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Intermediate 15 min read

How to migrate DNS from GoDaddy to Cloudflare

GRB Digital
  • DNS
  • Cloudflare
  • GoDaddy
  • Migration
  • Tutorial

Cloudflare gives you faster DNS, a free CDN, and better security than GoDaddy, at no cost. Moving across is usually a good call. The only catch is that DNS sits underneath both your website and your email, so a careless switch can take either offline. Done in the right order, you can move everything with zero downtime.

This guide covers DNS only: pointing your domain’s nameservers at Cloudflare so Cloudflare manages your records. It does not cover transferring the domain registration itself (who you pay the yearly renewal to). That’s a separate job for another guide. If your domain is a .com.au, Cloudflare Registrar doesn’t support .au domains anyway, so registration stays with GoDaddy regardless. The good news: you don’t need to transfer registration to get all the DNS, speed, and security benefits.

Requirements

  • A Cloudflare account (free)
  • A GoDaddy account with access to the domain
  • A bit of IT confidence, or an IT-savvy friend or AI to lean on

Doing this on behalf of someone else?

You don’t need their GoDaddy password. GoDaddy lets the owner grant delegate access to their domain:

  1. Send the domain owner your email address.
  2. Ask them to invite you as a delegate. Domain access only is all you need.
  3. Open your email, accept the invite, and create an account or log in.

You can now manage their domain from your own GoDaddy login.

Before you start

Two things prevent the outages people run into. Worth a minute each:

  • Email is the part that breaks. Your mail (MX) and email-authentication records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) live in DNS. If they don’t come across, inbound mail stops or your outbound mail lands in spam. We’ll deal with this explicitly below.
  • Lower your TTL ahead of time (optional). A day or two before, drop the TTL on your records to ~5 minutes in GoDaddy. Shorter TTLs mean the internet picks up the change faster, shrinking the risky window. Cheap insurance.

Steps

1. Set up a Cloudflare account

Sign up at dash.cloudflare.com. The Free plan is genuinely all most businesses need.

2. Add your domain

Click Add a domain, enter your domain (e.g. yourbusiness.com.au), and choose the Free plan. Cloudflare will set you up for the standard nameserver-based DNS move. That’s exactly what we want, since we’re only moving DNS.

3. Review the imported records carefully

Cloudflare automatically scans your existing DNS and lists what it found. This scan is not guaranteed to catch everything (especially email records), so don’t trust it blindly. Check it against your own records (next step), paying closest attention to:

TypeWhat it doesIf it’s missing…
A / AAAAPoints the domain to a serverWebsite goes down
CNAMEAliases a name (e.g. www)www stops resolving
MXWhere email is deliveredInbound email stops
TXT (SPF/DKIM/DMARC)Email authenticationYour mail lands in spam
SRVService records (Teams, VoIP)That service breaks

Proxy status matters. Each record has a cloud icon. Web records (A, www) can be 🟠 Proxied (orange) to get Cloudflare’s CDN and protection. Email records (MX) must be ⚪ DNS only (grey), because proxying mail breaks it.

4. Copy your Cloudflare nameservers

Cloudflare assigns you two nameservers, something like:

adam.ns.cloudflare.com
zara.ns.cloudflare.com

(Yours will have different names.) Copy both. You’ll paste them into GoDaddy shortly.

5. Back up your GoDaddy records

In GoDaddy, go to Domains → your domain → DNS. From the Actions menu, choose Export Zone File (guide here). It’s always good to have a backup, and it’s your source of truth for the next step.

6. Add anything Cloudflare missed

Compare the exported zone file against what Cloudflare imported. Add any missing records by hand in Cloudflare. Again, MX and TXT (email) records are the usual stragglers. Remember to keep mail records grey-clouded (DNS only).

7. Turn off DNSSEC at GoDaddy

This one causes hard outages. If DNSSEC is enabled at GoDaddy and you change nameservers without disabling it first, your domain will fail to resolve for everyone. In GoDaddy’s domain settings, find DNSSEC and disable it before continuing. (If it was never on, you can skip this.)

8. Update the nameservers

Now point GoDaddy at Cloudflare (official guide):

  1. Domains → your domain → Nameservers
  2. Change → I’ll use my own nameservers
  3. Delete GoDaddy’s nameservers and enter the two Cloudflare ones you copied in step 4
  4. Save

That’s the handover. The internet now gradually starts asking Cloudflare where your domain points.

9. Wait, and watch it propagate

It usually takes 1 to 2 hours, occasionally up to 48. Your site and email keep working the whole time, because the records are identical on both sides. Cloudflare emails you when the domain is active.

To keep an eye on it, open a command prompt (Windows) and check the nameservers:

nslookup -type=ns yourdomain.com.au

Try a different resolver to see how propagation is spreading:

nslookup -type=ns yourdomain.com.au 8.8.8.8   # Google
nslookup -type=ns yourdomain.com.au 1.1.1.1   # Cloudflare

Or use dnschecker.org to see propagation across the world at a glance. Once these return Cloudflare’s nameservers, you’re live.

10. Verify before you walk away

Don’t call it done off the homepage loading. Check:

  • ✅ Site loads over https:// with a valid padlock
  • ✅ Both www and the root resolve
  • ✅ Send a test email in and out, the step people forget
  • ✅ Optionally run the domain through mxtoolbox.com to confirm MX/SPF are intact

Congratulations, your domain is now protected by Cloudflare

A few good-to-knows now that you’re across:

  • Leave the old records in GoDaddy. They don’t need cleaning up, and they’re a handy rollback if anything looks off. Just switch the nameservers back.
  • Registration still lives at GoDaddy. You’ve moved DNS management, not the domain itself, so your yearly renewal still comes from GoDaddy. For .com.au domains that’s the only option, since Cloudflare Registrar doesn’t support .au.
  • Want DNSSEC back? You can re-enable it from DNS → Settings → DNSSEC in Cloudflare; it’ll give you a DS record to add in GoDaddy’s DNSSEC settings. Optional, but a nice bit of hardening.

While you’re in the DNS weeds, it’s worth checking your email authentication is actually solid, not just present. See our deep dive on SPF, DKIM and DMARC if you want to go further than “mail still works.”

If you’d rather not touch the DNSSEC and MX records yourself, this is exactly the kind of migration GRB Digital handles for clients as part of our cloud and infrastructure work. We’ll do the cutover, verify mail end to end, and hand it back working.