The most common phone call this desk receives
"The developer who built our site has left / stopped responding / disappeared." Sometimes amicable, sometimes not. Either way the site now runs on knowledge that walked out the door. This is the takeover sequence, in order, from many such takeovers, see also the takeover service page.
Week 1: recover access and inventory
- Domain registrar: whose account, can you log in, when does it renew? This is the crown jewel; losing the domain is losing the business online.
- Hosting: account access, plan details, backups present?
- Code: where does it live (repo? just the server?), and does the current version match production?
- Analytics and Search Console: whose property, can you still see data?
- Email and integrations: what sends mail, what keys exist, what renews monthly?
Document everything found, in your own document, from today forward. See also the takeover service for the version where this desk does it with you.
Week 2: audit before touching
- What platform, what versions, what dependencies?
- Backups: do they exist, when did one last get restored successfully?
- Security posture: updates pending, admin accounts, SSL status.
- Analytics: is it measuring? Since when?
- Forms: do enquiries still arrive? See the lost-leads audit.
Rule for the fortnight: document, do not fix. The temptation is to upgrade everything immediately; the discipline is to understand the system first.
Weeks 3 and 4: stabilize
- Take a full backup and test one restore.
- Apply critical security updates only, one at a time, on staging where possible.
- Move every account you can into the business's ownership.
- Set up monitoring so silence cannot hide an outage.
- Write the one-page operations note: how the site runs, how it deploys, who to call.
Before hiring the next developer
With the audit in hand, hiring becomes a different conversation: you can show the system, name the risks and ask how the candidate would handle them. Any developer who cannot answer the red-flag questions in reverse (what would YOU check first?) is guessing with your business. See also what ongoing care should cost, so the new engagement starts with published numbers instead of hope.