Who can manage my website for me?

The question is usually asked at a specific moment: something needs changing, the person who built the site is not replying, and it becomes clear that nobody is actually responsible for it.

There are four realistic answers, and the right one depends less on budget than on how often you will need something and how much you mind waiting.

A freelancer

Good for: occasional changes, a business with a simple site and a patient owner.

A capable freelance developer or designer, paid by the hour or by the job. Usually the cheapest per change and often the best value, because you pay for work rather than availability.

The catch is availability. Freelancers get busy, take holidays, take a full-time job. The arrangement works beautifully until the week you need something urgently and they are on a three-week project for someone else. That is not unprofessional, it is the nature of one person.

Ask: what is your usual turnaround, what happens when you are away, and who has access if you are not reachable.

A small agency, monthly

Good for: businesses that want to stop thinking about it.

A fixed monthly fee covering hosting, the domain, certificates, updates and a reasonable amount of change work. More expensive per change than a freelancer, cheaper than being down for a week.

What you are actually buying is response, not labour. Most months there is very little to do. You are paying so that the month there is something to do, it gets done without a negotiation.

Ask: what is included before anything becomes chargeable, what your response time is, and who specifically will be replying. "The support team" tends to mean whoever is free.

The platform's own support

Good for: anyone on Squarespace, Wix, Shopify and similar who is happy to do the editing themselves.

The platform keeps the site online, handles security, and answers questions about how to use it. It costs very little.

What it will not do is make the change for you. It will explain how you can. For a lot of owners that is the difference between the price on the website and the actual outcome, because the change never gets made.

In-house

Good for: businesses large enough that someone already spends real time on this.

Someone on the team who owns the site. Fine when the site is genuinely part of somebody's job. Risky when it is nobody's job but has been given to whoever is most comfortable with computers, because it drifts to the bottom of their list and then they leave.

The questions that actually matter

Whoever you pick, four questions predict how this goes.

1. Is the domain in my name? If not, fix it before anything else. Everything else on this list is recoverable. This one can leave you unable to use your own web address. See who owns my website and domain.

2. Do I have the logins? Hosting, registrar, Google Business Profile. Administrator access, held by you, from day one.

3. What is the response time, in writing? "Two working days" is a commitment. "As soon as we can" is not.

4. Who answers when the usual person is away? For a sole freelancer the honest answer is nobody, which is fine if you know it.

What this is really insuring against

Not a hacked website. Not a server outage. Those are rare.

The realistic failure is much duller: your prices change, you take on someone new, you move premises, and the site slowly stops being true, because every change requires chasing someone who does not reply. Eighteen months later your website describes a business you no longer run, and it has been quietly costing you enquiries the whole time.

That is what management is for. Not emergencies, currency. Which is why the right test is not "are they good", but "will they answer in year two", and the only reliable way to make that likely is a standing arrangement with a named person and a stated turnaround.

It is also why our own monthly fee includes changes done for you rather than a self-service editor. The bottleneck for a busy owner has never been the editing tool. It is finding the evening to use it. If you want the detail of what a fee like that should cover, website maintenance, honestly sets it out.