Agency gone quiet, closed down or walked away? We recover access, review what you actually have, fix the urgent risks and put proper care around your site.
The emails stopped getting answered. Then the phone. Maybe the agency has closed, maybe they have pivoted to other work, maybe the one developer who understood your site has left and nobody remaining will touch it. Either way, you are running a business on a website that nobody maintains, you are not sure who controls the domain or where the code lives, and every day it works feels slightly like luck.
The old way of handling this is to panic into a rebuild: a new agency declares the inherited site unknowable, quotes five figures for a fresh start, and you pay twice for one website. The other old way is worse: do nothing, because starting feels impossible without passwords, documentation or a friendly handover, and hope nothing breaks.
There is a calmer route. Websites are recoverable, almost always, even with zero cooperation from the previous agency. We have taken over enough Umbraco sites to have a method for it, and the method starts with what you have, not with what you have lost.
Domain, hosting, code, database, backoffice. We work out what you control, what you can claim, and how to recover the rest. Cooperation from the old agency helps but is not required.
We read the code and configuration and tell you the truth about it. Most inherited sites are better than their owners fear, and we will not invent problems to sell a rebuild.
Missing security patches go on first, backups are taken and verified with a test restore, monitoring goes on, and anything actively dangerous is fixed before anything cosmetic.
The site moves onto a normal retainer from £500 a month, with patches inside 48 hours of release and the typical first fix inside 18 hours. The luck-based era ends here.
The first conversation is a stocktake. Bring whatever you have: old invoices, a contact name, the website address, that folder of emails. From those fragments we can usually establish where the domain is registered, where the site is hosted and what recovery routes exist. Domains registered in your name can be repointed; hosting accounts can be claimed with proof of ownership; and in the worst case, where code is truly unreachable, a running website can have its content and structure recovered from the live site itself. In fifteen years of doing this we have yet to meet a situation with no way forward.
Once we have access, the review is honest by design. You get a plain-English account of what was built, what state it is in, and what actually needs doing, separated into urgent, soon and someday. The urgent list is usually short: apply the security patches that lapsed when the agency went quiet, verify there is a working backup by restoring it, and fix anything visibly broken. The someday list stays yours to decide; nothing gets smuggled into scope.
From there the site simply becomes a looked-after site. Most rescues settle onto our support retainer at £500, £950 or £1,800 a month depending on how much attention the site needs, often alongside our managed hosting so one accountable supplier holds the whole thing. If the rescue reveals the site is also stuck on an unsupported Umbraco version, we will lay out the upgrade path with real numbers rather than alarm.
Whether we can take over a site we did not build: yes, it is a large part of our work, and the long answer is in our FAQ on agency takeovers. And who patches the site once the dust settles: we do, within 48 hours of every release, as covered in who handles security patches.
If you are in this situation now, the worst move is waiting for it to become an emergency. Tell us what you know about your site, even if it is not much, and we will map the way out.
Tell us what you're working on and we'll come back within one working day.
An Umbraco Silver Partner agency in Llandudno, North Wales and the Isle of Man, building and looking after Umbraco and .NET websites for businesses and agencies across the UK and beyond. Simon Antony is a brand of Simplepage Ltd.
Maesgwyn, 3 Claremont rd,
Llandudno, North Wales, LL30 2UF