Why small businesses should stop treating website management as a DIY side project

Your website doesn’t need someone poking at it every day. For most small businesses, there’s no reason to spend hours each week tinkering with pages, checking analytics or wondering whether the latest WordPress update has broken something. But someone does need to pay attention to it.

That’s the part that’s easy to overlook when you launch a new website. The excitement is in getting it built. Then, once it’s live, it can be tempting to think the job is finished. But it isn’t. A website is more like a car than a billboard. You don’t need to work on it every day, but you wouldn’t drive it for five years without changing the oil.

Websites need maintenance. And for many small business owners, that maintenance becomes one more responsibility they don’t really have the time, inclination, or skillset to take on.

The problem with “I’ll manage it myself”

There’s nothing wrong with managing your own website. If you have a simple site, you’re comfortable with the software, and you have the time to keep up with it, do-it-yourself (DIY) can make perfect sense. The problem: those conditions tend to disappear as a website becomes more useful.

A basic five-page site speaking to year-round services, your history, location, and contact info won’t require much management. In fact, making sure your hours of operation are accurate might be all that needs to be done. But most businesses eventually want more from their websites. Maybe you want:

• A blog for SEO reasons
• A newsletter signup to keep customers informed
• Forms to generate leads
• Links to your social media to encourage engagement
• An online booking system for improved user experience (UX)

Maybe you’re using a customized WordPress theme with a dozen plugins and you accidentally triggered an update that broke everything. At some point you may need to accept that your website isn’t just an online brochure. It’s software that needs some degree of maintenance.

Website management is an actual job

This is where an advertised DIY approach can be misleading.

Modern content management systems (like WordPress) make it relatively easy to update a website. You don’t need to know how to write or understand code to change some text or add a photo. But knowing how to use WordPress isn’t the same as knowing how to manage a WordPress website. Someone needs to:

• Keep the framework, themes and plugins up to date
• Monitor security
• Make sure backups are working
• Notice when something stops working

And someone needs to think about the less technical stuff. Is the content still accurate? Is there a new or better way to describe your services? Are there opportunities to add internal links that you missed?

None of these things necessarily needs to happen every day. But ignoring them indefinitely isn’t a great strategy either.

Get a free website management quote

“Every so often” is easier said than done

Most business owners don’t neglect their websites because they don’t care about them. They neglect them because they’re busy. Or, when they do get around to attempting updates, it’s been so long since they used WordPress that they forget how to do it.

Website maintenance tends to land in the same mental category as choosing which pictures on your phone to send off for printing. It’s important, but it’s not urgent until it’s a full-blown emergency.

A plugin update gets postponed for six months. A security warning gets ignored. A contact form quietly stops working. An employee leaves and their picture and bio are still on the website. An old service is still listed. None of these problems announces itself. And when you finally notice one, you may not remember how things work or what to do next.

Sometimes the problem isn’t even your website

Here’s another thing that can catch website owners off guard: your website doesn’t exist in isolation. It depends on a hosting environment, domain registrar, plugins, third-party services, and sometimes other software or integrations.

• A hosting company can make a server-level change that affects how your website functions
• A third-party service can change its settings or stop supporting something your site relies on (Instagram is infamous for changing how its API works, which can break website photo galleries, and Google does the same thing with Maps—it’s very frustrating)

Suddenly, something that worked perfectly yesterday doesn’t work today.

One day your site disappears. You call your web designer to get things fixed, meanwhile the problem originated at your hosting company because they changed the server software without warning anyone. And hosting companies are notorious for refusing to take responsibility when a change on their end creates a problem on yours. But someone still has to deal with it.

A website manager can be that person. They can investigate what’s happening, communicate with the hosting company, and articulate what needs to be done to get your site back up and running. You don’t have time to become an IT specialist every time something goes wrong.

So what does a website manager actually do?

The answer varies depending on the website and the business. For one company, website management might mean a quarterly checkup and a few content updates. For another, it might mean monthly maintenance, SEO monitoring, and regular technical work. There’s no universal maintenance schedule. But website management can include things like:

• Updating WordPress, themes and plugins
• Monitoring security and backups
• Making image and copy changes
• Checking forms, links and other functionality
• Monitoring SEO and search performance
• Reviewing analytics
• Managing hosting and domain-related issues
• Troubleshooting problems
• Coordinating with developers, hosting companies or other technical specialists
• Periodically reviewing the website’s content and overall health

A lot of this work is preventative. And preventative work has an annoying characteristic: when it’s done properly, you don’t notice it. But that’s kind of the point.

But isn’t paying someone more expensive?

Sometimes, yes. But the cost of website management shouldn’t be compared to the cost of doing nothing. Compare it with the cost of doing it yourself. How much is your time worth?

If you’re spending three hours trying to figure out why a plugin has broken your contact form, that’s three hours you’re not spending on your customers or your business. AND it might be a complete waste of time if you can’t find the answer or fix the problem.

If your website goes down and you’re the person who has to spend the afternoon talking to your hosting company, that’s going to be a punishing, possibly fruitless afternoon.

If your website hasn’t been updated in two years because you haven’t had time, the cost isn’t necessarily a dramatic technical failure. It might simply be that your website isn’t doing as much for your business as it could.

And then there’s the cost of things you don’t know are wrong. That’s arguably the trickiest part of managing a website yourself. You can only attempt fixing the problems you know about.

Not every business needs monthly support

A small business with a relatively simple website probably doesn’t need a dedicated person checking things weekly, or even monthly.

We recently made an agreement with a Peterborough-area charity to help with quarterly website maintenance. They’d assumed the site needed monthly attention, but after speaking with them—and after taking its limited budget into account—we suggested quarterly updates and reporting instead. Four times a year, someone can make sure the software is current, check that security plugins are up-to-date, review analytics, and make any required structural changes while charity staff and/or volunteers continue to update the content.

Another business might benefit from monthly maintenance. A larger or more complicated website may need much more frequent involvement. Before its acquisition in 2021, I was responsible for maintaining the website for TML Supply Company (“Trent Metals”), a Peterborough-based HVAC wholesale distributor, and that combined with managing its authenticated customer portal, was a daily, part-time job.

The important question isn’t “how often does a website need to be updated?” It’s “how often does my website need attention?” Those are two very different questions.

When DIY is perfectly reasonable

I’m not going to suggest every small-business owner needs professional help. If you’re comfortable with the software, and you have enough time to stay on top of thigs, manage away. One of our clients, Kawartha Adventure Rentals, manages their own website almost completely independently. But the owner of that company is incredibly tech-savvy, is very familiar with the software, and keenly interested in learning more about web design and development. YOU have to be  honest with yourself about the three requirements:

1. Do you have the time?
   Not just time to make an occasional content change. Time to keep up with updates, check the site, review its performance and deal with problems when they arise.
2. Do you know what you’re doing?
   You don’t need to be a designer or developer, but you should know enough to recognize when something needs attention and understand the potential consequences of ignoring it.
3. Are you familiar enough with the software to manage it confidently?
   WordPress and other content management systems change. If you only log in twice a year, you may find that the software has changed quite a bit since the last time you used it.

If the answer to those questions is “yes,” great. If it’s “not really,” that’s not a failure… it probably just means website management isn’t the best use of your time.

Someone needs to pay attention

Your website doesn’t need constant attention. It doesn’t need to be endlessly redesigned, tweaked or fussed over. In fact, too much tinkering can create its own problems. What it does need is someone responsible for noticing when something needs attention. That could be you. It could be someone on your team who genuinely has the skills and the time. Or it could be a website manager who checks in on a schedule that makes sense for your business.

The goal isn’t to spend money maintaining a website for the sake of maintaining a website. The goal is to make sure the website you’ve already invested in continues to be secure, functional, accurate and useful. Because there’s a big difference between paying someone to pay attention and paying for a problem after nobody did. And sometimes, the most valuable thing a website manager does is make sure you never have to find out how expensive the second option can be.

Get a free website management quote