The website went live, it looked smart, everybody was pleased. Then a few months later you need something small changed. A new phone number. A price that has gone up. A photo of the job you finished last week.
So you email the person who built it. Nothing. You email again. Still nothing. You try the mobile number and it rings out.
And it dawns on you that you have no idea how to change a single word on your own website.
This is the call we get more than any other. It is worth understanding how people end up here, because almost all of it is avoidable, and because if you are already in this position you are probably not as stuck as you feel.
What has usually gone wrong
The domain is not in your name
This is the serious one. Your domain is your address on the internet. If it was registered under the designer’s account rather than yours, they control it, not you. When it comes up for renewal and nobody pays it, the site and every email address on it simply stop working.
Everything else on this list is an inconvenience. This one can take your business offline.
You have never had the logins
Most people are never given them. Not out of malice, usually, but because nobody asked and nobody offered. There are typically three sets: the domain registrar, the hosting, and the website itself. Missing any one of them limits what you can do.
Nobody ever showed you how to change anything
Even people who do have a login often stop there. They sign in, find a screen full of menus they do not recognise, worry they will break something expensive, and close the tab. A login you are afraid to use is not much better than no login at all.
The site was built on something only they can edit
Some sites are built on a designer’s own platform or a bespoke system. That can work perfectly well right up until the person who built it is unavailable, at which point nobody else can easily pick it up. A site built on something standard can be handed to any competent developer in the country.
You are renting and did not realise
If you pay a monthly fee and have never been told you own the site, it is worth checking what you are actually buying. Some arrangements are a genuine service — hosting, updates, support. Others are a rental dressed up as a purchase, where stopping payment means the site disappears and you have nothing to show for three years of fees. We wrote about the warning signs in what a small business website should cost.
Small things break quietly
Websites are not ornaments; they need occasional attention. Security certificates expire. Plugins go out of date. Contact forms stop delivering, which is the cruellest one because nothing appears to be wrong — the form still says thank you, the enquiries just never arrive. Without someone keeping half an eye on it, you find out months later.
It is not always dishonesty
Worth saying plainly: most of the time nobody has set out to trap you. A lot of web design is done by one person, sometimes alongside another job. People change careers, get ill, move abroad, or simply take on more work than they can handle and start avoiding their inbox.
That does not make it less painful when it is your business, but it does change the fix. You are not usually fighting someone. You are usually just trying to find out where things live.
What to ask before you pay anybody
You do not need to understand the technical side. You need six straight answers, ideally in an email you can keep.
- Whose name will the domain be registered in? The answer should be yours, or your company’s. Not theirs.
- Will I get every login in writing when it is finished? Domain, hosting, website. All three.
- Do I own the finished site? And if there is a monthly fee, what exactly does it cover, and what happens if I stop paying?
- Is it built on something standard? Put simply: if you vanished tomorrow, could somebody else take this on?
- Will you show me how to make simple changes myself? Not a training course. Half an hour on the things you will actually need.
- Is there a fixed price in writing? With the number of pages, who writes the words, and a completion date.
Anybody straight with you will answer all six without hesitating. Hesitation is the useful part.
If you are already locked out
Start with the domain, because it matters more than the website. Search for a free public WHOIS lookup and type in your address. It will tell you which company the domain is registered with and when it expires. If the contact details are yours, you can recover access through that company directly. If they are not, you may still be able to claim it with proof that the business is yours, and it is worth asking sooner rather than later.
Next, the hosting. If you have ever paid a hosting company yourself, even years ago, check that account. If the designer paid, contact the host, explain the situation and ask what evidence they need. Hosting companies deal with this constantly and are often more helpful than people expect.
If neither works, the site itself may have to be rebuilt. That sounds worse than it is. The content is yours, the photos are yours, and a rebuild is often quicker than chasing somebody who has stopped replying. What you must not do is let the old site drift until the domain lapses, because reregistering an address somebody else has grabbed is a different order of problem.
And whatever happens, do not hand over more money to someone who is holding your domain until it is transferred into your name.
How we do it
We hand over everything at the end. The domain is registered in your name, you get every login in writing, and the site is built on WordPress — the same software running a large share of the web — so it is never a specialist job to pick it up. If you decided tomorrow to go somewhere else, you could, and we would help you move.
We also sit down with you and show you how to look after the basics yourself. Nothing technical, just the handful of things people actually need:
- Changing text on a page – prices, opening hours, a phone number
- Swapping a photo, or adding new job pictures to your gallery
- Adding a page or a new service when the business changes
- Finding enquiries and checking the contact form is still delivering
- Who to ring if something looks wrong
It takes about half an hour. Most people are surprised how little there is to it, and it is the difference between a website you own and a website you are merely renting somebody else’s attention to maintain.
If you would rather not touch it at all, that is completely fine too — plenty of our customers never log in and just send us the changes. The point is that it is your choice, not a situation you are stuck with.
If this sounds familiar
If you are locked out of your own site right now, tell us the web address and we will have a look and tell you honestly where you stand – who holds the domain, what can be recovered, and whether it is worth rescuing or rebuilding. There is no charge for that and no sales call afterwards.
Cheap is often where this starts. We went through the trade-offs in cheap website design: what you actually get.
Get in touch and we will take a look, or see what a new site costs if you already know where this is going. If you want to know what a properly built site should include in the first place, read our business website checklist.