Someone built your site three years ago. They stopped replying, or moved back to the UK, or simply went quiet. Now you cannot change your opening hours and nobody knows where anything lives. This is one of the most common situations on the Costa Blanca and it is almost always recoverable — but not by starting again, which is the expensive mistake.
Find out what you own before you do anything
- Look up your domain on any whois service. It tells you the registrant and, crucially, the expiry date. If it is in the designer's name, that is the first problem to solve and the most urgent.
- Find the expiry date and write it down. A domain that lapses can be registered by anyone, and getting it back then depends on their goodwill and their price.
- Check your card and bank statements for recurring charges: the registrar, the hosting, maybe a mail provider. Those charges tell you which companies hold your things.
- Try to log in to whatever you have. Any old email with a password reset link is worth chasing.
The single thing that matters is the domain. Hosting can be replaced from a copy; a lost domain means every card, sign, listing and link pointing at an address you no longer control.
If the domain is in their name
Write to them once, calmly, in plain language, asking to be made the registrant. Keep it in writing. Most of the time this works, because it costs them nothing and they have moved on.
If there is no reply, contact the registrar directly. Registrars have a dispute process for exactly this, and being able to show you pay the invoices and trade under that name carries weight. It is slow, and it is far cheaper than losing the address.
Getting your website content back
- If the site is still online, everything visible on it can be recovered from the pages themselves — text, images, structure.
- If it has already gone down, the Wayback Machine has very often kept a copy you can read and rebuild from.
- The hosting company will usually give you a backup once you can prove the account is yours, even without the designer.
- What rarely comes back is what was never public: original photo files, drafts, source files. Assume those are gone.
Do not start from zero
The instinct is to build a new site on a new domain and be done with it. That throws away every position the old one earned, every link pointing at it and every printed card with that address. Keeping the domain and rebuilding behind it costs less and loses nothing — as long as the old addresses are redirected properly to the new pages.
And so it does not happen again
- The domain is registered in your name, with your email as the contact. Not the agency's, not the designer's.
- You hold the logins yourself, even if someone else uses them day to day.
- Automatic renewal is on, and the card behind it is one that has not expired.
- You have a backup, or you know exactly who takes it and how often.
- Anyone you hire should offer all of this without being asked. If they resist, that is the answer.