When the lights go out

Your web designer
has disappeared?

Phone goes to voicemail. Emails bounce. Your site might still be live, might be broken, you don't really know. This happens to a lot of trades, you're not the first. Here's how to recover what's yours and get your phone ringing again.

Domain recovery help, free · New site in 48 hours · One person, always reachable
See your replacement site Or ring Will direct
Why this happens

Four reasons web designers vanish. None of them are your fault.

When a trade tells me their web guy has gone quiet, it's almost always one of these four. Knowing which one lets you work out what's recoverable.

01

The one-person agency that gave up.

The most common one. A single freelancer who took on too many clients, got overwhelmed, and stopped replying instead of telling anyone. The site usually still works. They've just gone silent.

02

The agency that pivoted to bigger fish.

They started doing trades, then moved on to corporate clients with bigger budgets. You're still on their books in name, but you stopped being a priority eighteen months ago. They'll reply eventually, just very slowly.

03

The agency that went bust.

Companies House will tell you in two clicks. If their company is dissolved, your contract is void and any "release fees" they charged are unenforceable. Your domain is still yours, even if you have to fight a bit for the auth code.

04

The agency that retired or got ill.

Less common but it happens, especially with older one-man shops. Sometimes a family member is winding things down and just doesn't know the clients exist. A polite email to the registered business address gets a result more often than you'd expect.

What this is costing you

Every day the lights are off, customers go elsewhere.

A neglected or broken site doesn't just sit there. It quietly bleeds money. Google ranks active sites higher, so neglected ones slide down. Visitors who do land bounce because nothing's been touched in two years. Every week is calls you'll never get back.

A neglected site

Sliding

Google rankings drop ~10% every six months without fresh updates. Forms break. Phone numbers go stale. Visitors who do land find a site that doesn't look like anyone's home.

A site that's actively maintained

Ranking

Same trade, same town, but a site that loads fast, looks current, and has someone behind it. Phone rings 5-10× more often within three months.

The longer you leave it, the more rankings drift away. We've seen sites recoverable inside two weeks. We've seen sites that took six months to rebuild because the registry record got messy.

Before you do anything else

Grab these four things first. We can help you get them.

Whatever happens next, you want these in your own hands. We'll walk you through how to get each one. None of it costs anything. The whole process usually takes a week.

01

Your domain name.

Most important by miles. Check Nominet (for .co.uk) or ICANN's WHOIS (for .com) and see who's listed as the registrant. If it's your name and address, you're already in the clear. If it's the agency, we'll send you the template email to request the auth code, and the escalation path if they ghost you on that too.

02

Your Google Business Profile.

This is the panel that shows up when someone Googles your business name. If the agency claimed it under their email, you need it back in yours. Google has a "request ownership" process that takes 7 days. We've done this for clients before.

03

A copy of your existing site content.

If the site is still live, every page can be saved as a PDF in two clicks (Cmd+P or Ctrl+P, "Save as PDF"). Do this for every page you've got. Worst case, if the site goes offline tomorrow, you've still got all your content in a folder on your phone.

04

Your customer reviews.

Screenshot your Google reviews, your Checkatrade reviews, your Facebook reviews. The reviews themselves stay where they are (Google owns Google reviews), but having the text saved means we can show them on your new site immediately, with the right credit.

How Inboundry steps in

We do the recovery and the rebuild. You're not on your own.

If you've been ghosted by a web designer, the last thing you want is another sales call. So we don't do that. Here's the whole thing, end to end.

Why this won't happen with us

I'm one person. You always know where I am.

Inboundry is me. Will Howard. I've run small businesses for twenty years. I'm not selling to a corporate, not pivoting to crypto, not chasing bigger clients. I'm here.

If you ring this number you get me. Not an account manager. Not a ticket system. Not a chatbot. Me.

If something goes wrong with your site at 7pm on a Sunday, you can WhatsApp me. I'll see it. Most of the time I'll fix it before Monday.

I'm based in London, registered as a sole trader, working visibly on the public web. If I ever decided to stop, you'd get 90 days' notice and your domain handed back in your name. That's in writing, on every contract.

That's the whole pitch. No magic. Just being properly there.

See what we'd build

Four real sites we've built. Pick the one closest to yours.

A plumber, an electrician, a roofer, and a family builder. Different feel, same template. Click through, read them on your phone, see what's possible.

See the four demos

What people ask

The five questions we get most when this has happened.

"My site is still up but I can't log in. What do I do?" Don't panic, the site being live means the hosting and domain are still paying somehow (often a multi-year prepayment). Forward us a few details and we can start work on the new site while you sort the access. Often the old site stays live right up until the new one launches.

"I think they've kept my domain in their name on purpose. Can they actually do that?" Not legally, no. Domains belong to the named registrant. If they registered it under their own company name without telling you, that's a breach of normal agency practice and we can escalate via Nominet's dispute resolution. It works.

"My designer was a friend / family member. Can I really chase them?" You don't have to chase them, you just have to ring Nominet (for .co.uk) yourself and ask to transfer the domain into your name. If you're the actual business owner and they registered it for you, you can claim it back without a fight. Awkward conversations not required.

"What if my designer comes back later and demands payment?" If they reappear and try to charge you for work they didn't do (or didn't finish), they're on weak legal ground. As long as you've been straightforward in your communications (we'll help you draft them), there's nothing they can claim.

"I don't even know who built my site. How do I find out?" Check your email for any web-related invoice from the last 3 years. Look at the WHOIS record for your domain (we can do this for you in two seconds, just send us your domain name). The footer of your old site often has a small "designed by" credit. One of those three usually gives us the trail.

No call, no pitch

Let's get you back on your feet.
Free, in 48 hours.

Six quick questions, fifteen minutes. We build the new site. You see it in 48 hours. We help with the domain recovery either way, even if you decide we're not the right fit.

Get my demo

Or read about Will first if you want to know who's actually behind this.