The Situation
The situation is – I created a website for a client and needed to connect an existing domain to the site. I first had to figure out how to disconnect a domain from its website. She had previously purchased a domain from GoDaddy and gave me her login information. Should be an easy connection, right? If you’re a web designer/dev, you know that anything to do with the web is never ever easy.
I got onto GoDaddy to simply change some DNS settings and lo and behold, they had her set up a free GoDaddy Website which was connected to the domain that I needed. This hindered me from being able to edit the DNS settings as I needed to.
Now, normally, I could just go in and delete the records pointing to the existing website and put in what I needed, but because it was connected to a GoDaddy website, the DNS settings were locked from being edited at all.
My Search
After looking through all of the Product and DNS settings, searching through GoDaddy’s FAQ section, googling my problem “how to disconnect a GoDaddy website from a GoDaddy domain” and finally turning to my last cry for help, GoDaddy Live Chat, I discovered that the Live Chat feature was in fact, gone. I still have no idea why this is…
I’m ashamed to say I spent over an hour trying to figure out how to disconnect the website so that I could just change the DNS settings. I find with companies such as GoDaddy they make things that should be easy unnecessarily hard because they want you to use their products. I also feel like they constantly change how things are deleted, removed and changed so that old “how-tos” that people have written up no longer apply.
So, here I am in 2024 telling you how to disconnect your domain from your website plan to unlock your domain. (Or, if you’re a web designer, how to unlock it for your client.)
Also, after you read the solution, you’ll think I’m crazy for not figuring it out before, but it doesn’t follow the normal flow of setting up a domain on a website and is not at all clear on GoDaddy. My assumption was (A) you could just delete the A record (B) you could go into the website plan on the product page and just disconnect it there (C) you could remove the connection on the DNS page itself. None of those were it.
The Solution!
What you need to do is:
- Go to your products page.
- Navigate to your website by clicking “Websites + Marketing” > Manage
- Click on “Edit Website”
- Navigate to “Settings” inside the website builder (My Domain will be at the top of that section)
- Click “Manage” that is located right next to your domain name
- Then choose the radio option “Free GoDaddy URL” and hit continue. Oddly enough, this will publish your site again.
- I went the extra step and unpublished the website which is located right above where you managed that domain.
Conclusion
This is not standard practice. You don’t normally need to go into an actual website builder to disconnect a domain, but to each his own.
I hope that if you searched for this solution, you found it and it helped! If you have any other web-related questions, we would love to hear from you. Just send us a note using our contact page!