Recover an old website
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Hi everyone,
I need to recover an old WP-website that hasn’t been in use since 2012, and the problem is that no one in the organisation knows who started it up back in the day. Some of us didn’t even know it existed until a few days ago. The person we suspect created it has unfortunately left us.
I have tried to recover it but since there are no reciepts, activation URLs, etc., available I haven’t been able to.
So my question: How do we regain access to the website? We are currently building up a new one and it is quite urgent that we close the old one down.
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I see that you are building your new website, but need to recover a site. Since the original account details are unavailable and no one from your organization has access to the recovery information (such as receipts with transaction IDs, activation emails, or backup codes), we won’t be able to recover ownership or grant access to that site.
That said, you still have a few options depending on what you’d like to achieve:
- If the site contains personal or sensitive information, we can set it to private so it’s no longer accessible to the public or indexed by search engines.
- If it’s already private but still appearing in Google search results, those links will eventually disappear once Google refreshes its index. You can also use Google’s website removal request tool to speed this up: https://search.google.com/search-console/remove-outdated-content
- You can opt out of seeing ads personalized based on visits to sites within the WordPress.com network here: https://wordpress.com/settings/privacy
If you’d like to proceed with setting the site to private, please send an email to help@wordpress.com and include the website’s address in your message so we can review and take the next appropriate step.
Also, please feel free to share your site goals if you’re building a new site with us so we can recommend the ideal hosting plan for your site.
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