Your web developer vanished. What to do now
Emails unanswered, phone dead, and a website you cannot log into. It is more common than anyone admits, it is almost always recoverable, and most of the recovery costs nothing. Do these in order.
Before anything else: check the domain expiry date. Search "whois" plus your domain name. If it expires within ninety days, that is now the only urgent thing on this page. Everything else can wait a week; an expired domain can be bought by anyone, and buying it back — if the new owner will sell — routinely costs thousands.
Step 1 — Work out what you actually control
There are four separate things here, and people conflate them. You may hold all four, none, or any combination.
| What | How to check |
|---|---|
| The domain | A whois lookup shows the registrar. Search your email for that registrar's name — you may have an account you forgot. |
| The hosting | Search your email and card statements for a hosting company. If you have been paying it, the account is yours to reclaim. |
| The website admin | Try yourdomain.com/wp-admin. If password reset emails come to you, you are in. |
| The source files | Anything custom — a logo, a bespoke theme — may exist only on their machine. This is the one that is sometimes genuinely lost. |
Whoever pays the bill has leverage. If your card pays the hosting, phone the host, prove you are the account holder and ask them to reset access. They do this constantly and it is rarely difficult.
Step 2 — Take a backup today
Before you change anything or contact anyone. If you can reach the hosting control panel, download a full backup of the files and the database. If you can only reach WordPress admin, install a backup plugin and export from there. If you can reach neither, a free site-copier will at least save the pages as they appear.
A copy on your own laptop converts this from an emergency into an inconvenience. Do it before you email anybody.
Step 3 — Send one clear written request
Not an angry one. Most vanishings are illness, burnout, a new job or a business that quietly folded — far more often than deliberate hostage-taking. A short, unemotional message asking for four specific things is answered surprisingly often:
- Transfer of the domain to a registrar account in your name
- The hosting login, or the transfer of the hosting account
- An administrator account on the website
- Any source files: logo artwork, theme files, design originals
Give a deadline, say what you will do afterwards, and keep it factual. The written trail matters if you later need the registrar's dispute process.
Step 4 — Change every password
Once you have access, assume the previous holder still does too. Registrar, hosting, website administrators, the database user, and any connected service — analytics, email sending, payment gateways. Delete administrator accounts you do not recognise, and check the list of users for accounts created long after the site was built.
Step 5 — Find out what state it is in
Now the real question: is this worth keeping? Three things decide it.
- How far behind it is. Two years is routine. Five years, on a platform whose current version no longer supports the plugins in use, is a different conversation.
- Whether the theme was edited directly. If it was, updating it erases the changes — which is precisely why nobody updated it. This is the most common reason a site is stuck.
- Whether it still works on a phone. Not whether it looks acceptable — whether it actually works. Most sites of this vintage do not, and their owners have never checked.
That is what the free audit call answers — I render the site before we talk, and you get it in writing afterwards. And it answers it as a document you can hand to any developer — not just to me.
How to not be here again. Register the domain yourself, in your own name, on your own card. Hold the hosting account yourself and give your developer access to it, not the other way round. Ask for source files at handover, while everyone is still pleased with each other. Three precautions, ten minutes, and none of the above ever applies to you again.
Questions people actually ask
They registered the domain in their own name. Can I get it back?
Usually yes, and more easily than you fear. Start by asking politely in writing — most disappearances are burnout or a life event, not malice, and a clear request often gets a transfer. If that fails, every registrar has a dispute process, and if the domain is your registered business name you have a strong claim. What you must not do is let it expire while you argue: renewal costs $15 and losing it costs you everything built on it.
How do I know if my site is still being backed up?
Assume it is not. Backups were very often part of an arrangement that ended when the person stopped replying, and the hosting control panel will tell you in two clicks. Take a manual backup today, before anything else on this page — a copy on your own laptop turns a catastrophe into an inconvenience.
Is it cheaper to fix the old site or start again?
It depends on how far behind it is, and the honest answer needs someone to look. A site two years out of date usually updates fine. A site five years out of date, on a theme edited directly rather than through a child theme, can be more expensive to untangle than to rebuild — because every update undoes the previous developer's changes.
Can someone else just take over the maintenance?
Yes, but a careful developer will want to see the state of it first. Agreeing to maintain a site nobody has inspected means agreeing to inherit whatever is in there for a fixed monthly fee. Anyone who takes it on sight unseen is either not looking, or pricing in the risk somewhere you cannot see.