Your web guy disappeared. Here is why.

About a third of the projects I take on are rescues. Somebody built the site, went quiet, and stopped answering. The client always assumes the worst.

It is almost never the worst. Here is what actually happened, in rough order of frequency.

He quoted a fixed price for an undefined job. He said two thousand dollars for a website. Nobody wrote down what a website was. Four rounds of revisions in, he is working for free and he is angry about it, and the anger is easier to manage by not opening his email.

He built it on something he did not understand. It worked when he handed it over. Then a plugin updated, or a payment failed, or a certificate expired, and fixing it requires knowledge he does not have. Silence is cheaper than admitting that.

He has a job. A lot of local web work is done by somebody with a day job and three side projects. In March he had time. In June his real job got busy. You are not being ignored, you are being deprioritized by somebody with no capacity to tell you so.

He never had a process. No handover documentation, no credential list, no staging, nothing written down. Coming back to your project six months later means re-learning it from scratch, unpaid. That is a genuinely miserable prospect and people avoid miserable prospects.

None of that helps you. But it tells you what to check before you hire the next one.

Ask what the scope is, in writing, with a number of revisions on it. Ask what happens after launch and what it costs. Ask to see the handover documentation from a previous project. Ask whether this is their full-time work.

And ask for the credentials on day one, not at the end. A vendor who will not give you the keys to your own domain while the project is running is a vendor you cannot fire, and one day you will want to.