You’re probably wondering: why transfer your domain from Godaddy when they’re the biggest and still relatively cheapest? One good reason is their convoluted and confusing interface. Once you’ve got your domain, you don’t have to look at their site very often, but every time I do, it feels like such a chore. Wading through options upon options along with all of the extra services they’re constantly trying to sell you. It always feels like they want you to click on something by mistake just so they can make a few extra bucks off of you.

So I transferred one of our domains to Namecheap.com, which was not hard to do, but not intuitive. Godaddy’s cluttered website doesn’t make it very easy for you.

Here’s how to transfer your domain.

Preliminaries
Before you initiate the transfer, prepare your domain on the Godaddy side:

1. Make sure you do this at LEAST 2 weeks before your domain is set to expire.
2. If your domain is set to Private with Godaddy, change it to Public.
3. If your domain is Locked, Unlock it.

If you don’t do this, Godaddy will deny the transfer.

Transferring Your Domain
1. Head on over to Namecheap and initiate the Transfer Request and follow the instructions. Don’t worry if you don’t have an account with them. You’ll be asked to create an account during the process.

2. Namecheap will ask you for your EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol). You need to log into your Godaddy account to get it.
a. In your Godaddy account, click on Domain Management and look for Authorization Code. Then click on Send By Email. This will send the code to the technical contact registered for your site.
b. Once you’ve received your Authorization code (it took a couple of minutes), you can enter it in at Namecheap under EPP.

3. After you submit the EPP/ Authorization code to Namecheap, you should get an email asking you to click a link to confirm the transfer. It took about an hour before I got that email.
a. You should then be getting an email from Godaddy after you confirm the transfer to Namecheap.

And that should be it!

Also, I don’t know if this is a coincidence or not, but the day after I went through this process, Godaddy totally redesigned their web site, and it’s worse than ever. It’s extra confusing and not only have the previous options been moved around, the entire site looks like a clown party, or a gaudy jacket. Sounds like this is the right time to bail from Godaddy. Hopefully, Namecheap maintains their interface the way it is.