Your charity's website is down, the person who built it has moved on, and you are not sure where to start. Start here. The steps below are in order for a reason: some of the clocks in this situation are short, and working through them in sequence stops you burning a day on the wrong problem.
Step 1: work out which kind of down it is (10 minutes)
"The website is down" has four common causes, and each has a different fix.
- The domain has expired. Type your domain into the ICANN lookup (or Nominet WHOIS for .uk domains) and check the expiry date. If it has passed, this is your problem, and the most time-critical one.
- A platform subscription has lapsed. If the site was on Squarespace, Wix, or similar and you see a "site expired" or parking page, the subscription card has failed or the account holder stopped paying.
- The hosting has failed or lapsed. WordPress sites: you may see a hosting provider's error page, a database error, or nothing at all.
- It is only down for you. Check on your phone off the office wifi, or use a checker like downforeveryoneorjustme.com. Genuinely intermittent problems are usually DNS or hosting.
If email at your domain has also stopped, assume domain or DNS, and note that recovery emails may be going to an address nobody can read. Mention this to every provider you contact; they have processes for it.
Step 2: know the clocks you are on
This is the part people learn too late:
- Expired domains usually enter a grace period of up to 30 days when renewal is cheap, then a redemption period (typically another 30 days, with a fee), and then public release, when anyone can register your name. .uk domains get roughly 90 days in total. After release, domain squatters buy expired charity domains precisely because the traffic and email still flow to them.
- Squarespace deletes site content permanently around 30 days after a subscription expires. Recovery through support requires proof you control the attached domain and can take weeks, so open the ticket immediately, not after the committee meeting.
- Lapsed hosting retention varies from 30 days to nothing. Ask the host directly and get the answer in writing.
Step 3: recover access
Whose account is it? If the person is reachable, this is a phone call, a renewal payment, and a transfer of the account to a charity email address, all in a day. Offer to cover any costs on the spot; do not let £15 of renewal fee wait for a reimbursement process.
If the person is not reachable, contact the provider's support directly. Registrars, hosts, and platforms all have processes for organisations locked out of accounts held by departed individuals. Evidence that helps: your Charity Commission registration, proof the domain names your charity, historical invoices, and anything showing the charity paid for or publicly used the site. Expect identity checks and some patience.
While the recovery ticket is open, salvage your content from the outside. The Wayback Machine holds copies of most established charity sites; it will not restore your website, but it preserves your text, structure, and page list, which turns a rebuild from an archaeology project into a copy-editing one.
Step 4: keep serving people while it is down
Your website being down does not have to mean your charity is unreachable. In the first hour: update your Google Business Profile with current contact details, pin a post to your most active social account explaining how to reach you, and tell your key referrers (commissioners, partner organisations, funders) directly. If people in need use your site to find help, this step outranks everything else in this article.
Step 5: make this the last time
Once the site is back, fix the pattern rather than the incident. Move every account to charity-owned logins with two administrators, turn on auto-renew with a charity payment card, and write the one-page asset register from our website ownership audit. If the outage exposed a deeper problem, a platform nobody can edit, a volunteer dependency, ownership you cannot untangle, that is a rebuild conversation rather than a recovery one, and it is better had calmly now than urgently next time.
When to bring someone in
Get help when the recovery involves more than one provider blaming another, when donor or beneficiary data might be involved, or when the site has been down more than a few days and the clocks above are running. A specialist can usually tell within a short call which recoveries are worth pursuing and which content is faster to rebuild than rescue.
If that is where you are, book a free 20-minute call and bring whatever you know about where the site lived. Untangling this is unglamorous work we have done before, and the first 20 minutes of advice are free either way.
