My web developer stopped replying. What are my options?

First, the reassuring part

A website that is live stays live. It does not stop working because the person who built it stopped answering — it keeps serving until the hosting or the domain lapses. So you almost certainly have time to do this properly rather than in a panic.

What you are actually recovering is control, and it comes in four pieces of very different difficulty.

1. The domain — do this first

This is the only piece that is genuinely irreplaceable, because it is your address. Everything else can be rebuilt; a domain someone else controls cannot be.

Look up your domain on a WHOIS service to see who the registrant is and which registrar holds it. Then:

• If you are the registrant — you are fine. Recover the account through the registrar's password reset.
• If your developer or their agency is the registrant — contact the registrar directly, not the developer. Registrars have a dispute process for exactly this, and proof that the business trading under that name is yours carries real weight.
• If it expires soon — deal with it today. An expired domain can be bought by anyone, and getting it back after that ranges from expensive to impossible.

2. The hosting

Find out where the site is actually served from. If you have been paying the hosting bill, the account is yours and this is a password reset away.

If your developer has been paying it and billing you, you do not need that account at all — you need the site's files, and then you can host it anywhere. Which brings us to the harder one.

3. The files

Ideally you get the source files. Failing that, you can still preserve what is live: everything a visitor's browser receives can be captured, which is enough to keep the site running and looking identical while you decide what to do next.

This is not as good as the source. Rebuilding from a captured site is more work than editing the original. But it is a real option and it means an unresponsive developer cannot hold your site hostage.

4. The content

Your text, photos, menu and prices are yours. Even in the worst case — no source, no hosting access — you can copy them out of the live pages and keep them.

Do this now regardless of how the rest goes. It takes an afternoon and it is the part that would be genuinely painful to recreate.

The version of this that cannot happen again

Once you have recovered what you can, the arrangement worth having is one where none of this depends on a single person answering email.

That is the shape Helm takes: the domain is registered to your business, the site is hosted and maintained for you, and the content is yours to edit from a dashboard. A provider going quiet stops being a crisis when nothing you need day to day passes through them.

What to do differently next time

Whoever you work with next, ask for three things in the first week rather than the last: the domain registered in your name, a copy of the source files, and the ability to edit your own content without going through anyone.

That third one is what turns an unresponsive developer from a crisis into an inconvenience.