Bluehost vs GoDaddy: Which WordPress Host to Pick

5/5 - (1 vote)
Buy Bluehost if this is your first WordPress site and you can live with a three-year term: $3.99 a month against GoDaddy’s $6.99, and it is the host WordPress.org has recommended longest. Buy GoDaddy if you want a one-year commitment instead of three, or your domains already sit there. Neither company runs a free trial. Both sell a money-back guarantee, and GoDaddy’s shrinks to 48 hours if you pay monthly. Also read: – Best WordPress Hosting – Namecheap vs GoDaddy – SiteGround vs DreamHost

Who should buy which

  • First blog, tightest budget: Bluehost Starter. $3.99 a month is the lowest entry price of the two, and one website is all a first blog needs.
  • You do not want a three-year commitment: GoDaddy. Its intro pricing runs on a one-year term, so you are locked in for twelve months rather than thirty-six.
  • Several sites on one bill: Bluehost Business at $6.99 a month, which is the same headline figure as GoDaddy’s entry plan.
  • You already keep domains at GoDaddy: GoDaddy, for the single control panel. The saving on mental overhead is real even when the saving on money is not.
  • A shop: neither, at these prices. Look at a managed host instead. Bluehost’s eCommerce Essentials at $14.99 a month is shared hosting with WooCommerce pre-installed, not managed WooCommerce hosting.
  • An Australian or Asian audience: neither. Both serve mainly from North America and Europe, and distance costs you more than any setting can win back. See our test of Australian WordPress hosting.

Price, and what happens at renewal

The intro price is the number both companies advertise. The renewal price is the number you will actually pay for most of the time you own the site, and on both hosts it is roughly double. Bluehost shared and WordPress plans, all on a 36-month term:
  • Starter: $3.99 a month, renewing at $9.99
  • Business: $6.99 a month, renewing at $13.99
  • eCommerce Essentials: $14.99 a month, renewing at $21.99
GoDaddy managed WordPress plans, intro price on a one-year term:
  • Basic: $6.99 a month, renewing at $14.99
  • Deluxe: $10.99 a month, renewing at $19.99
  • Ultimate: $14.99 a month, renewing at $26.99
Prices checked September 2026. Read those two lists side by side and the trade is clear. Bluehost is cheaper at every tier, but you pay for three years up front to get that price. GoDaddy asks for one year. If you are unsure the site will still exist in eighteen months, the shorter term is worth the extra few dollars a month. GoDaddy’s Deluxe plan adds a staging site and a CDN. Bluehost puts staging on its higher WordPress tiers rather than the entry plan, so compare on features you will use rather than on the headline alone.

Refunds: a money-back guarantee, not a free trial

This is the part that catches people out, so here it is plainly. Neither host lets you try the service without paying. You pay, you use it, and if you dislike it you ask for your money back inside a window. Bluehost gives a 30-day money-back guarantee on new shared, VPS and dedicated signups. Domain registration and renewal fees are not refundable, and neither are monthly billing terms or Cloud Hosting. GoDaddy gives you 30 days, which its refund policy states as 720 hours, on terms of a year or longer. On a monthly term you get 48 hours. Two days is not enough time to migrate a site, test it and form a view, so if you are trialling GoDaddy in any real sense, take the annual term. One more line from GoDaddy’s policy worth reading before you buy: if a hosting service has already been performed, it is non-refundable.

The WordPress connection, stated correctly

WordPress is open-source software, released under the GPL and built by a worldwide community of contributors. It is not owned by a company. Automattic is a separate business that runs WordPress.com and develops WooCommerce, and it employs many contributors, but it does not own WordPress and it does not certify hosts. What does exist is a short list of recommended hosts on WordPress.org’s hosting page: Pressable, Bluehost and Hostinger. Bluehost is described there as WordPress.org’s longest running recommended host. GoDaddy is not on that list. Treat the list as a signal about relationships rather than a ranking of quality. It tells you Bluehost has been close to the project for a long time. It does not tell you Bluehost is faster.

PHP versions

Any host you are considering in 2026 should be running PHP 8. The currently supported branches, per php.net, are 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5. Of those, 8.4 and 8.5 are in active support and get ordinary bug fixes; 8.2 and 8.3 are in security-only support, meaning critical fixes and nothing else. GoDaddy states that its managed WordPress plans run the latest version of PHP with Zend extended long-term support. On any shared plan, the version you get is the version set in your control panel, and it is not always the newest one available. Check it after you sign up and move it to a supported branch. A site left on PHP 7 is a site running unpatched code.

Performance

Both hosts put your files on SSD or NVMe storage, throttle CPU on shared plans and offer a CDN. GoDaddy publishes a 99.9% uptime guarantee on its managed WordPress plans. A CDN helps less than the marketing suggests. It caches static files close to your visitors, which shortens the trip for images, CSS and JavaScript. The dynamic requests that make WordPress slow still travel to the origin server. That is why a data centre near your audience beats a distant server plus a CDN, and why our Australian testing came out the way it did. Shared hosting at these prices means neighbours. If your traffic grows past a few tens of thousands of visits a month, you will hit resource limits on either host and be asked to upgrade. Plan for that rather than being surprised by it.

Security

Bluehost covers the basics: password-protected directories, IP blocking, spam filtering, free SSL, and Cloudflare in front for DDoS absorption. Relying on Cloudflare is not a weakness, it is what most of the industry does. GoDaddy bundles a web application firewall, DDoS protection and malware scanning into its managed WordPress plans, and includes daily automatic backups with 30-day retention. Neither is a security product. On shared hosting your biggest risks are an out-of-date plugin and a weak password, both of which are yours to manage.

Backups and migrations

GoDaddy includes daily automatic backups with 30 days of retention on its managed WordPress plans, plus on-demand backups, and offers a free migration wizard during onboarding. Bluehost’s backup provision varies by plan, so confirm what your tier includes before you rely on it. Whichever host you choose, keep your own off-site copy. A backup that lives only on the server it is protecting is not a backup.

Support

Both run 24/7 support by chat and phone, and both have large knowledge bases. Bluehost’s WordPress-specific support is the more consistent of the two in our experience, and GoDaddy’s weak point is queue length at busy times rather than competence. If support quality is your deciding factor, neither of these is the answer. Managed WordPress hosts staff support with WordPress specialists and charge accordingly.

Verdict

Bluehost for a first WordPress site. It is cheaper at every tier, it has the longest-standing relationship with the WordPress project, and its 30-day money-back guarantee gives you a genuine month to change your mind. GoDaddy if a three-year commitment is the sticking point, or if consolidating hosting with domains you already own there is worth more to you than a few dollars a month. Take the annual term, not the monthly one, or your refund window is 48 hours. If neither convinces you, that is a reasonable conclusion. Both are budget shared hosting with a WordPress label, and the step up to a managed host buys you a genuinely different service. Our WordPress hosting comparison measures the managed hosts the same way.

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