When the only person who understood your Umbraco site resigns, the site keeps running but the knowledge walks out. Here is how I catch what they dropped.
The resignation letter mentioned a new opportunity. The handover was two meetings and a document written in the last week of a notice period, which is to say it was a list of links. And now the person who knew how the website actually works is gone, and the website, with no sense of occasion, continues to run.
That is what makes this problem so easy to underestimate. Nothing broke on their last day. The site serves pages, the forms submit, the content publishes. For the first few weeks the only difference is a quiet one: a category of question that used to have an answer no longer does. Why does the deploy take two attempts? What is that scheduled job for? Is it safe to update that package? The person you would have asked is settling into a desk somewhere else.
Then the first real request arrives. Marketing wants a new landing page variant, or a form change, or that integration finally switched on. And the team does what teams do: someone capable but unfamiliar opens the codebase, spends a day reading, makes a cautious change, and hopes. Sometimes hoping works. Sometimes staging does not match production in a way only the departed developer knew about, and now you have a second problem on top of the first.
Meanwhile the invisible work has simply stopped. Whoever left was, without anyone quite noticing, applying security patches, keeping packages current, watching the error logs, renewing the odd certificate. None of that appears on any backlog. It was just done. Now it is just not done, and unpatched software does not complain; it waits.
If this is where you are, two things are true and worth hearing. First, you have not done anything wrong: single points of failure grow silently in every organisation, because a competent person quietly absorbing responsibility looks identical to everything being fine. Second, the window you are in right now, after the departure but before the first crisis, is the cheapest moment there will ever be to fix this.
I step into the gap the departure left, in two distinct phases.
The first phase is rebuilding the knowledge your organisation lost. I read the codebase, the infrastructure and the database the way a new senior hire would if they had months, except it takes days, because after fourteen years and more than 200 Umbraco sites, other people's builds are mostly variations on patterns I already know. The output is written down: how the site is put together, how deployment actually works, where the sharp edges are, and a candid list of anything the previous developer left in a risky state. From that point on, the knowledge lives in a document your organisation owns, not in any single head, mine included.
The second phase is steady cover. A monthly retainer gives you a set number of my days each month, and the invisible work starts happening again: patches within 48 hours of release, packages kept current, backups verified rather than assumed, and capacity for the ordinary flow of fixes and small features that marketing never stopped wanting. My answer to what support and maintenance includes covers the detail, and the full support and maintenance service is built for exactly this situation. Where bigger pieces of development are needed, the same person who now understands your site can build them, which is the whole advantage.
You may also be running a recruitment process for a replacement, and that is sensible. The two things are not in tension. I have often been the bridge that makes hiring calm instead of panicked: with the site covered, you can take four months to find the right person rather than four weeks to find an available one, and when they arrive they inherit documentation instead of a mystery.
If you want to check who you would be trusting, my track record is set out plainly in how much Umbraco experience I have: on the platform since 2011, every version from 4 to 17, Umbraco MVP 2026. The first step is a conversation about what your developer used to look after; I reply within one working day, usually the same day, through the contact page.
Tell me what you're working on and I'll come back within one working day.
A specialist Umbraco developer offering freelance / contract services to a wide variety of clients across the UK
Maesgwyn, 3 Claremont rd,
Llandudno, North Wales, LL30 2UF