Who owns the website in a large firm?
In most large firms, everyone has an opinion about the website and nobody owns it. Clear ownership — of the platform, the sections and the standards — is what keeps it accurate and useful.
Ask a room of people at a large professional-services firm who owns the website, and you'll often get several answers. Marketing runs it. IT hosts it. Each practice group writes its own pages. Leadership approves big changes. Recruiting manages careers. Business development wants projects added.
All of them are right, which is the problem. When everyone owns part of the website and nobody owns the whole, it drifts: pages go stale, sections contradict each other and nobody is sure who can fix what.
Separate the kinds of ownership
It helps to recognize that "owning the website" is really several different jobs:
- Platform ownership — the technology, hosting, security and performance.
- Experience ownership — the structure, navigation, design system and standards that make the site coherent.
- Content ownership — the accuracy and freshness of specific sections and pages.
- Strategic ownership — deciding what the website is for and how success is measured.
These can sit with different people or teams. What matters is that each one sits with someone, by name.
A website without clear owners doesn't stay neutral. It slowly becomes out of date.
Marketing should own the experience
In my view, marketing is the natural owner of the overall experience: the architecture, templates, voice, standards and measurement. That's where the view across audiences, channels and goals lives. It's also where the responsibility for consistency belongs.
That doesn't mean marketing writes everything. It means marketing designs the system everyone else contributes to.
Subject-matter experts should own their substance
The people who do the work know it best. Practice leaders and experts are the right owners for the accuracy of their service and market pages, with marketing supporting them on structure, clarity and search. A named owner and a review cadence — say, twice a year — keep those pages honest.
Make ownership visible
Ownership only works if people know about it. A simple register listing each section, its owner, its last review date and its next review date turns an abstract principle into something you can manage. It also makes it easy to spot orphaned pages.
Governance that helps, not hinders
The goal of governance isn't more approvals. It's making good contributions easy and bad ones unlikely: clear templates, simple guidance, a quick path to publish routine updates and a thoughtful review for bigger changes. Too much process and people stop contributing; too little and quality slips.
I've written before that a website transformation is an operating change, not a redesign. Ownership is the heart of that operating change.
Measure what matters to owners
Owners care about their sections when they can see how those sections perform. Sharing simple, relevant metrics — visits to their service pages, inquiries, time on project stories — connects the website to their goals and keeps them engaged. It's the same principle as measuring so leaders can act.
Start with a conversation
If ownership at your firm is unclear, start by mapping it: every section, who currently maintains it, and who should. The conversations that follow are often the most useful website work you'll do all year.
Sources and further reading
- Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
- GOV.UK, Content design: planning, writing and managing content
- W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, WCAG overview