What to do with a website you cannot edit

The bloke who built it has stopped replying. The login was in an email account you no longer use. The prices are from 2021, the phone number is your old one, and there's a photo of a member of staff who left three years ago.

You've been meaning to sort it for eighteen months. Every time you think about it you run into the same wall: you don't know who controls what, you don't know what you'd lose by starting again, and nobody will give you a straight answer about any of it.

This is one of the most common situations in small business and one of the least written about, because it's nobody's favourite subject. It's also more solvable than it feels, and the first step is not technical.

Work out what you actually own

A website is really three separate things, and they're often held in three different places. Untangling them is most of the job.

The domain name. Your address on the internet. This is the one that matters most, because whoever controls it controls where your traffic goes. It's rented yearly from a registrar, and the renewal notices go to whichever email was used when it was bought.

The hosting. The computer your site sits on. Replaceable, and much less important than people think.

The site itself. The pages, the text, the photos. Sometimes locked inside a platform you don't have the password to, sometimes just files sitting on the hosting.

You can lose the third and rebuild it in a weekend. Losing the first is genuinely serious, because a new address means starting over with search engines and with every business card, van sign and listing that points at the old one.

Find out who holds the domain, today

There are public tools that tell you who a domain is registered through and when it expires — search for a domain lookup or WHOIS service and type your address in. The registrar's name will usually be visible even when the owner's details are hidden.

Once you know the registrar, you can contact them directly about recovering access. They have a process for it. It involves proving you're the business, it's tedious, and it works far more often than people expect.

Do this even if everything else stays broken. A domain that quietly expires because the renewal notice went to a dead email address is the one failure here that's genuinely hard to undo.

Try the developer once, properly

Before assuming the worst, send one clear, unemotional message. Not a chaser — a specific request.

Hi — I need to take over the admin for the website. Could you send me the domain registrar login, the hosting login, and the site admin login? Happy to pay for your time in sorting it out.

A fair number of these get answered, because the person isn't avoiding you, they've just moved on and your emails have been vague. Offering to pay for the handover removes the last reason to ignore it.

If there's no answer in a fortnight, stop. Chasing further is a way of feeling busy rather than getting anywhere.

The middle path almost nobody considers

Here's the thing that gets missed. If you can't edit the site, you don't have to fix the site to fix the problem.

The problem is that customers are reading wrong information. There are cheaper ways to correct that than recovering a login.

Your Google listing is under your control and is read by more people than your website. Get the hours, the number, the description and the photos right there. For a lot of local businesses that alone repairs most of the damage.

Then, if the domain is recoverable, you can point it at a simple new site later. And if it isn't, you can put a new site on a slightly different address and redirect people from your listing and your social accounts, which is not ideal and is entirely survivable.

When to give up and rebuild

Rebuild when two things are both true: you can't get into it, and it's actively misleading people.

An old-fashioned site with correct information is not an emergency. An old site with the wrong phone number is losing you work every week, and every week you spend trying to recover a login is a week of that continuing.

A simple five-page site — what you do, where, roughly what it costs, who you are, how to get hold of you — can be up in a weekend on any of the ordinary website builders, at a cost that's a small fraction of what you were quoted for the original. Write the words first; the software is the easy half.

Make sure it can't happen again

Whatever route you take, spend twenty minutes at the end making the next person's life easier, and that person is probably you.

Register the domain in your own name, using a business email account you'll keep forever. Not a personal address, not one belonging to whoever built it. Turn on auto-renewal and put the expiry date in your diary anyway.

Write the logins down somewhere real. If you pay somebody to build or manage a site, the contract should say the domain is yours and you get admin access to everything, before the first payment.

Where the information lives matters more than the site

Step back from the mechanics for a second. What actually went wrong here isn't a lost password. It's that everything a customer needs to know about your business was locked inside one thing, controlled by one person, and when that broke there was no other copy.

The facts themselves — what you do, where you go, what things cost, when you're free — are yours and they aren't complicated. The site was only ever one place to put them. Google's got a copy, your listings have a copy, and increasingly people ask AI apps rather than visiting websites at all.

That's the gap hailera works on: you write those answers once, check them yourself, and publish them as an agent, so what people are told doesn't depend on a single site somebody else has the keys to. Fixing your Google listing this week does a good share of the same thing for nothing, so do that first, whatever happens with the login.

Do the cheap thing first, whatever you decide

Whichever route you end up taking, none of it needs to wait on the login. Fix the Google listing this week. Write down the five things a customer needs to know about you. Find out who holds the domain.

Those three take an evening between them, and they'll make the decision about the old site much easier, because you'll know exactly what you're trying to recover and how much it's actually worth to you.

Today: look up who your domain is registered with and when it expires. Put the expiry date in your diary. That's the one thing here that gets much worse if you leave it.

Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.