Squarespace vs GoDaddy – similarities and differences in 2024
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In the world of website builders, Squarespace and GoDaddy stand out as two popular options for users looking to establish their online presence. While both platforms offer extensive templates, user-friendly interfaces, and in-house marketing tools, they also possess distinct features that set them apart.
To assist you in making an informed decision, we have meticulously tested and evaluated websites built with both Squarespace and GoDaddy.
In this article, I present a comprehensive comparison of these website builders, equipping you with the knowledge to choose the perfect solution for your specific needs.
Squarespace vs GoDaddy website builder: overview
| Squarespace | GoDaddy website builder | |
| ⭐ Rating: | ||
| 🥇 Overall rank: | #11 out of #32 | #19 out of #32 |
| 💵 Price: | From $16.00/month | From $9.99/month |
| 🪄 Ease of use: | Perfect for beginners | Very simple to use, a bit limiting |
| 🎨 Templates: | 180+ modern templates | 20+ different layouts |
| 🏢 Business features: | Solid in-house eCommerce and marketing | In-house features, suited for beginners |
| 👨💻 24/7 live support: | Yes | Yes |
| ✂️ Free domain (first year): | Yes | Yes |
| 🔒 Free SSL certificate: | Yes | Yes |
| 🔥 Coupons: | Cybernews Website Builder Coupons | Cybernews Website Builder Coupons |
How we compared both providers
By evaluating both website builders' characteristics, we aim to empower you with valuable insights and help to make an informed decision on which provider better aligns with your specific needs and preferences. Here are the criteria we looked at when comparing Squarespace vs GoDaddy:
- Pricing. We compared the pricing models of Squarespace and GoDaddy to ensure the best value for your investment.
- Ease of use. We assessed the user-friendliness and intuitive interfaces of Squarespace and GoDaddy for beginners and experienced users.
- Templates. We explored the template collections of both providers, evaluating customization options.
- Business features. We analyzed the array of business features offered by each platform, including eCommerce, marketing tools, and SEO capabilities.
- Performance. We assessed loading speeds and overall website responsiveness to test which website builder is faster.
- User recommendations. We considered feedback and recommendations from existing customers to provide valuable insights for decision-making.
Comparing Squarespace and GoDaddy pricing
Below, you’ll find a summary of both Squarespace's and GoDaddy's plans and pricing, as we’ll go through each of them separately and see which one offers the best value.
In short, both providers offer free trials to try out the service. In terms of subscriptions, GoDaddy is cheaper. This website builder offers prices ranging from $9.99 to $20.99 per month, making its prices cheaper than the industry standard.
Squarespace, when paid annually, is similar to other alternatives on the market. Its prices range from $16.00 to $52.00 per month. Let’s go through GoDaddy’s plans first, as it's the cheaper option.
GoDaddy plans
GoDaddy is rather cheap – the three options you can choose from are these:
| Plan | Features | Price |
| Basic | Offers a connection to your own domain, SSL security, 1 social media platform, and to send 100 marketing emails | $9.99/month |
| Premium | Allows connection to an unlimited number of social media platforms, offers advanced appointment features, and sending up to 25,000 marketing emails | $14.99/month |
| Commerce | Offers everything above with additional eCommerce features | $20.99/month |
You might be wondering, what’s the best choice here? I’ll break down all of these plans for you to choose what would be perfect for your needs.
- Basic. This $9.99 plan offers you the most basic features. It’s tailored perfectly for portfolios, either business or personal. It allows you to make your own personal website, connect your domain, secure your site with an SSL certificate, connect one social media platform for easy posting on your dashboard, make 5 social network posts per month, and send up to 100 monthly marketing emails.
- Premium. This $14.99 plan offers more features than the Standard plan that would greatly benefit a small business. This plan allows you to connect to an unlimited amount of social network platforms, make an unlimited amount of social media posts, and send 25,000 monthly marketing emails. This plan still doesn’t let you sell on the website. But the ability to post unlimited amounts of content from your social network sites on your website is a huge plus.
- Commerce. The most expensive ($20.99) plan includes everything mentioned above with extra key features. To make things short, this plan allows you to sell on your website with their full eCommerce package. Discounts, delivery options, and abandoned cart recovery. This is the only plan that truly allows you to sell, so if that’s what you’re looking for – the choice is clear.
Squarespace plans
Squarespace is more expensive than GoDaddy, however, it's not that expensive when you compare it to most website builders on the market today. The options you can choose from are:
| Plan | Features | Price |
| Personal | Offers a free custom domain, SSL security, and unlimited bandwidth and storage | $16.00/month |
| Business | Added advanced analytics and eCommerce with a 3% transaction fee | $23.00/month |
| Commerce Basic | Removes the 3% transaction fee and offers more eCommerce features along with complete HTML, CSS, and JavaScript customization | $28.00/month |
| Commerce Advanced | Additional extra options, such as advanced shipping and selling subscriptions | $52.00/month |
Now, let’s look at all the plans in greater detail:
- Personal. Similar to GoDaddy’s Basic plan, this plan offers you core features for $16.00 a month. The features are the creation of your website and full website editing, free custom domain, SSL security, unlimited bandwidth, and storage. This plan, just like GoDaddy’s Basic plan, is best for portfolios. Unlike the Basic plan, this plan includes marketing features. The core features in the Personal plan are optimal for showing off your work.
- Business. Moving on, this $23.00 a month plan offers everything as the Personal plan and a few additional ones. Simply, it markets itself as a plan focused on business, with extra features such as advanced analytics and eCommerce (with a 3% transaction fee).
- Commerce Basic. This plan ($28.00 a month), offers advanced features, such as no transaction fee for eCommerce, full CSS, HTML, and JavaScript customization, advanced eCommerce analytics, customer accounts, and professional emails.
- Commerce Advanced. The features that the Commerce Advanced plan offers for $52.00 a month are there for you to make your money back. The additional features are advanced shipping options, abandoned cart recovery, and selling subscriptions. These features help to have returning customers. For someone starting out, it’s not the best option. This plan seems the best choice for bigger and more established businesses, so if that’s you – go ahead.
Ease of use – testing both platforms
When it comes to choosing a website builder, ease of use is definitely important. After all, a website builder has to make website building go from a complicated process to something anyone could do. Here's what you can expect from Squarespace and GoDaddy:
- Both builders focus heavily on ease of use – they’re extremely comfortable for beginners.
- Squarespace offers a variety of website building tools and also has a basic grid system that you need to follow when designing. The setup menu is beginner-friendly, intuitive, and easy to use.
- GoDaddy website builder offers less customization – it has a strict grid to follow. The setup process is simple with a few questions you need to answer and it has guides to point the user in the right direction.
In this section, I’ll go through the signing up, editing, and building processes and explain how they work as well as illustrate how they actually look.
Using Squarespace
Setting up your website with Squarespace is super easy and simple – Squarespace leads you through the entire process step by step.
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You choose your template first, and only then you sign up. Is this approach better than GoDaddy? Instead of asking you questions, you have to choose a template suited to your needs immediately.
- After that, you’re asked to name your site, and then you receive a quick tutorial explaining how the Squarespace editor works.
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Moreover, Squarespace editor is really focused on simplicity. Tools regarding anything you might need are displayed on the left side of your screen. The editor highlights the possible editing options and lets you quickly add and remove content on the website.
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You also have to follow a grid, and you can add sections and blocks to fill with content. GoDaddy does not offer blocks like that, and by using their website builder, you’re left to your own devices. It is also possible to choose from several premade sections. These sections fit the template of your choice pleasantly, taking overall style, fonts, and colors into consideration.
- It’s possible to add additional elements to those premade sections because, you know, sometimes they don’t have everything that you might need. This really lets your creative juices flow, and the customizations are almost endless.
In conclusion, design-wise, Squarespace is beautiful. You don’t have to think much when designing your website, and it comes out well put together.
Using GoDaddy
GoDaddy offers an incredibly simple and quick "sign up and go" interface. And the process is definitely fast. All you have to do is press the Start for Free button, and you’re ready to go.
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After signing up with either an email or a social media account, you’re presented with two steps: choosing a category from a preselected list and then naming your site.
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It’s quick and simple, and all of the decisions that you make in the beginning can be changed later on when editing. After that, you’re thrown into your site’s editor. Only now are you able to choose your site’s template and try out the website’s editing options with the use of the menu on the right.
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The menu also lets you add and edit sections, such as restaurant reservations and showing live streams from your social media platforms.
- GoDaddy’s editor is made for beginners. It follows a simple grid pattern, and you won’t be able to move your items in every way that you might want. However, the grid pattern does look pretty good and gives your site a nice, sleek look. Besides, you can fully customize it.
All in all, it’s simple, a little constricting, and the limitations are great if you do not have any prior design experience – because they lead to a great-looking website.
GoDaddy vs Squarespace website builder templates
When comparing website builders like Squarespace and GoDaddy, one crucial factor to consider is the variety and functionality of their templates. Let's delve into the key differences between the two platforms in terms of their template offerings:
- GoDaddy website builder offers over 200 templates that are versatile and allows using the same content with a different layout.
- Squarespace offers over 178 templates, which are not a one-size-fits-all and are crafted specifically for different websites.
- Both website builders offer beautiful options, however, the level of functionality between them differs.
A good template is a great starting out point for a user with no design experience. Let’s take a look at how these website builders compare:
The major difference between GoDaddy vs Squarespace is the way templates work. The templates on GoDaddy are pretty basic and nothing out of the ordinary. You have the opportunity to choose from over 200 templates that mainly differ in the site’s layout. They will simply take your existing content and change how it looks and behaves.
I liked how easy it is to swap themes and see your content presented afresh. It's a simple way to edit the website's style and feel at a press of a button.
Moving on to Squarespace, there are over 110 templates to choose from, and unlike GoDaddy, they’re very visually diverse. Instead of having different layouts, you'll be given massive example sites, different in their style, visuals, and even niches. Squarespace did their homework and made the user’s job easier by dividing the templates into topics to choose from: so you can find the one closest to your business.
A standout point is that you can add templates into a My Favorites tab to find the ones that caught your attention before quickly. As for the templates themselves, they’re modern-looking and polished. These templates focus heavily on visuals, making your site extremely appealing to the eye.
GoDaddy and Squarespace both offer AI-powered features, but there are some key differences between the two. GoDaddy's artificial intelligence helps users create a website without any coding knowledge. It asks users a few questions about their business and then generates a website template that is tailored to their needs.
Squarespace also uses artificial intelligence, but it goes a step further by offering AID (artificial intelligence design) features. These features allow users to customize their website templates with AI-generated suggestions for colors, fonts, and layouts.
All in all, I really enjoyed Squarespace’s templates because of their heavy focus on visuals and overall customization. The designs are modern and very pleasing to the eye. It’s virtually impossible to mess up the site’s look. GoDaddy’s templates are more like a guide, and you have to decide what would look nice and work with your content.
Business features
Both website builders offer an extensive feature set tailored for businesses. Let’s take a more detailed look at what they actually offer and which one stands out more:
- GoDaddy’s strength is in business, and they offer a variety of tools for selling, marketing, and analytics.
- Squarespace is well-rounded for websites of any kind, from blogging to selling and marketing.
- Both sites have great first-party tools that are fit for selling.
Both of these platforms have tools that are incredibly formulated for small businesses. If you’re comparing Squarespace vs GoDaddy to choose which is better for selling – this part is the most important.
So how do these website builders compare when it comes to business? Let's start with commerce.
eCommerce
The eCommerce suite that these website builders offer is quite impressive and have very helpful guides. Let’s look into it.
- Shipping features. Squarespace offers a variety of shipping options, including flat-rate shipping, calculated shipping, and free shipping. You can also set up shipping rules based on location or product weight. GoDaddy also offers a variety of shipping options, including flat-rate shipping, calculated shipping, and free shipping.
- Taxes. GoDaddy automatically calculates taxes for your customers based on their location. You can also set up custom tax rules. Similarly, Squarespace also automatically calculates taxes for your customers based on their location. You can also set up custom tax rules.
- Integrations. Both Squarespace and GoDaddy integrate with a variety of third-party apps, including shipping carriers, payment processors, and inventory management systems.
- Discounts. Both website builders allow you to offer a variety of discounts to your customers, including percentage discounts, free shipping, and bulk discounts.
Squarespace and GoDaddy both offer a comprehensive set of eCommerce features. However, Squarespace has a slight edge in terms of gift cards and integration with a wider range of third-party apps. GoDaddy, on the other hand, provides more shipping options and discounts.
Marketing
Squarespace and GoDaddy both offer a basic set of marketing features. Let’s look at both website builders' similarities and differences regarding those features:
- Email marketing. Squarespace offers a more robust email marketing service than GoDaddy. You can send up to 500 emails per month for free, and you can also create and send automated email sequences. GoDaddy, on the other hand, offers a basic email marketing service that allows you to send up to 500 emails per month.
- Social media marketing. Both Squarespace and GoDaddy integrate with a variety of social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can use these integrations to share your website content on social media and track your social media analytics.
- Affiliate marketing. GoDaddy offers an affiliate marketing program that allows you to earn commissions by referring customers to GoDaddy products and services. Squarespace, on the other hand, doesn’t have such a feature.
- Marketing automation. Squarespace offers a marketing automation feature called Squarespace Email Campaigns. This feature allows you to create and send automated email sequences based on user behavior. GoDaddy doesn’t have this feature, though.
SEO features
Squarespace and GoDaddy also offer a comprehensive set of SEO features. Below we listed the key features, similarities, and differences between their SEO features:
- Meta title and descriptions. You can edit the meta titles and descriptions for all of your pages and posts. Both Squarespace and GoDaddy offer this functionality.
- URL slugs. With both website builders, you can also customize the URL slugs for all of your pages and posts.
- Keyword research. You can use GoDaddy's keyword research tool to find the right keywords for your website. It’s actually designed to be used with Google’s paid-ad scheme, AdWords. Squarespace also has this functionality – the search keywords panel in Squarespace analytics shows which search terms drive traffic to your site from search engines.
- Sitemaps. Both builders also automatically generate sitemaps for your website. A sitemap informs search engines that individual pages on your site are new or updated and are available for crawling.
- Google Analytics. Squarespace and GoDaddy integrate with Google Analytics so you can track your website's traffic and performance.
All in all, Squarespace’s SEO tools aren’t as good as GoDaddy’s. They allow you to change the page description, titles, and some meta information. If you have some experience with SEO, you might like this better than GoDaddy. There is also an SEO section on the Marketing menu which basically deals with site-wide matters.
Performance results
In this section, I will analyze the performance results of both GoDaddy and Squarespace, highlighting their respective strengths based on website loading speed. A fast-loading website is crucial for ensuring customer satisfaction, as nobody likes waiting for extended periods for a website to load. Let's dive into the findings:
- In performance tests (overall speed, loading time, fullest extent load), GoDaddy surpasses Squarespace.
- Both Squarespace and GoDaddy offer satisfactory performance results.
For the last side-by-side comparison, we put both of the websites that we built through GTMetrix. If you’re unfamiliar with this platform, it measures the page’s or platform’s optimization and overall speed. Here are the results for GoDaddy:
| Overall performance: | 99% |
| Largest contentful paint: | 960ms |
| Test server location: | Vancouver, Canada |
And here are the results for Squarespace:
| Overall performance: | 76% |
| Largest contentful paint: | 1.3s |
| Test server location: | San Antonio, TX, USA |
GoDaddy’s website builder is astonishingly fast. Largest contentful paint loads in just 960ms seconds. For Squarespace, it takes 1.3 seconds to load fully, which is still an excellent result.
You have to agree that both website builders are actually quite snappy. Both websites load fully in less than 3 seconds, so your visitors won’t have to sit around and get bored.
Squarespace vs GoDaddy – Reddit recommendations
Reddit is a great place to get honest and unbiased recommendations from real users. When it comes to website builders, there are two popular options that are often compared: Squarespace and GoDaddy.
According to numerous Redditors, Squarespace stands out as the top website builder for individuals seeking a user-friendly and seamless website creation experience without compromising on customization capabilities. The platform appears to be carefully designed to cater to the needs of both beginners and professional web developers, offering a streamlined and hassle-free journey for all users. Here are some of the things that Reddit users are saying about these two hosts:
On the other hand, other users exclude some more advanced features of GoDaddy focused on businesses and would recommend opting for the latter. However, Squarespace is also recommended as a stylish and simple solution.
Ultimately, the best way to decide which website builder is right for you is to try both of them out and see which one you prefer. You can sign up for a free trial of both GoDaddy and Squarespace to test them out before you commit to a paid plan.
Squarespace vs GoDaddy – side-by-side comparison
| Category | Squarespace | GoDaddy |
| Price | ❌ | ✅ |
| Ease of use | ✅ | ❌ |
| Templates | ✅ | ❌ |
| Business features | ❌ | ✅ |
| Other features | ✅ | ❌ |
| Performance | ✅ | ✅ |
Bottom line
When making a comparison between Squarespace and GoDaddy, it is imperative to consider individual preferences. Both platforms boast user-friendly interfaces and similar website editing capabilities.
Squarespace stands out for its well-roundedness, catering to a wide range of website types. Squarespace provides plenty of stunning website templates but allows for limited editing. This is a double-edged sword as it limits customization, but ensures that the website always looks beautiful and runs smoothly. However, it is worth noting that their plans are more expensive, and comprehensive social media marketing requires additional expenditure.
On the other hand, GoDaddy offers straightforward layouts, so users can make design choices themselves. While it may not match Squarespace's versatility and visual appeal, GoDaddy prioritizes marketing features.
Both platforms excel in providing robust eCommerce options, yet GoDaddy's InSight tool particularly appeals to novices in the field. With competitive pricing and appealing templates for email marketing, GoDaddy is better for online selling pursuits.
FAQ
Which is better, GoDaddy or Squarespace?
It depends on your needs – Squarespace is slightly more expensive, however, the design possibilities are almost endless with their beautifully crafted templates. GoDaddy is cheaper than Squarespace and is better if you're on a budget.
Can I use Squarespace with GoDaddy?
Yes, it’s possible to use Squarespace with a GoDaddy domain if you already have one. If you don’t, Squarespace offers its own custom domains, which would mean less hassle for you.
Can I use my GoDaddy domain name on Squarespace?
Yes, you can use your GoDaddy domain name on Squarespace. You can either transfer your domain to Squarespace or connect it to your Squarespace account. If you transfer your domain, you will manage all of your domain settings and billing from your Squarespace account. If you connect your domain, you will still need to manage some of your domain settings through GoDaddy.
Can I switch from GoDaddy to Squarespace?
Yes, you can switch from GoDaddy to Squarespace. You can either transfer your domain to Squarespace or connect it to your Squarespace account. If you transfer your domain, you will manage all of your domain settings and billing from your Squarespace account. If you connect your domain, you will still need to manage some of your domain settings through GoDaddy.
Comments
Thank you for doing so much to present a readable breakdown that even a novice like me can get the gist of. I feel better now about working with GoDaddy through a nonprofit I volunteer with, but as a strongly visual person of course I’d like the options of Squarespace. All in all, GoDaddy makes much more sense though and I don’t feel wistful anymore.
I'm really happy to hear that you enjoy your experience with GoDaddy. At the end of the day, both providers are very good at what they do. It all depends on your budget and your personal needs.
First of all, thank you for your kind words. Both builders are indeed very functional and easy to use. However, I should point out that both also include a free SSL. You might be thinking about GoDaddy's shared hosting solutions – those do not include a free SSL. GoDaddy's website builder plans, on the other hand, all come with a free automatically installed SSL certificate.
Hope this helps :)
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