GoDaddy is the hardest platform to leave, and not for technical reasons. It is hard because one account holds your domain, your website, and usually your email, arriving as a single renewal invoice that makes them feel like one inseparable product. They are not. They are three things that can be moved, kept, or cancelled independently, and once you can see them separately the move becomes routine. This guide covers all three, in the order that keeps your email working throughout.
Which GoDaddy product do you actually have?
Answer this before anything else, because it changes the work. Log into GoDaddy and look at My Products. If you see Websites + Marketing, you have the drag-and-drop builder, which is the most common and the simplest to leave. If you see Managed WordPress, you have a WordPress install that GoDaddy hosts, so the WordPress guide applies to your content and this guide applies to your domain and email. If you see cPanel or Web Hosting, you have raw hosting with something installed on it, most often WordPress, and you should find out what before planning anything. Many owners discover at this point that they are paying for two of these at once.
Should you actually leave GoDaddy?
GoDaddy is a perfectly competent registrar and its support answers the phone, which is worth more than people admit. If your domain is parked there and you are happy, there is no reason to move the registration at all, and this guide never asks you to. The website product is a different conversation. GoDaddy's Websites + Marketing builds sites that look like GoDaddy sites, the editor is dated, and the constant upsell prompts wear on you. The renewal pricing is the more common trigger: introductory rates roughly double at renewal, and owners often find they are paying for a website plan, an SSL certificate, an SEO tool, and an email plan that could cost considerably less assembled differently. If your renewal invoice surprised you, that is the honest reason to look.
How do you move a GoDaddy website, step by step?
- Identify your product in My Products, as above, and note separately whether your domain and your email are also GoDaddy items. Most readers find all three.
- Export anything stored: contacts, form submissions, and order history if you sell. These live in GoDaddy's database, not on your website.
- Import your site by pasting its address into the new builder. Copy, photos, services, testimonials, contact details, and section layout come across as editable pieces.
- Match your page addresses to the ones you have now, so your existing rankings carry over rather than pointing at errors.
- Rebuild the systems: contact form destination, booking, and store catalog. Up to 30 products can import automatically, staged until you connect Stripe.
- Point your domain at the new site. Go to My Products, find the domain, and choose Manage DNS. Add or edit the two CNAME records. Do not touch anything labeled MX and do not switch nameservers.
- Verify: load the bare domain and the www version from your phone on cellular data, confirm the padlock, then send and receive a test email at your business address.
- Cancel the website plan only, about a week later. Keep the domain registration and keep the email product unless you have deliberately moved them.
Do you have to move your domain away from GoDaddy?
No, and for most people the answer should be not yet. Leaving the domain registered at GoDaddy while your website lives elsewhere is completely normal and fully supported. You keep the GoDaddy account for the domain renewal, typically around twenty dollars a year as of July 2026, and you stop paying for the website plan. If you later want to consolidate at a different registrar, transfer the domain then, as its own separate task, once the website has been running happily for a few weeks. Doing the website and the registrar in the same week means that if anything looks wrong you will not know which change caused it. Separate the changes and each one is diagnosable in a minute.
What happens to your GoDaddy email?
It keeps working, because you are not going to touch it. Website traffic is routed by the two CNAME records you change. Email is routed by MX records plus a few TXT records that prove your mail is legitimate. These are different rows in the same table and editing one does not affect the other. So your Microsoft 365 mailbox continues delivering through the move, and you keep paying GoDaddy for it until you decide otherwise. If you do eventually want to move email, treat it as its own project on its own week, because email moves are genuinely more delicate than website moves and involve migrating actual mailbox contents. The only way to break email during a website move is to accept an invitation to change nameservers, which is why every step above says to add records instead.
What comes across and what does not?
For a Websites + Marketing site, nearly everything that is visible: your copy, photos, services, testimonials, contact details, and the colors, fonts, and section structure, all as pieces you edit by clicking them on the live page. What does not come across is anything stored rather than published, which is the same list as every other platform: appointment history, customer records, order history, and form submissions. GoDaddy's marketing add-ons, its email marketing tool and social posting features, have no import path and need a decision rather than a migration. If you are on Managed WordPress instead, your content lives in WordPress and the WordPress guide covers the export details, though the domain and email advice above is the part that matters most.
