Who Should Actually Be Updating Your Website?

The honest answer is: whoever will actually do it. Not whoever is most qualified — whoever will still be doing it eight months from now, on a Tuesday afternoon in your busy season, when your holiday hours need changing today rather than next week.

There are only four real options: you, someone who works for you, a freelancer or agency, or a care plan. Which is right depends less on your budget than on two things — how often your website needs to change, and how much it hurts when it doesn’t. Here’s the honest version of each, plus the failure mode that catches more small businesses than the rest combined.

Option one: you

Nobody knows what your website should say better than you do. If your site is on a builder with a drag-and-drop editor, you’re reasonably comfortable with a computer, and you don’t mind poking at it, this is a genuinely good answer. It’s free, it’s instant, and there’s no one to wait for.

The catch isn’t skill, it’s calendar. Website updates are never urgent until they’re overdue. You’ll do it Sunday, then Sunday is gone, then it’s March and the page still advertises a January special. And the jobs you do rarely cost the most time — twenty minutes finding the login before two minutes changing the price.

One thing worth doing before you go this route: find out how to undo. Check whether your platform keeps version history or backups, and how to roll back. Most owners look for that only after they’ve broken something.

Option two: someone who works for you

The office manager, the front-desk person, the one employee who is vaguely good with computers. This is what most small businesses drift into, and it’s cheap in the obvious sense: you’re already paying them.

It’s not free, though, and the costs show up sideways. It isn’t their actual job, so it competes with the work you hired them for. They’re often nervous about breaking something, so changes get delayed or done half-heartedly. Quality drifts — a banner that doesn’t quite match — because nobody set a standard.

And there’s the real problem: when they leave, access often leaves with them. The account is under their email; the password is in a browser on a laptop you handed back. Plenty of businesses find this out the week after a resignation. Make the accounts yours and add them to them — not the other way round.

Option three: a freelancer or an agency

You get actual expertise. Someone who can tell you the change you asked for is a bad idea, who knows why your site is slow, who can build something new rather than edit what’s there. For anything custom — a redesign, a booking system, something that connects to your other software — this is the only right answer on the list.

The trade-off is that small changes fit badly. Most freelancers bill a minimum of half an hour to an hour, typically at $75 to $150 an hour, so a one-line price update can cost you $75. Not because they’re being greedy — opening a project, re-learning how your site was built, editing, testing and publishing genuinely takes that long. It’s just an expensive way to change a phone number.

The other trade-off is availability. One person is one person — they take holidays, get busy with a bigger client, get sick. When your promo needs to go up on Friday and they reply on Monday, there’s nothing you can do. Agencies smooth that out and charge for the smoothing.

Option four: a care plan

A flat monthly fee, usually somewhere between $20 and $100, that covers the boring essentials — hosting, backups, security, someone watching that your site is actually up — plus a number of small changes each month. You describe what you want in plain English and it gets done and republished, usually within minutes.

What you gain is that nothing depends on one person’s calendar, the price doesn’t change when you ask for more, and the safety net is built in rather than remembered. What you give up is hands-on control — you’re describing the change rather than making it, which some owners like and some genuinely don’t.

Be clear on the boundary before signing up for any of them. Care plans cover small changes: text, hours, prices, photos, a promo banner, a new section. Brand-new pages and full redesigns are bigger projects, quoted separately. If what you want is a new website, buy a new website — a maintenance subscription is the wrong tool.

The thing that actually goes wrong: nobody has the login

This is the most common website problem small businesses have, and it has almost nothing to do with technology. The site was built five years ago by a cousin, a former employee, or an agency that has since closed. They set everything up under their own email because it was faster. Now they’ve moved on or stopped replying — and you can’t change your own opening hours.

It feels like a dead end. It usually isn’t. There are three separate accounts involved and you only truly need one of them.

• The domain — your web address itself, held at a registrar like GoDaddy or Namecheap. This is the one that matters. Lose everything else and you can rebuild; lose the domain and customers can’t find you at all.
• The hosting — the space the site lives in. Annoying to replace, but replaceable.
• The site’s own login — the platform admin, if there is one. Useful to have, least essential to own.

Getting back in

1. 1Start with the domain, not the website. Search for a free WHOIS lookup and enter your web address. It’ll tell you which registrar holds your domain — that’s the company whose account you need.
2. 2Try a password reset with every email address your business has ever used: the current one, the old one, the Gmail you set up in a hurry, a former employee’s. Recovery mail goes wherever the account says.
3. 3Search a year or two of card statements for the registrar or hosting company’s name. Whoever’s card pays the bill has a strong claim, and the last four digits are often exactly what support asks for.
4. 4Contact the registrar’s support and ask for account recovery. Every major registrar deals with this constantly. Have your business registration, an invoice and the payment card ready.
5. 5Ask the original builder — politely, in writing. A short, friendly email asking them to transfer the domain and hosting to your account solves this more often than people expect. You need their cooperation more than you need to be right.
6. 6If you truly can’t recover it, you can still rebuild — but chase the domain to the very end first. A new website on your existing address is a project. A new address is starting over.

How to never be locked out again

Whichever of the four you choose, the rules below are the same. They take an afternoon once and save you a fortnight later.

• Own the domain yourself. Registered in your name, in an account you control, paid with your card. Everyone else gets access — you get ownership.
• Use a business email address you’ll keep forever, not a personal one and not an employee’s. Something like admin@yourbusiness.com that survives staff changes.
• Add people as collaborators instead of handing over your password. Most platforms let someone use their own login with permission to work on your site. When they leave, you remove them.
• Keep one page listing your registrar, hosting company, website platform and which email each account uses. Not the passwords — those belong in a password manager. Just the map.
• Check the card on your domain renewal once a year. An expired card on auto-renew is how sites vanish overnight with no warning.
• Ask for a copy of your site occasionally — an export or a backup file. You may never open it. It changes the conversation completely if a relationship sours.

There’s no universally correct answer. If you enjoy it and have the time, do it yourself — you’ll be faster than anyone. If you need something built, hire a good freelancer and pay them properly. If you want the small stuff handled so you can stop thinking about it, that’s what a care plan is for.