Website maintenance keeps it running. Who keeps it useful?

You can have a well-maintained website, good suppliers and plenty of activity around it, and still end up making too many of the decisions yourself.

Should we improve the SEO? Rewrite the services pages? Change the navigation? Build a landing page? Get the developer involved? Is this something for the marketing agency? Do we need to redesign it?

If you’re the person those questions eventually come back to, you’re already doing part of the job of looking after the website. The problem is that you’ve got a business to run as well.

Most website suppliers improve parts of the website. Website Stewardship helps decide which parts are worth improving in the first place.

It gives established businesses an experienced outside view of their website. The job isn’t to generate a constant stream of improvements. It’s to work out what matters, challenge assumptions and help make sure time and budget go into the right work.

The problem isn’t an untidy website

The cost of getting this wrong isn’t a few old pages or a navigation that could be better.

It’s wasted budget, slower sales conversations, confused prospects and management time disappearing into decisions that shouldn’t need this much attention.

Perhaps sales keep explaining something the website should make clear. Marketing is paying to send people to a page that doesn’t quite support the campaign. An agency is improving search performance on a service that isn’t strategically important any more.

Individually, none of these looks particularly serious. Together, they can mean a lot of people doing perfectly competent work without anyone asking whether it’s the right work.

That’s the gap Website Stewardship is intended to fill.

Sometimes the obvious problem isn’t the problem

I saw this with Locale.

I’d already worked on its rebrand and website, so this wasn’t an independent stewardship engagement. But the ongoing relationship meant I could look beyond individual requests and consider what the site needed as the business developed.

Search was one area we wanted to improve. The obvious response would have been to keep optimising the existing product pages.

But the problem wasn’t simply optimisation. People were searching around specific needs and solutions while much of the website was organised around broader product and feature descriptions.

So the work changed. We restructured key content around customer intent and created dedicated pages for areas including Visitor Management, Amenity Booking, Room Booking, Desk Booking and Mailroom Management.

Average Google search position subsequently improved from around 24 to 11, while daily organic impressions roughly doubled. Several of the new and reworked pages also gained first-page positions for relevant non-branded searches.

The important decision came before the SEO work: recognising that improving the existing pages wasn’t enough.

Read the Locale case study.

You may already have someone doing this

If you have someone with the time, authority and experience to keep a clear view of what the website needs, you probably don’t need Website Stewardship.

A marketing director or digital lead may already do it. A good agency may take enough responsibility for the wider picture that the gap doesn’t exist.

But there are plenty of businesses in between. The website matters and several people may contribute to it, but there’s nobody internally whose job is to keep the whole thing pointed in the right direction.

So those decisions work their way back to the owner, managing director or another senior person.

That’s the situation I’m interested in.

Do you have this gap?

You probably don’t need another website service just because some of these sound familiar. But together they’re a useful indication that nobody quite owns the wider view.

• Website decisions regularly end up back with you.
• Several suppliers or people contribute, but nobody looks across all of their work.
• You have plenty of ideas for improvements but no clear way to prioritise them.
• Sales or marketing regularly work around things the website doesn’t do well.
• The business has changed faster than the website has.

If most of those sound familiar, the problem may not be a lack of activity. It may be deciding where that activity should go.

What you’re actually getting

The point isn’t to add another person to the supplier list. It’s to reduce the amount of website thinking that has to start with you.

In practice, that means:

• a clear view of the website’s current priorities
• regular review of what has changed and what the evidence is showing
• input before committing to significant website work
• clear recommendations about what should happen next, and why
• coordination with existing agencies and specialists where useful
• an ongoing view of what matters, what can wait and what isn’t worth doing

The result should be clearer priorities, fewer unnecessary projects and better use of the people and budget you already have. It should also mean fewer website decisions landing on your desk without enough information to make them.

Maintenance is still important

None of this replaces technical maintenance, SEO, development or marketing. Those jobs still need doing.

Website Stewardship asks a different question: given what the business needs now, where is our attention best spent?

An SEO agency might see falling rankings and recommend rewriting a service page. Your developer might think the page itself could work harder. Marketing might want a better landing page.

All could be right. But if that service has become less important, or customers now buy it as part of something else, improving the page might be competent work on the wrong problem.

Someone needs to ask that question before the work starts.

How it works

I start by understanding what the business needs from the website and how well the current site supports it.

That includes the website and the available evidence, but also what happens around it. What does sales keep having to explain? What is marketing trying to achieve? What has changed in the offer? Where are prospects getting stuck?

The first useful output isn’t a giant audit. It’s a clear set of priorities: what matters, why it matters and what I think should happen next.

From there, we keep that view current. New requests can be considered in context, evidence can change the priorities and larger pieces of work can be understood before money is committed to them.

Sometimes that leads to changes. Sometimes it stops work that doesn’t need doing.

You’re not paying for a stream of recommendations. You’re paying for someone whose job is to keep asking whether the website is helping the business in the way it should.

What if I recommend work I can also deliver?

There’s an obvious conflict if the person recommending work benefits from recommending more of it.

So the recommendation comes first.

I work across strategy, UX, design, content and development, and sometimes it makes sense for me to take something forward. But if your existing developer, SEO specialist or agency is better placed to do it, they should.

If something substantial needs me to deliver it, that’s a separate piece of work with its own scope. You can decide whether I’m the right person to do it.

That separation matters. I need to be able to tell you that something doesn’t need doing, even when it’s work I could have charged you to do.

Someone still needs to make the business decisions

Website Stewardship doesn’t mean handing control of the website to me.

You still decide what the business is trying to achieve, what you’re prepared to spend and whether a recommendation goes ahead.

My job is to make those decisions easier: understand the context, investigate the problem, challenge the obvious answer where necessary and give you a clear recommendation.

You shouldn’t have to become an SEO specialist, UX designer or technical lead just to work out what question to ask next.

Who keeps the website useful?

I’ve written separately about what a good business website should actually do: help the right people find you, understand what you offer, decide whether it’s relevant and take the next step, while making things easier inside the business rather than creating more work.

Technical maintenance keeps that website running. But the business changes, customers change and priorities shift. What made sense two years ago might not make sense now.

Most established businesses already have people maintaining, improving and promoting their website. What they’re often missing is somebody responsible for stepping back and asking whether it’s the right work.

If you’ve become the person joining those dots, Website Stewardship may be the role you’re trying to fill.