Your web developer has disappeared. Here's what to do.
They've stopped answering, and your website, your domain and maybe your email are sitting in their accounts. A practical order of work for getting control back, and how to make sure it never happens again.
· 7 min read · Adam Jones
This comes up more often than you’d think. Someone built your site a few years ago, it’s been ticking along fine, and now you need a change, or something’s broken, or a renewal email has turned up from a company you’ve never heard of. You message the developer. Nothing. You try again a week later. Still nothing.
Before anything else: don’t panic, and don’t assume the worst about them. People get ill, close their business, move abroad or just drown in their inbox. None of that changes what you need to do, but it’s worth keeping the tone civil, because a friendly message that gets answered will save you a lot more time than anything below.
What follows is roughly the order I’d work through it in.
1. Send one clear message, in writing
Email is best, because you want a record. Keep it short and specific: you’re taking the site’s management in-house (or to another developer), and you need the following by a date two weeks out:
- Access to the domain, or the transfer code for it
- Login details for the hosting
- Any admin logins for the site itself
- A copy of the site’s files and database, if they hold them
Say thank you. Don’t threaten anything. If they reply, most of this post stops mattering.
2. Find out where your domain actually lives
The domain is the thing that matters most, because everything hangs off it: your website address, and very often your email as well. If you lose control of the domain, you lose both.
Look up your domain on a WHOIS service. For a .co.uk or .uk, Nominet runs its own lookup. For a .com, any WHOIS tool will do. The registrant’s personal details are usually hidden these days, but you’ll almost always see which registrar the domain is with (GoDaddy, 123 Reg, Namecheap, IONOS and so on) and when it’s due to expire.
Write the expiry date down. If it’s close, that’s your deadline, and you should treat everything from here on as urgent. A domain that lapses can be picked up by someone else, and getting it back from a stranger is far harder than getting it back from your old developer.
3. Work out whose name it’s in
This decides how hard the next bit is.
If the domain is registered to you or your business, you’re in a good position even if you’ve never had a login. You’re the legal holder. Contact the registrar directly, explain that you’re the registrant and you’ve lost contact with the person who manages the account, and ask what they need from you to prove it. Expect to send ID and possibly proof of your business address. For a .uk domain, Nominet can also help the named registrant directly. For a .com, registrars are obliged under ICANN rules to give the registrant the transfer code when asked.
If it’s registered in the developer’s name, or their company’s, legally it’s theirs, and the registrar won’t hand it to you however long you’ve been paying for it. Your options are to keep trying to reach them, to go through a formal dispute process (Nominet runs one for .uk domains, and there’s an equivalent called the UDRP for .com), or to get legal advice. All three are slower and more painful than they should be. This is why the prevention section below exists.
Invoices help either way. If you can show you paid for the domain and the site, keep that paperwork together.
4. Check what’s running your email
If your email address ends in your own domain, it’s being handled by something: Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or a mailbox bundled in with the hosting. Find out which. The quickest way is usually to look at who you pay for email, or what you log into.
Why it matters: email depends on settings (DNS records) attached to the domain. Nobody needs to touch your mailboxes to break it. If the domain or its DNS changes hands carelessly, email can stop arriving with no warning. When you or a new developer move things, the email records need to come across exactly as they were.
If your mailboxes are on the developer’s hosting account rather than a service you pay for directly, get your mail exported sooner rather than later.
5. Get a copy of the site
If you have an admin login for the site itself (WordPress is the common one), you can usually take a full backup yourself with a backup plugin, without needing the hosting account at all. Do that now, while it’s still up.
If you have no logins at all, the site can still be rebuilt, but do yourself a favour and save the content while it’s live: copy the text of each page into a document and download the images you own. The Wayback Machine at archive.org sometimes has older copies as well, which is a useful last resort if the site has already gone down.
6. Find out who pays for the hosting
If the developer was paying for hosting and charging it back to you, the site will stay up exactly as long as their card keeps working. When that renewal fails, it goes offline.
Hosting companies will generally only talk to the account holder, so if the account isn’t yours there’s less you can do here directly. What you can do is make sure you have a copy of the site (step 5) and control of the domain (steps 2 and 3). With both of those, the hosting can be replaced in an afternoon. Without the domain, it can’t.
A word on who owns the site itself
This catches people out. In the UK, unless your contract says otherwise, copyright in the design and code usually stays with whoever created it, even if you paid for it. You’ll normally have some right to keep using what you paid for, but if it ever turns into an argument about reuse or ownership, that’s a conversation for a solicitor, not a blog post.
Most of the time it never gets that far. It’s still worth knowing, so you’re not surprised if it comes up.
Making sure it never happens again
Whoever builds your next site, me or anyone else, insist on these from the start:
- The domain is registered in your name, in a registrar account you own. Your developer can have access to it. They shouldn’t own it.
- You pay for hosting directly, or at the very least you know exactly who the host is and you have your own login.
- Every login lives somewhere you control. A password manager is ideal. A document in a safe place is fine.
- Your contract says what you own when the work is finished and paid for.
- You have a copy of the site’s files, or know how to get one without asking anyone.
None of this is an insult to your developer. A good one will be relieved you asked, because it means that if they get hit by a bus, you’re not stuck.
If you’re dealing with this right now and want a hand untangling it, get in touch. Sorting out access and moving a site to hosting you control is exactly the kind of job my fixes and ad-hoc work are for, and I’d rather you rang me before the domain expires than after.
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