There’s a common pattern I see with small businesses and institutions: the website works fine until it doesn’t, someone calls a developer to fix it, the bill comes in, and three months later the cycle repeats.
That’s not a development problem. That’s a maintenance problem — and there’s a different solution for it.
A developer builds things. A webmaster keeps them running. Here are five signs you need the second one.
1. You’re paying for one-off fixes every few months
If your relationship with a web professional is “something breaks → I call someone → I get a bill,” you’re paying premium rates for reactive work. A webmaster handles updates, catches issues before they break anything, and keeps your site from becoming a series of emergencies.
2. Your plugins or CMS haven’t been updated in over six months
Outdated plugins are one of the most common entry points for security problems. If nobody is watching your site regularly, nobody is catching this. It’s not dramatic until it is.
3. You have no idea how fast your site loads
Page speed affects search rankings, bounce rates, and how professional your organization looks. If you’ve never run a performance audit — or the last one was years ago — there’s almost certainly something slowing you down that nobody has fixed.
4. Making a simple update requires coordinating with multiple people
If updating a phone number or swapping a banner image takes an email chain, a Zoom call, and three days of waiting, your web operations are not set up to support your organization. A webmaster owns that process so you don’t have to.
5. Your website doesn’t match how your organization has grown
Old pages, outdated bios, services you no longer offer, broken links to things that moved — this is what happens when a website is built and then left alone. It’s not a redesign problem. It’s a “someone needs to own this” problem.
The difference in practice
A developer you call when something breaks will fix what’s broken. A webmaster will fix it, figure out why it broke, and make sure it doesn’t happen again. They’ll also notice the three other things that were about to break while they were in there.
For most small and mid-size organizations, ongoing web support costs less per month than a single emergency development call — and it means you stop having emergencies.
If any of these signs look familiar, let’s talk. I work with small businesses and institutions that need a dedicated web person without the overhead of a full-time hire. Send me a message →