How to find out who built your website
People end up looking for this in one of three situations. They bought a business and inherited a website nobody explained. They took over from someone who left. Or the person who built it has stopped answering the phone.
All three are worth about fifteen minutes of detective work, and there is one question worth asking before you start.
Do you actually need the person, or do you need the accounts?
Almost everybody who looks for their web designer does not really want the designer. They want something the designer is holding: a login, a password, control of the domain.
Those are two very different jobs, and the second one often does not need the first.
You can find out who your domain is registered with and get it into your own name without ever speaking to whoever set it up. Same with your hosting. Same with the website itself. Those are covered in how to get access to your own website.
So before you start hunting, write down what you would actually ask this person for if you found them. If the answer is "the logins", go and get the logins. The search below is worth doing anyway, because knowing who built it explains a lot, but it stops being urgent.
If the answer is "I want them to fix something", then yes, you need the person.
Seven places to look, quickest first
One. The bottom of your own website.
Scroll to the very bottom of your home page and read the small print. A surprising number of sites carry a line like "Site by Rivet Studio" or "Designed by Anna Lee", often in gray text a shade lighter than everything else.
Ten seconds, and it works more often than it should.
Two. Your email.
Search your inbox for your domain name, then for the words invoice, website, design, and hosting. Go back further than you think. If the site is six years old, search six years.
Look in whatever inbox the business used at the time, not just the one you use now.
Three. Your bank and card statements.
Look for a one off payment somewhere between $1,500 and $12,000 in the month or two before the site went live, or a recurring charge for maintenance.
The company name on the statement is often the answer, and sometimes it is a person's name rather than a business.
Four. The domain record.
Search for "ICANN lookup", use ICANN's own tool, and put in your web address.
You may see a name and an email. You may see a privacy service instead, which hides the details and is very common. Either way, note the registrar, the company the domain was bought from. Small designers tend to use the same registrar for every client, so it is a clue even when the name is hidden.
Five. The page source.
This sounds technical and is not. Open your home page, right click anywhere that is not an image, and choose View page source. A wall of code opens. Ignore all of it.
Press Ctrl and F together, or Cmd and F on a Mac, and search for these words one at a time: built, design, author, agency, studio.
Builders leave credits in there and forget. You are looking for a name or a web address.
Six. Search for your own business name plus "web design".
Type your business name and the words web design into Google. Then try your business name and the word portfolio.
Agencies advertise their clients. If a studio built your site, there is a decent chance your business is sitting on their portfolio page right now with a screenshot of your home page next to it.
Seven. Ask your host.
If you know who hosts the site, their support team can tell you whose name the account is in. They will not hand over anybody's password, but "the account is in the name of X" is usually something they will confirm to the person paying the bill.
The one most people miss
Go to the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org and put in your web address.
It keeps old copies of websites going back years. Pick a version from around when the site first launched.
Then scroll to the bottom of that old version and read the footer. Designer credits get removed during later redesigns, but the archived copy still has the original. It is the single best trick on this page and it costs nothing.
While you are there, it is worth seeing what your site looked like three years ago anyway. Most owners have not.
If you find them and they have moved on
This is the common ending, and it is worth saying plainly that it is nobody's fault.
An owner on a small business network was asked why so many small business websites sit neglected. The answer named the builder, who was:
"a) no longer in business, b) broke up with them, c) moved out..."
That is the whole lifecycle of a small business website in one line. Somebody helpful made it. Then life happened.
It shows up in what people search for, too. Type "my web designer" into Google and watch what it offers to complete. Almost nothing about hiring, almost nothing about fees. The one thing it suggests is "my web designer disappeared".
So if you find a name and a dead email address, you have not failed. You have learned that nobody is coming back, which is genuinely useful, because it means you can stop waiting and start on the accounts instead.
If the trail goes completely cold
It happens, particularly with sites built before about 2018.
You do not need to identify the person to take control of your own website. The domain, the hosting and the site login can all be recovered on their own, through the companies that hold them, by proving you are the business. That is slower than a friendly handover and it works.
Start with the domain, because it is the one thing that cannot be rebuilt. Everything else can.
One thing to do once you know
Whatever you find, write it down somewhere that is not your memory.
A single page with the domain company, the host, the website login, who built it and when, and the renewal date. Put it wherever your business keeps its important papers.
Every problem on this page exists because that page was never written. It takes ten minutes and the person it saves is probably you, in four years, having forgotten all of this.