What to do if your web designer goes bust? - Webfactory

The nightmare scenario for any business is their web designer going bust.

In today’s economy, it’s not easy to guarantee your web designer won’t go under but if the worst does happen here is some guidance which may help:

• 1. Your web address – Your web address can usually be recovered. When you appoint a new company to take over your website they should be able to recover control of your address and move it from the old company to them. It’s worth noting that just because your designer has gone bust, your website domain will normally not disappear with them. The only time this may happen is if the domain was due for renewal and the designer has not paid the fee to renew it.
• 2. Your website content – You should try your best to copy as much of the content from your website into a Word document or at least print out the pages. This way even if the site goes down you have a copy of the content and so won’t have to rewrite everything for your new website. If your website has gone down and you no longer have access, contact a designer as soon as possible as there are some last-resort options which may allow the recovery of your content.
• 3. Your email accounts – It depends on how your emails are set up as to whether your email accounts will go down with the designer. If you use webmail (that is, you log in to your email through a web browser), these emails could disappear, so back them up. If you access your email through an application such as Outlook, your existing messages are probably safe and when your new designer sets up your email service it will just feed into the same mailbox but you may have to update your settings.

We recommend getting in touch with a new designer as soon as possible to help avoid any issues. If you are facing this problem and would like some help please feel free to contact us.