GoDaddy WordPress Hosting Review: Good Value or Not?

Are the GoDaddy WordPress hosting plans a good choice for your website?

It’s no surprise that GoDaddy offers plans tailored to the most popular content management system (CMS) on the web (WordPress)! Depending on your needs, the handy features that GoDaddy’s WordPress plans provide could help your website succeed.

In our GoDaddy review for WordPress, we’ll take a closer look at the features it offers, as well as its support system, performance, and prices. Let’s first begin with an overview and then we’ll dive into the fine details.

An overview of GoDaddy for WordPress

GoDaddy WordPress plans versus main competitors

⚙️ Features

GoDaddy boasts a lot of variety when it comes to hosting. It provides shared plans, virtual private servers (VPS), dedicated options, and, of course, WordPress-specific offerings.

Here’s a full breakdown of the features you can access with the Basic WordPress hosting tier:

• Free business email and domain for one year
• Daily malware scans with Sucuri
• Automatic backups
• One-click migration
• WP-CLI, SSH and SFTP access
• Automatic WordPress core updates
• Latest version of PHP
• 24/7 customer support

It’s a decent feature set, although there’s nothing here that’s particularly unique compared to other hosts.

The Ultimate plan serves up additional features, including unlimited malware removal and hack repair, and one-click staging.

More impressively, the Ecommerce plan includes free access to premium WooCommerce features and extensions like WooCommerce Subscriptions. The premium extensions alone are worth thousands of dollars and offer serious value if you’re creating a WooCommerce store.

📞 Support options and quality

GoDaddy offers 24/7 support availability all throughout the year via multiple channels:

The live chat option is arguably the most popular. It initially responds with an AI bot, which is fairly common these days, but if you ask it to “talk to a human” it will re-route you. The system will first ask you to sign in, but if you select that you “can’t sign in”, it’ll still pass you onto a support agent that will answer your questions:

Unfortunately, when we tried it, we found that the support agent wasn’t that great at answering our questions with clear answers. They also gave us links to the U.K. version of the GoDaddy site even though we initiated the conversation from the U.S. version of the site and from a U.S. IP address.

Of course that was a one-off interaction. A more well-rounded overview of GoDaddy’s support can be gleaned from our 2018 WordPress hosting survey, which asked more than 830 users for their opinions. In that survey, GoDaddy received the following scores for support (out of five):

• Overall support: 3.3
• WordPress-specific support: 3.3

It’s not horrible, but it is below many other cheap WordPress hosts:

• SiteGround: 4.7 (overall) / 4.5 (WordPress-specific)
• InMotion: 4.2 / 3.8
• DreamHost: 4.0 / 3.9
• A2 Hosting: 3.7 / 3.6
• Bluehost: 3.2 / 3.4

So overall we can see that while GoDaddy’s support isn’t the worst, it’s not the best either. It’s also worth nothing for those of you who prefer the self-help or community-help routes, that GoDaddy does have help articles and community forums at your disposal:

🏎️ Performance

Performance is a vital consideration when choosing a web hosting plan. Website optimization will only take you so far if your server is sub-par. For our GoDaddy review for WordPress, we took a look at all the speed-boosting features it offers, such as:

• CDN integration. As we mentioned earlier, all of GoDaddy’s WordPress plans provide out-of-the-box CDN integration for increased site speed.
• Load-balanced, clustered server environments. GoDaddy’s servers are optimized for WordPress. Additionally, they’re prepared to handle traffic spikes that might otherwise crash your site.
• 99.9% uptime guarantee. GoDaddy provides an uptime guarantee in its contracts that enables customers to request account credits in the amount of 5% of their monthly bill if it fails to meet the minimum requirement.

Like the features available in GoDaddy’s Basic WordPress hosting plan, nothing here stands out as particularly unique or better than other providers. However, you can rest assured that you’re at least receiving decent performance optimization.

Uptime and loading time (via our hosting monitor)

Having your site’s server up and running is crucial. When it’s down, you’re missing out on ad revenue, email subscriptions, sales, and page views. GoDaddy “guarantees” 99.9% uptime, but our hosting uptime monitor shows some ups and downs every now and then. Check it out to see some historical data. Here are the last three months:

And here are the current results on GoDaddy loading speeds from multiple locations:

💰 GoDaddy WordPress hosting pricing

GoDaddy offers managed WordPress hosting at some of the lowest prices on the market, putting it squarely into budget WordPress hosting territory. Its most expensive plan costs only $14.99 per month.

All the plans include a free domain name for the initial contract term and a free SSL certificate as long as you maintain a hosting plan with GoDaddy. Here’s what you get with each plan, beyond the features we discussed before:

• Basic ($5.99 per month): one website, 10 GB of storage
• Deluxe ($8.99 per month): one website, 20 GB of storage
• Ultimate ($14.99 per month): one website, 30 GB of storage

To get the prices above, you need to purchase an annual contract. Month-to-month billing is available, but is more expensive and excludes perks like the free domain name. However, that’s just standard practice for most budget hosts.

When it comes to features, it’s a mixed bag.

On the one hand, GoDaddy includes some genuine standout features. For example, the Ultimate plan comes with several premium WooCommerce add-ons, which are collectively worth thousands of dollars per year. That’s amazing and worth considering if you plan to start an online store with WooCommerce.

On the other hand, some of GoDaddy’s listed features are available for free via plugins. For example, its daily malware scans are performed by Sucuri, its “SEO Optimizer” is just Yoast, and WooCommerce already provides unlimited products and no transaction fees on its own. GoDaddy tries to make it seem like these are unique perks, when in reality they’re not.

Another downside is that by default, all the WordPress plans support only a single website, though you can pay a $2.99 per-site fee to add up to 99 additional sites to your plan. That flexibility is nice, but for anyone running multiple sites, the costs can easily spiral.

Why not use GoDaddy’s cheap shared plans?

Before we wrap things up, it’s worth mentioning that GoDaddy’s basic web hosting plan is five dollars cheaper than its managed WordPress counterpart and still lets you install WordPress. Plus it gives you access to cPanel, which you don’t get on the managed WordPress plans.

Additionally, excluding the lowest tier, all of GoDaddy’s web hosting plans let you host multiple websites, whereas the GoDaddy WordPress hosting plans limit you to a single website.

Okay, so why not go with one of these instead?

Well, there’s certainly nothing wrong with doing that. But the benefit of the WordPress-specific plans is that you get access to optimized WordPress performance, as well as beneficial features such as*:

• WordPress pre-installed
• Automatic updates
• Staging sites
• Malware and hack removal
• Bundled WooCommerce plugins

*The exact features depend on which plan you sign up for.

➕➖ Overall pros and cons

To close out our GoDaddy review for WordPress, here’s a summary of its best features:

• Prices are among the best for managed WordPress plans.
• You get access to an excellent list of features (especially for ecommerce).
• The performance is solid for the price.

On the other hand, the biggest downside to GoDaddy’s WordPress plans, in our opinion, is that they only support a single website. If you want to host multiple sites, you’ll need to look into their web hosting plans.

Beyond that, GoDaddy’s live chat support option is a bit cumbersome to stumble through until you get to a live person and even then the support can be less than ideal.

For example, as we mentioned earlier, when we reached out from a U.S. IP address, the representative provided us with links to the U.K. version of the website and was unable to provide a clear response to our inquiry.

It’s also important to mention that many of the features it lists as “exclusive” to their WordPress plans are in fact available for free with plugins like Sucuri, Yoast, and WooCommerce.

🏆 Conclusion

In a nutshell, GoDaddy WordPress hosting plans offer adequate performance and a pretty attractive feature lineup, especially for online stores. However, we can only recommend it if you’re looking to host a single website. Otherwise, you’re better off looking elsewhere. Below are some suggestions:

• If you have a bigger budget and want a truly red carpet managed WordPress experience, consider Kinsta. Plans start from $29.17 and include Cloudflare Enterprise integration with edge caching, a Web Application Firewall (WAF), and DDoS protection.
• For a lower budget managed WordPress option, try Namecheap’s EasyWP (see how Namecheap compares to GoDaddy) or Hostinger (read our Hostinger review). Both offer attractive specs at more competitive prices than GoDaddy. Namecheap starts at $3.24, while Hostinger begins at $2.69.
• Check out our collection of the best cheap managed WordPress hosts for a list of additional options.

Do you have any questions about GoDaddy for WordPress? Ask away in the comments section below!

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