How to Find Out Who Built Your Website (and Who Still Has the Keys)

If you are asking who built my website, there are five places to look and most people find the answer in the first two: the footer of the site, the page source, the theme and plugin author fields, the public domain and hosting records, and your own old invoices. This is how to find out who designed a website you inherited, in the order that gets an answer fastest, and what to do when the name you turn up belongs to someone who stopped replying two years ago.

This comes up more than you would think. Somebody bought a business and the site came with it. A partner left. An office manager who handled all of this retired years ago and took the details with her. The site keeps running, which is the problem, because nothing forces the question until something breaks.

Who built my website? Start with the footer credit

Scroll to the very bottom of your home page. A lot of small agencies put a credit there: "Site by Something Studio" or "Designed and developed by" with a link. It is a link the agency wanted, so it tends to survive redesigns of everything else.

If the footer is bare today, that does not mean it always was. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine keeps dated snapshots of public pages going back years. Look up your own address there, open a capture from around the time the site was built, and scroll to the bottom of that old version. Credits that were later removed are often still sitting in the archived copy. The same trick works for a contact page that used to list a webmaster address. Coverage is patchy by design, so if one capture does not load properly, try a different date.

How to find out who designed a website from its page source

Right-click any page and choose View Page Source. You do not need to understand the code. You are scanning for names, and browsers give you a find box with Ctrl+F or Command+F. Search for the words author, design, built, developed, and copyright.

A few specific things are worth knowing about what you will see.

The theme and plugin author fields

This one is specific to WordPress and it is the best lead most people never check. Every WordPress theme declares itself in a file called style.css, in a header block with named fields: Theme Name, Theme URI, Author, Author URI, Description and Version. Plugins carry an equivalent header in their main PHP file. Those fields are how WordPress itself lists a theme in the dashboard, which means a shop that built you a custom theme almost always put its own name and website in the Author and Author URI lines.

If you can log into the WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance then Themes, click the active theme, and read the author panel. If you cannot log in, the same file is usually readable in a browser at yoursite.com/wp-content/themes/your-theme-name/style.css, and the theme folder name is in your page source from the step above.

Follow the domain and hosting records

The builder and the account holder are frequently different people, and honestly the account holder matters more. Public records will name the companies involved even when they name no person. A WHOIS or RDAP lookup returns the registrar your domain sits with, the creation date and the expiry date. Nameservers tell you which company is steering the domain right now. The server IP traces back to a hosting company.

Two things to do with that. First, note the domain's creation date, because it usually lands within a few weeks of when the site was originally built, which narrows your search of old email considerably. Second, call the host and the registrar. You will not get the account details over the phone from a stranger, but they can tell you what proof of ownership they need from you, and that conversation is the start of getting access back. We cover reading these records properly in how to find out who manages your website hosting.

Search your own paper trail

This is the least glamorous step and it works more often than any of the technical ones. You are looking for a name and, better, an email address that a registrar will accept.

1. 1Search every inbox in the company for your domain name, plus the words invoice, hosting, renewal, launch, and DNS. Include archived and deleted mail, and include the personal address of anyone who used to run the office.
2. 2Search accounting for vendor payments. Pull three to five years of card statements and look for recurring charges to hosting companies and registrars, and one-off payments to a design firm. The merchant name on the statement is often the exact business name.
3. 3Look for the original proposal or contract. If one exists, it may also settle who owns the code, which is a separate question we cover in who owns the code when you hire a developer.
4. 4Ask longtime staff and your bookkeeper. Somebody usually remembers a first name and a rough year, and that is enough to search on.
5. 5Check your business email records. If mail is running on a domain you own, whoever set up those records had access to your DNS. Our email checker shows the mail host and the SPF and DMARC records, and the provider named there is another company that has a file on your account.

What if the site is on Wix, Squarespace or Shopify?

Hosted platforms change the shape of the hunt. There is no theme folder to read and no server to trace, because the platform hosts everyone. What matters instead is which email address owns the account, and only the platform can tell you that. Contact their support with proof that you own the business and the domain, and ask about their account recovery and ownership transfer process. They deal with this constantly, especially with businesses that changed hands.

One useful side effect: on these platforms the site cannot be quietly deleted by a departed freelancer without the account being touched, and the platform keeps a record of who touched it.

When the answer is a person who no longer answers

This is the outcome we see most. You find a name, you find an old email address, and nothing comes back. Do not panic and do not start changing things at random. Work in this order.

• Send one clear written request. Email and, if you have it, text. Ask for exactly three things: the domain registrar account, the hosting login, and a copy of the files and database. Keep it short and unemotional, and keep the copy you sent, because registrars and hosts sometimes ask what you tried.
• Go around them, not through them. Registrars and hosts have documented ownership dispute and account recovery processes for exactly this case. Business formation documents, a matching business address, invoices you paid and control of the business email all count as evidence.
• Do not let the domain lapse while you argue. If the renewal date is close and you cannot reach the account holder, contact the registrar now. Recovering an expired domain is more expensive and less certain than renewing one.
• Take a backup the moment you get in. Files and database, downloaded and dated, stored somewhere that is not the server.

Our step-by-step version of this is in what to do when your web developer disappears. If the developer is still around and you simply want out, how to fire your web developer covers the safer sequence.

Once you know, write it down

Whatever you turn up, put it in one place today: the builder's name, the registrar, the host, the platform, the renewal dates, and which email address each account is tied to. Our website ownership checklist is the list we hand new clients. It is the difference between a two-hour handover and a two-month one.

And the honest sales note: taking over a site somebody else built is a normal part of what we do. A lot of the maintenance work we pick up starts with a site whose original developer is out of the picture, and the first thing we do is exactly the audit above, then move the accounts into the owner's own name. If the hosting is also unclear, our managed hosting includes migrating from whatever it is on now. We have been at this from Mill Creek since 2011. If you would rather do it yourself with the free tools above, that is a completely reasonable choice and the steps here are the same ones we follow.