The designer, nephew or agency that built your website stopped answering, and now something needs changing: new hours, a new phone number, a renewal notice you can't act on. The site is yours, but the domain, the hosting and the website login are in their accounts. This is fixable, and usually without starting over. Each piece is held by a different company, each company has its own way of handing it back, and the order matters: get the domain name first, because almost every other recovery asks you to prove you control it. Below is a rebuilt example (not a real client), how to find who holds what, and how each piece comes back.
lookup.icann.org. It names the registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Squarespace Domains, Network Solutions...) and the expiry date. The owner's name is usually hidden for privacy, so the registrar is what you are after. Note the expiry date: if it is close, this is now urgent.ns1.bluehost.com or dns1.p08.nsone.net point at a host or a DNS service; a "who hosts this website" lookup on your address names the server company. Wix, Squarespace and Shopify sites say so in the page source and in the footer of their error pages.| What you lost | Who can hand it back | How |
|---|---|---|
| The domain name | The registrar, and whoever is named as its owner (the registrant) | If the registrant is your business, the registrar's account recovery gets you in with photo ID and proof of the business. If it is the developer's name, ask them to move it to an account of yours at the same registrar: most registrars have a free account-to-account "push" or "change of account" that takes minutes and does not touch the website. If they will not answer, the registrar has an ownership-dispute process; send it invoices that show you paid for the domain, your business registration, and anything showing the name has been your trading name |
| The hosting | The hosting company, for whoever holds the account | If the account is yours, recover it like any account. If the developer hosts many clients under one reseller account, you cannot be given their account; ask for a full backup (the files and the database) or a move to a hosting account of your own. Hosts will not hand a reseller's data to a third party, so if the developer has vanished, the copy comes from the live site instead: a migration plugin or a person who rebuilds it from what is public |
| The WordPress admin login | Whoever controls the hosting | Once you hold the hosting, you can make yourself a new administrator without anyone's old password: the host's WordPress tool (cPanel's WP Toolkit, Softaculous, or the host's own dashboard) usually has a "Log in" or "Reset password" button, or run wp user create yourname you@yourbusiness.com --role=administrator where the host offers WP-CLI. Then remove the old accounts you do not recognise |
| A Wix, Squarespace or Shopify site | The account that owns the site, then the platform's support | The current owner can hand it over in a few clicks: Wix "Transfer site", Squarespace "Transfer ownership" under Permissions, Shopify "Transfer ownership" under Users and permissions. If they are unreachable, each platform's support has an ownership-verification process; expect to show you control the domain and the business |
| Business email (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365) | The email provider | If the developer is the only administrator, both providers have an admin-recovery route that asks you to prove you control the domain, usually by adding a record they give you to its DNS. That is why the domain comes first |
| Google Business Profile (the map listing) | Google, then the current owner | Search your business on Google Maps, choose "Own this business?" and request access. The current owner is asked to approve; if they do not answer within about a week, Google may let you verify it yourself |
Log in to each account from your own device and change the password and the recovery email and phone to yours. Turn on two-step sign-in for the registrar and the email admin, the two that everything else hangs off. Set the domain to renew automatically on your own card. Then write one page: each service, its company, the login email, and the renewal date. Keep it somewhere a second person in the business can find it.
With a cooperative registrar this takes an afternoon; a dispute can take a few weeks, mostly waiting on the companies. If you would rather hand the paperwork and the moves to someone, that is what the box below is for. Related: your website stopped loading, "This site can't be reached", and the login page just reloads.