How to Transfer a Domain from GoDaddy to Bluehost

It’s no secret that Godaddy has really expensive prices when it comes to charging for all their products, and that includes: Domain names, Emails, Privacy domains, SSL certificates, etc…

Compared to its competitors, they offer affordable prices. Luckily, Bluehost does that, and they offer some of these services for free.

In this tutorial, we will see how to transfer a domain from Godaddy to Bluehost.

Before you start on your domain transfer, you must meet the following requirements so you can be able to proceed with the transfer:

• The remaining time in your domain name’s expiration date must be more than 15 days.
• The first registration date of your domain name is more than 60 days ago.
• You can transfer your domain only if it has one of these extensions: com, net, org, info, co, us, and biz.

The first thing you will need, in case you haven’t done it already, is to buy your own hosting from Bluehost.

You can get it on a 50% discount for $3.95/month.

Here are a few reasons why we recommend Bluehost as a good hosting provider:

• Officially recommended by WordPress.org
• Free domain name
• Free SSL certificate
• Newbie friendly
• Affordable price – only $3.95/month

If you would like to know more about what it has to offer, here is our review on Bluehost.

Inside your Products page, choose among the list, the domain name you wish to transfer and click on “Manage”

Next, you need to check if your contact information is correct. This is vital because based on the given credentials, this will ensure that you receive the authorization code to the specified email address and keep your domain under the name you specified.

So make sure everything is right.

Now, you need to disable your privacy protection for your domain name.

Assuming you already purchased privacy protection for your domain, in that case, you will have to click on “Remove Privacy” which you can find right under your contact information.

During this transfer process, if you want to minimize the downtime as much as possible. We recommend you to change your Godaddy name servers to point to Bluehost.

You can do that by entering the following name servers, in your domain DNS settings, scroll to the bottom of the page and you’ll find a section where you can change your name servers like it is shown in the picture below:

After that, it’s time to unlock your domain name. You can simply do this by switching your locking status from ON to OFF.

Please note that for this change to take effect, it takes between 2 to 5 minutes.

Now, that our domain is unlocked. You are ready to get your authorization code.

Before you do this, double check one last time if you have the right email address specified in your contact information.

This is where Godaddy will send you the authorization code for the transfer.

Press “Get authorization code”, and you will shortly receive an email containing your EPP authorization code.

After you click on the link, you’ll be taken to another page, proceed afterward to the next page, and your authorization code will be sent to your email, and you’ll also have the option to view your authorization code from that same page.

The email should look something like this:

Another way to do this, if you wish to unlock multiple domains at once and get all their authorization codes in a spreadsheet, go to “My products” and click on “Manage All”.

You’ll see next a table grid containing all your domains, check the ones you wish to unlock, then press “Export” as it is shown in the image below:

Next, you will get a popup where you can select the authorization code checkbox, so they can be included within the spreadsheet.

After that it’s done, you will shortly receive an email containing your CSV file with a list of your selected domain names and their authorization codes.

Great job on completing the steps with Godaddy! Let’s move on to the Bluehost transfer steps.

Now with Bluehost. Start by connecting to your account. Click on “Domains”

Depending on where you were initially, you might get a different page layout for your domain manager. But overall, they are both fine.

Here are two images showing you where you can access the transfer page on both versions of the domains page:

Enter the domain name you wish to transfer

After entering the domain name, you’ll be asked for your EPP authorization code. Add the code you received in your email from Godaddy.

In the contact information section, you can choose the credentials that will display as the contact information for your domain.

Now to the last step of our domain transfer process.

At the checkout page, make sure to select at least 1 year as quantity for your domain.

Usually, the transfer takes between 5-7 days. Meanwhile, you can check your progress by going to Domain Manager then on Transfer EPP under the details, you can see the current status of your domain transfer

Lastly, once your transfer is complete, you should receive an email from Godaddy notifying you about the success of the domain transfer.

Well done on completing the job. Now you realize that it’s not as hard it seemed the first time.

If you run into any troubles during this process, let us know in the comments so we can help you get through it.

Also, we would like to add, you should also consider moving your emails as well. There is no point to keep paying Godaddy for that service when you can have the same service with unlimited email accounts for free with Bluehost.

You want to know how to migrate your website files, check our article on how to migrate your WordPress website.