A form stops sending, or the site needs a new phone number on it, and the email to the person who built the site gets no reply. A week later there is still no reply, and you realize you don’t know where the site is hosted, who renews the domain, or whether anyone has a copy of it. We maintain sites we didn’t build, and taking one over starts the same way whether the last developer left politely or just stopped answering.
First, find out what you actually own
A website is four things held in different places: the domain name, the DNS records that point it somewhere, the hosting account where the files and database live, and the email, which may or may not be on the same host. Each has a login, and each login belongs to somebody. The urgent question is which of those four accounts are in your name and which were opened by the developer on your behalf.
Start with the domain, because everything else hangs off it. Look up who the registrar is and whether the renewal notices go to an address you can read. If the domain renews on the developer’s card and that card stops working, the site and the email go dark together, and the registrar will be writing to someone who isn’t answering.
Get a copy before you need one
Whatever else happens, get the files and the database somewhere you control. If you have the hosting login, look there for an export of both, and a developer who is merely slow, rather than gone, may still hand over a copy if asked plainly. With it, a move to new hosting is a job with a known shape. Without it, the site is one lapsed hosting bill away from vanishing, and rebuilding it from screenshots is a new build, quoted like one.
While you are at it, change the passwords on anything the developer could still reach, and write down what they still administer. Someone who has stopped answering should not still be able to log in to your site.
What a takeover looks like from our side
When a site comes to us this way, the first job is an inventory. Where does the name point? What is the hosting running? How far behind are the updates? Does a backup exist that anyone has ever restored? It is the same list we run on sites we have cared for from the start. Nothing changes on the live site until we know what is there.
Then the site moves onto hosting we operate, with the DNS switch timed so the old host keeps serving until the new one is ready, and from then on the updates are watched daily and the person watching them is the person you email. Sometimes nothing is wrong with the site at all. What it was missing was an owner.
Make the next hand-off boring
The lasting fix is to keep the four accounts in the business’s name from now on, with the developer as a user who can be removed, and to keep a copy of the site that is not in the developer’s hands. Whoever you hire next should be glad to work that way. It is how managed hosting and site care works at our shop, and the questions about updates and backups are the same ones a security audit of a small site asks.