Moving a site from a previous developer.

Three things to recover

Domain, hosting and code are three separate things and very often live in three different places. The domain may be registered to the developer's personal email, hosting paid from their account, and the code may exist only on the server with no copy anywhere else.

The domain matters most. Without it there is nothing to move — and recovering it takes longest, because it means dealing with the registrar and proving the company is the owner.

Where to start

• Check publicly who registered the domain, where, and when it expires.
• Establish who pays for hosting and where the invoices go.
• Ask for access in writing: domain panel, hosting panel, site admin, analytics accounts.
• Take your own copy of the site and database before changing anything.
• List every page URL currently in Google — that is the basis of the redirect map.

Where traffic gets lost in a move

The most common expensive mistake is moving the site to new URLs without redirects from the old ones. Google spent years accumulating signals about specific addresses — if those return 404 after a rebuild, that value disappears and you start over.

The second common loss: leaving the indexing block that was in place during development. The site is live, looks good, and is invisible for weeks because nobody removed one line.

When a rebuild beats a move

If the site is slow, unreadable on phones and built on something that can no longer be updated, moving it unchanged only postpones the problem. But that decision belongs after a review, not before.