The developer who built your site has left the agency and nobody there knows how it works

Why this happens at almost every agency

Agencies are built around individual developers, not systems. One person builds your site, holds all the knowledge in their head, and moves on to the next job. When they leave the company, that knowledge walks out with them.

The agency does not lose sleep over this because you are still paying monthly. From their side, nothing has changed. From your side, every request now gets met with delays, vague answers, or a quote for a rebuild.

Whether you are a florist in Brighton or a letting agent in Sheffield, the pattern is the same. The agency sold you a relationship with a company. What you actually had was a relationship with one person, and that person is gone.

What you are actually paying for now

Your monthly fee was meant to cover someone keeping the site running, making small changes, and fixing things when they break. That assumed someone at the agency knew how the site was put together.

Now, when you ask for a change, the request goes to whoever is free that week. They open the files, do not recognise the setup, and either guess, refuse, or tell you it needs a rebuild. None of those outcomes are what you are paying for.

The fee has not gone down. The service has. You are now funding the agency's learning curve on your own website.

The warning signs you already noticed

You probably spotted this drift before you put a name to it. The signs are consistent across every agency this happens to:

• Simple changes that used to take a day now take two weeks
• Whoever replies to your emails does not seem to know the site
• You get asked questions you were never asked before, like "where is the site hosted?"
• Requests come back with "we would need to look into that" and then nothing happens
• The agency starts suggesting a rebuild for problems that should be small fixes
• Bugs get introduced when changes are made, then quietly blamed on "how it was built"

The rebuild suggestion is the giveaway. They are not telling you the site is broken. They are telling you they cannot work out how it functions and would rather start fresh on your money than read someone else's code.

What to do about it

You have a few options, ranked from least to most useful.

1. Ask for documentation in writing. Email the agency and ask: where is the site hosted, what is the domain registered through, what software was used to build it, and where are the files stored. If they cannot answer in plain terms within a week, you have your answer about whether they can maintain it.

2. Ask who is now responsible. Get the name of the developer or technical lead now assigned to your site. Ask how long they have worked with it. If the honest answer is "they picked it up last month," you are not being maintained, you are being babysat.

3. Get the site reviewed independently. A second pair of eyes can tell you in an hour whether the site is well-built and just needs someone competent to take it over, or whether the original developer left a mess that genuinely is hard to maintain. Either way, you will know where you stand.

4. Move it. If the agency cannot maintain what they built and want to charge you to rebuild it, the relationship is over. Most sites can be moved without rebuilding. The agency will tell you otherwise because that is how they keep the work.

A site that was built five years ago by a developer who has since left is not, by itself, a reason to rebuild. It is a reason to find someone who can read code.

What a proper handover looks like

When I take on a site that was built by someone else, the first thing I do is write down how it works. Where it is hosted, how it is updated, what it is built with, where the contact form sends emails. This takes a few hours and means anyone could pick it up after me.

That is the basic standard. Agencies skip it because documenting work costs time and earns nothing. The result is the situation you are in now.

If you want someone who will actually read the existing site, document it, and then maintain it without surprises, that is what I do. SkipTheAgency's Maintained plan is £65/month and includes a full review of what you already have before any changes are made. If the site is fundamentally sound, I will tell you. If it needs work, I will tell you what and why, in plain English.

The free migration covers the move itself: domain, hosting, files, email forwarding. You bring the access details, I do the rest.