Moving your domain to another registrar without losing your website or email

You can transfer a domain to another registrar without your website or email going down, but only if you first check who answers for your domain's DNS. When that's the registrar you're leaving, copy every record somewhere else and switch the nameservers before you start the transfer, not after.

Owners usually move a domain for boring reasons: the renewal price crept up, the account is in a former employee's name, or the registrar keeps phoning with upsells. The transfer itself is paperwork. The part that takes sites offline is a setting most people have never looked at, and it sits with a company they're about to stop paying.

Will my website and email go down during a domain transfer?

Not if your DNS is run by someone other than the registrar you're leaving. If it is run by that registrar, expect the old company to stop answering for your domain at the moment the transfer completes, and your site and email go quiet with it. Move the DNS first, wait a day or two, then transfer.

I watched this exact thing happen this month. A client's domain was leaving Squarespace while it still used Squarespace's nameservers. The second the transfer completed, those nameservers started refusing every question about the domain, and public resolvers returned errors instead of an address. There's no grace period and no warning email. What put the website and email back was the copy of every record I had saved before the transfer started, rewritten at the new registrar.

The registrar doesn't do this to punish you. From its point of view, the domain isn't its customer any more, so it has no reason to keep serving records for it. Expecting a company you just left to keep running your DNS for free is a bit like expecting your old landlord to keep forwarding your mail out of kindness. Some do. You don't want your email to depend on it.

How do I find out who runs my DNS?

Look up your domain's nameservers. They're public, and the end of each name tells you which company runs your DNS. If those nameservers belong to the registrar you're leaving, your records will disappear with the transfer, so they need a new home first. If they belong to anyone else, the transfer won't touch them.

It takes two minutes, and you don't need a login:

1. Open ICANN's registration data lookup and type your domain without the www.
2. Find the "Registrar" line, which names the company you pay, and the "Name Server" lines underneath it.
3. Compare the end of the nameservers with the table below. If the company is the same as the registrar, you have work to do before the transfer.

If you see a name you don't recognise, it often belongs to the web host or the developer who built the site. Ask them before you touch anything. And if the registrar account is in somebody else's name, that's a separate problem to solve first; who actually owns your website covers how to get it into your own.

The records to copy before you change anything

Moving the DNS means recreating every record at the new DNS host, then switching the nameservers to it. Most hosts offer to scan your old records automatically. The scan finds the common ones and quietly misses the rest, so compare it line by line against the old panel. For a typical small business, this is what's in there and what a customer notices when one goes missing:

A and AAAA

Point your domain at the server with your website. Missing, and the site doesn't load at all.

CNAME

Point names like www, or a booking tool's subdomain, at another address. Missing, and "www.yourname.ca" fails while the bare name works, which is very confusing to diagnose over the phone.

MX

Tell other mail servers where your inbox lives. Missing, and customer emails bounce back to the sender, usually without you ever knowing they tried.

TXT for SPF, DKIM and DMARC

Prove your emails really come from you. Missing, and your quotes and invoices start landing in spam. More on these in setting up business email on your own domain.

Other TXT

Verification codes for Google Search Console, Microsoft 365 and similar. Missing, and those services may decide you no longer own the domain.

Take a screenshot of the old DNS panel as well, before you switch anything. If a record goes missing three days later, the screenshot is the only place it still exists.

How long does a domain transfer take?

For .com, .net and other generic domains, up to five calendar days once you've started it. ICANN's rules give the old registrar five days to respond, and silence counts as approval. Many registrars let you approve the transfer yourself by email, which can finish it within the hour. Moving the DNS beforehand adds a day or two.

Laid out as a calendar, a careful transfer looks like this:

One owner-friendly trick: switch the nameservers a full week early if you can. Changes to nameservers can take up to a day to reach everyone, and the week gives you time to notice a missing record while the old panel still exists to copy from.

When will a domain transfer be refused?

Most refusals come from a 60-day lock: within 60 days of registering the domain, within 60 days of a previous transfer, or within 60 days of changing the owner's name, organisation or email. Expired domains, disputed ones and those under a court order are refused too. Check the dates before you plan the move.

Notice what isn't on the list: the registrar disliking that you're leaving. Under the ICANN Transfer Policy, a registrar may refuse only for the specific reasons it names. A sales rep who tells you the domain "can't be moved" without giving one of them is selling, not explaining. Canadian .ca domains follow their own registry's rules rather than ICANN's, so check those numbers with your registrar.

Do I lose the time I already paid for when I transfer?

Usually not. For .com, a completed transfer adds one year to the existing expiry date, and the new registrar's transfer fee pays for that year. The remaining time carries over. The exceptions: the total can't exceed ten years, and a transfer soon after an automatic renewal cancels that renewal's year instead.

The rule comes from the .com registry specification: on a successful transfer, the registration is extended by one year, up to ten years in total. The catch sits in the 45 days after an expiry date. If the old registrar auto-renewed the domain and you transfer away within that window, the auto-renewed year is cancelled and only the transfer's year is added. You don't end up with less time than you paid for in total, but you may pay the old registrar's renewal and then see it reversed, so it's simpler to transfer more than two weeks before the expiry date.

If you're moving the website to a new host at the same time, do it as a separate step, on a separate day. Changing the registrar, the DNS and the server in one afternoon means that when something breaks, you have three suspects instead of one. The website migration service is how I handle the server side of a move without losing search rankings.

Questions owners ask me about moving a domain

Sources, read on 17 October 2026: ICANN Transfer Policy for the five-day approval, the authorization code deadline, the refusal reasons and the 60-day locks; ICANN's FAQs for registrants; the .com registry functional specifications for the added year, the ten-year cap and the auto-renew grace period. The Squarespace case is a transfer I handled in October 2026.