I once moved a domain between providers, and it reinforced something that sounds obvious in hindsight but is surprisingly easy to overlook when you are staring at a registrar dashboard late at night:
Who manages your domain registration and who runs its DNS are two different jobs.
The same company may handle both, which makes them feel like one service. They are not.
Think of the registrar as the landlord. It keeps the domain registered in your name, handles renewals, and maintains the official ownership details.
DNS is more like the utilities. It tells the internet where to find your website, email, and all the other services quietly attached to the domain.
Changing landlords does not automatically move the utilities.
Before transferring the domain, I recreated its entire DNS zone at a new DNS provider.
Every record was copied and checked: the website records, email records, verification records, and the obscure TXT entries that nobody remembers until something stops working.
Once the new zone was ready, I updated the domain's authoritative nameservers so that DNS was already being served from the new provider.
Only after confirming that everything still worked did I proceed with the registrar transfer.
That sequence turned out to matter.
When the transfer completed, the DNS zone at the previous registrar disappeared from the old account.
Not archived for later reference. Not left behind with a friendly reminder.
Gone.
Thankfully, the domain was no longer relying on it.
Nothing broke, which in infrastructure work is basically the happy ending.
Some registrars may remove a hosted DNS zone once a domain is transferred away.
If you wait until after the transfer to copy the records, you may discover that there is no longer anything there to copy.
At that point, you have potentially lost two things at once:
That can affect much more than the website.
Missing DNS records can interrupt email delivery, domain verification, analytics tools, third-party integrations, and other services that have been quietly working for years without drawing attention to themselves.
A routine transfer can quickly become a scavenger hunt conducted under outage conditions.
Treat the DNS migration and registrar transfer as two separate changes:
The important part is that the domain should no longer depend on the old registrar's DNS service before the registrar transfer puts that service at risk.
Don't Let Your Old Registrar Take the DNS With It
Do not assume the old DNS zone will remain available after the domain leaves the registrar. It might, but "might" is not a migration plan.
Boring is the goal when working with domains.