Our web agency has disappeared.

It probably did not happen all at once. First the replies slowed down. Then the monthly invoice kept arriving but the work stopped being visible. Somewhere in there you sent an email with a small request, a text change, a broken link, and it simply never came back. Now the phone number rings out, or the company page says something about exciting new directions, or Companies House says more than their website ever did.

And you are left holding a website you did not build, cannot see inside, and depend on every single day.

The feeling is oddly specific. It is not quite anger, because perhaps nothing dramatic was done to you; people just stopped. It is closer to standing in a house where the builder has taken the wiring diagrams away. The lights are on. Everything works, today. But you do not know where anything is, you do not know what happens if a fuse goes, and you have started noticing every flicker in a way you never used to.

There are practical worries stacking up behind the feeling, and you have probably already lain awake itemising them. Who controls the domain? If it renews on someone's abandoned credit card, what happens the year it does not? Where does the site actually live, and is anyone paying that bill? When did anyone last update the software underneath it? Is there a backup, and where, and would anyone know how to use it? If the contact form silently broke tomorrow, how many days of enquiries would vanish before anyone noticed?

Then there is the question underneath all the others: whose problem is this now? Because the honest answer at the moment is yours, and it landed on you without a handover, without documentation, and without anyone asking whether you wanted it. You have a business to run. Becoming the accidental custodian of an undocumented website was not in the plan, and every week it sits unowned, the quiet dread compounds a little.

If any of that is familiar, two things are worth knowing before anything else. First, this is common. Agencies close, pivot, shrink and drift constantly, and their clients' websites are usually the last thing wound down properly. You have not been uniquely careless; you have been normally unlucky. Second, and more usefully: it is almost never as bad as the 3am version suggests. Websites are recoverable things. What is missing is not some irreplaceable magic; it is access, knowledge and an owner. All three can be rebuilt.

The way back

This is work we do regularly, and it starts with a stocktake rather than a sales pitch. Bring us whatever fragments you have: the site address, old invoices, an email thread, the name of a developer who once seemed helpful. From those we can usually establish where the domain is registered, where the hosting runs and what recovery routes exist. Domains owned in your name can be repointed. Hosting accounts can be claimed with proof of ownership. Code can very often be retrieved, and even in the rare worst case a running site's content and structure can be recovered from the live site itself. We have written up how takeovers work in our FAQ: can you take over a site another agency built is the short version, and the answer is yes, without needing the old agency's cooperation.

Once we can see inside, you get a plain-English review of what is actually there. Not a horror story engineered to justify a rebuild; a straight account of what was built, what state it is in, and what needs doing, sorted into urgent, soon and someday. In our experience most inherited sites are workmanlike and perfectly maintainable, and we say so when it is true. The urgent list is usually short and unglamorous: apply the security updates that lapsed during the silence, take a backup and prove it restores, switch monitoring on, fix anything visibly broken. Details of how patching should work are in our FAQ on security patches; the honest test is whether you can name who applied the last one, and by then, you will be able to.

Then the site simply becomes a looked-after site, which is what it should have been all along. Most rescued sites settle onto one of our support retainers, from £500 a month, with the typical first fix inside 18 hours of a report, often paired with our managed hosting from £99 a month so a single supplier is accountable from the server to the CMS. Everything gets documented as we learn it, so the knowledge that walked out of the old agency's door gets rebuilt somewhere it cannot walk out of again. And because we have been doing this since 2008, across more than 200 Umbraco sites, the odds that your site contains something we have never seen before are slim.

The one mistake worth avoiding is waiting. An unowned website degrades invisibly, then all at once, and the difference in cost between a calm takeover and an emergency one is real. Tell us what you know about your site, even if the honest answer is very little. That is enough to start, and it is a great deal better than another quarter of hoping.