How this usually starts
Nothing about the website changes in the week the replies stop. It loads, the contact form still arrives, the padlock still shows. What changes is that the one person who knows where everything lives, the domain account, the hosting, the email, the backups, has stopped answering, and you are left working out from the outside how much of the business was resting on that.
The version people fear is a developer holding a website to ransom. The real version is duller. Somebody registered the domain in their own name because it was quicker than talking a busy customer through a registrar signup, always meant to hand it over, and never got round to it. The arrangement held for years because nothing went wrong, and the trouble was stored up in the arrangement rather than in the week the emails stopped.
So this piece has two halves. If your designer still answers, there is a ten-minute check below that is worth running before anything is wrong, because it decides how exposed you would be if the replies ever stopped. If the silence has already gone past awkward, the second half is the rescue path, including what a rescue saves and what it cannot shortcut. The same neglect shows up two ways, as a site that has quietly got slower and as a site whose owner cannot be reached, and why is my website slow? covers the first of those.
The ten-minute check to run today
Four things decide how exposed you are, and all four can be settled before lunch. None of them needs technical skill.
First, the domain. Log in at the registrar it is held with and read the registrant name. If it is not you or your company, that is the most important line in this piece, because the registrant is the one who controls the renewal, the DNS and any future move. If you cannot log in at all, that is the same answer arriving by another route. Who owns your domain name is the long version of this one check, including why a WHOIS search will not settle it for a .co.uk domain; the other three items below are the part that post does not cover.
Second, whose name the hosting account is in. The account that pays for the hosting is the account that decides whether the site stays up, and it commonly sits with the builder with the invoices going to their address. If you have never seen a hosting invoice, you have your answer already.
Third, the email account that can reset everything else. Whoever administers the email on your domain can trigger password resets on nearly every account attached to it, which makes that one login worth more than all the others put together. If the email was set up by the same person who built the site and was never handed over, it goes in the same column.
Fourth, the backups. When did the last one run, and where does the copy live? A backup kept on the same server it is protecting is not an escape route. The useful version sits somewhere else entirely, is recent, and can be restored by somebody other than the person you cannot currently reach.
One wrong answer out of the four is this week's problem. All four together is a recovery job, and recovery is smaller than it feels from the outside.
What to ask anyone who looks after your site
The same four facts work as questions, and they are cheap to ask while the relationship is fine. Whose name is the domain registered in? Who holds the hosting and the email accounts, and can I have the logins now rather than in an emergency? If you disappear, what happens to me: is there a second copy of everything, and does anybody besides you know where it is? And what happens to the site and the domain if you retire, fall ill, or sell the business?
I run a one-person studio, which is exactly the shape of arrangement this piece is about, so it is fair to hold me to the same questions. Every site I look after has the domain registered in the client's name from the start, the content written for the site stays the client's, and moving an existing domain over is free, so the arrangement holds up whether or not I am the one answering in ten years.
If it has already gone wrong: the rescue path
Start with one email and put a date in it. Set out exactly what you need: the registrar login, the hosting account, the email admin, the most recent backup, and a reply by a named day. Keep it short, keep a copy, and send it. The date is there to turn an uncomfortable silence into something you can act on, because either the reply comes or the deadline passes, and both tell you where you stand.
If nothing comes back, the logins are the next job, and this is where the fear is usually bigger than the problem. Every registrar and host has a process for proving a business is yours and handing access back. It is paperwork rather than a trick, and it goes first because everything else hangs off the domain.
The order matters more than the effort. Email recovery at the big providers works by adding a DNS record to the domain to prove you control it, so the domain has to come back before the email does. Website rescue and moves is built for this exact sequence, a developer who has disappeared or a handover that never happened, with the domain and the email taken over alongside the site itself.
The move should never be the frightening part. A working copy of the site is built on the new hosting and checked before anything switches over, so downtime stays as close to zero as possible, and the domain and email move at the same time or stay put while you decide. Nothing gets rebuilt unless you ask. Plenty of rescued sites turn out to be decent sites that were simply abandoned.
What a rescue saves: your words, your photographs and your web address. Content you supplied stays yours whoever built the site, which is why a rebuild using your own words and photographs sidesteps the ownership argument entirely. What it cannot shortcut: an account held in somebody else's name is a process with that provider rather than an argument you can win by email. And unless copyright in the code and design was assigned in writing, it stays with the person who created it, because under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 the author of a work is its first owner and the rule that passes copyright to an employer covers employees only.
If that is where you are, tell me what has happened. The first conversation is the only commitment, and you will get an honest answer about what the rescue involves before anything moves.
What it costs, honestly
Prevention is cheaper than rescue and always was, but the gap is smaller than people expect, because the expensive part of a rescue story was never the move. Here, the move is free, including any login recovery on the way. Ongoing care and hosting is from £49 a month including VAT, with no notice period: daily off-server backups, software and security updates, uptime monitoring, and content changes done for you in one to three working days.
There is a named backstop as well. The 24 Hour Restore Promise says that if a site hosted on a paid plan goes offline and is not restored within 24 hours, the next month is free, with the clock starting from whichever comes first, the monitoring noticing the outage or you telling me.
If the ten-minute check came back clean, care and hosting is the prevention answer, and it is the same list the check asks about: backups kept off the server, updates applied on a schedule, somebody watching. If it came back dirty, the rescue page is the way back, and it costs nothing to start.
The questions that come up
What do I do if my web designer is not responding? Send one dated email saying exactly what you need and when you need it by, then run the four checks above while you wait. The checks decide how much the silence actually matters.
How long should I wait before assuming my web designer is gone? Long enough for the dated email to pass its reply-by date unanswered. After that, stop chasing and start checking.
How do I get access to my website if my web designer has disappeared? Start with the domain and work outwards. The registrar, the host and the email provider each have a recovery process for the legitimate owner, and the domain is the one that unblocks the other two.
Who owns my website, me or the person who built it? Split it into three. The domain belongs to whoever the registrant record names. The words and photographs you supplied stay yours. The code and the design are the surprise: the person who created them is the first owner of the copyright unless it was assigned in writing.
What happens to my domain if it is registered in my designer's name? It becomes a recovery job with the registrar rather than an argument. A WHOIS search will not settle it either way, because Nominet does not publish the registrant's name for a .uk or .co.uk domain without consent. It is not a case for Nominet's Dispute Resolution Service either, which exists for abusive registrations and trademark disputes rather than for deciding who between a business and its designer holds the domain.
Will my website go offline if I move it to new hosting? It should not. A working copy is built and checked on the new hosting before anything switches over, and the domain and email move at the same time or stay put.
Why has my website started saying it is not secure? The certificates behind the padlock on most small sites are issued free by automated authorities, last 90 days and renew automatically, so when the maintenance stops the renewal fails and the browser starts warning visitors instead of showing the padlock. It is a warning rather than a block, which is why it is easy to keep putting off.
What happens to my business email if my website goes down? They are separate services sharing one domain, so one can fail while the other keeps running. If the email account was the designer's, the way back runs through the domain: the providers prove you control it by adding a DNS record to it, so the domain has to be recovered first.
Can I get my money back from a web designer who disappeared? There are three routes, and which one applies depends on how you paid; Digital Otter's guide to a designer disappearing sets out all three. A credit card payment over £100 brings the card provider in jointly liable under Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974. Chargeback is a card scheme rule rather than a law, works on debit and credit cards, and typically allows around 120 days from the transaction to raise a claim. The small claims track in England and Wales handles claims up to £10,000, and it starts with a letter before claim. None of them is quick, and none of them recovers the website, which is why the money question and the site question are best kept apart.
What happens if the person who built my site has died, or their company has closed? If they have died, the domain forms part of the estate and the registrar will ask for probate documents before moving it. If their limited company was dissolved, its assets passed to the Crown as bona vacantia, and the same guide describes restoring the company to the register as the cleanest way forward. Both are slower rather than hopeless, and both start with the same registrar conversation.
What to do next
If the checks came back clean and the replies still come, ask the questions in the middle of this piece and leave the rest alone. If they came back dirty, or the reply-by date has passed, the order is the email, the domain, then everything else, and website rescue and moves is the page for it. The services page sets out what that covers alongside the care plans.
One thing the free tools will not do, said plainly: the free security check grades your SSL setup, your security headers and the SPF and DMARC records that stop somebody sending email as your business. It cannot tell you who holds your logins or whose name your domain is in. Run it anyway, because it takes seconds, and then go and settle the question it cannot answer.
If the checks came back wrong, or the reply-by date has passed, this is the job for it. The move itself costs nothing.