“Can I update my own website, or do I have to pay someone every time?” This question often comes up once a site goes live, usually when a price changes or a phone number turns out to be wrong. The short answer is yes, but what you can edit and whether you should takes some consideration.
Editing your content is a job you can almost always take on yourself. Changing a price, swapping a photo, fixing a typo, or publishing a new post doesn’t need a developer, and waiting on one to change a single sentence can cost more than the edit itself.
Maintaining the software underneath is a much more complicated task. This includes the updates, backups, security monitoring, and renewals that keep a site secure, fast, and working. It’s easy to ignore until something breaks.
How hard each job is depends on how your site is built. A site you run from a dashboard, one that pulls its content from a separate editor, one built with a framework, and one coded by hand all handle editing and upkeep differently. This is the first of three posts. This one covers how your site’s build shapes what you can edit and which changes you can safely take on yourself. The next two cover where doing it yourself gets risky, and what to do when something breaks.
Start With How Your Site Is Built
The way your site is built decides how much of it you can change yourself, and how much upkeep it needs. Two sites that look identical to visitors can ask very different things of their owners, and the difference only shows up when you try to edit one or when something goes wrong.
Most small business sites fall into one of four types.
- An all-in-one content management system (CMS). A CMS is software that lets you edit a site from a dashboard in your browser, with no code involved. WordPress is the best known, and newer ones like EmDash are rebuilding the same idea with modern tools. Editing is the easiest of the four, and the software behind it, including themes and plugins, is what needs the most upkeep.
- A site with a separate content editor. In this setup, often called a headless CMS, the editing screen lives separately from the site visitors see. Tools like Sanity, Contentful, and Strapi work this way. You edit in a friendly screen, and the site updates from it. Editing stays simple, but there are two systems to keep running instead of one.
- A site built with a framework. Frameworks like Astro, Eleventy, and Hugo are tools that assemble pages from templates and content files. A typical one publishes finished pages as plain files, so there’s no public login page or plugin ecosystem to attack, and the main upkeep is updating the code libraries the framework relies on. Content edits happen in the files themselves, so they usually go through a developer or a connected editor.
- A hand-coded site. These are built page by page in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, sometimes with a tool like React. A small one has almost nothing to patch, but every edit, including a new blog post, means changing the code, and anything repeated across pages has to be changed in each place. Sites that use React also depend on code packages that need occasional updates.
Features change the upkeep. The low maintenance of a files-based site only lasts while it stays simple. Online stores, booking, member logins, and anything else that stores customer data or runs on a server bring maintenance back, and those parts need the same attention a CMS does. When an outside service handles the feature, such as a payment or scheduling provider, much of that work shifts to the provider, though the connection to your site still needs checking.
You don’t need to memorize the tools. You need to know two things about yours. How do you edit it, and what has to be kept up to date? Those two answers set how much of the rest of this series applies to you, and whoever built your site can answer both in a minute or two.
Take the Updates You Can Handle Yourself
Most of the changes a site needs from week to week are content, and content is the part you can own. Prices change, hours shift, a new service gets added, and a photo goes out of date. When you make those changes yourself, the site is accurate on the day the facts change instead of whenever a request gets picked up.
Start with the changes that come up most.
- Change the words and prices. Text edits are the easiest win on any site. On an all-in-one CMS you click the text and then type, and on a headless setup you change it in the editing screen. On a files-based or hand-coded site, a text change usually goes through whoever built it, or through an editor they’ve connected to the site.
- Swap photos, and keep the files small. Oversized images are a common reason pages load slowly, so resize a photo before you upload it.
- Publish new posts and pages. A new post is the same job as any other edit, and it’s how a site keeps answering customer questions. The case for it is in Does Your Small Business Actually Need a Blog?.
- Use an account that can only edit content. Many CMSes let you create roles, and an Editor role can change content without reaching the settings that could break the site. Other setups have a similar split, with content edits in your hands and the code left to the developer.
- Ask for a walkthrough before handover. Have whoever built the site show you each change you’ll be making, on your own site, so the first time you try it isn’t also the first time you’ve seen it.
Watching your numbers is part of owning the site. Traffic stats usually aren’t built into the platform. They come from a separate analytics tool, such as Google Analytics or Search Console, and some CMSes can show them inside the editing screen through add-ons.
A few minutes each month is enough to notice what matters: a page that stopped getting visits, a spike after a new post, a contact form that no longer delivers messages. Sending yourself a test message through your own form is part of that check, and the form can fail with no error on the page.
A site you’re comfortable editing is a site that stays current. Coming back after a few months away feels rusty on any system, but how to edit a page rarely changes much. A quick refresher from whoever built it gets you back up to speed.
Editing is the easy half. The harder half is the software underneath, and that’s where the next post picks up.