What Happens When Your Web Designer Disappears

I have written before about who owns the various parts of your website, which is a good thing to sort out while everybody is on speaking terms. This post is about the other situation: it is already too late to have that conversation, because the person who built your website has stopped answering.

That happens for entirely ordinary reasons. People retire, change careers, get ill, close a company, or simply drift out of contact with a client they last did work for four years ago. It is rarely anybody behaving badly, which is worth holding on to, because the recovery is much easier if you are not treating it as a dispute.

The important thing to understand at the start is that your website does not stop working the day they stop answering. It usually keeps going for months or years. What has actually happened is that the renewals, which were quietly being handled, are now not being handled, and the clock on those is the thing you are racing.

Work out what you are actually missing

Before contacting anybody, find out where you stand. Most of this you can establish on your own in half an hour, without needing anything from the person who has gone.

Who holds the domain name. Public records will tell you which registrar a domain is registered with, even when the registrant details themselves are hidden, which they usually are for a small business. Search for a WHOIS lookup and put your domain in. Two things matter: the registrar, which is the company you will need to deal with, and the expiry date, which tells you how much time you have.

Where the website is hosted. Often the same company, often not. Your registrar's records may point elsewhere. If your email runs on the same domain, that is frequently a separate service again.

Whether you can log in to anything. Try the password reset on the registrar and the host. This is the single most useful test, and it turns on one question: which email address is on the account. If it is yours, you are in a strong position and most of the difficulty disappears. If it is theirs, that is the real problem to solve.

That last point is worth dwelling on, because it is the mechanism by which this becomes urgent. Renewal notices go to the address on the account. If that is an address nobody is reading any more, nothing will tell you the domain is about to lapse. It will simply stop working one day, and the first you know of it is a customer mentioning your website is down.

Getting control back

In rough order of how well it tends to go.

If the account email is yours, reset the password and you are done. Change the contact details to something you will still be reading in five years, and note down what you found.

If they respond to a straightforward ask, that is by far the easiest route, and a lot of people who have gone quiet on new work will still deal with a small request. Something plain works best: "I am tidying up our business records. Could you transfer the domain to an account in my name, or send me the login?" No blame in it, nothing that reads as the opening of an argument. Transferring a domain is routine and takes minutes.

If they cannot be reached at all, go to the registrar directly. Registrars have a process for this, because it is a common situation. You will be asked to prove the business is entitled to the domain, typically with company registration details, invoices showing you paid for it, or evidence of the business trading under that name. Expect it to take days rather than hours, and expect to be asked for documents. It is a real process with a real outcome, not a brush-off.

If the company has been dissolved, this changes things and is worth taking seriously. A domain registered to a company that no longer exists is an asset of that dissolved company, and recovering it can be genuinely complicated. I am not a solicitor and this is not legal advice, but this is the one situation where getting proper advice early is worth the cost, rather than trying things and hoping.

What you can and cannot get back

Managing expectations here saves a lot of wasted effort.

• Usually recoverable: the domain name, given enough persistence. This is the one that matters most and is worth the most effort, because everything else can be rebuilt and this cannot.
• Usually recoverable with more difficulty: the hosting account, and with it whatever is stored on it.
• Often not worth recovering: the website files themselves. Everything visible on the website can be pulled down from the live pages by anybody, including you. What is harder to get is the editable original: the source files, the design assets, the working version somebody would need to make changes. If those are gone, rebuilding is frequently faster and cheaper than archaeology, particularly on a website that is a few years old and due a refresh anyway.
• Frequently gone for good: original photography at full resolution, logo files in their editable form, and any licences bought under somebody else's account. These are worth asking for specifically while you are asking for anything else, because they are the ones you cannot recreate from the live website.

If the domain has already lapsed and been picked up by somebody else, that is a harder situation than any of the above, and the honest answer is that you may not get it back. That is the outcome the whole of this post is trying to help you avoid.

Once you have it back

Put it somewhere it cannot happen again, which is mostly about the email address rather than anything technical.

• Register the domain in the business's name, at a registrar you have an account with, using an address that will outlive any individual person. A generic business address is better than a personal one, for exactly the reason this post exists.
• Turn on auto-renewal, and check the payment card on the account is one that is still in date.
• Write down one page: registrar, host, email provider, what logins exist, and who to contact for each. Keep it with your other business records rather than only on the computer.
• If someone else looks after your website going forward, that is fine and normal. The arrangement to aim for is that they have access to accounts that are yours, rather than you having access to accounts that are theirs.

None of this is about distrusting whoever helps you. It is that the arrangement should survive somebody becoming uncontactable, which is a thing that happens to good people for ordinary reasons and is nobody's fault when it does.