Questions · 12 November 2026 · By Dorian, founder

Our web person has gone. How do we get our website back?

It happens often: a freelancer moves on, a friend stops helping, an agency closes. The website keeps running for a while, until a renewal fails or something breaks. Take it back in this order, and your email keeps working while you do.

1. Find out what you have

Four things, often in four places:

• The domain name, registered with a registrar and renewed every year or every few years.
• The DNS: the settings that point the name at your website and your email, usually at the registrar or at Cloudflare.
• The hosting: where the website's files and database live.
• The email: where the mailboxes live, for example Microsoft 365 or Google.

A WHOIS lookup on your domain name shows who it is registered with and when it expires. Our free Health check reads the public side for you: the certificate, the email protection and when your domain expires.

2. Check whose name the domain is in

The registered owner should be your business. If it is the web person, or their company, they or the registrar have to change it. Registrars have a process for proving a domain is yours: invoices, company documents, the email address on the account.

3. Get into each account

• Use the password reset on each account. The link goes to the email address on the account: if that address is on your own domain and you can open the mailbox, you are in.
• If it is the web person's own address, ask the provider for its ownership process.
• Ask the web person, politely and in writing, for the logins or a handover of the accounts.

4. Do not move anything yet

• Before you change the DNS or move the domain, write down where your email is delivered (the MX records). Changing nameservers without copying them is a common way to lose email for days.
• Take a full copy of the website and of every mailbox first.
• If the domain expires within a month, renew it before anything else.

5. Put everything in your business's name

Move each account to an address on your own domain that the business owns, with two-step login. Write down where everything is: registrar, DNS, hosting, email, and who can sign in. If a staff member is leaving too, read A staff member is leaving.

How DARCH helps

Your domain, accounts and data stay in your name. If you leave, you get a full copy and written handover notes.