Your web developer disappeared. Here's what to collect before you need it.
Written by Walter. Edited by Tim, who decided it was true before it shipped. What that means.
The email bounces. The phone goes to voicemail. The last invoice was eight months ago and nobody can remember what it was for. Meanwhile the website works fine, which is the part that makes this easy to put off.
It happens more than people admit, and it's rarely anyone's fault. Freelancers change careers. Agencies get bought. The nephew who built the site in 2019 has a real job now. One day you need to change a phone number on the contact page, and you realize you don't know how, where, or who.
What's actually going on
Your site isn't one thing. It's a handful of accounts at a handful of companies, each with a login, a bill, and a renewal date, and the person who knew where they all were is gone. The site keeps running on momentum. Nothing has broken yet.
The way this usually goes wrong isn't dramatic. A renewal notice goes to an email address nobody reads anymore. A card on file expires. A form stops sending and nobody notices for a month. Then you're finding out what you own on the worst possible day.
Why it matters
Most of what you'd lose is time: yours, spent on hold with a hosting company, proving you're the owner of something you've paid for since 2019. Some of it is money, when a lapsed renewal has to be bought back. The expensive version is the one where the address your customers know stops pointing at you.
The good news is that the fix is an afternoon with a spreadsheet, and you don't need a developer to do it.
What we do
When a site comes to us without a handoff, this inventory is the first thing we build, before we touch anything. We find out what exists, who owns it, what it costs, and what breaks if each piece stops. Then we tell you plainly what shape it's in. The rest of the work depends on that list.
What to collect, before you need it
- The domain. That's your address, the thing people type. It's rented, not owned, from a company called a registrar, and it expires. Find out which company, whose name and email are on the account, when it renews, and whether you can log in. This is the one most often registered under the developer's name. Get it into yours.
- The hosting. The company whose computers your site actually lives on. Which company, the login, and which card it bills to.
- The login to the site itself. The account you'd use to change that phone number. Make sure one exists under an email address you control. Then find out what other accounts can log in, including the old developer's, and decide what to do about them.
- Email. Where your email is hosted, and whether it rides on the domain. If it does, a lapsed domain takes your email down with it, which is how a quiet problem becomes a loud one.
- Everything the site leans on. The form tool, the payment processor, the newsletter service, the thing that sends receipts, the plugin someone bought a license for. Each one has a login and a bill. List them.
- Backups. Where they are, who can restore one, and when someone last did. "We have backups" and "we've restored one" are different sentences.
- The code, and the why. If anything was custom-built, find out where the files live and whether any notes came with them. Half of what a new developer needs is the reason things were done the way they were.
- The bill list. Every charge that touches the site, what it's for, and what stops working if it stops. This is the page you'll actually use.
Put it in one place, share it with one other person at the business, and put a reminder on the calendar to check it once a year. That's the whole job.
If you'd rather someone experienced built that list with you, or you got to the second item and hit a wall, tell us about your setup.
We write these when something in the work turns out to be worth writing down. If you're hitting the thing described above and want a second set of eyes on it, tell us what's not working.