My web guy disappeared: how to take back your site

If your web developer has disappeared, check who owns your domain name before anything else. Whoever controls the domain controls your website, your email and your ability to move to anyone else. A free WHOIS lookup takes thirty seconds and tells you how serious this actually is.

This happens more than people think, and it is usually not malicious. Someone goes out of business, gets ill, changes careers, or simply stops replying. The result is the same: you cannot change your own website and nobody knows the passwords.

Start here, before you do anything else

The three situations you might be in

The domain is in your name. You are fine. Genuinely. Log into the registrar, and from there you can point the domain at new hosting and a new site whenever you want. Everything else is recoverable.

The domain is registered to the developer or their company. This is the real problem, and it is the one to focus on. Everything else can be rebuilt; the domain is the thing that cannot simply be recreated, because your customers, your search rankings and your email all point at it.

The domain is in your name but you have no login. Contact the registrar directly. As the registered owner you can usually prove identity and recover access without the developer’s involvement at all.

Recovering a domain someone else holds

Assume disorganisation before malice. Most people in this situation are not holding your domain to ransom, they have just stopped opening emails.

Start with a clear written request naming the domain and asking for transfer, giving a reasonable deadline. Send it to every address you have for them.

If nothing comes back, contact the registrar directly. Explain the situation and provide evidence: invoices showing you paid for the domain, emails where they refer to it as yours, anything establishing that it was registered on your behalf. Registrars deal with this regularly and have processes.

For .uk domains, Nominet operates a dispute resolution service which can transfer a domain where the registrant details are wrong or the domain was registered on someone’s behalf. For .com and others, ICANN’s UDRP exists but is aimed at trademark disputes and is heavier going.

If you cannot get the old website back

You often do not need it.

With the domain in hand, a new site can be built and pointed at the same address. Your search rankings largely survive that, because Google associates rankings with the domain rather than with the files sitting behind it. A rebuild done sensibly, keeping the same page addresses where possible, holds most of what you had.

To recover the old content, the Wayback Machine at archive.org has snapshots of most sites. You can copy your text back out of it. Images are hit and miss, but text usually survives.

Also check whether you have the content elsewhere already: old brochures, emails to the developer with copy in them, your own drafts. Most small business websites are five pages of text you could rewrite in an afternoon.

The other accounts to secure

While you are at it, take ownership of everything else, because the same person often set these up:

Google Business Profile, which may have them as owner. Google can be asked to transfer ownership of a listing you can prove is your business. Analytics. Any social accounts. Email hosting.

Each one you recover now is one you do not have to fight for later.

Making sure it never happens again

The prevention is simple and it is worth being firm about it with whoever you work with next:

• Register the domain yourself, in your name or your company’s, and keep the login. It costs £10-£15 a year.
• Own the hosting account in your name, even if someone else manages it.
• Hold admin access to your own website, whether or not you ever use it.
• Keep a note of every account, where it is and who has access.

Any provider who resists this is telling you how they expect the relationship to end. Good ones set it up this way without being asked, because it removes an argument later.

More on this in do you own your website and who owns your domain and content. If you are moving to someone new, how to switch web providers covers doing it without losing anything.

If you are stuck in the middle of this and want someone to look at what you can and cannot recover, send us the domain and what you know and we will tell you honestly where you stand, including if the answer is that you can sort it yourself for the price of a domain renewal.