How to Back Up a GoDaddy Website Builder Site

GoDaddy's Website Builder, sold as Websites + Marketing, is quick to set up and easy to keep. It is also a closed box: at the time of writing there is no export, no download, and no version history after you publish. If you want a copy, you make one from the public pages.

Why bother

Three reasons come up again and again:

• The plan lapses because a card expired, and the site goes offline with nothing to download.
• Someone publishes a broken page and there is no earlier version to go back to.
• You decide to move to another builder and find that there is nothing to move.

Method 1: save pages by hand

Right-click, Save As, one page at a time. Fine for a two-page site. The saved page can look wrong because parts of the layout depend on scripts, and images come down at whatever size the page showed.

Method 2: a desktop crawler

HTTrack or SiteSucker copies the site to a folder. GoDaddy serves images from its own image host, which you need to allow in the crawler's settings, and you have to remember to run it before anything goes wrong.

Method 3: a monthly backup

Dead Simple Backups crawls the public site every month: each page as HTML, a full-page screenshot of each page rendered in a real browser, and the images, styles, and fonts copied from GoDaddy's servers into the zip. It emails you a private link on the 1st, keeps 12 months, and needs no GoDaddy login.

Paste any page of your site on the GoDaddy page for a free single-page backup first. It takes a couple of minutes.

What a copy will not include

Anything behind a login, form submissions, appointment bookings, the online store's order history, and the original size of uploaded photos. Download originals from the GoDaddy media library while you have access.

Q: Can I download my GoDaddy website?

Not from GoDaddy. A copy of the public pages can be made with a crawler or a backup service, which gives you HTML, screenshots, and images.

Q: Does GoDaddy Website Builder keep old versions of my site?

Not after you publish. The editor has undo while you are working; there is no version history to restore from later.