If your church runs its email through GoDaddy's Google Workspace reseller plan, you've probably gotten a notice — or will soon — that GoDaddy is stepping away from reselling Workspace. That means the account your pastor, office administrator, and ministry leaders log into every day for email, shared calendars, and Google Drive is on a clock, whether or not anyone on staff has time to deal with it. This isn't a reason to panic, but it is a reason to act before the migration becomes urgent. Churches are especially exposed here because so much runs through that one inbox: giving receipts, visitor follow-up, staff scheduling, board communication, and the domain your congregation has trusted for years. Below is exactly what's happening, how to tell if you're affected, and the steps to move your church's email safely — without losing a single message, contact, or calendar event.
GoDaddy has historically acted as a reseller of Google Workspace: it sold you the subscription, handled billing, and gave you a management panel, even though the actual mailboxes lived on Google's infrastructure. GoDaddy is now winding that reseller relationship down, which means it will stop billing and administering those Workspace accounts on its end.
This does not mean Google deletes your church's email. Your data lives with Google, not GoDaddy — but the billing relationship, the admin console access, and the support path all run through GoDaddy today. When that goes away, someone needs to either move the account's billing directly to Google, or move the church to a new provider entirely, before GoDaddy's cutoff date. Miss it, and mail can stop being delivered, staff can get locked out of the admin console, and nobody will be able to reset a forgotten password or add a new staff member's inbox.
The exact cutoff date varies by account and region, so check the email GoDaddy sent to your Workspace admin (usually the account owner or office manager) and your GoDaddy account dashboard under Workspace Email / Productivity for the specific deadline that applies to your church.
A typical small business has an IT contact or a paid ops person who tracks vendor notices. Most churches don't — the Workspace account was often set up years ago by a volunteer or former staff member, and the login credentials, billing details, and even which email address is the "admin" account can be a mystery to whoever's in the office today.
Churches also depend on that domain for things that are hard to recreate if access is lost even briefly: donor giving-platform confirmations, background-check and safety-training email chains for volunteers, wedding and funeral coordination, and the calendar every ministry leader checks before double-booking the fellowship hall. A short outage is an inconvenience for a retail business; for a church office it can mean a missed pastoral care request or a bounced giving receipt during a stewardship campaign.
Because of that, the safest approach is to treat this as a planned migration with a real date on the calendar — not something to get to "when things slow down."
Log into your GoDaddy account (the one used to manage your church's domain or hosting) and look for "Workspace Email" or "Productivity" under your products. If you see a Google Workspace subscription listed there, or if your staff logs into Gmail using a domain like yourchurch.org rather than a personal Gmail address, you're on a GoDaddy-resold Workspace plan and this applies to you.
Also search your church office's inbox for recent emails from "GoDaddy" or "Google Workspace via GoDaddy" — these notices typically go to whichever email address is listed as the account owner, which may not be the pastor's inbox. If nobody can find the notice, call GoDaddy support directly and ask, "Is our Google Workspace subscription affected by GoDaddy's Workspace reseller wind-down, and what's our transition deadline?" Have your domain name ready when you call.
If your church uses GoDaddy only for the website or domain registration — not email — this doesn't affect you at all. The trigger is specifically having Google Workspace mailboxes billed and managed through GoDaddy.
You generally have three paths. First, transfer the Workspace subscription directly to Google billing, keeping the same mailboxes, same passwords, and same Google interface — just paid and managed through Google instead of GoDaddy. This is the lowest-disruption option if your team is happy with Gmail/Google Calendar and just needs the plumbing fixed.
Second, migrate to a different Workspace reseller or IT provider who handles the transfer for you, which can be worth it if your church wants ongoing help (password resets, adding/removing staff, security setup) rather than self-managing through Google's console.
Third, some churches use this forced migration as the moment to reconsider the platform entirely — for example, moving to Microsoft 365 (which has a well-known nonprofit/church discount) or a lower-cost email provider, if Google Workspace's pricing or features no longer fit. There's no wrong answer here, but the transfer-to-Google-billing option is the fastest and least risky if you're short on time before the deadline, and it can always be revisited later once the account is stable.
1. Identify the Workspace admin account — the one login that can manage all staff mailboxes. If nobody knows it, GoDaddy support can help verify domain ownership and recover access.
2. Export or note everything tied to the old billing: which staff have mailboxes, any shared/group inboxes (like info@ or giving@), shared calendars, and any Google Drive folders the whole staff uses. Screenshot the admin console's user list before you touch anything.
3. Follow GoDaddy's specific transfer flow for your account type — this is usually a guided "transfer to Google" process inside your GoDaddy account, not a manual export/import. Using the built-in transfer path (rather than creating a brand-new Workspace account) is what preserves your existing mail, calendar history, and Drive files with zero data loss.
4. If you're switching providers instead of transferring, use Google's Data Migration Service or your new provider's migration tool to pull mail, contacts, and calendars over before you cut off the old mailboxes — never delete the old account until every staff member has confirmed their new inbox has everything.
5. Update DNS records (MX, SPF, DKIM) only as instructed by whichever path you take — these records control where your church's email actually gets delivered, and an incorrect change here is the single most common cause of email going down mid-migration. If your domain is also hosted at GoDaddy, this can often be handled through the same dashboard.
6. Test before you announce it's done: send and receive a test email from each staff mailbox, confirm shared calendars still show events, and verify any donor-platform or church-management-software integrations (like Planning Center or a giving platform) that email through this domain still connect.
Don't wait for the deadline to sneak up. This week: find the GoDaddy notice or call support to confirm your exact cutoff date, identify who has admin access, and decide which of the three paths above fits your church. Put the deadline on the church office calendar with a two-week buffer before it, so you're not making DNS changes the night before a Sunday service.
If your church's office doesn't have anyone comfortable making DNS or admin-console changes, this is a reasonable moment to bring in outside help for a few hours rather than risk a self-managed mistake that takes down email during a busy ministry season. A short, planned migration is far cheaper — in time, stress, and risk — than an emergency fix after mail stops flowing.
Get a free church email deliverability audit →No, not if it's done correctly. Using GoDaddy's built-in transfer-to-Google path (or a proper migration tool if you're switching providers) preserves existing mail, contacts, and calendar history. Data loss typically only happens when someone creates a brand-new account instead of transferring the existing one, or deletes the old account before confirming everything copied over.
Check the email GoDaddy sent to your account's admin address, and log into your GoDaddy dashboard under Workspace Email or Productivity — the deadline is usually shown there. If you can't find it, call GoDaddy support with your domain name and ask them directly; deadlines can vary by account.
No. The most common path is simply transferring the same Google Workspace subscription so it's billed and managed directly through Google instead of GoDaddy. Your staff keeps the same Gmail inboxes, same calendars, and same logins — only the billing relationship changes.
Depending on the account, you risk losing admin access to add or remove staff mailboxes, billing issues that can suspend the subscription, and in the worst case, mail delivery failures. It's worth treating the deadline as firm and migrating with a comfortable buffer rather than waiting until the last few days.
Yes, and for a church office running on volunteer or part-time admin staff, that's often the safer route. A migration specialist can verify your admin access, handle the DNS and transfer steps correctly the first time, and confirm everything (mail, calendars, giving-platform integrations) works before declaring it done — avoiding the trial-and-error that causes outages when this is attempted without experience.