In this GoDaddy and Squarespace comparison, we’ll show you the differences between these two popular companies. No matter if you would like to build a website for personal use, or a complete online store to sell products, if you choose the wrong service, you’ll struggle a lot.
For that reason, we tested both companies and here is the full web hosting and website builder comparison.
Site builders
GoDaddy and Squarespace offer two website builder tools that are different. So, we’ll look at their features and what you can do with them. GoDaddy offers a great website builder tool called Gocentral.
We first used it, it was easier than what we thought and better in features than what we expected. In addition, The GoDaddy site builder comes with HTML5 web pages with the latest versions of programming languages.
On the other side, Squarespace offers another tool that looks amazing, but when we tried it, we found lots of issues that no business owner needs.
It doesn’t really matter if the site builder is great or bad if the result is not what you expect as quality coding and secure web pages. We found the Squarespace website builder average compared to the one that GoDaddy offers.
Customer support
Both companies offer good customer support, So, you can contact them by phone, live chat or emails. However, if your website uses lots of resources and needs complicated configurations, then, GoDaddy is what we recommend.
They have more experience in web hosting and they can handle any situation you face. GoDaddy customer support won lots of awards in the web hosting and customer satisfaction ratings.
Server speed
As a big web hosting company, GoDaddy uses fast servers with a high level of protection. On the other side, Squarespace has multiple location centers, however, we found them fewer than what GoDaddy has and that has a big impact on the site uptime and also loading time.
Compared to server speed, both companies offer nearly the same level of speed. However, GoDaddy has more to offer in terms of speed boost, CDN, and security.
Uptime
We found downtime with Squarespace, unlike what they talk about, they have problems with internet connectivity and other related to SSL. SSL is one of the most important things when it comes to selling online and getting your money.
In addition, if SSL is under downtime, your customer won’t be able to buy your products and even worse, that can risk the payment details. That’s because of the data that can be intercepted when the user types the credit card details.
Here is one of the Squarespace reported SSL issued by the company itself. With 98.95% SSL uptime, that’s bad.
On the other side, GoDaddy has a better uptime with faster server connectivity and very few issues.
Prices
When it comes to pricing, Squarespace is a waste of money compared to what they offer as features. With $12 per month, you get unlimited pages, but you need to pay a full year in advance.
That will cost you $144 a year for a simple website Or you can choose the monthly payment option that cost $16.
On the other hand, GoDaddy offers what you need and even more with cheaper prices and better support.
GoDaddy offers pans for $5.99 and of course, there is a free trial for one month. In addition, for online stores, Squarespace cost $20 at lest and compared to what GoDaddy offer for small businesses, it’s expensive and not worth the money you pay for unless you know nothing about web hosting.
The biggest problems with Squarespace is that they offer web hosting plans with expensive cost. Even more, there are no exceptional features for that high cost.
You can get everything they offer and more with GoDaddy at cheaper prices and better tools.
So, if you think that Squarespace is Good for a website, then, use Weebly instead with cheap prices and the same features.
Best features
This is the best part, the majority of small business owners choose GoDaddy over Squarespace. It’s not a matter of pricing only, but also a matter of features. In fact, GoDaddy is the biggest web hosting company in the USA. It has thousands of servers across the USA and also the world.
So, the company has the cloud hosting infrastructure to work better, faster and even more secure.
Squarespace offers good features, however, they don’t meet the level of GoDaddy that has a longer list of features.
GoDaddy, Unlike Squarespace, does not promise only, but offer all the things that your website needs. So, you get a completely online payment system with PayPal shopping cart and hosting. But also, you get a lot of payment systems including credit cards, PayPal, and even the Apple Pay option.
On the other side, there is no real business online without a professional email.
Unfortunately, what Squarespace offers is not better than GoDaddy, GoDaddy has a complete domain name DNS system, so, you can update the settings of the domain anytime you need easily for your email.
Furthermore, you can forward your email to Gmail, Yahoo or other providers and reply directly from there.
- Read also: eCommerce website hosting services
Now, when it comes to small business and online stores, no web hosting company can beat GoDaddy. We tried GoDaddy for years, and it has great second phone service and also a toll-free phone number for your website. In addition, there are more options and add-ons for your website.
eCommerce hosting
Both companies offer online store systems, however, if you read clearly the details, you find that GoDaddy offers more options. For eCommerce, GoDaddy is also the winner.
In today’s world, Facebook has billions of users and millions of active visitors per day.
So, if you focus a little bit on Facebook marketing, you’ll bring more sale. Luckily, GoDaddy offers the best Facebook page builder tool. You don’t have to do any complicated tasks.
Just let GoDaddy create your Facebook page automatically. Then, the tool posts update using your latest website news and products after your permission.
- Read on: managed VPS hosting services
All that means a lot in today’s online marketing and unfortunately, Squarespace has nothing to do with all that.
GoDaddy offers a great email marketing service, in the end, they’re also one of the biggest email marketing service providers. So, you can count on their great customer support and products.
For more details, here is what GoDaddy offers:
- appointment scheduling
- email subscription forms
- professional email address
- email marketing
- thousands of fully responsive templates
- mobile-optimized designs
- search engine optimization tools
- DNS tool
- online store system
- shopping cart options
- contact forms
- photo galleries
- social media sharing links on your product pages which helps to bring more sales
- openTable tools to let visitors make online reservations, this is great for restaurants.
- an easy blog to share your latest updates, posts and even photos, and videos.
Which is better for your domain name?
The domain name is your website or online store at the end. Unfortunately, a lot of people neglect that fact that the Domain DNS tool and uptime has a huge impact on its ranking on Google. In addition, the small downtime or wrong configuration can cause serious problems for online stores and personal websites.
No matter if you want to build a website for cafe, wedding, restaurant, hotel or more, if you don’t have an advanced DNS managed, you won’t be able to control your domain name.
GoDaddy is the only web hosting solution that offers a premium DNS and advanced tool for domain management. So, you can add records like CNAME, TXT, or others.
You’ll need these settings many times to verify your domain with Google, PayPal or other services. Moreover, the DNS lookup can impact the site negatively if it’s slow or under internet connectivity issues.
Squarespace offers basic settings, but GoDaddy offers complete control over your domain name with a premium DNS.
Even better, GoDaddy has the biggest domain name marketplace on earth. So, you can find a great domain name from there, there are hundreds of premium domains available to buy. Square space has nothing like that and that way, GoDaddy is our recommended option for those who want to succeed.
Which is better?
At the end of the day, there are some basic things that a website owner looks for and need. Even with a comparison of features and prices, you need a website that looks good, with clean code, and that Google understands better.
You need a web store to sell online without issues and amaze your customers with updates offers discounts and more.
It’s clear that GoDaddy is the winner in this comparison. We recommend GoDaddy over Squarespace because it offers more features, faster servers, better customer support and even more, they have affordable prices.
