My web designer has disappeared. What now?

It is more common than anyone admits. A one-person operation stops trading, takes a job, gets ill, or simply stops replying. The business is left with a website it cannot change and no idea what it actually controls.

The instinct is to keep chasing. That is usually wasted effort. Switch objective early: you need access, not cooperation, and access can generally be obtained without them.

First, secure the domain

Before the website, before the content, before anything. The domain is the only piece that cannot be recreated, because it is the address on your van, your invoices, your email and every link anyone has ever made to you.

Find out where it is registered. Run a WHOIS lookup on your domain. It shows the registrar even when the owner's details are hidden behind a privacy service.

Contact that registrar directly. Explain that you are the business the domain relates to and that you cannot reach the registered contact. They will have a process. Have ready: company documents, invoices showing you paid for it, and anything linking the business to the name.

For .uk domains, Nominet has a dispute route if the registrar cannot resolve it.

Check the expiry date while you are there. If the domain is close to expiring and the person who set up auto-renew has gone, that is now urgent rather than merely annoying.

Second, the hosting

Find it the way most people do: your own bank statements. A recurring payment to a hosting company is your evidence and your answer at once.

Contact the host, explain the situation, prove you are the paying customer. Ask for account access, or at minimum a full copy of the site files and any database.

If you cannot identify the host at all, and the domain is now under your control, you do not strictly need it. You can point the domain at new hosting and put a new site there. The old files would be convenient, not essential.

Third, the content

Even without any access, you can recover most of a small site:

• Copy the text from the live pages by hand. Tedious, quick enough for a five-page site.
• Save the images from the browser. They will be the web-sized versions, which is usually fine.
• Check the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org for pages that have already gone.
• Check your Google Business Profile for photographs you uploaded there.

Then rebuild, and it is not the disaster it sounds

This is the part that surprises people. Producing a replacement website is no longer a large project. With the text and images recovered and the domain under control, a small business site can be back within days.

Keep the same URLs where you can. If the old site had /services and /contact, use those addresses again, so existing links and anything Google has indexed still land somewhere real. Where a URL has to change, redirect the old one. That is the same discipline as a proper migration.

Do not skip this bit afterwards

The recovery is not finished when the site is back. Finish it properly so this cannot recur.

Write down what you now control. Domain registrar, hosting, site login, Google Business Profile, email. One page, stored somewhere other than inside those accounts.

Put everything in the business's name, using an email address that will outlive any individual employee.

Turn on auto-renew for the domain, and check it points at a card that will not expire quietly.

Agree a written response time with whoever takes over. The original arrangement almost certainly had none, which is precisely how you ended up here.

The uncomfortable lesson

Almost nobody in this situation is a victim of bad faith. Small suppliers stop trading, and there is rarely any malice.

The vulnerability was structural: one person held everything, nothing was written down, and there was no agreed way to reach them. That is a common arrangement and it works perfectly until it does not.

The insurance costs nothing. Own your domain, hold your logins, know who to ring. If you are reading this because it has already happened, do that part today, while the memory of the last fortnight is still fresh enough to make it feel worth fifteen minutes.