Last updated 27th August 2024 | By the editorial team
Creating your website is no longer the daunting experience that it once used to be. This means business owners, big or small, can leverage the internet’s power to sell their products online. Plus, it’s quick and easy to get a professional-looking website together, giving anybody a place to share their views and thoughts. All of this is possible – without the stress – thanks to affordable and flexible website builders like Wix and GoDaddy.
Site builders like these two offer relatively straightforward editors and a host of ready-made templates to choose from. Better yet, there is no risk for you with free plans and terrific trials.
There are more choices and plenty of flexibility in terms of which website builder you go with, making reading through our Wix vs GoDaddy comparison crucial.
We’ve spent hours researching and reverse engineering both Wix and GoDaddy to ensure we have our heads across both editors. This allows us to feel confident, pitching them both head-to-head to ascertain which offers the best value and why.
Our Wix and GoDaddy comparison will give you a complete understanding of the:
So, let’s get stuck into it!
Wix is an industry-leading web creation platform that provides everything you need to create, manage and grow your business online. They offer intuitive design features, faster load times and enhanced performance so you can build more memorable user experiences. You’ll also be able to reach more customers with their advanced marketing and SEO tools while their ultra resilient and flexible infrastructure means your site is ready for any amount of traffic.
When you think GoDaddy, you might be thinking about their famously-known domain names and web hosting. That’s a fair bridge to cross, as it was their ballgame for many years. It’s now possible to have everything handled with the one company, and the GoDaddy website builder isn’t one to overlook.
It is a simple all-rounder with some surprisingly strong performance in terms of the backend and business-focused tools and technology like their coveted InSight dashboard.
A significant component of why you would opt for using a website builder like Wix or GoDaddy is the stress-free aspect of getting a competitive website together in less time than it takes to decide what to watch on Netflix.
When we consider the ease of use for website builders, we are looking for:
Wix makes building a website easy and intuitive. Here’s how:
GoDaddy is a simple editor allowing users to build their website with the same drag-and-drop functions, plus the bonus of having a lot of structure pre-populated with their ADI. The editor is a breeze to handle but has fewer options available. Now, this doesn’t mean it’s worse – as fewer options mean less head-scratching for beginners and fewer components to learn overall.
Unfortunately, this does limit some of the potentials for those wanting greater control over the finer details.
Conclusion: Both of these options are great, Wix is simple and feels great to use, while GoDaddy is a fast way to put together your site. When it comes to being all-around user-friendly, Wix was the much smoother editor to put to their significant experience advantage.
Keep an eye out in the future for GoDaddy; they’re certainly on the right track!
Wix makes it easy to customize your site. With its limitless features and customization tools, you can build a Wix site easily and quickly. Plus, their AI technology can build your site for you, or you can choose to build from scratch or use one of their 900+ fully-customizable templates.
You can also use Wix’s Logo Maker to create an incredible logo for you in minutes. The endless apps, widgets, and add-ons in the Wix App Market Place also put Wix ahead of other site-building platforms in terms of integration.
There are marketing tools and dedicated features to manage specific types of businesses. Wix has a mobile app (Wix Owner) for you to manage your site from your phone.
GoDaddy can impress you. Designing your site and customizing it to your liking is fantastic with GoDaddy’s straightforward editor. As we touched on briefly already, they use ADI to pre-populate much of your site initially. It’s not difficult to use; picture yourself ordering your perfect website from a robot!
GoDaddy utilizes a drag-and-drop builder and keeps the customization functions tidily in the side-panel. There are well over 100 plus themes, and we liked that you could change the overall theme with ease, but noted that the detail-oriented design aspects were not as expansive.
Conclusion: From a design and customization perspective, both website builders do a terrific job of providing flexibility and control. In a general sense, there are many reasons why you could put either over the other.
We considered the two at a deeper level and felt that Wix was the better choice. The Wix editor is more comprehensive, and their collection of themes or templates is superior, offering better control over the design process. In saying that, GoDaddy is a much more stripped-down version of this.
To create the most success for your website – you will want to hit the nail on the head with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). These are a robust set of best practices that will improve your websites’ ranking in search engines like Google and Bing.
If that went straight over your head, don’t stress. The good news is that website builders like Wix and GoDaddy have come a long way in making this fundamental aspect as streamlined as possible.
Wix offers a robust suite of built-in SEO capabilities designed to help optimize your site for search engines so you can increase organic traffic. Save time with bulk 301 redirects, instant homepage indexing on Google, a Google Business Profile integration and more. Plus, customize meta tags, structured data markup and more across multiple pages of the same type at the same time. Every Wix site comes with a strong technical SEO foundation, so you can focus on growing your business.
With GoDaddy, you will have all the same SEO focused features on fine-tuning your website for better ranking. Unfortunately, there is no app store component with GoDaddy. Still, they offer built-in tracking and keyword suggestions, making it a little more comfortable not having to use additional apps.
Plus, it is easy to manually ping Google with your sitemap to help it crawl your new website faster.
Conclusion: These two are very similar in what they provide to you to improve your SEO. Wix is fantastic and certainly gets the job done, but some functionality requires installing additional apps. Whereas with GoDaddy, there are no other installations; these tools are built directly into your site dashboard, which makes it very beginner-friendly.
We are going to go ahead and say GoDaddy edges this one, particularly for beginners. However, there is nothing wrong with Wix SEO – mostly if you are switched on.
When you build your site on Wix, you get enterprise-grade infrastructure so you can focus on growing your business, saving you time and money. Your site will be able to handle billions of requests daily, with multi-cloud hosting and total coverage of 200+ global CDNs. You’ll get industry leading speed and Core Web Vitals optimization. Wix site security is fully managed by dedicated experts—giving you 24/7 protection and peace of mind.
Wix and GoDaddy have substantial knowledge bases available, filled with helpful guides. If you can’t find what you need on their websites, then you’ll be happy to know that they both offer 24/7 online support with live chat, email, and telephone contacts.
In our experience, we prefer Wix here. They have a much more extensive library of helpful articles, which means you’ll typically spend less time on the phone or live chat.
Pricing wise, these two website builders offer similar pricing structures; it’s essential to know the inclusions between free and paid plans.
Wix has a free version where you can explore the basics and still have access to the 100s of templates, unlimited pages, and free hosting. If you upgrade to Premium you get even more.
GoDaddy doesn’t have a free plan. Instead, they offer a one month trial. They offer four traditional plans, all of which feature their marketing tool ‘InSight’L:
All of these plans will include essential SSL security too.
Conclusion: So which website builder has better value for money? While GoDaddy offers cheaper pricing, it is important to remember that some of their features are stripped back, especially the design aspect. Wix has a much better overall package, and the value in their premium plans is important to consider.
When you compare the two website builders, you will quickly see that they both have higher costs if you intend to make sales online, i.e., operate an eCommerce site.
Now, when you bring it all together – we confidently recommend Wix as having better value for your money. They offer a better experience and overall a more comprehensive website builder. Drag-and-drop editing gives you the abilities as close to what you’d expect from a WordPress site while maintaining the code-free user-friendly nature.
Find out more about Wix by reading our Wix review or use the button below to get started.
If you don’t feel like Wix is the match for you and want to check out GoDaddy’s stripped-back aspect, we recommend reading our GoDaddy review here.