What happens if your web designer disappears?

This happens more often than the industry likes to admit. Freelancers move on, agencies fold, retainers go quiet, and occasionally the situation is more serious than that. Across the projects we inherit, we're picking up an abandoned site roughly once a quarter, and sometimes more.

If you're reading this because it's just happened to you, the short answer is: it's almost always recoverable, but the speed of the recovery depends on what access you've still got and how quickly you act. Here's the long version.

What "disappeared" usually means

In most cases, "disappeared" means a freelancer has stopped responding to emails, an agency has stopped picking up the phone, or a developer has moved on to another job and isn't interested in supporting old work. Annoying, not catastrophic, and usually solvable in a few days.

In rarer cases, it means the agency has folded, the freelancer has shut up shop, or the company that built your site no longer exists. These are harder, because there's no one to even ask for the things you need.

In the rarest case, the person who built your site has died. It happens. We've inherited a project where the previous developer passed away just before he was due to hand over login details, and the client was left without access to their own site, hosting, or domain. That's the worst version of this scenario, and even that one was recoverable. It took some patient liaison with the hosting provider (who we happened to know personally) and a formal process with ICANN to prove ownership of the domain, but we got there.

The point of telling you that isn't to be morbid. It's to make clear that even the worst version of this situation has a path out.

The first things to check

Whatever the cause, the order of operations is the same. Work through these in this order, because the early ones get harder to recover the longer you wait.

The domain. Whose name is it actually registered in? Log in to the registrar (or try to). If you can access it, the domain is yours and you've cleared the highest-stakes hurdle. If you can't, that's the first thing to fix, and it's the one that can take the longest if you have to escalate to ICANN.

The hosting. Who's the account holder, and can you log in? If the agency was paying for the hosting on your behalf, you may need to set up a new account in your name and migrate the site across. If you can't access the existing host at all, the host's support team can usually help you prove ownership and recover access, though it takes time.

The CMS admin. Have you got admin-level login to your own WordPress (or other CMS) back end? If you have, you can already make changes, install a backup plugin, and pull a copy of everything down.

Third-party services. Forms, email delivery, analytics, payment processing. List every service the site depends on and check whose name each one is in.

Once you've got that picture, you know exactly where you stand and what needs solving.

What we do when we inherit a site

When a client brings us an inherited site, our first move is always the same. We take a full backup straight away, before we touch anything else. If the site is in a fragile state, the backup is the safety net that lets us actually start working on it.

Then we run a technical audit. What's the site built on? What plugins are installed and which ones are out of date? When was core last updated? What's the hosting environment like? What's broken, what's nearly broken, and what's working but inefficient?

The next step is a functional review. What does the site actually need to do for the business, and which of the existing features are still serving that purpose? Inherited sites almost always have plugins that were installed for a reason nobody can remember, and removing the redundant ones makes the site faster, more secure, and easier to look after going forward.

After that it's a tidy-up. Update what needs updating, remove what's no longer needed, fix what's broken, and document what's left. By the end of that process you've usually got a site that's significantly healthier than it was when we picked it up, even before any new design work has happened.

How to avoid this for next time

The single best thing you can do to make sure this never affects you again is to make sure you own everything that matters about your site. Domain in your name. Hosting in your name. Admin login to your CMS. All third-party service accounts in your business's name.

If that's all in place, then whoever maintains your site can change without disrupting the site itself. Our post on whether you actually own your website covers the full checklist, and the website migration page in our docs covers how we handle the technical side when a site needs to move.