Who Is Responsible for Website Maintenance in a Company?

In most small companies the honest answer is nobody, and nobody is not a person who can be asked why the backup stopped running. Website maintenance falls between roles: too technical for marketing, too small for IT, too ongoing for the agency that built the site, and too invisible for anyone to notice it has been dropped.

This article is about fixing that gap with names rather than intentions. Before you can assign the work you need to know what it is, so if that is not settled yet, start with what the work involves and then the task-by-task version in the task-by-task breakdown.

The Four Candidates, and What Each One Actually Covers

Four parties are usually involved in a website’s life. Each of them covers a real part of the job and none of them covers all of it, which is precisely how work goes missing.

Read that right-hand column again. Nothing in it is covered by anybody in the table. That column is the maintenance gap, and it is where a site quietly deteriorates while four parties each reasonably assume it belongs to one of the others.

Why “The Agency Who Built It” Is the Most Expensive Assumption

This is the single most common misunderstanding we meet, and it is understandable. You paid them to build the site, they know it better than anyone, and they are the people you would call if something went wrong.

But a build contract ends at handover. Unless you signed a retainer, the agency has no obligation to apply next month’s security patch and no reason to know your certificate is expiring. Many will help when you call, and they should. That is a favor with a delay attached, not a maintenance arrangement, and it fails in exactly the case that matters most: the silent failure nobody calls about, because nobody knows.

If your site was built by an agency and you do not have a retainer in writing, then maintenance is currently unowned. That is not an accusation of anybody. It is just a fact worth establishing today rather than in an emergency.

A Simple Responsibility Matrix

The fix is not a new hire. It is deciding, once, who is accountable for each group of tasks, and writing it down where somebody will find it. Accountable means one name, not a department.

Two rows in that table deliberately say “personally”. Domain renewal and the hosting account should never be owned by an employee’s personal email or a departed contractor’s credit card. Those are the two failures that take a whole site off the internet with no technical fault at all, and they are entirely preventable by knowing who holds them.

The Three Questions That Expose the Gap

You can find out whether maintenance is owned at your company in about five minutes. Ask these of whoever you think owns it, and listen for a name and a date rather than a reassurance.

• Where is our most recent backup, and when did somebody last restore it successfully? “The host does backups” is not an answer to either half.
• Who is told if the site goes down at 2am on a Sunday? If the answer is a person who would only find out by visiting the site, nothing is monitoring it.
• When did somebody last submit our own contact form and confirm it arrived? This is the one that most often produces silence, and it is the one that costs the most.

If those three come back without names and dates, the work is unowned. What that leads to is set out in what happens if you do not maintain your website.

In-House, Agency or Provider

Once you know the work is unowned, there are three ways to own it, and the right answer depends on size rather than on principle.

In-house works when somebody genuinely has the time and the discipline, and when there is a second person who could step in. One capable person doing it around their real job is a single point of failure, and the failure mode is a quiet lapse during a busy quarter rather than a dramatic mistake.

Your build agency on a retainer works when they offer one and it is specific about scope. The advantage is that they know the site. The thing to check is whether maintenance is a service they run properly or a courtesy attached to a development relationship.

A dedicated maintenance provider works when you want it to be somebody’s actual job, with a schedule and a report you can audit. The thing to check is whether the report contains numbers or only green ticks.

Whichever you pick, the deliverable that proves it is owned is the same: a monthly report with dates in it. Ours is described on the work process page, and what is in each plan is on the plans page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where to Start

Copy the matrix above into a document, put real names in the accountable column, and circulate it. Most of the value is in the exercise: the empty rows are the work nobody is doing, and they are usually the same rows everybody assumed somebody else had.

If you would rather see the current state of your site before deciding who owns what, ask us to look at it. We will tell you what is monitored, what is backed up and what is not, which is a much easier conversation to have with facts in it.