Is Nobody Looking After Your Website? What to Do
Do you know who holds the keys to your website today? If the answer is “whoever built it” and that person no longer replies, you’re not alone. The site was built, it went live and it worked; then the agency closed, the freelancer moved on or the friend who was good with computers ran out of time. Since then nobody has updated it, you’re not quite sure where the domain is registered and every warning in the dashboard makes you a little more nervous.
In short: a website nobody maintains doesn’t stand still: its content management system, its plugins and its PHP version age while new vulnerabilities keep being published. The first step is to take stock of logins, domain, hosting and backups. And you almost never need to rebuild it: bringing it up to date in the right order is usually enough.
What happens to a website nobody maintains?
It falls behind on versions, and an outdated version may have security flaws that are already public. The figures below are for WordPress, which is our speciality, but the same thing happens to any website that relies on parts that need updating.
According to WordPress.org’s statistics (data checked on 28 September 2026), the current version is 7.1 and 41.2% of WordPress sites run an older one. WordPress’s own releases page puts it plainly: only the most recent version in the 7.1 series is safe to use and actively maintained.
PHP, the language WordPress runs on, tells a similar story: 37.6% of WordPress sites run PHP 8.1 or older (WordPress.org, same date), versions that no longer get security fixes according to php.net.
Why does that matter so much? Patchstack’s State of WordPress Security in 2026 report, based on 2025 data, gives three clues: 91% of new vulnerabilities were in plugins, 46% had no fix by the time they were made public, and the weighted median time from a vulnerability being published to the first attack is 5 hours.
Put simply: most of the risk sits in plugins, and when a fix comes out it needs to be applied quickly. On a website with nobody behind it, nobody applies that fix. Security isn’t the only thing that suffers:
- Updating gets harder and harder. Jumping several versions at once is when most things break, so it keeps getting put off.
- Forms stop sending and nobody notices until a customer complains some other way.
- The site slows down with old plugins, a database nobody cleans and an outdated PHP version.
- It ends up hacked. If that has already happened, start with our emergency guide for hacked websites.
Signs your website has been left on its own
Nothing serious has to have happened for you to know your site has been left alone. These are the clearest signs:
- The dashboard is piling up update notices that nobody applies.
- The site warns you that your PHP version is outdated.
- You don’t know who pays for the hosting or when the domain expires.
- The site’s admin email belongs to someone who is no longer around.
- Contact form messages go to an inbox nobody checks, or don’t arrive at all.
- The security certificate (the padlock in the browser) has expired at some point.
- You’re afraid to touch anything in case it breaks.
Take stock before you touch anything
Before you update, switch hosting or call anyone, gather what you have. This table tells you what to look for, where, and what to do if it’s missing:
| What to check | Where to look | If you don’t have it |
|---|---|---|
| Admin access to the site | The site’s dashboard (in WordPress, wp-admin) | It can be recovered from the hosting or the database if you have access to them |
| Hosting and who holds the contract | Invoices and emails from the provider, the hosting panel | Search your email for renewal notices and, if the contract is in someone else’s name, ask them to transfer it |
| Domain: registrar, owner and expiry date | The registrar’s panel or a WHOIS lookup | If it’s in the name of whoever built the site, ask for a transfer before it expires: this is the most urgent item |
| Backups: whether they exist, where they are and whether a restore has been tested | The hosting panel or a backup plugin | Take a full backup (files and database) before any change and store it off the server |
| Versions of the content management system, plugins, theme and PHP | The site’s dashboard (in WordPress, Tools › Site Health) | Write them down: they’re your starting point for updating in order |
| Email on the domain | The domain’s MX records and the hosting panel | If email runs on the same hosting, any hosting or DNS change affects it: keep that in mind before migrating |
Once you’ve taken stock, you know whether the problem is access, versions or both, and nothing gets lost along the way.
Does it need rebuilding?
Almost never. An unmaintained website can be brought up to date without starting from scratch: first a full backup and, if possible, a test copy of the site; then update it in stages (plugins, theme, core and, last, the PHP version), checking after each step that the key pages and forms still work.
Rebuilding only makes sense when the site no longer does what you need or when it depends on something beyond repair, such as a theme or plugin that no longer exists and holds half the site together. That decision comes after reviewing it, not out of fear of updating.
How we do it
Maintaining websites that someone else built is the most common part of our work. All our maintenance plans start with an initial website audit to see what state your site is in before we begin, and from there we take care of maintaining it without having to rebuild it. There are three plans, all with no lock-in:
- Essential (€39 + VAT per month): plugin, theme and core updates, regular backups, monitoring and a monthly report on what we’ve done.
- Smart (€59 + VAT per month): all of the above plus daily backups, advanced security, emergency recovery included and hosting management.
- Business (€100 + VAT per month): all of the above plus SEO and GEO content maintenance, so AI assistants can find you too, and urgent support with a 4-hour response.
If your site isn’t built with WordPress, we maintain it too: tell us about it and we’ll prepare a custom quote.
And if you only want to bring it up to date once, with no monthly plan, you can use an hourly package: you buy it and use it for whatever you need, valid for 6 months.
Taking over unmaintained websites
Initial audit, updates and no lock-in.