Whether you’re a startup, a small business owner, or an enterprise-level company, a website is likely one of your most important assets. As a writer, my website is integral to ensuring I come across professionally to potential clients. No matter the size of the business, we leverage our sites to build reputation, to grow reach, and ultimately — to convert.
But a website isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it asset. Not even close.
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A website is an ongoing project that, for many organizations, requires input across teams and departments. It can be a beast to get a site in great shape, and there’s hardly a company on the face of the Earth that would comfortably say their website is in perfect condition.
So, how do you get your website closer to alignment with best practices and your goals? Website management.
In this article, we’ll look at the foundations of website management: what it is, why you need it, and how to do it.
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Some organizations designate specific website managers, while others use the IT team, the marketing team, or another department altogether to keep the website optimized. However, because the elements of website management are so broad, it’s easy for issues to get neglected when there isn’t a team member leading the charge across departments.
Elements of Website Management
Website management is a broad term that taps into several different areas and expertise. These are the elements that make up website management:
- Content. Optimizing your website for current search engine best practices can be a moving target. As algorithms change, website managers and contributors stay on top of keeping their content optimal.
- Marketing strategy. Ensuring your website is aligned with your overall marketing strategy is another important part of website management. When a strategy changes or a new campaign is launched, the website needs to be updated.
- Design. Website design can change as a brand’s image changes or as an organization grows. While a website manager won’t generally be the designer, they are responsible for ensuring necessary departments — like the design team — are on top of their function.
- UI/UX. Website management includes usability and experience. Website managers may test the usability of a section, or A/B test to find preferred calls-to-action (CTAs), button colors, or features. Then, they’ll pass the task off to a designer or operations team to update.
- Analytics. Website managers or operations teams measure engagement and usage of a website. Using heat maps like Hotjar or traffic analytics tools like Google Analytics help to give a website manager a sense of how the site is being used (and hints about how it can be improved).
- Technical maintenance. A well-managed website runs smoothly and, to do that, maintenance is required. A technical team ensures links work, navigation is smooth, and website pages aren’t crashing.
- Compliance and security. Finally, a key component of website management is staying compliant with emerging security regulations. Keeping users safe and collecting data in a compliant way on the website are top priorities.
Why Is Website Management Important?
Website management is a broad term — so its impact is also broad. Four of the key reasons great website management is important are.
User Experience
First, website management ensures your prospects and customers are able to use the resources you’ve laid out for them. Whether it’s an educational blog or a technical white paper, users need to be able to access, navigate, and read your website pages and PDFs.
Great website management ensures all links work, navigation panels operate, and overall readability and accessibility are up to par.
Compliance & Security
Each year, more and more regulations come out regarding user data and information. As a result, website managers need to pay close attention to their site’s security and compliance measures. Website managers or designated departments like IT ensure their users are safe, and their organization won’t be liable for non-compliance with website regulations.
Business Growth
When your website is managed properly, it’s set up to reach more people. Good technical management and staying up-to-date on SEO best practices means that your website can land in front of more eyes. As a result, your business can grow.
Brand Image
Nothing corrodes authority in a brand quite like a malfunctioning website. Properly managed websites are designed well, employ a seamless experience, and use best practices to ensure that their brand image is reputable. As a result, visitors trust the information they see on the site and the overall brand image grows in the positive direction.
Whether your organization has a website manager or not, your website needs to be thought of as an ongoing project for multiple departments to engage with. Here are some tips for making sure your website stays in good shape:
1. Have a maintenance schedule.
When website management is left up to chance, it can sit at the bottom of a priorities list (especially when organizations lack a specific website manager). That’s why a maintenance schedule is a must.
A proper maintenance schedule includes calendared dates to:
- Test links and navigation.
- Refresh blog content.
- Ensure that CTAs are relevant and updated.
- Sharpen and update SEO practices.
- Review analytics and run user tests.
These components run on different schedules. Blog content is recommended to be refreshed annually, while analytics and user testing should happen more regularly. This makes scheduling maintenance all the more important.
2. Prioritize UX in web page elements.
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When bringing a brand to life, design often takes priority — leaving navigation and user experience behind. But navigation and UX are two of the most impactful components of a website. In fact, 89% of users find a different option when a website has poor user experience. When UX is properly highlighted, users can get a lot more value out of the site. As a result, they spend more time on it and chances of converting increase.
Leverage UX principles like color accessibility, clear and repeated CTAs, and readability across devices, but don’t be afraid to test if you’re not sure what users will prefer.
Pro tip: Allie Cox, marketing operations consultant, advises, “If you’re using forms on your website, implement real-time validation, which guides users as they input data. As a result, you reduce errors and improve the quality of the data you capture. Also, you want to make sure you only ask questions that are necessary. Fewer fields with great formatting foster faster fill-outs and more participation.”
3. Use SEO best practices.
Website management isn’t just about making sure the technical components of your website run smoothly — it’s also about using best practices in your web pages and blog content. HubSpot’s free Complete SEO Starter Pack is a great resource for understanding the basics of SEO, highlighting concepts like:
- Keyword research.
- Internal & external links.
- Tags, headers, and meta descriptions.
- Technical SEO.
- Backlinking.
Whether you’re updating a long-time site or building a new website to manage for your organization, you’ll want to make sure you’re leveraging SEO principles. I found that SEO can seem difficult, but when you break it down, it’s often just about creating clear content. If you’re not familiar with SEO, start small and grow your SEO initiatives as you get more comfortable.
Pro tip: “If you’re focusing on incorporating a particular keyword, try to make sure it’s in your H1, slug, at least one of your H2s, and in the introductory paragraph,” recommends Rachel Cameron Potter, SEO specialist. “And if you can, incorporate images into your blogs — but make sure the images aren’t too large, because large images slow loading speeds, which can put you in Google’s bad books.”
4. Make sure your team is coordinated.
Website management requires input from a lot of different departments — and you may not even have a website manager at your company. As a writer, it’s pretty obvious when an organization lacks a website manager. Blogs get held up and content ends up dissonant from branding, product releases, and other company initiatives. Someone needs to be in charge of what’s happening across the website.
Your website manager is responsible for creating the website management schedule and pulling together the departments necessary to keep the website running smoothly. If you don’t have a website manager, take a look at your organization’s structure and identify the team or individual that makes the most sense to facilitate website management.
5. Test, test, test.
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Hunches and generic best practices will only get you so far — testing will clarify what specifically works for your organization and users. Leverage testing and analytics tools that allow you to investigate how different features and functions perform across your website. Use A/B testing to compare different landing pages and buttons and use user testing sites like UserTesting to see how users are interacting with your site as a whole.
6. Leverage design as a conversion tool.
Website management means testing, looking at results, and making changes. If your website isn’t converting to the degree you want it to, pay attention to which elements users aren’t engaging with. Bad user experience corrodes brand image and reputation. Users respond poorly to terrible element experience — 75% of online users base credibility judgments off of visuals.
Pro tip: “Make sure your buttons beg to be clicked. Bold, bright, and beautifully designed buttons boost your conversions,” Cox suggests.
7. Use a content management system.
Staying on top of website content isn’t easy — but it’s easier when you leverage a software designed for that purpose. Content management systems like HubSpot Content Hub help you keep track of a lot of the elements of website management, like:
- Generating content.
- A/B testing.
- SEO.
- Analytics.
- Memberships.
Spreadsheets won’t cut it as your website scales, so get a CMS in place to keep track of the pieces of website management.
Final Thoughts
My biggest takeaway from diving into website management is that the topic is broad. And whenever there’s a broad project, there needs to be a project manager. I’m not sure enough organizations recognize the importance of having a website manager (which is probably why websites feel like such difficult beasts to conquer).
Whether you’re running a startup one-pager or an enterprise-level site with hundreds of blog posts, return to the basics of what makes a website great: readability, usability, and reach. I recommend taking a general audit of your site on a quarterly or even annual basis to see where there are opportunities for growth. And once you’ve defined your weaknesses — assign the project to someone to manage.