Transferring an existing domain involves switching the company that handles the registration service, so after the transfer itself, you will have to manage things like renewal payments or DNS resource record updates through the new registrar company. The transfer procedure itself is standard with most generic and country-code domain extensions. Certain country-code extensions are more specific and entail different steps, but in the general case transferring a domain involves several basic steps and one of them is unlocking the domain. The lock is a safety option, which is being embraced by more and more domain name registry operators. It’s a standard feature supported by all generic top-level domain names. If a domain is locked, it will not be possible to initiate a transfer process, so no one can even attempt to register your domain. The lock can be removed only through the account where the domain name is registered and all new domain names that support this feature are locked by default the moment they are registered.