What to do when your web person stops answering

The short answer

Start with the domain name, not the website. If the person who built your site stops answering, your first job is proving to the domain registrar that the account belongs to your business. The pages, the forms, and the email all follow from that one account.

A website is not one thing you own. It is 4 or 5 separate accounts that point at each other: the domain at a registrar, the files at a host, the routing in DNS (the system that tells the internet where your domain sends traffic), the mailboxes at a mail provider, and sometimes a page builder on top. One person can hold all of them and nothing looks wrong from the outside. It breaks on renewal day, when a card expires and nobody gets the warning email.

What going dark actually looks like

Going dark is rarely dramatic. Calls go to voicemail, the last invoice never arrives, and a half-finished project sits still. Sometimes the person is fine and moved on to a job with health insurance. Sometimes they got sick. Treat the accounts as the problem to solve, not the person.

The second version is harder. They answer, they are polite, and they will not hand over the logins. That is not a technical problem. That is an ownership problem, and paperwork solves it.

Do these in order

1. Write down what you already have. The domain name, every email address that might have opened an account, and the card that paid the renewals.
2. Find your registrar. A public WHOIS lookup names the registrar even when the owner contact details are hidden. Registrar support has a documented account recovery process for exactly this situation.
3. Pull the billing trail. Card and bank statements name the registrar, the host, and the mail provider. Support desks accept the last 4 digits and a charge date as proof more often than people expect.
4. Take a full backup before you change anything. Files and database. If you move DNS first and the host locks you out, the backup goes with it.
5. Recover hosting, then DNS, in that order. Moving DNS before you can log into the host leaves you with a domain name pointing at nothing.
6. Move email last, and plan the cutover. Mail drops messages when the old and new servers overlap wrong.
7. Lock it down. New passwords everywhere, 2-factor turned on, and a second owner on every account who is not one employee's personal Gmail.

Failure modes we see

• The domain is registered in the developer's name. Their address is the recovery address, so every password reset email goes to them and not to you. This is the root cause behind most of the rest of this list. Start at who should own your domain, hosting, analytics, and business accounts.
• The site lives inside the developer's platform account. The business pays the developer, the developer pays the platform, and there is no billing relationship for you to point at when you call support.
• DNS sits at a fourth company nobody wrote down. Moving the host takes the email offline along with it, and nobody sees it coming.
• Somebody transfers the domain in a panic. A transfer started at the wrong moment locks the name for weeks and takes the site down in the middle of the move. Recover the account first. Transfer later, on a quiet day.
• The only backup is on a laptop nobody can reach. A backup you cannot download is not a backup.
• Business email runs on the same domain. Lose the domain and you lose the mailbox, and that mailbox is the password reset address for the bank, the CRM, and the ad accounts. This is the one that turns a website problem into a company problem.

When to bring in help

• The registrar denies your recovery request and you have no billing trail. That is an ownership dispute. Call your attorney before you call another web company.
• Email on your domain is already down. The order of operations matters and every hour of downed mail costs you real messages.
• The site is defaced, redirecting somewhere strange, or flagged by a browser. Read what a hacked website means before you touch anything.
• You take payments or store customer records on the site. Get someone who has done a migration under those conditions.

One more case: if you are hiring a replacement while you are still locked out, the hiring standard changes. Ask every candidate how they hand over accounts on day 1, not at the end. How to choose a web design company covers the questions that separate the good answers from the vague ones.

Red Eye's recommendation

Do the boring inventory now, before you need it. List every account, the login email on file, who holds the password, and the renewal date. Put that list somewhere 2 people at your business can reach without asking anyone for permission.

If you are already locked out, book the free Systems Review. We map what exists, name who controls each account, and hand you the recovery order in writing. If you want us to run the recovery, you get a fixed price in writing first and month to month after that. Everything we build is yours, including the logins, on the day we build it.

Related: Who should own your domain, hosting, analytics, and business accounts, What website maintenance actually covers, How to choose a web design company, and What a hacked website means.