Website takeover, when the person who built it is gone.

The situation is more common than you think

Small business websites outlive the people who build them. The freelancer takes a full-time job, the agency drops its smallest accounts, the nephew who set it up in college moves away. The site keeps running, because websites mostly do — right up until the day it needs to change, or the day it breaks.

By then the problem is rarely the website itself. It is that nobody knows where it is hosted, who is being paid for it, or which of four old email addresses controls the domain name.

What we get called about

• The developer stopped answering. Emails go unanswered, the phone number is dead, or the freelancer moved on years ago. The site still works, but nothing about it can change.
• Nobody has the logins. The hosting account, the domain registrar, and the admin password left with whoever set them up. This is recoverable more often than people expect, and proving domain ownership is usually the way in.
• It has not been updated in years. An unpatched content management system with abandoned plugins is the most common way a small business site gets compromised. Often it is already serving spam by the time anyone notices.
• It broke and nobody can fix it. A white screen after an update, a contact form that silently stopped delivering, or checkout failing on mobile. Someone has to read the code to know which of those it is.
• You inherited it. New in the role, or the business changed hands, and the website came with it undocumented. First job is finding out what you actually own.
• The agency wants to start over. Sometimes a rebuild genuinely is the answer. Often it is the only thing the shop you asked knows how to sell. Those are different situations and you deserve to know which one you are in.

What you get told

The audit ends in one of three recommendations — maintain, repair, or replace — with the reasoning behind it. That matters here more than on most work we do, because the shop assessing your site is also the shop that would be paid to rebuild it, and you have no easy way to check whether the verdict was self-serving.

So it is worth saying plainly: we regularly tell people their site is fine. A well-built site on a supported platform that simply has not been patched needs maintenance, not a replacement, and quoting a rebuild for it would be the easier sale and the wrong answer.

Why the domain name comes first

If you control the domain, you are never truly locked out. Hosting can be replaced, a site can be rebuilt from a public copy, and email can be pointed somewhere new — all of it turns on the domain, and none of it is possible without it.

This is also the single most common thing we find registered to the wrong person: a former employee's personal email, or a contractor who bought it in their own name a decade ago. It is worth checking who holds yours today, whether or not you ever call us. If it is not you, that is the first thing to fix.

Once a site is ours to look after, it gets patched, monitored, and backed up automatically, and you reach the person who does the work rather than a ticket queue. Our longest-running client relationships are on the work page, and they are the argument for taking this seriously — sites we have kept running for over a decade.