Weebly vs GoDaddy Website Builder

Weebly and GoDaddy website builders focus on helping small businesses build both their websites and online presences. But despite this similarity, they have a fair share of differences, too – and before choosing which one you pick, you need to do a little bit of research.

Weebly, acquired by the Square payment gateway, focuses heavily on eCommerce. Plus, with some nice-looking themes, and an intuitive drag-and-drop editor, you can use Weebly to make an entirely custom website.

Meanwhile, the GoDaddy website builder goes all-in on marketing. It’s an all-in-one hub for all things business – a website builder, an eCommerce platform, social media posting, email marketing, and more.

On this comparison, I’ll show you my test sites, and tell you all about my experiences from comparing Weebly vs GoDaddy – covering pricing, ease of use, templates, business features, and website performance. Alternatively, if you don’t feel like going through my ramblings, just click here to go straight to the conclusion.

Or just follow the table below to read on the things that interest you the most.

Winner

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Weebly vs GoDaddy for different sites

Weebly and GoDaddy both focus on businesses – the features you can find in these builders are quite similar and clearly aimed at one target audience. But how do these builders compare when it comes to building different kinds of websites?

Weebly vs. GoDaddy - a case study

There is no better way to measure which website builder is best, than – you guessed it! – build a website with it! That's exactly what I've done here: for this Weebly vs GoDaddy comparison, I have two test sites set up and ready.

During this part of the post, I'll be taking a look at how easy it is to use the two platforms to set up and edit your very own website, as well as taking a look at the themes and features that they provide.

But before we get there, here's something I promised earlier – here's is a website I made with Weebly (click the images to open the sites in full!):

And here is the site I built with the GoDaddy website builder:

Now, step into my shoes – and see my experience from extensively using both of these platforms:

Ease of use – different approaches, similar stories

• Weebly offers a beginner-oriented interface, blending together a customizable drag-and-drop website builder and eCommerce features.
• GoDaddy website builder offers less customization and no true drag-and-drop functionality, but it's quite simple, and functionally doesn't lag much behind Weebly.
• Both options are intuitive and well-suited for beginners. Both Weebly and GoDaddy focus on trying to make website building as simple as possible.

No surprise – the best website builder is usually determined by how it manages to make difficult things easy. And so, in this section I'll be comparing the signup and editing processes of these platforms.

Let's get to it!

Using Weebly

Upon signing up, I was immediately asked the most important question of this comparison.

After Weebly was acquired by Square, the new owners have decided to use the platform to promote their existing product – the Square eCommerce platform. And so, in order to use Weebly, you need to choose the "Weebly Websites" option.

Don't listen to what the big bad sign is saying here: Weebly absolutely has plans for selling online.

Once that is done, you'll move to a big decision #2 – picking out your theme.

And then, you'll be given the reigns to the Weebly site editor: which looks like this.

On the left-hand side, you can see all the available options.

You can drag and drop them on your website – just like this.

If you don't trust yourself to mix and match various elements into a presentable-looking website, you can also choose one of the few pre-made sections. That will make building a custom website just a bit easier.

You can also add some of those elements and combine them with the pre-made sections to further personalise them: which I found to be pretty neat.

But actually – I have a little confession to make.

I know Weebly very up close and personal: in fact, the first time I used it was perhaps in early 2018, when I was just trying to find an easy way to make a simple website (same, huh?). That was all before all this Square stuff.

And back then, Weebly had several more elements you could add to the site – the new version of Weebly is relatively barebones, compared to what it used to be.

It certainly makes building website easier. But I do wish that there were more design options here.

Okay – rant over.

Once the website is happily put together, all I had to do was to press the "Publish" button, and my little creation was live. Everything was seriously simple – as it should be. Man, I just wish that there was more that I could do.

Using GoDaddy

GoDaddy does its absolute best to make the onboarding process as simple as possible, too.

I logged in to the site, clicked a massive "Start for Free" button, registered using my social media or an email, and that was it – I was already out there building my website.

All I had to do was to select my site category, and pick out a site name.

And that was....it. No theme selection, nothing. Just an open interface, ready to get edited.

Here you can also see the effect the two things I had to choose does to the website. The picked out theme determines the added demo content – images, texts, and so on. And your selected title becomes, well – the site's title.

Comparing the editing on Weebly vs GoDaddy website builder, GoDaddy looks a lot less intricate than on Weebly. By that, I mean that there's no drag and drop builder. Everything's put together in a simple grid system. Each element can move up and down, and the smaller ones can move left and right.

Once an element is highlighted, there are certain things that can be edited about them: size, layout, and so on.

One thing that really impressed me, was the selection of possible sections: here, GoDaddy blows Weebly out of the water.

There are over 30 different types of sections, fulfilling different goals: content, menus, photo galleries, donations buttons, and so on.

Plus: each section has some different layouts, so you can pick out the one best matching your style.

I'll be honest, I enjoyed GoDaddy's editing process more that I enjoyed Weebly's. Sure, Weebly lets you add elements where you please, and mix-and-match everything around to get your desired result. But there isn't all that much to edit around!

Both platforms are easy to use: but overall, GoDaddy website builder was a more pleasant platform to work with. There were more elements, that could be effortlessly combined to make a good-looking website. Weebly offers more design freedom but simply falls short in terms of available sections and elements.

Templates – old school vs. the new cool

• Weebly offers around 60 templates, spread out across several different niches.
• GoDaddy website builder offers only 20 different templates: however, they're not pre-made options like on Weebly, but rather different layouts for your existing site.
• GoDaddy templates are more versatile, letting you use the same content with a different layout.

For a beginner user with limited web design experience, a good template can be an excellent starting point, making page building a lot easier.

Let's have a look at how both platforms tackle this challenge.

Weebly templates

Weebly has around 60 templates, separated into 7 different niches.

Actually, I found them to look pretty good. They're minimalist, letting you very quickly set your own mood and style, just by adding a few images of your own.

Of course, your decision on whether you'll enjoy Weebly's templates will depend entirely on your taste. Personally, I don't find 60 themes to be enough to fully hit both the niche and the design tastes for all of the users.

Most likely, you will need to make some sacrifices. But if you enjoy both the style, and the topics that Weebly has – it's a pretty solid pick. All down to you here!

GoDaddy website builder templates

GoDaddy offers even fewer templates than Weebly – there are only 20 options to pick from.

However, this number is actually no problem: in fact, I'd argue that there's even more choice here than it was on Weebly.

How so? Let me explain.

GoDaddy doesn't offer pre-made website templates. Instead, it offers 20 different layouts, that will use your existing content, and will a website all around it. Just like that:

Once you sign up, you'll be asked to mention what kind of a website that you're making. That will determine the demo content that gets added to your site: the pictures, the content, the overall layout.

And then, you'll be given an option to choose how the menus will look and how different elements will interact with one another. There are 20 varying options for that.

For some – that might be a bit disappointing. There are no drastically different pre-made website options, you'll have to choose and edit everything yourself.

That being said, I find GoDaddy templates to be a way to build a website that is designed entirely by you.

As it is a trend with this platform, you're not getting the full design freedom – but you're sure getting a freedom to mix and match everything GoDaddy throws at you. And I like it that way.

Weebly offers a classic approach, with around 60 pre-made websites. Meanwhile, GoDaddy puts the design decisions in your hands, offering not website templates, but around 20 distinct site layouts. For me, GoDaddy's approach seems better suited for a wider range of businesses, who don't have to depend on the platform to have the theme that looks "just right".

Business features – two different strengths

• Weebly offers a solid eCommerce platform. It's a simple solution, that combines well with multiple third-party tools.
• GoDaddy's biggest strength is its marketing. Email, social media, and business management tools are a lifesaver for smaller businesses.
• When it comes to SEO, both platforms showcase different approaches. GoDaddy holds your hand all the way through, while Weebly plays it simple.

Both of these platforms focus heavily on small businesses: offering eCommerce, marketing, and SEO tools to go together with their website builders. Let's have a look at how each builder can help you with each of these business hurdles:

eCommerce

Weebly has a solid eCommerce suite baked right into the platform. From the dashboard, it's simple to add and manage products, as well as set up coupons, gift cards, or check out customer reviews.

Knowing Weebly's relationship with the Square payment gateway, it's no surprise to see eCommerce embedded so deep in everything this builder is doing. This is a great option for beginner users: everything is simple and set up automatically.

On top of the built-in eCommerce features, Weebly also has a third-party application store, which includes a lot of various eCommerce tools. So, it'll be pretty easy to add additional capabilities, like dropshipping, popups, or set up analytics.

When it comes to adding the store on the site, simplicity defeats customizability. You can only choose from 4 options, on how your products could be laid out on the site.

But overall, I was rather impressed with how Weebly weaved eCommerce into its platform. This is certainly one of its strengths.

GoDaddy also has a pretty strong eCommerce suite. A helpful guide on the dashboard leads the way for each new store owner, telling what things need to be done in order to achieve some of that sweet, sweet success.

Adding the online store on the site is also rather simple – that can be done via the website editor, by choosing the "Online Store" section.

There aren't many options to pick from: you get to choose only from two layouts.

But I genuinely enjoyed how GoDaddy adapted the product screen, depending on the colors and fonts that I chose.

Both platforms offers solid eCommerce suites – but for me, Weebly is ever so slightly ahead. It manages to be easy to use, and also brings in a killer feature – a solid third-party application store. If that doesn't impress you all that much, either of the options will be great.

Marketing

This is GoDaddy's turf. Hey, when you call your own product "Websites+Marketing", it sets certain expectations, right?

Well – the expectations were fulfilled. I loved both email marketing and the social media posting features. They both follow a similar style and pattern – so I'd like to focus on the latter.

The social media posting features not only let you post to all your platforms directly from one dashboard, but also include numerous pre-made post templates.

In recent years, the social media presence became as important (and perhaps more important) than the website itself. I loved GoDaddy's approach to offer its clients a unified solution to post consistent, contemporary content throughout the platforms. I'll be honest – I'm not the greatest when it comes to design. To me, a tool like this could be a lifesaver.

Anything to fool people that graphic design is my passion, you know?

Another excellent feature is GoDaddy Insight – a tool that helps you reach specific business goals, and lets you know how it's going.

Once you pick out what specific things you want to achieve...

GoDaddy goes full personal trainer mode and offers you a diet and a workout regime to achieve your goals.

During your work, you'll get scored and compared to other websites with similar goals. The score goes from 0 to 100 and turns out, I am better off keeping my day job:

I genuinely loved this: the platform essentially eliminates guesswork, giving your a clear direction of where to go, and how much is left to get there.

Overall, GoDaddy's marketing suite has absolutely impressed me. Solid job.

Meanwhile, Weebly focuses mostly on email marketing and does a pretty good job there. I genuinely enjoyed the custom emails feature, which picks out suitable email templates to send out to the visitors.

For example, it will offer to send out emails on various holidays, or inform the people about the new items on the store.

The email builder is pretty simple to use, and follows Weebly's design style:

I also liked the automated emails feature, which will automatically send out emails to your customers, depending on the actions that they do – i.e. signing up to your newsletter, or completing a purchase.

Sadly, there's a little caveat: it only lets you set up 2 campaigns a month, and send out 500 emails. Comparing Weebly vs GoDaddy here, the latter gets the advantage – the email limits on GoDaddy increase depending on the plan that you choose.

For more advanced email marketing on GoDaddy, you'll need to purchase a separate marketing plan. It costs anywhere from $8 to $75 a month.

GoDaddy wipes the floor with Weebly when it comes to marketing. The combination of email marketing, social media posting, and GoDaddy InSight is an excellent free option for all small business owners.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If your website business plan is to rank high on search engines and bring in users from there – this is the part where you should squint your eyes and bring your head closer to the screen. I'll wait.

Yes, just like that.

When it comes to SEO, I really liked what GoDaddy had to offer. It doesn't play around assuming that you know all the required SEO basics – instead, it tries to make everything as simple and approachable as possible.

The GoDaddy SEO wizard will ask information about your website, and then run you through a series of edits, making sure that everything about your site is as optimized as it can be.

There isn't much that you can do here: but I was very impressed with how user-friendly everything was. However, there's one thing to keep in mind – the SEO wizard is not available with the cheapest, Basic website plan. You'll need to pick up the second-tier Standard plan or higher.

Weebly does not discriminate like that. All of the SEO features here are available for everyone. The SEO section on the dashboard lets anyone quickly change the site information:

And then, each page can have its own SEO data added via the editor. Footer and header code can also be added, for additional analytics, marketing, and tracking tools.

On SEO, GoDaddy and Weebly use two different approaches. GoDaddy offers great ease of use, but asks you to pay for it. Weebly leaves the hard work for you – but doesn't charge anything extra for it, either.

Performance – two excellent results

• GoDaddy shows one of the best results for all website builders tested on this site.
• Both Weebly and GoDaddy offer solid performance, suitable for modern business websites.

For the final Weebly vs GoDaddy test, let's talk about performance – perhaps one of the most important things about your website. Your page can be as beautiful as they come: but if it takes ages to load, no one's going to bother seeing it!

For this comparison, I put up both of my test sites on GTMetrix: it's a tool that measures the overall page optimization and speed.

This is how the Weebly website did:

And this is GoDaddy site:

You can tell which service is ran by a server hosting provider, huh?

GoDaddy website builder is incredibly fast. Fully optimized from top to bottom, it loads the website in 1.3 seconds. That's exactly twice as fast as Weebly, which takes a total of 2.6 seconds.

Now, it's worth mentioning: despite the difference, both website builders are actually quite fast. They even load faster than Google's recommended 3-second threshold for optimal user experience.

So really, both of the website builders are going to be quite fast. It's only that GoDaddy is insanely fast.

Pricing – which one's cheaper?

Both Weebly and GoDaddy offer 4 paid plans each, that will offer a varying level of business and website-building features. Weebly's premium plans range from $5 to $38 a month, while GoDaddy website builder will cost anywhere from $6.99 to $17.49.

On top of that, Weebly also offers an entirely free plan, which lets you build a full website without paying anything. GoDaddy does not offer a free plan: however, it offers a free 14-day trial for each of its plans.

Let's see at how these options compare:

Weebly plans

Here is every available plan for Weebly:

Visit Weebly

When talking about them, there's one thing I want you to consider:

These prices will only be valid when paying for 12 months in advance. If you wish to pay monthly, the prices will increase: the plans will go from $6, $12, $26, and $38 each, to $9, $16, $29, and $46.

Are these plans any good though?

Well – I don't recommend the free plan if you're serious about your website. I'm sorry, but that's just the honest truth: most good services out there are paid. The free plan will limit you to a tiny 500MB of storage, Weebly's own subdomain, and also plop in a massive ribbon on your website for everyone to see.

It's a good option to test the platform's capabilities. For everything else, I'll pass – and I recommend you do as well.

Similarly, I can't recommend the Connect plan as well. Sure, this plan lets you connect your own domain (hence the name), and adds some basic marketing features, but everything else is the same. The storage is still tiny, and most importantly – the Weebly ads are going to stay as well.

Instead, let's talk about some plans that are actually worth going for!

Pro plan

The Pro plan costs $12.00 a month, and includes a pretty good suite of features for personal and business websites:

• The storage is now unlimited
• Weebly's ads are removed
• Extra site-building features: memberships, site search, HD video
• eCommerce is available – with up to 25 items, and a 3% transaction fee

This plan is a great option for personal websites. It has all the website design features enabled, and there's even eCommerce! However – I can't rightly recommend this plan if you're looking to sell online. The reason is simple: the 3% transaction fee will quickly make this cheap plan pretty expensive.

Just a modest $500 of sales a month will mean that you'll be paying an additional $15 to Weebly, for no reason whatsoever. Yuck.

Business plan

Business plan (at $26.00/month) will include all the features from the previous plan, plus a few extras:

• No transaction fee on eCommerce
• Additional eCommerce features: item options, coupon codes, item reviews, gift cards, and more
• Advanced eCommerce statistics

Sure, this doesn't sound like much (hint: it isn't) – but the core feature here is the advanced eCommerce. With the 3% transaction fee removed, it's a much more suitable option for selling online.

Business Plus plan

At $38 a month, Business Plus is quite a lot more expensive that the previous eCommerce-capable plan. For that extra money, it offers a bunch of additional features, focused on eCommerce. Here's what they are:

• Real-time shipping calculator
• Abandoned cart emails

And that's...it! That being said, both of these features are very suitable for bigger eCommerce shops. In fact, even a smaller shop could use this plan. For instance, the abandoned cart emails allow you to send messages to the people who left your site without purchasing.

If you can use this method to make back more that $13 in profit a month – this is already a feature worth taking.

GoDaddy website builder plans

GoDaddy has four premium options as well: here's what they are.

Visit GoDaddy Builder

But similarly to Weebly, there's one thing to consider when talking about GoDaddy website builder's pricing:

Once your initial purchase period ends, the prices of GoDaddy website builders plans will increase. The plans will go up from $6.99, $10.49, $13.99, and $14.99 a month, to $11.99, $15.99, $21.99, and $24.99 a month respectively.

Let's have a look at what these plans can do:

Basic

GoDaddy website builder's Basic plan is tailored specifically for personal websites. At $9.99/month, this plan:

• Lets you connect your own domain to the website
• Has no GoDaddy ads on the site
• Lets you connect 1 social media platform to the dashboard for easy posting
• Gives 5 social media posts per month
• Lets you send 100 marketing emails a month

It's a good choice for something like portfolios. While there are some marketing features, namely for social media and email marketing, they're all pretty limited.

However, at $9.99/month, it's more powerful than Weebly Connect – and cheaper than Weebly Pro. It's decent value for money.

Standard

Moving on, the $9.99 Standard plan adds a few additional features, such as:

• SEO optimization
• Up to 500 monthly marketing emails
• Up to 3 connected social media accounts
• Up to 20 monthly social media posts

The star feature here is certainly the SEO optimization – which, sadly, is missing from the Basic plan. There are also more social media and email marketing capabilities available, making it a decent option for small businesses.

Premium

The Premium plan (for $14.99 a month) keeps piling on some features for small businesses.

• Organizing appointments and recurring events
• Caps for social media accounts and posting are removed
• You can send out up to 25,000 monthly emails

This is a good plan, if you wish to use GoDaddy's marketing features to their full extent: the cap for emails is very solid, and with no caps on social media, you can post to your heart's content. There is still no eCommerce – so you can't sell online. But for everything else, it's a perfectly suitable pick.

Ecommerce

Finally, the Ecommerce plan adds all the features above but also adds one crucial thing: full eCommerce. This is the plan to use if you wish to use GoDaddy to sell online. It'll set you back $16.99/month.

Also, here's an interesting fact – this plan includes abandoned cart recovery. A Weebly plans which offers that will cost $38/month.

GoDaddy offers better value than Weebly. Weebly's Free and Connect plans are no good for serious websites. GoDaddy offers cheaper solutions for both personal and business websites. Just beware of the increasing prices – which is true for both of the website builders here.

Weebly vs. GoDaddy – side-by-side comparison

These platforms are different from one another – in their very own special way.

Weebly is pretty excellent if you're looking for a simple way to run an online store. The third-party templates let you push the simple, intuitive interface to its limits. However, I wasn't all that impressed by the platform's lackluster selection of website editing sections. Despite having a full-on drag-and-drop builder, there simply isn't much to...drag and drop.

That being said, Weebly still offers a very serviceable way to sell online: if that's your thing, you should definitely consider it.

Visit Weebly

Meanwhile, GoDaddy website builder goes all-in on marketing. And I love it for that. The eCommerce options are still here, but you also get some good email marketing, social media posting, and GoDaddy InSight – a tool, that helps you reach your goals and measures your overall success.

Sure – you can't edit each and every pixel of your website, but if you care about the result more than the process, GoDaddy website builder is a great choice.

Visit GoDaddy Builder

Overall, in my head, there's certainly a clear winner.

GoDaddy website builder does everything Weebly does, and then adds a little extra. It's faster, more exciting to use, and has more helpful business features out there. There are several eCommerce platforms better than Weebly. But not many websites+marketing suites better than GoDaddy.

Good luck with building both your sites and businesses!

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Weebly vs GoDaddy website builder FAQs