Website content updates: who should make the changes?

Key takeaways

Website content updates outsourcing suits the steady flow of small changes: new team members, prices, opening hours, case studies, product details and blog posts. A managed content team can make these within days through your CMS. Design and code changes need a developer; you approve wording and facts before anything goes live.

• Routine content changes: a managed team.
• Design, layout and code: a developer.
• You approve wording and facts.
• Review key pages every quarter.

Why do business websites go out of date?

Because updates fall to whoever has time, which is nobody. Staff leave but stay on the team page, prices change but the website does not, and the last blog post is two years old. Visitors read stale content as a sign the business is careless or closed.

• Which business processes should you outsource?
• An abandoned blog on your website: fix, freeze or delete?

Which website updates can a managed team make?

Text and image changes through your content management system: team and contact details, prices and opening hours, product or service descriptions, case studies, news and blog posts, and alt text for images. Keep a simple request form and a turnaround target so changes do not queue for weeks.

• Team, contact and hours.
• Prices and product details.
• Case studies and blog posts.
• Image alt text and captions.

• Website change requests: how fast should updates happen?
• Alt text for business website images: how to write it

What needs a developer or your approval?

New page templates, layout and navigation changes, forms, integrations and anything touching code need a developer. Prices, claims about results, legal pages and anything regulated need your approval before publishing. Agree the approval route once so updates do not stall.

• Website maintenance costs in the UK
• Should you outsource pricing? Why the decision stays in-house

When should website updates stay in-house?

When changes are rare and one person can make them in minutes, or when the content is so specialist that only your experts can write it. Even then, a quarterly review of key pages by someone outside the team catches what insiders stop noticing.

• How much volume makes a process worth outsourcing?
• Does this process win you customers? The differentiation test

What does this look like in practice?

A pattern we see: a list of website changes builds up for months, then gets lost in a redesign project. A small weekly update routine usually removes the need to redesign quite so soon.

• See client work
• Website Design & Development for UK businesses

Website updates checklist

Set these up once.

• One request form for changes.
• Turnaround target for routine updates.
• Approval route for prices and claims.
• CMS access limited to content roles.
• Quarterly review of key pages.

• Marketing processes to outsource, and the ones to keep
• The process selection score: outsource, split or keep?

Next step

Send us the list of website changes you have been meaning to make. We will tell you which a content team could handle this month and which need a developer.