugins, though they all work in broadly the same way.

With GoDaddy, you’ll have access to ecommerce functionality once you opt for the Ecommerce plan, costing £12.99 per month. Like GoDaddy’s SEO tools, the ecommerce functionality exists within the builder’s ecosystem.

The GoDaddy Ecommerce plan allows users or businesses to list products, take payments from customers, and update and manage shipping. You can also make use of promotional codes, including discounts, and sell using social media.

GoDaddy ecommerce allows you to list as many as 5,000 products, with up to 10 images per product. You also have the option to sell either physical products or digital ones.

With GoDaddy, you can list up to 5,000 products, with up to 10 images per product. You can also sell physical products and digital products. You also gain functionality that allows you to sell on social media.

To compare GoDaddy, WordPress and other options you can visit our best ecommerce website builder page.

User reviews

User reviews can provide a good indication of how customers have experienced a product. They might not always be the most reliable sources of information, but they can be helpful.

On Trustpilot, as of July 10th, 2024:

GoDaddy scores 4.7 out of 5 stars. Over 100,000 people have reviewed GoDaddy with 84% rating it 5 stars.
Squarespace scores 1.3 out of 5 stars. Over 1,000 people have reviewed Squarespace with just 14% rating it 5 stars.

Bear in mind that, while there are differences in the ratings above, there’s also a massive discrepancy between how many reviews each brand has received.

GoDaddy vs WordPress: Summary

GoDaddy and WordPress both offer a good experience for anyone looking to build a website, but what they offer is very different.

GoDaddy is a pure website builder with everything done for you; WordPress is a CMS where you have the freedom to scale your website.

Take a look at the list below for a summary of the features covered aboveL

Ease-of-use: GoDaddy is the easier to use option. For a newcomer, it’s the clear choice.
Price: WordPress offers one of the cheapest plans around, though GoDaddy may end up cheaper once you start adding features and tools.
Templates: WordPress offers a much larger number of templates, though you may spend more.
SEO: GoDaddy offers a built-in easy to use SEO experience. WordPress offers more flexibility, but only if you know what you are doing.
Ecommerce: GoDaddy offers a simple ecommerce experience, though WordPress offers more scalability.
User reviews: GoDaddy is the clear winner.

GoDaddy and WordPress are very different options for a person or business planning to build a website.

In general, the best choice for you will depend on your level of experience. GoDaddy cuts out a lot of the complexity, while WordPress provides an incredibly flexible, and scalable, experience.

Bryn Glover

Bryn is the founder and editor of WebsiteJumpStart. He has worked in the digital field for over a decade and was editor for Startups.co.uk - the UK's leading small business website - and for NerdWallet UK before launching WebsiteJumpStart to help people and businesses get online with ease.

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