A few times a year, a business owner sends me a version of the same email. The developer stopped answering. They can’t log into their own site. One woman found out her old developer had quietly registered her domain under his own account years earlier, and she only discovered it when she tried to move hosts and couldn’t.
If that’s where you are right now, I’ll tell you what I tell them. You’re not as stuck as it feels, and this happens far more than anyone admits.
How you ended up here.
Most of the time it isn’t sabotage. The developer takes on too much, or takes a full-time job, or the project stalls and the emails get awkward and then they just stop coming. The work going quiet is the part you notice. The real problem is underneath it: the pieces that make the site yours, the domain, the hosting, the login, were never put in your name. So when the person disappears, your access walks out the door with them.
The three keys you should own, no matter who builds the site.
All three matter for any website, whatever it’s built on. The only thing that changes by platform is where you log in for that third key.
Your domain name. It should live in an account you control, with your email and your card, at the company you bought the domain from (that company is called the registrar; Namecheap, GoDaddy, and Cloudflare are common ones). The account should be in your name, not tucked inside your developer’s.
Your hosting. Same idea. The hosting bill should come to you, and you should be able to log into the hosting company’s dashboard yourself even if you never touch it.
Admin access to the site itself. Whatever your site is built on, WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, or anything else, there’s an account that lets you edit it, and it should be in your name with your email on it. On WordPress that login usually lives at yourdomain.com/wp-admin, though some sites move it to a custom address for security, so don’t panic if that exact one doesn’t load. What matters is that you can get into the admin area yourself. If the only account that can belongs to someone who isn’t answering, you’re locked out of your own front door.
You don’t have to know how to use any of these. You only have to own them. Owning the keys and knowing how to drive are two different skills. I’m glad to teach anyone to drive, but I just won’t keep the keys.
Find out where you stand this afternoon.
You can answer this in about fifteen minutes. Log into the company you bought your domain from. Log into your hosting company. Log into your site’s admin area the way you normally would to edit a page. If you get into all three with your own credentials, you’re in good shape, ghost or no ghost. If you can’t get into one of them, write down which one. That short list is the entire problem, and it’s almost always smaller than the panic makes it feel.
So it doesn’t happen again.
When you hire the next person, lead with one question before scope, before price, before anything: who will own the domain, the hosting, and the admin login? The answer should be you, in writing. A good developer wants you to own all three, because it means you can leave at any time, which is usually the reason you end up never wanting to.
Then ask a second question, the one that catches the rest: if we stop working together, can I take the whole site and all the logins with me, without needing your help? The right answer is a plain yes. Be wary of anyone who wants to keep your site on their own account “to make support easier,” or who builds on a system you can only change by going through them. Both sound helpful and both leave you unable to walk away.
If you’re already locked out.
The first move isn’t to rebuild anything. It’s to find out exactly what you have and what you can still reach. Sometimes access is recoverable, through a domain transfer, a hosting account you forgot you were paying for, an admin reset. Sometimes it isn’t, and the smarter path is a clean rebuild on accounts that are yours from the first day. You can’t make that call until someone takes inventory and tells you the truth in plain language.
That’s what a rescue is. I start by figuring out what you actually have, then we decide together what’s worth recovering and what’s worth rebuilding, and you walk away owning every key, whether I build the next version or you hand the list to someone else.
If your web guy ghosted you, this is where to start: Rescue.
And if you’re not in a crisis, only a little uneasy because you just realized you can’t say for certain who owns your domain, that’s a good instinct to trust. Go check this afternoon. Knowing is half the battle.