Leaving GoDaddy: An Honest Migration Checklist

GoDaddy isn't evil. It's a volume business, and volume businesses optimize for signups, not for the customer who's been quietly renewing for six years. If your renewal invoices keep creeping up and support keeps pointing you at upsells, switching is reasonable. Here's how to do it without breaking anything.

First, untangle what you actually have there

This is the step everyone skips. A typical GoDaddy account mixes three separate things:

• The domain (the name itself)
• The hosting (where your site's files live)
• Email (often Microsoft 365 resold through GoDaddy, sometimes forwarding, sometimes cPanel mail)

You can move each one independently, and you don't have to move them all. Write down which of the three you have before touching anything. The email one matters most: if your mailboxes are Microsoft 365 through GoDaddy, moving your website does not touch your email, and panicking about it is the most common source of self-inflicted downtime.

The order that works

1. Take full backups. Website files, databases, and an export of your DNS records. Even if your new host does the migration for you, having your own copy costs nothing.
2. Move the hosting first. Your new host builds a working copy of the site while the old one stays live. Nobody visiting your site notices a thing. This is what we do on every plan, free.
3. Test the copy properly. Click through your pages, log into your admin, send a test form. Five minutes of clicking saves you a bad week.
4. Switch DNS. Point the domain at the new server. Keep the old hosting active for a few days as a safety net, then cancel it.
5. Transfer the domain last, or not at all. A domain transfer takes 5 to 7 days and is completely separate from hosting. Your site works fine with the domain still registered at GoDaddy. One warning: changing the registrant contact details can trigger a 60-day transfer lock, so if you plan to transfer, don't edit those details first.

What to check before you cancel

Log into the old account one last time and look for things attached to it: email forwarders, subdomains someone set up in 2019, SSL certificates you paid for separately. Cancel the hosting only after the new site has been live for a week and email flows normally.

The lazy option

All of steps 1 through 4 are things we do for you, free, on any plan. You hand us a login or a backup file, we build the copy, you approve it, we flip the switch. If your setup has something weird in it, we'll tell you before we start, not after. Start here.