Your developer disappeared. How to get back into your site.

This is more common than you would think. The freelancer stops replying, the agency folds, the employee leaves badly, or the person who set everything up ten years ago is simply unreachable.

What you can recover depends entirely on which layer you still control. Work out which of these you have, then follow the matching route.

Work out what you control

In order of power:

1. The domain registrar account — the most powerful position
2. The hosting account
3. A WordPress administrator account
4. None of the above

If you control hosting

You can recover WordPress, whatever the admin situation.

Reset a password through the database. In your host's control panel, open phpMyAdmin, find the wp_users table, edit your user, set user_pass to a new value using the MD5 function from the dropdown. Log in, then change it again properly through WordPress.

Or create a new administrator via code. Add a snippet to your theme's functions.php over SFTP that calls wp_create_user and grants the administrator role, load any page once, then remove the snippet immediately. Leaving it in place is a live backdoor.

Or use WP-CLI if your host offers SSH: wp user create and wp user set-role.

Once in, audit every account, remove ones you do not recognise, and rotate the security salts in wp-config.php to log out every existing session including theirs.

If you control the domain but not hosting

You cannot reach the current site, but you control where the domain points. That means you can rebuild elsewhere.

1. Save whatever you can. The public pages are still visible — copy the text, save the images. HTTrack or a similar tool can mirror the public site.
2. Check the Wayback Machine for anything already removed.
3. Set up new hosting and rebuild.
4. Point DNS at the new host when ready.

You lose the database — form submissions, orders, users, anything not public. On a brochure site that is survivable. On a shop it is not, and it is worth trying harder to reach the old host first.

Try the host directly. If you can identify who hosts the site, contact them with proof that the domain and the business are yours. Some will help, particularly if the account is unpaid or abandoned. It is not guaranteed and it is worth an email.

If you control the WordPress admin but nothing else

Better than it sounds. From inside WordPress you can export everything:

• Tools → Export for all content as XML
• A backup plugin to produce a full files-and-database archive, sent to your own Google Drive
• Export WooCommerce orders and customers to CSV
• Note every plugin and setting you will need to recreate

With that archive, you can rebuild on hosting you control and move the domain when you are able to.

Do this today, before anything changes. An administrator account you still have is an asset that can disappear without warning.

If you control none of it

The hardest position, and not hopeless.

Establish what you can prove. Company registration, trademark, invoices showing you paid for the work, email correspondence.

Contact the registrar. Domain disputes have formal processes — UDRP for gTLDs, equivalents for country domains. Slow and not free, and a legitimate route where the domain is clearly your business name.

Take legal advice if the domain matters commercially. A solicitor's letter often resolves what emails did not.

In parallel, plan a rebuild on a new domain. It is not what you want, and waiting indefinitely for a resolution is worse.

Afterwards

Once you have control back, do the ten-minute audit: check who actually owns the domain, hosting, licences and analytics, get everything into accounts in your name, and write it down in a password manager.

Then, when you next give someone access, give them their own accounts rather than yours — so the next departure is an administrative task rather than this.