Who should be responsible for updating our website?
The short answer
One named person, with a short recurring checklist. The most common arrangement — everyone can ask, nobody owns it — is why most small business sites drift out of date. It takes about ten minutes a quarter plus a check before every public holiday, and the person who does it should be able to make the change themselves rather than requesting it.
On this page
The arrangement that fails
In most small businesses the website is owned by everyone, which means nobody.
The manager assumes the owner handles it. The owner assumes the developer does. The developer waits to be asked. Nobody is neglecting anything — there is simply no point at which someone is responsible for noticing that the hours are wrong.
So the hours stay wrong until a customer arrives at a locked door and mentions it.
What ownership actually requires
Three things, and the third is the one usually missing:
A named person. Not a role, a person. "The manager" is a job title; "Layla" checks the website.
A short recurring trigger. Not "when needed" — that never arrives. Before every public holiday, at the start of each season, and after any price change.
The ability to make the change. This is the part that decides whether the first two matter. If your named person has to email someone and wait two days, they will weigh it up each time, and small corrections will lose that calculation permanently.
Ownership without the ability to act is just someone to blame later.
The checklist, in full
Ten minutes, four times a year:
- Opening hours, including the next public holiday
- Prices, against what you actually charge today
- The menu or service list — anything discontinued, anything new
- Phone number and address, matching your Google listing exactly
- Staff, if you name them
- Any seasonal notice that should have come down
- The contact form — send a real test and confirm it arrives
That last one catches a silent failure that costs more than everything else combined. Forms stop delivering without any visible sign, and businesses discover it weeks later, having lost every enquiry in between.
Before every public holiday
The single highest-value habit, and it takes two minutes.
A wrong holiday opening time is the worst error a small business website can make, because the failure is total: somebody travels to you and finds a locked door. That is worse than having no website — you converted an interested customer into a bad experience, and often a review.
Put the next public holiday in a calendar with a reminder a week before. That one recurring event prevents most of the damage this article is about.
When it should be a developer
Some changes genuinely need one, and it is worth being clear so the boundary does not become an argument:
You: words, prices, images, hours, menu items, staff, seasonal notices.
A developer: new page types, layout and structure, integrations, anything that changes how the site is built.
If that first list is not something you can do yourself, that is the thing to fix — not the diligence of whoever was supposed to be checking.
Making the first list possible
Everything above depends on your named person being able to make the change rather than request it. That is not a discipline problem, it is a tooling one.
It is also what Helm does: the things that change often — hours, prices, menu items, staff, seasonal notices — sit in a dashboard, so the person who owns the checklist can actually complete it in the ten minutes it should take.
The test
How long would it take your named person to correct one price, right now?
Under a minute, and your site will stay current. If the answer involves emailing anyone, the site is already out of date, and no amount of ownership or discipline will change that. The process is the problem, not the person.