What to do when your web designer disappears

TLDR

If the person who built your website has gone quiet and you're not sure what you can still get into, take a breath. You're not in trouble, and you didn't do anything wrong. This happens more than you'd think. Below is how to figure out what you actually own, get back into your own accounts, and make sure you're never left in this spot again.

Here's what we'll cover:

• Why this is far more common than it feels
• The four things you actually own, and how to check each one
• How to track down your domain and hosting when you have no logins
• The steps to take back control
• The questions that keep you from getting stranded twice

You are not the only one

We hear this story a lot. Somebody built your site a few years back. Maybe it was a freelancer, maybe a cousin who was good with computers, maybe an agency. For a while, everything was fine. Then you needed to change a phone number or add a new service, you sent a message, and nothing came back. The emails bounce. The phone goes to a full voicemail box. The person who holds the keys to your website is just gone.

If you've been putting off dealing with this because you feel a little foolish for not having the logins, let that go. Most business owners don't have this stuff written down, because when the site got built, everything worked and there was no reason to think about it. You're not behind. You're just at the point where it finally matters.

First, take a breath

Your website is almost certainly still up and running right now. A designer disappearing doesn't usually take the site down with them. So you have time. You don't need to make any fast decisions today.

Panic is what leads people to do something rash, like buying a brand new domain or letting someone rebuild everything from scratch before they've checked what they already have. Slow down. Let's find out where you actually stand first.

Figure out what you actually own

A website is really four separate things, and you can own some of them without owning the others. Once you know which pieces you control, the path forward gets a lot clearer.

The four pieces are:

Your domain. This is your web address, the yourbusiness.com part. It's the single most important thing to control, because whoever holds the domain controls where your site and often your email point.

Your hosting. This is the space where your website's files actually live. Think of the domain as your street address and hosting as the building it points to.

Your email. Email is tied to your domain name, but is often managed in Microsoft or Google. 

The design and code. How it all looks and works under the hood. This is the piece most tied to whoever built it, and sometimes the hardest to move.

You don't need to be technical to sort this out. You just need to find out whose name is on each piece.

Start with your domain

Your domain is the first thing to check, because losing it is the one thing that's genuinely hard to undo.

There are free "whois" lookup tools online where you type in your web address and see who registered it and where. This is the whois website I use to search whois records. If it shows your name and your email, good. That's the outcome you want. It means you can recover access with a password reset.

If it shows the missing designer's name, or a company you don't recognize, make a note of it. It's not the end of the world, but it's the thing you'll want handled first, and it's worth getting help with so nothing lapses.

Find your hosting

Next, figure out where your site lives. Sometimes you already pay a hosting company and just forgot, so check your bank and credit card statements for a recurring charge from a web company. That charge is a thread you can pull.

If you can't find a payment anywhere, your old designer may have been hosting the site on their own account. That's common, and it's fixable. It just means the site can be moved to hosting that's in your name, which puts you back in control.

Get back into your accounts

Here's the good news about most of this. The key to almost everything is your email address.

Domain registrars, hosting companies, and website tools all let you reset a password to the email on file. So if you still have access to the email account that was used to set things up, you can often recover a surprising amount on your own by clicking "forgot password" and following the steps.

If the accounts were tied to an email you don't control, that's where a steady hand helps, because there are proper ways to prove you're the rightful owner and get access transferred. It's a known process. You're not the first person to walk through it.

Save a copy of what you have

While your site is still up, save what's on it. Copy your text into a document. Download your photos. Keep a simple list of your pages. If you need help with this, we have tools that can do this for you. 

This does two things. It protects the content you've built, and it makes any future move faster and cheaper, because nothing has to be recreated from memory.

Bring in someone steady

At some point you'll want a person, not just a to-do list. When you pick who that is, you're really choosing how much you want to feel in control from here on out.

The right partner will do a few things without being asked. They'll give you your logins instead of guarding them. And they'll tell you plainly what happens if you ever decide to move on, because a partner who's confident in the relationship has no reason to lock you in.

You've already learned what the wrong version of this feels like. That experience is useful. It tells you exactly what to look for.

Make sure this never happens again

Before you hand your website to anyone new, ask these questions and write down the answers:

• Who owns my website and domain name?
• Can you send me a copy of my website?
• Do I have admin access to update my own site?
• If we ever part ways, how do I take everything with me?

A good answer to each of those is what keeps you from ever being stranded again. Anyone who hesitates on these is telling you something worth listening to.

You deserve someone who picks up the phone

The hardest part of this whole situation isn't the technology. It's the feeling of being left with no one to call. We built our business around being the opposite of that. We're local, we're real people, and we answer.

If you're staring at a website you can't get into and you're not sure where to start, reach out. We'll help you find out what you own and lay out your options, with no pressure and no jargon. Getting back in control of your own site is more doable than it feels right now.