What to do when your web designer disappears

It happens more often than anyone admits. Someone built your site three years ago, you paid them, it worked. Now the emails bounce, the phone number is dead, and you need to change your opening hours.

This is recoverable, almost always. But the order you do things in matters, because the wrong first move can lose you the site entirely.

First, work out what you actually own

A website is three separate things, and they can sit in three different places. People discover this at exactly the wrong moment.

The domain name. Your address. Rented yearly from a registrar.

The hosting. The computer serving the files.

The site itself. The pages, images and content.

Your designer may have registered all three in their own name, with their own card, on their own account. That is the difference between a bad week and a genuine problem.

Check the domain first, before anything else

The domain is the urgent one, because if it expires it can be bought by anyone, and getting it back ranges from expensive to impossible.

Search for a WHOIS lookup and enter your domain. It will show you the registrar and the expiry date. Two things matter: how long you have, and whether the contact details are yours or theirs.

If the expiry is close, deal with it today. Everything else on this page can wait a week. This cannot.

Then find out where it is hosted

Look for the last invoice you paid, or any old email. Hosting companies email about renewals constantly, so search your inbox for the domain name and see who has been writing to you about it.

If you find the account and it is in your name, change the password now and add your own card. If it is in their name, contact the host directly, explain the situation and ask about their process for transferring an account. Most have one, because this is not a rare situation.

Get a copy of the site while you can

Before changing anything, take a copy. If you have hosting access, download the files and export the database. If you do not, at minimum save every page as a PDF and download every photo you care about.

Text is easy to rewrite. Photos of your own finished work from four years ago are not, and losing those hurts long after the rest is fixed.

Decide: rescue or rebuild

Once you can get in, you have a choice, and rescuing is not automatically cheaper.

Rescue makes sense if the site works, ranks reasonably, and the only problem was access. Change the passwords, put your own card on everything, and move on.

Rebuilding makes sense if you still cannot edit it yourself. A site only one missing person could update was always going to end here. Rebuilding on something you can change yourself removes the whole category of problem, rather than deferring it to the next disappearance.

Keep your domain either way. It carries whatever search history you have, and changing it throws that away.

Two things to insist on next time

Whoever builds your next site, settle these before any money changes hands.

Everything is registered in your name, with your email and your card. Let them have access. Do not let them have ownership. A professional will not blink at this.

You can make ordinary changes yourself. Prices, hours, photos, a new service. If every small edit needs them, you have built the same trap again with a different person in it.

The part worth remembering

Almost nobody loses a website because of a technical failure. They lose it because one person held the keys and stopped answering.

Own the domain, hold the accounts, and be able to change your own opening hours. Everything else is recoverable.

The Instinctor team