GoDaddy WordPress Hosting Review

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GoDaddy is the Big Daddy of domain names. Even people not head-deep in web hosting have heard of GoDaddy, especially for registering domain names. While GoDaddy started off in the domain business, they now offer many web hosting plans, including Managed WordPress Hosting. We suspect many people – especially beginners – would be drawn to GoDaddy’s WordPress hosting services as an add-on while registering their domain names.

In this review post, we will detail GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress Hosting services, how they performed on our performance benchmarks and speed tests, and our overall ranking of their web hosting services. For advanced customers, GoDaddy also offers VPS hosting, dedicated server hosting, and non-WordPress shared web hosting, but we won’t review those services in this article.

GoDaddy General Features

GoDaddy’s general features are pretty standard. The only “wow” feature is 24/7 phone support, which is uncommon among hosting providers (generally, 24/7 support is only available via email or live chat). We like providers that offer phone support because when there is a difficult or intense problem, it is nice to talk to someone in real-time by phone.

GoDaddy includes up to five free email accounts – depending on your plan – from Microsoft 365, but only for the first year. You’ll have to pay after the first year, even if you paid for a two or three-year hosting plan. If you have a separate email plan through Google as part of Google Workspace, you don’t need to worry about email hosting – Google is your email host. But if you host your own email server, you must buy a separate email hosting plan after the first year or continue paying for Microsoft. This adds cost and complexity to your WordPress setup, so keep that in mind.

Unlike other WordPress hosts, GoDaddy offers an upgraded marketing and social media package starting at $10/month. We tried it out using a free seven-day trial that you get with your new WordPress hosting package. It seemed pretty cool and appears quite useful if you are a one-person operation. People with social media and design experience will probably find the templates quite basic, but if you don’t have the experience or time to create this on your own, why not use GoDaddy’s templates?

GoDaddy Optimization Features

GoDaddy offers several optimization features like many other WordPress hosting providers. We especially appreciate that GoDaddy offers Cloudflare’s CDN in all WordPress plans plus HTTP/3 support, which few WordPress hosts support. We want to note that GoDaddy’s real-world website performance was amazing, which we detail later in this review.

If you are an advanced WordPress user, note that it was hard to transfer our test website to GoDaddy using an SSH script or the online File Manager. You can’t upload multiple files at once using the File Manager, nor can you access the home directory. GoDaddy’s servers are locked down, so it is hard to use scripts via SSH. If you aren’t an advanced WordPress user, there is no need to worry about this.

GoDaddy’s Experience Improvement Program (EIP)

GoDaddy automatically enables its Experience Improvement Program (EIP) on its United States-based WordPress plans. Also known as Real User Metrics (RUM), the EIP allows GoDaddy to track the real-time performance of your website. While we do not feel it is a problem on its face, we discovered that the added JavaScript from the EIP was slowing down our test website. For example, the overall Performance score on Google Page Speed increased from 76 to 89 by disabling EIP. We recommend you either experiment with disabling EIP to see if your website loads faster or just disable it.

GoDaddy WordPress Managed Hosting Plans

GoDaddy’s two main WordPress plans only come with one website. However, GoDaddy now offers the Managed Pro 5 account with five websites included. Note that GoDaddy’s plans do not include some WordPress optimization features built into other web hosts in this price category. Only on the top-tier “Ultimate” plan and the five-website plan does GoDaddy offer a “WordPress Code Optimizer.”

Of the three plans, the middle “Deluxe” plan is our choice, but we recommend comparing this plan to other providers for the same or less monthly cost, such as Ionos, SiteGround, or Pressable. Remember that GoDaddy doesn’t include email hosting, so you must add that to the monthly cost. On the other hand, GoDaddy’s performance is far better than other WordPress hosts in this price range, on par with more expensive Rocket.net.

Furthermore, while GoDaddy provides a free domain name and free Microsoft 365 email accounts (up to five, depending on your plan), these features are only free for the first year. When you renew, you’ll have to pay for them, which adds no extra value to the plans. But if you are already paying for these items elsewhere, then it doesn’t affect your cost with GoDaddy.

GoDaddy WordPress Performance Tests

As with all of our web hosting reviews, we tested GoDaddy using our test WordPress website to see how GoDaddy performs in real life. We ran all of these tests using the Deluxe Managed Hosting plan, which is our recommended GoDaddy WordPress hosting plan. There are three components: Google Core Web Vitals, GTMetrix Performance, and worldwide speed testing. The results are below, and you can also see our detailed testing criteria on this page.

Google Core Web Vitals – Lighthouse Scores

We were pleasantly surprised at GoDaddy’s solid performance on the Google Core Web Vitals. An overall performance score of 89 is solidly among mid-tier providers and not far off from our top performers, with scores of 93-94.

The scores above are not the actual Lighthouse values but the ones Lighthouse assigns to each metric. We chose to display these scores instead of the actual values to make comparing scores across web host providers easier. Below is the chart showing the actual Lighthouse values for those of you who are more technically minded.

GTMetrix Performance

Wow! GoDaddy’s GTMetrix results highly impressed us! We didn’t expect GoDaddy to perform so well, but its scores are comparable to top-tier WordPress hosts like Rocket.net and WPX. We especially appreciated GoDaddy’s average LCP time of 1.2 seconds, as LCP is a Google Core Web Vital. This average time is very fast globally compared to all of the other WordPress hosts we tested. We also want to point out that GoDaddy’s time-to-first-byte (TTFB) scores are also very fast – under 500ms!

Worldwide Load Testing

As GoDaddy uses Cloudflare CDN, it is no surprise that GoDaddy delivers very fast results across all international test sites. The load testing also confirms GoDaddy’s fast TTFB scores we discovered during GTMetrix testing. We are very impressed with GoDaddy’s performance!

Our GoDaddy WordPress Review Recommendation

We can’t argue with GoDaddy’s excellent performance on our real-world tests. GoDaddy’s performance blew us away; for that reason alone, we recommend GoDaddy for beginner and mid-level WordPress users. Top-tier users will want to go with a WordPress host with all the bells and whistles, such as Rocket.net or Kinsta, although it will be more expensive.