Why Build a Website With GoDaddy and How You Can Do So

Building and maintaining a genuinely successful online presence has become as indispensable for companies as having products and services to offer. Through websites, companies can reach prospects all over the world, generate leads, turn leads into potential customers and retain existing ones.

Now, there are several ways companies or even individuals can use to build their websites. The first is to hire a web development company to write in-depth code and manually construct everything about the website closely to the client’s needs and preferences. While this ensures a high level of website functionality, it is an undoubtedly complicated and costly process.

The other option is to use a website builder service where all there is to do is choose from many templates and drag and drop items into place. Such services provide a somewhat similar, yet more accessible, indeed fun and way cheaper website-building experience that requires a little to no technical background whatsoever. GoDaddy happens to be one of the most popular, reliable and relatively affordable website builders out there, and that is precisely our primary focus for today.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy, Inc., previously called Websites + Marketing, is an American IT service management company that specialises in web hosting, domain registering and website building. You can use GoDaddy to host a website that you built elsewhere but you can also use it to build your very own website.

As a website builder, GoDaddy makes the perfect online editing and publishing tool with which you can create a quick and responsive website. It requires absolutely no technical knowledge of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. It is just a purely non-coding website builder trusted by over 21 million customers worldwide.

Are you a professional wedding photographer and want to showcase your work in a multi-page online portfolio? Are you a food blogger who is trying to revive almost-forgotten recipes? Or maybe you are a lifestyle creator helping people to design and live their most authentic lives? Well, GoDaddy is backed with everything you need to create the perfect website to drive more traffic, convert interested visitors into customers and generally expand your business.

More precisely, here are four practical reasons why you should use GoDaddy to build your website.

1. You Can Customise Your Website

GoDaddy, as a website builder, is so simple. It allows you to customise your website the way you want either by asking you a series of questions to help set up the website or by letting you choose from many templates and then giving you the options to edit it to your preferences and your business needs.

For example, you can add content to the website wherever you would like and have multiple galleries of images, menus, or pricing lists. You can even upload videos or, if you want, add YouTube or Vimeo video links.

Every section of your website is customisable as well, from the name of the page to your website’s navigation bar. You can also change the colours, styles, fonts and pretty much just the entire site design.

Given that not everyone uses a desktop, and almost everyone uses their mobile phones more often, GoDaddy has the option to make your website both desktop and mobile-friendly. It especially ensures that the mobile-based version of your website does look up to scratch and is responsive and optimised to help increase your website traffic and retain your loyal customers.

2. You Can Create An Online Store

With GoDaddy, you can opt for an e-commerce plan for your business and start selling online. You will be able to include products and services, add a shopping cart, and set up payment options, methods such as PayPal and Apple Pay, and plans. GoDaddy also allows you to promote your products through coupons and offer different types of shipping.

What is also great is that you can add as many featured products for your visitors to scroll through as you want and send emails to your customers or subscribers about any sales offers, or events. 

3. You Can Link Social Media To Your Website

GoDaddy can pretty much act like your online hub. So you can have options to link your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube as well as LinkedIn to your website.

Having social media increases your visibility, easily connects you with your customers, makes it easy for them to send you inquiries and makes it easy for you to update them on your business or whatever else you are promoting.

Now, connecting social media to your GoDaddy website and having them all in one area will give your website’s visitors a seamless experience too.

4. You Can Use SEO Tools

Most of GoDaddy’s plans come with a built-in SEO tool to help your website show up within search engines like Google or Bing and gain traffic for visitors and customers. You will find the SEO wizard in the website builder, and a step-by-step guide is provided to show how to optimise each page of your website by adding relevant keywords and descriptions.

How to Create a Website with GoDaddy

Well, creating a website with GoDaddy is quite easy and fun and can be boiled down to four basic steps.

First, You have to go to GoDaddy’s homepage and sign up for a new account. You will then choose from a galley of templates how you want your website to be. After that, you will get the chance to customise the template to your preferences.

Once your website is complete, you should go ahead and publish it, which means it will be available and accessible on the Internet.

Then, of course, you should monitor the site, fix any issues that may arise and always make sure it is performing well. Finally, you would need to expand the website according to the progress it is making and how much it is meeting the goal it was initially created for.

This could be helpful if you already have some imagination of how you want your website to be, where all there is to do is perform a few actions to turn it into reality and get it up and running. However, this is not the case with many people. So here are some more in-depth steps to help you create your website with GoDaddy.

1. Plan It Out

To make progress in building your website, you first need to create a solid plan for it.

In other words, you must get organised and have a wireframe, a sketch or a plan set up for everything you want your site to have. This could be sections, headers, footers, images, videos, or categories. Maybe you need a contact page, a bonus page or a menu page. Whatever you believe is good to include in the site, just include it in your plan.

You get inspired by looking into as many websites as you want. Then, sit down and sketch out what you want your website to be like.

So, once you have mapped out the things you want for your website, this is going to be the foundation of your website’s structure.

2. Choose a Website Template

Now we get to the actual practical work.

Go to GoDaddy’s homepage and click Start for Free. Before you sign up, you will be asked to pick a design from the available templates, which you can change later, by the way. GoDaddy has a gallery of templates designed for both online stores and regular websites so choose what is best for you.

Once you do that, you can register either using your email, your Google account or Facebook account. After that, you will be redirected to the Site Editor.

So if you want to change the template you chose, you can choose another one. GoDaddy has a huge gallery of amazing templates organised in many different categories to help you find the most suitable one for your industry. For instance, you can find stunning templates for websites specialised in Music, Art & Design, Photography, Health & Fitness, Travel, Fashion & Beauty and even Real Estate, Cars, and Professional Services.

3. Customise Your Template

Given that each template is customisable, you can actually change them slightly or completely to get them as close as can be to your imagined design.

On the Site Editor, you can see a preview of what the template you chose currently looks like and a bar on the left with multiple options to change it.

For instance, you can change the design of the template in terms of the website name, text, buttons, images, rows and backgrounds. Likewise, you can add more pages to your site and customise them accordingly. You have options to add widgets or content, personalise the website however you want, or make it an e-commerce one and add products. You can even reset the entire template to the original design.

Interestingly, you do not need to bother with what the website looks like on desktop or mobile, for GoDaddy automatically adjusts its designs according to the device used to view them. In fact, there is an option on the Editor that shows you what your website looks like on a desktop browser, tablet or mobile phone. This can actually help you make any necessary adjustments to ensure better functionality for your website.

The last option allows you to change the template settings, such as adding a website icon, optimising your site for search engines, enabling Google Analytics and managing other things such as privacy, cookies, backups and language. 

4. Choose Your Domain

After you have completed customising the template to your taste, your website should be ready for publishing, yet the domain will be a random name given by GoDaddy and ending with godaddysites.com. This is the address users from anywhere in the world should use to access your website.

To change this address, you have two options. You can either use a domain you have already gotten elsewhere or purchase one from GoDaddy. To purchase one from GoDaddy, all you have to do is go to your Products page, click E-Store and Websites, choose your still unpublished website and click Manage. Choose Connect a domain. This will redirect you to the Domain Settings page.

Choose My Domain instead of Free GoDaddy URL. Here, you will have to either enter the external domain or Get a new domain, so click that. You will be asked to type your desired domain name, and GoDaddy will check if it is available or already taken.

Once you pay for and get your domain name, it will be assigned to your website.

5. Launch Your Site

So, the final step is to get your website published and watch your business grow. Be sure you look over the website once it is live, check how your website is viewed on other devices and ensure there are no issues with any of them whatsoever, especially with responsiveness. Remember, if your website takes longer to load, visitors will quickly draw off from it.

You also need to be checking for reviews all the time and stay active on social media to increase SEO and ranking.

That being said, GoDaddy still gives you the choice to take down your site at any time if you want to and make it unavailable on the web. You can do so by going to the SEO & Settings on your Site Editor, then Site Domain. There you can find an option to Unpublish your site.

Other Options

There is another way, however, to create your website with GoDaddy, and that is to click the three horizontal lines at the right-left corner of GoDaddy.com and choose Websites & Hosting, then Website Builder, where you will be redirected to the templates page. Choose the one that most appeals to you and click Start Editing.

Next, you will be asked to choose a category for your website. There are options to choose from, including Cosmetics and Beauty Supply, Spa, Life Coach and Photography, or you can type your own category. Then, you will need to give a name to your website. Once you type it and click Next, you will be redirected to another, but different, Website Editor.

On the new Editor, you can add sections, pages, links or drop-down menus.

You can also change the theme if you want, as well as the colours, fonts and buttons.

From the Settings sections, you can publish the site, connect a domain, or add a Favicon, which is just a little image on your tab. There is an option to view the Site History, so if you made any mistakes, you can go back and reset them.

Plans

GoDaddy gives you a free 30-day trial when you register without even asking for your credit card information. After the trial ends, you can choose from the different plans the platform offers that best suit your needs and budget.

As of August 2023, GoDaddy has three plans for Website Builder, Basic, Standard and Premium, each starting at £6.99/month, £8.99/month and £11.99/month. For an E-Store, GoDaddy has a Starter plan at £11.79/month, a Premium plan at £15.78/month and an Unlimited plan at £27.54/month.

The Website Builder Basic plan offers some features like website security, on-the-go editing, a one-year free professional email, and 100 email marketing sends per month. However, it does not provide any SEO, so it will not help your website rank at all. This means your website will be one of the lowest.

That said, all the other plans in this category, as well as those in E-Store, offer SEO, so they might be better options for you.

GoDaddy is highly recommended if you are a beginner and have zero technical skills in website building. Besides being so easy to use, it offers some quite affordable plans to launch your website, reach more customers and grow your business.