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Somebody hands you responsibility for a website and there is no documentation, no handover, and nobody left who built it. This happens constantly — a marketing hire inheriting from a predecessor, a business acquisition, a family company where the nephew who set everything up moved abroad. The work is archaeology, and doing it before something breaks is dramatically easier than doing it during an outage.
What matters here
- Find the domain first — registrar, expiry and registrant contact.
- Then hosting — where the site physically lives and who pays for it.
- Then email — often a separate provider from the website.
- Write it down as you go — the document is the actual deliverable.
The main options
A WHOIS lookup on the domain is the starting thread: it names the registrar and the expiry date, which is the most urgent unknown. Bank and card statements reveal what is being paid for and to whom, which usually locates the hosting account. From there, get everything into accounts the business controls — transfer the domain if it sits somewhere inaccessible, and consolidate hosting rather than inheriting a scattered estate. If the site itself is neglected, free migration moves it somewhere maintained, and if it turns out to be unmaintainable, rebuilding with a builder or managed WordPress is often faster than reviving it.
A caution on the first renewal
The most dangerous moment for an inherited website is its next renewal date, because the notice goes to an address nobody monitors and the payment card may belong to someone who left. Establish the expiry dates for domain and hosting in your first week, and fix the contact and billing details immediately — that single action prevents the majority of inherited-website disasters.
How to choose
Produce a one-page record: domain and registrar, expiry dates, hosting provider, email provider, who pays, who has access, and where backups live. It takes an afternoon and it is the only thing standing between the business and repeating this exercise when you move on.