Operations
A UK owner's checklist for when your web designer stops replying: what to gather, who controls the domain, and how to take back the site.
Verithora 27 May 2026 Updated 13 Aug 2026 7 min read
If your designer has stopped replying, you are not the first owner to be sitting at the kitchen table at 10pm wondering whether your site is about to break. It happens often enough that there is a routine for it, and the routine works best if you do it before anything has actually broken. This is the checklist.
The aim is calm recovery. By the end, you will know who controls the domain, who controls the hosting, where enquiries are going right now, and what your options look like if the site does fall over in the next week.
Before you assume the worst, spend 20 minutes pulling everything you have into one place. A single notes file or a folder on your desktop is fine.
You are looking for: the original quote or contract, every email thread with the designer, any invoices you have paid (the bank reference often names the registrar or host), any login details they sent you, the date the site went live, the email address the contact form was supposed to go to, and the domain itself written out exactly. Old WhatsApp threads count. A scanned scrap of paper counts. If the designer reappears, this is what you reach for first; if they do not, this is what the next firm needs in their first hour.
Open a WHOIS lookup (Nominet’s WHOIS for .uk; ICANN Lookup for .com, .net, .co). Type your domain in. Three pieces of information matter: the registrar (the company holding the domain), the registrant (the legal owner on file), and the renewal date.
If the registrant is your business, you are fine on the domain. Reset the password at the registrar and you have the keys. If the registrant is the designer, or a generic “Domains by Proxy” privacy mask, you do not yet own the domain in any meaningful sense. That is recoverable, but it is now the first thing on your list. Note the renewal date too: if it is in the next 60 days and the designer is paying for it, you need to assume that renewal will not happen.
Hosting is harder to surface than the domain because there is no WHOIS for it. Three quick checks usually narrow it down. Look at the site’s source (right-click, View Page Source, then check the <meta name="generator"> tag and the site’s HTTP response headers). Run a free tool like BuiltWith: it names the host, the CMS, and the CDN in one pass. And check your own bank statements for any recurring charge to a host like Cloudflare, SiteGround, Krystal, 20i, IONOS, or AWS.
If you find a recurring charge in your own name, you control the hosting. Log in to that provider and reset the password. If you find no charge, the designer is paying for the hosting and you do not yet have access. That is the second item on your list.
Whatever happens next, you want a copy of what is currently online. The simplest tool for this is HTTrack (free, runs on Windows or Mac); it walks the live site and saves every page as a folder of HTML and images. For a brochure site of 10 to 40 pages it takes 10 minutes. You will not get the CMS or the database, but you will have the words, the images, and the structure. A new firm can rebuild from that without losing the content you have already paid to have written.
If the site uses WordPress and you have admin access, install a backup plugin like UpdraftPlus and pull a full export (files plus database) to your own Google Drive. Do that now, not next week.
This is the one most owners forget, and it is usually the one that quietly costs the most. Open the contact page on your own site. Fill the form in with a real test message. Wait an hour. If the email lands in your inbox, the routing is yours. If it lands nowhere you can see, it is going to an address only the designer controls.
If the form is submitting to a third-party service (Formspree, Web3Forms, Netlify Forms, Tally) the submissions usually sit in that service’s dashboard. Without the login, those enquiries are stacking up where you cannot see them. Move the form to a route you control as soon as the new firm is in place; in the meantime, ring round any customer who said they had emailed in but heard nothing.
If the live site disappears before you have a replacement, work backwards from urgency. First, point the domain at a placeholder. Most registrars let you set a forwarding rule that redirects the bare domain to a single Google Doc, a Notion page, or a one-page Carrd site you can spin up in 20 minutes. A placeholder that says “We are updating the site this week. Please call us on [number] or email [address]” is better than a 404. Second, update your Google Business Profile with the same message and a working phone number; that is the surface most local customers actually find you on. Third, post the same message to whichever social account you keep current. None of this rebuilds the site, but it keeps enquiries arriving while you do.
The fastest way to vet a new firm is to ask three questions in your first email: who specifically will reply when I send a change request, what does the bill look like in month two, and what do I keep if I leave. A serious firm will answer all three in a single reply with names and numbers. A non-answer is a signal. Our pricing page has the version of those answers we publish; the services page describes the scope; a recent rebuild we ran on a business of our own shows what the work looks like in practice. If you are local to the M25 corridor, the Dorking page is one example of how we describe a town we cover.
Our cost guide for 2026 is the most useful sense-check on what a fair rebuild quote should land at. Read it before you book three discovery calls. If you are comparing replacement quotes on price, we recorded the published prices of five UK providers, ours included, in August 2026: every figure in that table was fetched from the provider’s own site, with a checked-on date.
Six items, in writing, before any money changes hands. The domain registered in your business name, with the login details handed to you on day one. A backup of the site that you can download yourself, every month, automatically. A named human who replies to your emails. A response-time commitment in working days, not “as soon as possible.” A monthly rolling contract, or a 30-day money-back guarantee, so cancelling does not require a lawyer. And a written off-boarding process explaining exactly what you walk away with if you leave.
If a firm refuses any of those six, the relationship will end in the same place this one did. Walk.
For a .uk domain, Nominet’s Dispute Resolution Service works through mediation first, with a paid expert decision stage behind it; Nominet’s site publishes the current fees, and check them directly, because we could not re-verify them when we updated this post in August 2026. For .com domains, a UDRP filing through WIPO costs US$1,500 in filing fees for a single-panellist case covering up to five domains (WIPO’s published fee schedule, checked August 2026), before any legal help you hire. Both routes are realistic when the domain is genuinely yours and the paper trail proves it. Both are slow, with timescales measured in weeks to months.
The pragmatic question is whether your business can wait that long with the domain held hostage. For most small businesses with under £500k in trade tied to the domain, buying a near-equivalent (yourbusiness.co.uk if you had yourbusiness.com, or adding the town to the brand) and starting fresh is cheaper than the dispute. Set up 301 redirects from the new domain to the old later if you reclaim it. For more on the legal route, Citizens Advice covers problems with a service at the level you need.
The owners we speak to in this position almost always blame themselves. They picked the designer, they did not push for the logins, they did not ask the awkward question about ownership at the time. Owners take responsibility for things, and this is the shape it shows up in.
It is worth saying plainly: a designer who stops replying is a designer being unprofessional, not a customer being naive. Small UK businesses are not expected to know which DNS record to check or which clause to redline. You hired someone to handle it; they stopped. The recovery is fiddly, but it is recovery, not failure.
When you are ready, send us a short email describing where you are in the list above. A reply lands inside two working days, from a named person, with the next two or three steps you can take that afternoon.
Written and checked by Verithora, a one-founder web studio in East Dulwich, London SE22.
Questions
Usually not in the first week. The site keeps serving whatever it served yesterday. The risk compounds quietly: a domain renewal you do not know about, an SSL that lapses, a plugin update that gets skipped, a contact form that has been routing to an inbox no one reads. The point of the checklist below is to find those before they find you.
Start with a WHOIS lookup to see which registrar holds the domain, then contact that registrar with proof you are the trading business named on the site: usually a Companies House extract, a recent invoice from the designer, and ID. If the registrar will not move it on those grounds and the designer is unreachable, your fallback is a Nominet dispute for .uk domains, or buying a near-equivalent domain and migrating. The dispute route is slow; rebuilding on a new domain is faster in most cases.
Sometimes. If the hosting account is in your name, you can usually pull the files yourself via the host's file manager or FTP. If the host is in the designer's name, contact the host directly with proof of business ownership. If neither works, you have what is on the live site, which a new firm can rebuild from, with the content, structure, and look intact. Source code is helpful but rarely essential for a small-business site.
For most SMB-scale projects, no. Small claims via the gov.uk Money Claim Online service handles up to £10,000 and is realistic for unpaid refunds; anything larger gets expensive fast. The honest answer most owners arrive at is that rebuilding the site costs less than a year of legal back-and-forth. Keep the paper trail in case the designer reappears with an invoice, but plan to move on rather than win.
With a partner that has done it before, expect 4–5 hours of your time spread over a week or so, and roughly a week of elapsed time from first call to live site. Most of your time is the kick-off conversation and one round of feedback on the draft. The new firm should be able to point at the live site you are leaving, replicate the working bits, and improve the broken ones.
Need someone to actually run your site?
That is what we do. From £49 a month. £0 setup. 30-day money back.