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Developer gone? What to do with your website

Your developer stopped replying and the site runs on goodwill? A step-by-step checklist: access, backups, audit, documentation and choosing new support calmly.

The Dorobymo team Published 4 min read

Your site was built by a friend of a friend, a freelancer or a small studio. Everything worked, and then the person stopped replying. Maybe they changed jobs, maybe they just vanished. The site is still up, but you don’t know where it’s hosted, who pays for the domain, or what happens if something breaks.

The good news: this is fixable. The bad news: it shouldn’t wait, because problems tend to appear at the worst moment — the domain expires, the host suspends the account for non-payment, or the site breaks after a plugin update. Here is a checklist to start with.

1. Collect all access

The first and most important step. Without access you’re not the owner of your site, just a visitor.

Domain registrar

Find out where the domain is registered and in whose name. You can check the registrar with a WHOIS lookup. The key question is whether you have a login to the registrar account and whether the domain is registered to your company or to you personally. If it’s registered to the developer, that’s the biggest risk: without them you can’t renew or transfer it.

Hosting

Find where the site physically lives. Clues: invoices in your inbox, the domain’s DNS records, emails from a hosting provider. You need access to the hosting control panel and, ideally, SSH/SFTP credentials too.

Site admin

An administrator login for WordPress, OpenCart or whatever CMS you use. If you don’t have it but you do have hosting access, an admin account can be created or recovered through the database.

DNS

Sometimes DNS isn’t managed at the registrar but in a separate service such as Cloudflare. Check who has access there: both your website and your domain email depend on DNS.

Analytics and search consoles

Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Merchant Center, ad accounts. These are often tied to the developer’s personal email. Ask to be added as an owner, or add the site again and verify ownership yourself.

Tip: keep one sheet listing every service, the login and the renewal date, and store passwords in a password manager, not in chat history.

2. Make a backup

As soon as you have hosting access, take a full backup: site files and the database. Don’t rely on “the host makes copies anyway”. Check that the archive opens, and keep a copy off the hosting — in the cloud or on your own drive.

For clients on support we run backups regularly: files plus database, an integrity check of the archive, a copy in the cloud. A backup nobody has checked is a hope, not a backup.

3. Run an audit

Once you have a copy, you can calmly look at what’s inside.

Technical state

  • Which versions of the CMS, PHP, themes and plugins are running? What hasn’t been updated in ages?
  • Is there an SSL certificate, and when does it expire?
  • Any signs of a hack: unknown admin users, suspicious files, odd redirects?

SEO and content

  • Does the sitemap work, and does Search Console see it?
  • How many pages return 404, how many unnecessary redirects are there?
  • Are any important pages blocked from indexing?

What the developer did by hand

Some features often live in theme edits, custom scripts or cron jobs on the server. Find them before you update anything, because the first update might overwrite them.

4. Document it

Write down what you found: where the site lives, which services are connected, what custom work exists and how to check it. The document doesn’t need to be long — a few pages are enough. But the next person working on the site will start from understanding rather than digging. And you’ll no longer depend on one person’s memory.

5. Choose who will support the site

There are a few options:

  • An in-house specialist — makes sense if the site is large and changes daily.
  • A freelancer — cheaper, but the same disappearing act can happen again.
  • A support team — a fixed scope of work each month, reports, and several people who know your site.

Whatever you choose, agree on a few things in writing: access stays with you, backups run regularly, changes are tested on a copy first, and you get a monthly report of what was done.

For example, we’ve supported the website of a lubricants distributor on a monthly contract since 2024: we update pages and the points-of-sale map and send a report and documents every month. The client always knows what’s happening with the site.

In short

  1. Access: domain, hosting, admin, DNS, analytics.
  2. A full backup, checked and stored off the hosting.
  3. An audit of the technical state, SEO and custom work.
  4. A short document explaining how everything fits together.
  5. New support with clear rules.

If you need a hand

This is exactly what we do: take over sites left without a developer, collect access, back up, audit and keep them supported. You can get a rough estimate with the calculator on our pricing page, and if your situation is messy, just write to us and we’ll sort it out together.