S4 Media

We get asked how to move a contractor website off GoDaddy more than almost any other question. Usually it goes like this: a contractor here in Eastern Idaho — last time it was a flooring guy near Shelley — bought a GoDaddy domain years ago, clicked “yes” on the Website Builder upsell, and now has a site he can’t rank, can’t customize, and pays for every month. He wants out. He’s also terrified that moving will kill his domain, his email, or whatever Google visibility he has.

Good news: moving off GoDaddy Website Builder is a solved problem, and you almost never need to touch the parts you’re scared about. Here’s the whole thing in plain English.

First, understand what you actually own

This is where most contractors get stuck, so let’s separate the three things GoDaddy has probably bundled onto one bill:

• Your domain (yourcompany.com) — the address. This stays put. You do not need to transfer your domain to move your website. Repeat that to yourself. Moving the site and transferring the domain are separate jobs, and you can do the first without the second.
• Your email (you@yourcompany.com) — if it runs through GoDaddy’s Microsoft 365 bundle, it keeps working after the website moves, as long as nobody deletes the email DNS records. More on that in step 6.
• Your website — the pages built in GoDaddy Website Builder. This is the only thing being replaced.

Once you see it as three separate things, the fear mostly evaporates. You’re swapping out one of the three and leaving the other two alone.

Why contractors move off GoDaddy Website Builder

Quick and fair, because Website Builder isn’t a scam — it’s just the wrong tool for a contractor who wants to rank:

• Limited SEO control. You get basic page titles and descriptions, but fine-grained control — schema markup, clean URL structures, per-page indexing rules — is somewhere between painful and impossible.
• No real ownership. You can’t export your site. If you stop paying, the site is gone. On WordPress, your site is files and a database you can move to any host on earth.
• Template ceiling. When you want a page per service and a page per town — the structure that actually ranks in local search — builders get clumsy fast.
• You’re renting; WordPress is owning. WordPress is open-source software that powers a large share of the entire web (their numbers are at wordpress.org). No single company can hold your site hostage.

If your GoDaddy site is getting you calls and you have no ambition to grow search traffic, keep it. This post is for everyone else.

How to move a contractor website off GoDaddy, step by step

Step 1: Take inventory before you touch anything

Log into GoDaddy and write down: what subscriptions you’re paying for (domain, Website Builder, email, anything else), when the domain renews, and where your email is hosted. Then go through your current site and note every page and its exact web address (URL). Ten minutes with a notepad now saves hours of panic later.

Step 2: Copy your content out by hand

GoDaddy Website Builder has no meaningful export. The practical move: open each page, copy the text into a document, and download your photos — ideally the originals from your phone or camera roll, because the builder compresses images. While you’re at it, save your Google Business Profile info and any reviews you’ve posted on the site. For a typical 5–8 page contractor site this is an evening of work.

Step 3: Set up WordPress on a real host

Pick a WordPress host — there are dozens of reputable ones, from budget shared hosting to managed WordPress platforms. What matters for a contractor site: decent speed, automatic backups, and support that answers. Install WordPress, pick a clean lightweight theme, and skip the 40-plugin buffet. A contractor site needs an SEO plugin, a forms plugin, a backup plugin, and not much else.

Step 4: Rebuild the pages — better, not just moved

This is your one chance to fix structure for free, so don’t just re-pour the same slab. Rebuild with the layout that ranks in local search: homepage that says what you do and where in the first sentence, one page per service, one page per town you work in (for us that’d be Rigby, Idaho Falls, Rexburg, Ammon, Shelley — you know yours), an about page with your license and insurance info, and a contact page with a short form. Add your phone number to the header, tap-to-call on mobile.

Step 5: Match or redirect your old URLs

If your old site had pages like /services or /about, either recreate the new pages at the same addresses or set up 301 redirects from each old URL to its new equivalent. This is how you keep whatever Google credit the old pages earned. It’s one afternoon of care, and skipping it is the number-one way people lose rankings in a migration. (This is also why you wrote the URLs down in step 1.)

Step 6: Point the domain — and don’t touch the email records

When the new site is built and you’ve clicked through every page, log into GoDaddy’s DNS settings and change the records that point your domain at the old builder (typically the A record and/or CNAME) to point at your new host instead. Your host’s docs give you the exact values.

The one rule: change only the web records. Do not touch the MX records. MX records are what route your email. Leave them alone and your email never blinks. DNS changes usually take effect within minutes to a few hours, and the switchover itself causes essentially zero downtime because the old site stays live until the moment the pointer flips.

Step 7: Cancel Website Builder — and nothing else

Once the new site has been live and stable for a week or two, cancel the Website Builder subscription. Not the domain. Not the email. Just the builder. Set your domain to auto-renew while you’re in there — an expired domain is a far worse disaster than anything in this post.

Step 8: Tell Google

Verify the site in Google Search Console and submit your sitemap (your SEO plugin makes one automatically). Update the website link on your Google Business Profile. If the URL structure changed, watch Search Console for crawl errors over the next month and fix anything it flags.

The mistakes we see contractors make

• Transferring the domain at the same time as the site. Two moving parts, one weekend, double the ways to break things. Move the site first. Transfer the registrar later if you want to — or never; a domain registered at GoDaddy pointing at a WordPress site elsewhere is a perfectly fine permanent setup.
• Deleting the old site before the new one is live. The old site is your safety net. It costs you one extra month of builder fees to keep it up through the switch. Pay it.
• Rebuilding the same thin site on WordPress. If the old site didn’t rank, cloning it onto WordPress won’t either. The platform is the truck; the content is the load.
• Nuking DNS records they don’t recognize. If you don’t know what a record does, leave it. Especially anything labeled MX, TXT, or SPF/DKIM — that’s email plumbing.

What this costs, honestly

DIY: hosting runs roughly $10–$40/month, a decent theme is free to ~$60, and the labor is a few evenings if you’re comfortable clicking around new software. Hiring it out: shops like ours do the whole migration — content moved, structure fixed, redirects handled, DNS switched — as part of a standard build. Either route beats paying builder rent forever for a site you can’t grow.

FAQ

Will I lose my Google rankings if I move my site off GoDaddy? Not if you match or 301-redirect your old URLs and keep the same domain. In our experience rankings typically hold through a careful migration and then improve, because WordPress gives you page structure and schema controls that Website Builder doesn’t.

Do I have to transfer my domain away from GoDaddy? No. You can leave the domain registered at GoDaddy indefinitely and just point its DNS at your new WordPress host. Domain transfer is optional and best done separately, after the site move is stable.

Will my email stop working when I move my website? Not if you leave the MX records alone. Email and website are separate services on the same domain. Change only the web records (A/CNAME) and your email continues without interruption.

Can I export my site from GoDaddy Website Builder? There’s no real export. Plan to copy text page by page and gather your original photos. For a typical contractor site of 5–8 pages, that’s an evening of work.

How long does the whole migration take? The rebuild is the long part — days to a couple of weeks depending on page count. The actual switchover (DNS change) takes minutes to a few hours to propagate, with essentially no downtime if the old site stays live until the new one is ready.

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If you’d rather hand this whole checklist to someone who’s done it before — content, redirects, DNS, the works — that’s a standard part of every site we build. See our pricing →

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