My Web Designer Has Gone Quiet. How Do I Get My Website Back?

Emails stop being answered. The phone goes to voicemail. Maybe the site is still up and you just can't change the phone number on it, or maybe it's gone down and you have no idea who to call.

First thing worth saying: this is common, and being in this position doesn't mean you did anything daft. One-person web shops close, people move on, and plenty of small businesses were never handed the things they should have been handed on day one. The second thing worth saying is that it's usually recoverable — but the order you tackle it in matters a lot.

There are four separate things, and people conflate them

When somebody says "they've got my website", they usually mean some mixture of four assets that are held in different places and recovered in different ways:

• The domain name — your address. Held at a registrar such as GoDaddy, 123-reg or Namecheap.
• The hosting — the machine your site runs on. Often a completely different company.
• The site itself — the actual files, code, images and text.
• The Google properties — your Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics, which are ordinary Google accounts with permissions attached.

You can lose access to any one of these without losing the others, and you can rebuild around some of them but not all. Which is why the domain comes first.

Start with the domain, always

The domain is the one thing that's genuinely painful to replace. A new website can be built in a fortnight. A new domain means every business card, van livery, directory listing and Google review pointing at the wrong address, and years of accumulated search history reset to zero.

Look up your domain on a WHOIS service to see which registrar holds it and when it expires. UK .co.uk domains are managed by Nominet, and you can check the registration details through them.

What you're looking for is whose name it's registered in. If it's registered to you or your company, you're in a strong position — you can go to the registrar directly, prove who you are, recover the account and move on. If it's registered in your designer's name, it's harder, but not hopeless: registrars have processes for disputed registrations, and Nominet operates a dispute service for .co.uk domains. That's the point at which it's worth a conversation with a solicitor rather than advice from a blog.

Check the expiry date the moment you realise there's a problem. A domain nobody is renewing will lapse, and a lapsed domain can be bought by anybody.

Then the hosting and the site files

If the site is still live, it's running somewhere and somebody is paying for it. Your bank statements are often the quickest route to finding out who — a recurring payment to a hosting company tells you exactly where to direct your account recovery.

If the files themselves are gone and unrecoverable, that is genuinely a rebuild. It's worth knowing that this is survivable and not as expensive as it sounds — but it's also the reason to make sure it can't happen twice.

Don't forget the Google side

Your Google Business Profile is often the most valuable thing you own online, and it's separate from your website entirely. If your designer set it up under their own account, Google has a documented process for requesting ownership of a profile you're the rightful owner of. It takes a few days and it works.

Do the same for Search Console and Analytics. If you can't get access, they can be set up fresh — you'll lose the historical data, which is annoying rather than fatal.

How to make sure it never happens again

Whoever you work with next, insist on these. Any decent developer will agree without blinking, and the reaction you get to asking is itself useful information:

• The domain registered in your name or your company's name, on an account you control, with your own login.
• A copy of the actual site files handed to you, in a form you could give to another developer tomorrow.
• Owner-level access to your own Google Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics — with them added as a manager, not the other way round.
• A named person you can actually reach, rather than a support address.
• No lock-in that makes leaving expensive. If someone needs a contract to keep you, that tells you something.

That list is also, more or less, how we work — every site we build is handed over as code you own, on a domain in your name, with your Google properties under your control. Not because it's generous, but because the alternative is what put you in this position.

If you're currently stuck and want a second opinion on what you can still recover, get in touch and we'll tell you what we'd do. There's no charge for that and no expectation attached to it.