A few times a year somebody in Hull rings me because the person who built their website has stopped replying. Emails unanswered for weeks, the phone going to voicemail, and usually something on the site now broken that nobody can fix. It is a horrible position to be in, mostly because you have no idea yet how bad it is.
It is nearly always recoverable. This is the order I would work through it.
It might not be what you think
Before you assume the worst: developers get ill, take on too much work, or have something going on at home and handle it badly. I have known people go quiet for six weeks and come back mortified. If the relationship has been fine up to now, one more polite message and a bit of patience costs you nothing.
What you should not do is leave it three months, and there is one specific reason for that.
Check the domain first
Your domain name is the one thing that can be properly lost rather than just inconvenient. If it was registered in your developer's name, on their account, paid with their card, and it comes up for renewal while they are unreachable, you are in a far worse spot than if the website is simply sat there broken.
Look your own domain up on any public whois service and see whose details come back. Then find out when it renews. If that date is close and you cannot reach the person holding it, deal with that today, ahead of everything else on this page.
Work out what you actually own
There are usually four separate things here, and people assume they are one thing.
The domain name. Rented yearly from a registrar.
The hosting. The server the site sits on, often a different company and a separate bill.
The website itself. The WordPress install, the theme, your content.
The email. Frequently somewhere else again, and the bit that hurts most when it breaks.
Go through your bank and card statements for the last year. Recurring payments to a hosting company or a registrar tell you what is in your name. If none of those bills ever came to you, that is the size of the job.
The four logins that matter
In rough order of importance: the domain registrar account, the hosting or control panel, the website admin login, and whoever runs your email and DNS. Get those four and you are free. You need nothing else from your developer after that.
Ask plainly, in writing. Please send me the login details for the domain, the hosting and the website admin, or confirm they are already in my name. Keep it civil. Most people who have gone quiet out of embarrassment will send them over, and a civil email is a lot easier to hand to somebody else later than an angry one is.
If you cannot get in
You are not stuck, you are just doing it the long way. Registrars and hosting companies have processes for exactly this. They will want proof the business is yours, which might be a company registration, a history of invoices, or the domain printed on your headed paper. It takes days rather than minutes and they will not move without the paperwork, so gather it before you ring them.
In the worst case, where nothing is in your name and nobody will hand anything over, you rebuild on a new domain or a new host. Nobody wants that outcome and it costs real money, but I have done it twice and both businesses came out fine. Losing the site is survivable. Losing the email address customers have been writing to for eight years is the part that actually hurts, so sort that one first.
What to send the next person
If you ring me, or anybody else, after all this, the more of the following you have the faster and cheaper it goes.
What the site is built on, if you know. WordPress, a builder like Wix or Squarespace, or something custom.
Any logins you do have, even partial ones.
Who you pay and how much, for hosting, domain and anything else.
Any backup that exists, and where it is.
What is actually broken right now, as opposed to what has always annoyed you.
That last one matters more than people expect. Half the time the urgent problem is small and the rest is a wish list, which is a much cheaper conversation. I have written before about telling a fix from a rebuild.
Making sure it does not happen twice
Register the domain yourself. Your name, your card, your email address. Give your developer access, do not give them ownership.
Keep the hosting in your name too, even when somebody else manages it for you.
Ask for a backup you can hold. A copy of the site and the database, once a quarter, somewhere you control. My piece on backups and staging covers what a decent setup looks like.
Write the four logins down somewhere sensible. A password manager, not a note in a drawer.
Know who does the updates. If nobody does, they are not being done, and that is how sites get broken into.
None of that is about distrusting whoever built your site. I hand clients their own domain and hosting on purpose, because I would rather they could walk away from me easily. It also means that if I got run over by a bus tomorrow, they would have a bad month rather than a bad year. There is more on how I work in what I actually do every month.
If you are in this right now
Start with the domain, then the hosting, then the admin login. Get what you can in writing, gather your paperwork, and try not to panic about the site being down for a fortnight. In almost every case I have seen, it is a fixable problem and a smaller one than it feels like on day one.
If you want a second opinion before you spend anything, I run a free thirty minute surgery. Bring whatever you have got, even if that is nothing more than the web address, and I will tell you what you are dealing with. Get in touch and we will find half an hour.
Free 30-min surgery
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