My web designer has stopped working with me — what should I do?
The short answer
Make sure you control the essentials: the domain, the hosting or website-builder account, DNS, email and a full copy of the site. Ask the designer to move any accounts in their name into yours, then remove their access and change passwords and recovery emails. Do it while you’re still on good terms if you can.
Checklist
- Domain: find out where it’s registered and whose account it’s in. See how to find your registrar.
- Hosting or website builder: you need the owner login, not just an editor login.
- DNS: know where your DNS is managed. It controls your website and email.
- Email: check you can manage your mailboxes and that the account isn’t on the designer’s domain or card.
- Content: get a full backup, or at least your text, images and product data.
- Access: once everything is in your name, remove the designer as a user and update recovery emails.
If a designer won’t respond and the domain is registered to you as registrant, the registrar’s support team can usually help you recover the account after checking your identity. Who owns the design and code depends on your contract.
Words used here
- Domain registrar
- The company you buy (rent) your website name from — e.g. Namecheap, Cloudflare, Porkbun or GoDaddy.
- DNS (the traffic controller)
- The internet’s address book: it tells a browser which computer to visit when someone types your domain.
- Backup / snapshot
- A saved copy of your data at a moment in time, so you can restore it later. Always take one before deleting anything.
- Personal login
- The account is registered to a personal email (like Gmail). If that inbox is lost, so is the account. Use a business address such as ops@yourdomain.
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