My web designer has disappeared. What now?
It usually starts small. An email goes unanswered, then another, and the site carries on working so it does not feel urgent. It becomes urgent the day something has to change, or the day the domain comes up for renewal and nobody knows where the reminder went.
Almost all of this is recoverable, but the order matters. Deal with the domain first, because it is the only part with a deadline attached.
First, find out who owns the domain
Look up your domain on a WHOIS service, and for a .uk domain use Nominet's own lookup. You are looking for the registrant name and the registrar, which is the company the domain is held with.
If the registrant is you or your business, you are in a good position: contact the registrar, prove who you are and take over the account. If the registrant is the designer or their company, you have a dispute rather than a lockout, and there is a documented process for it.
Either way, note the expiry date now. A domain that lapses can be bought by anybody once it leaves its grace period, and losing the domain is the one genuinely serious outcome here. Everything else is inconvenience.
Then work out where the site is hosted
If you can reach the hosting account, take a backup of everything before doing anything else. If you cannot, the content is still recoverable: everything visible on the site can be copied from the live pages, and pages that have since changed are often still in the Internet Archive at web.archive.org.
What you probably cannot recover is the design itself, which is why rebuilding is usually faster than fighting for access. That feels unfair and it is normally true.
Get the other accounts back
The Google Business Profile is the one worth chasing, because it is often the biggest source of local enquiries. Google has a formal process for requesting ownership of a profile somebody else manages: request access through the profile, and if there is no response within a set period you can escalate and usually claim it.
The same applies to Google Analytics and Search Console. Search Console can simply be re-verified if you control the domain or the hosting, and Analytics history is nice to have rather than essential.
Email is the urgent one if your addresses run on the domain. If mail stops, chase that before the website, because it is doing more work for your business than the site is.
What to do about the website itself
If the site still works and nothing needs changing, you have time. Sort out the domain and the accounts first, then plan a rebuild at a sensible pace rather than in a panic.
If it has broken, or if it is out of date in ways that cost you work, rebuilding is usually the shortest route. Your words, photographs and logo transfer; only the arrangement of them is lost. A small business site rebuilt from existing content is a short job.
Whoever you use next, settle the ownership questions before any money changes hands. That is the whole lesson of this situation.
How to make sure it cannot happen again
Register the domain yourself, in your name, on an account whose password you hold. Everything else can be delegated; this cannot.
Keep a written note of what exists and where: domain registrar, hosting, email, the Google accounts, and who has access to each.
Use an email address for those accounts that is not controlled by the person building the site, and that you will still have in five years.
Ask any new designer, in writing, what you keep if the arrangement ends. A straight answer takes them a sentence.
Common questions
- Can I get my domain back if it is registered in my designer's name?
- Usually yes. Registrars have a documented process for disputed registrations, and for .uk domains Nominet runs a dispute resolution service. It takes time and some evidence that the domain belongs to your business, but it does succeed more often than people expect.
- My website is still working. Is it urgent?
- The website is not, but the domain renewal is. A site can run for months untouched; a lapsed domain can be gone permanently. Find the expiry date first and work backwards from it.
- Can I recover the content if I cannot get into the hosting?
- Most of it. Anything visible on the live site can be copied straight from the pages, and older versions are often preserved at web.archive.org. The design and the underlying files are the parts you generally cannot get, which is why rebuilding tends to be quicker than fighting.
- How do I get my Google Business Profile back?
- Request access through the profile itself. The current manager is notified and has a set period to respond; if they do not, you can escalate and normally take ownership. It is worth doing even if you rebuild the website elsewhere.
- Should I just start again?
- Frequently yes, if the site is old or was built on a platform you cannot get into. Recover the domain and the Google accounts, because those carry the value, and treat the website itself as the replaceable part.
If you would rather somebody just did it
I build websites for self-employed tradesmen and small businesses across the UK: £249 to build, then £49.99 a month to host, maintain and update it. The sites I have built currently hold 97 page-one Google rankings between them.