EAGLE SOLUTIONS
In short: If your website developer has disappeared, do not change anything until you recover all 4 kinds of access: domain, hosting, WordPress admin, and every connected service like Analytics or payment gateways. The domain matters most: if it is yours, everything else can be rebuilt.
The situation is always similar. Years ago someone built your website, and it has been running ever since. Then one day something needs changing, or an email arrives from the hosting provider, or the site simply starts behaving oddly. Then it turns out your website developer disappeared months or years ago, and nobody noticed until now.
Most of the time there is no bad intent behind it. The developer took another job, moved abroad, switched to another technology, or never did maintenance in the first place. That does not change the fact that you have no one to call. In this article I describe what is worth doing, and in what order.
Your developer disappeared? First, do not touch anything
The first instinct is to find someone right away to "fix it", or to start clicking around the admin area yourself. If the site works right now, do not change anything until you have access to everything. After a failed update or a deleted plugin you are in a much worse position if there is no backup and you do not know where the site runs.
The four kinds of access you need
A website consists of four separate things, and each has its own access. I list them in order of importance.
1. The domain
This is the most important, because it is your address, for the website and usually for your email as well. If the domain is yours, everything else can be rebuilt. If it is not, everything else is uncertain.
Check whose name it is registered in. .ro domains are registered with ROTLD, and .com and others can be looked up with a public WHOIS search. The owner's name is often hidden, but the registrar (the company holding the domain) is always visible, and they have an official procedure to prove ownership. For that you need your company documents rather than the goodwill of the former developer.
The worst case is when the domain is in the developer's own name. This is not rare, and it can be settled legally, but at that point it is a legal matter rather than a technical one. It is worth contacting them in writing as soon as possible.
2. The hosting
The site's files and database run on a hosting account. If the hosting invoice comes to you, you have an account and may just have forgotten the password. The provider's support can sort that out. If the invoice goes to the developer and they bill you for it, the hosting actually belongs to them, and if they stop paying, the site disappears.
Where the site runs can be found out from the domain's DNS settings, even if nobody remembers.
3. The WordPress admin
This is the easiest to recover once you have the first two: the password can always be reset from the hosting. If the WordPress admin email address belongs to the developer, change it to yours. Otherwise password-reset emails, security warnings and update notices keep going to them.
4. Everything connected to the site
This is what people usually forget: Google Analytics, Search Console, Google Business Profile, the payment gateway, invoicing, the courier service, the email-sending service. Each has an account, and if the developer connected their own, the data belongs to them too. Make a list of what you use, and check the owner of each.
What not to do
- Do not have it rebuilt immediately. Rebuilding a working site is expensive, and if the domain is not yours, rebuilding does not help either. Access first, decision second.
- Do not pay strangers for "recovery". Recovering a domain and hosting goes through the official route, with the provider.
- Do not start updating without a backup. If the site has not been updated for years, a big jump can easily break it.
Once you have access
From there the question is what state the site is in. Plugins not updated in years, an expired licence for a premium theme, a backup nobody knows works. A health check tells you this, and then you can decide whether it is worth fixing or cheaper to rebuild.
If you need help with this, taking over existing websites is exactly what that service is about: I collect the access, assess the site's state in writing, and tell you what is urgent and what can wait. If you are stuck at one of the steps, write to me about where you are.
