Weebly vs GoDaddy: Is There A Need For Speed?

Are you in a bit of a hurry? Understandable if you’re putting together a website on top of everything else – we’ve put this quick side-by-side comparison table to help you quickly see whether Weebly or GoDaddy is the right option for you.

Keep reading to discover more details on exactly why we picked GoDaddy as the better builder, why although Weebly has the majority score wins that GoDaddy takes the cake.

Weebly shines in its value for money, as it comes with some pretty good features on the free plan like a free SSL certificate, SEO tools, and chat and email support. It also has a great app store that will add valuable tools to your website to make running your business easier.

Weebly has some simple templates that are fairly easy to navigate, but they’re quite outdated when you compare them to Wix or Squarespace’s templates. Also, its block-type editing makes customization a little challenging.

GoDaddy’s features lack some depth, restricting what you can actually do with your site. On that note, it doesn’t provide much creative freedom overall.

But, with its ADI, GoDaddy offers the quickest way to get online. After just a couple of clicks, hey presto: a brand new website! That makes GoDaddy ideal for those who feel they lack creative flair and want a platform to do the legwork for them – and quickly.

You can also switch themes at any point, which GoDaddy will reformat for you – saving you time and hassle.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here – let’s delve into everything our research told us about these two great website builders.

The Winner

GoDaddy wins for ease of use

GoDaddy is easier to use than Weebly. Using GoDaddy’s ADI builder requires absolutely minimal effort, with just a few clicks and questions needed to build your site. Weebly is also pretty easy to use, but it’s clunky and can’t match the simplicity of GoDaddy’s user journey.

Visit GoDaddy

Website builders are there to help people get online more easily. Of course, some are easier to use than others, so we tested both Weebly and GoDaddy to find out which is the most user-friendly.

Weebly uses drag-and-drop for its template customization. Weebly also gives you access to thousands of apps, which can be installed with one click. This makes it really easy to personalize your website – but as we mentioned can feel a little clunky.

For ease of use Weebly scores a 3.4/5 compared to GoDaddy’s 4.1/5 because GoDaddy creates the website for you and comes with a great range of tools. Since Weebly merged with the payment processing website Square it’s been a little slow on its updates and has become less user-friendly than GoDaddy overall.

One of the people we tested found Weebly a little challenging to navigate:

Using its ADI, GoDaddy can create a website in a matter of minutes, which users can then customize to their liking. The whole editing process usually takes less than an hour, so it’s a really quick, painless experience.

During our user testing, one user was impressed with the speed and ease of GoDaddy:

Design Easily with GoDaddy

Answer a few questions and hey-presto! You have a website! That’s how quick it is with GoDaddy.

Start with GoDaddy

The Winner

GoDaddy wins design flexibility!

GoDaddy is the better option for design. You can quickly create a website that looks professional, and customize the elements to make it your own. GoDaddy prioritizes speed, making it quick to get online and have a mobile responsive design.

Visit GoDaddy

We’ve discussed how easy each builder is to use, which leads on nicely to our next comparison – just how flexible is each platform with its design tools? In other words, which platform gives you the most creative control?

Weebly provides over 50 templates, covering categories including business, portfolios, and online stores. Weebly also provides over 360 apps – making designing and building a website a bit easier.

A small issue with its templates is that you can’t search for a specific industry theme – instead, you’ll need to scroll through each category to find the perfect one. You won’t be able to preview what each template looks like on a mobile or tablet, either. Also, in our testing, we found that Weebly’s mobile responsive themes had poor formatting and that’s a big SEO issue with more people browsing via mobile.

In our research, GoDaddy blew Weebly out of the water with its designs. While Weebly came in with a disappointing 2.5/5, GoDaddy’s professional designs and easy-to-edit templates merited a much more impressive 4.3/5 design score.

GoDaddy uses ADI to help design your website. It asks a few questions about what type of website you need –  a portfolio, business etc – and then gives you a website that’s ready to go. GoDaddy’s themes are also far more mobile responsive than that of Weebly’s.

After this, you can edit the theme and update text boxes, but that’s about it. Overall, GoDaddy and its ADI are for people looking to get online quickly, rather than design lovers – it’s not quite as design conscious as Wix or Squarespace, for example.

Get Modern Templates with GoDaddy

Website templates are always evolving and GoDaddy’s templates are too, compared to Weebly’s.

Try GoDaddy Today

The Winner

Weebly wins for features and tools

Weebly just about takes the lead from GoDaddy when it comes to the depth of its features. It offers more comprehensive blogging tools, social media integration, and way more apps to choose from.

Visit Weebly

A good website builder needs to offer more than just a smooth design experience – it should also provide a bunch of handy features, apps, and tools to streamline your website or online store. So, why does Weebly have the bigger and better toolbox?

Ecommerce

In our testing, Weebly came out as the best value for money for building an online store. Its clear interface via Square Online’s ecommerce editor makes it easy to start selling online, but it lacks big data tools like managing stock inventory. Overall, it’s for a small business that wants an easy and enjoyable user journey.

Thanks to its ADI, GoDaddy is the quickest way of building an online store. Although you can now sell digital products, most of its ecommerce features still lack the quality and depth found on other platforms.

A Weebly Expert - Alyssa Tollefson

Alyssa Tollefson

Alyssa Tollefson is a Weebly (Square Online) web designer who created Friday’z Boutique and now helps people leverage all the features Weebly offers so they can provide a top-notch omnichannel experience for their customers or clients. Alyssa designs other people’s websites at https://www.alyssatollefson.com/

What website builder did you use for your business?

There aren’t really “templates” in the traditional sense, but you are able to customize each page using sections. Square (Weebly) does suggest page layouts or you can start with a blank page.

What advice would you give to people building a website?

Keep it simple. Clean, concise websites tend to convert better and provide a better user experience. Make sure it is very clear the action(s) you want visitors to take on each page.

How did Weebly help your business?

I love how simple Weebly (Square Online) sites are. They make it extremely efficient to offer an excellent experience for my clients and for their customers.

What apps added value to your business?

For my web design consulting business, I love that I can use Square to host my website, invoice and contract my clients, and manage all my projects. It takes a lot of work out of the equation for me. For my boutique, The Hive, I have made use of the many apps that integrate with Square, but most notably, is Shippo.

I’m able to use Square Online to login and fulfill orders, but the Shippo integration allows me to print labels and pay for all my shipping in one place. Then, I simply drop off my packages at the Post Office. It makes my shipping workflow easy and straightforward – again, reducing busy work.

Marketing

GoDaddy has a really cool marketing suite that helps build your brand. You can engage with your website visitors via email or social media, easily creating posts to share. GoDaddy has made huge improvements to its marketing and has even implemented SEO tools to help more people see your content.

Weebly provides a service named “Weebly Promote”, which helps you create effective email campaigns. It supports you with copy and templates, and can also schedule the emails you send.

Overall for the marketing category, GoDaddy promotes brand building better and helps your website reach more people.

Social Media Integration

GoDaddy wins here, too. While both let you embed social buttons, GoDaddy takes things further by allowing you to add social media feeds directly to your website. This means your visitors can see what you’re tweeting, posting, and sharing at all times. It also has a social post creator so you can create your social posts directly from GoDaddy. The socials GoDaddy supports are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

App markets

Let’s put it this way: Weebly has the most apps of any builder, while GoDaddy doesn’t even have an app market. So, it’s pretty clear who the ‘appiest website builder is, but we’ll quickly go over some reasons why.

On Weebly, you can choose from thousands of third party apps, which can all be installed with one click. Some are free, while others come at a small cost. Apps are available covering all the key areas, including marketing, ecommerce, social media, and loads more to help improve your site’s performance.

Try Weebly Absolutely Free!

Weebly’s App Center is handy for building your website, as it allows you to get more tools and grow your website’s capabilities.

Try Weebly Today

The Winner

Weebly just about wins SEO

It’s very close, but Google just about prefers Weebly to GoDaddy. Both platforms offer good tools for helping your website appear higher on search engines, but Weebly edges it with its wide range of SEO apps and helpful user guides, making things even easier.

Visit Weebly

If you’re wondering what SEO is exactly, it’s the system that helps your website rank higher on search engines like Google. Essentially, it helps people find your site more easily.

Improving your website’s SEO can be done in a number of ways. For example, both Weebly and GoDaddy allow you to:

• Update meta titles and descriptions (the text you see on Google searches)
• Edit URLs (the text found after your website domain)
• Add alt text to images (the text describing an image to help Google identify it)

All of these functions will help search engines index (find and categorize) your website. Both platforms offer great SEO tools, but Weebly has the app center to help you out even more. It also provides really helpful SEO best practice prompts, plus guides on keywords and coding.

The Winner

GoDaddy wins for help and support

GoDaddy gets the gold medal in this section with a 3.8/5 help and support score. While Weebly got a decent 3.3/5. Both website builders offer live chat features, phone support and help centers, Weebly only offers phone support on more expensive plans. GoDaddy also offers social media support and has a built-in restore option.

Visit GoDaddy

As with all things tech, you’re bound to encounter certain issues that need resolving quickly. With this in mind, we looked at the levels of help and support provided by each builder.

When it comes to customer help, it’s a close one. Weebly provides email, phone, and live chat support – but only from 6 AM – 6 PM (PT). Also, Weebly only provides phone support when you’re on the more expensive payment plans.

On the other hand, GoDaddy provides 24/7 phone support, a live chat option, but no email support.

Also both offer a help center or places online to seek the answers to common questions. Weebly has a slightly more in-depth help center, with a wider range of resources than GoDaddy – for those who want to quickly look up any issues.

But all GoDaddy plans offer support and they even help with social media, and you don’t need to reach out to the support team for restoring your site as they have this feature installed.

The Winner

Weebly offers better value for money than GoDaddy

Both platforms provide good value for money when you compare the features and price plans, both Weebly and GoDaddy have free pricing plans. GoDaddy is certainly a cheap option, but Weebly wins because for the price tag you get a good range of features – and get loads of free apps, too.

Visit Weebly

Website builders have changed the game in many ways. One of these is the money – you don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on a web designer anymore.

If you’re a fan of frugality, you’ll love Weebly – the website builder with the highest value for money score of any other builder we’ve tested. It has some of the most affordable price plans on the market, and offers a free plan to boot. Its premium plans range from just $6 per month to $26 per month when paid annually (see the image below for more detail).

The free plan lets you build a beautiful website at no cost (obviously), but it does come with a “.weebly” subdomain. This doesn’t look very professional, and also means your website will be covered with Weebly ads. For just a few dollars a month, it’s definitely worth upgrading.

Do You Need To Stick To A Budget?

The Weebly website builder defeats all other builders in the value for money category. So if you need to save a few bucks then take a look at what you get for Weebly’s free and paid plans.

Pick a Weebly Plan

GoDaddy is also really cheap. There are four paid plans to choose from, you can go for the free plan and then the paid plans start from just $6.99 per month, up to $29.99 per month.

Each plan lets you customize with the same tools, and GoDaddy now provides a free SSL certificate on every plan! If you’ll be needing SEO help and unlimited social media posts then you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.

Need Your Website To Be Running ASAP?

Although Weebly wins in value for money, we’d say your money would be well spent on GoDaddy’s impressive design and tools.

Pick a GoDaddy Plan

We’ve pitched Weebly and GoDaddy against each other in all the key areas for building a website. Using our expert knowledge and results from our user testing, we really got under the skin of each platform to find out what makes them tick.

Let’s quickly recap where each website builder excels…

For value for money and a great app store you should consider Weebly as your website builder or ecommerce builder. If you’re looking for a marketing platform that helps you shape your brand image at lightning speeds then GoDaddy is the platform for you.

You should now have a good idea which platform is best suited for which type of user – and which is the right fit for you.

Who takes the crown, though? After a closely fought contest, we’ve given it to GoDaddy. It deserves the throne because of its impressive range of features, excellent design capabilities, and great help and support along the way.

Weebly is a good option, but overall, if you want a more modern and functional website we’d say: go with GoDaddy.

A Builder That Keeps Improving

Unlike what we’ve seen with Weebly, GoDaddy keeps making improvements to it’s builder. So it will grow with you and give you more capabilities over time.

Give GoDaddy A Go!