Could I hire someone to manage my website?

You have probably arrived at this question the same way most of our enquiries do. The website has become genuinely important to the business — it is where prospects judge you, where enquiries come from, where your credibility is decided before anyone picks up the phone. And yet, pressed on who looks after it, the honest answer is a vague one: a developer who built it three years ago, an agency on a small monthly fee, the marketing person when she has time. Nobody owns the whole of it. So the obvious fix is to hire someone whose job it is.

It is a good instinct, and we are not going to talk you out of it lightly. But before you write that job spec, it is worth being clear about what you would actually be asking one person to do — because the gap between the job as you imagine it and the job as it really is, is exactly where these hires tend to disappoint.

The instinct is right

Start with what is correct about the impulse, because plenty of it is.

A website with no single owner drifts. We have written before about the four elements of website management — hosting, maintenance, support and content — and how the failures almost always live in the gaps between them, where each supplier assumes another has the part nobody actually has. Putting one named person in charge is a real answer to that problem. Accountability concentrates. There is someone to ask, someone who notices when the certificate is about to lapse, someone whose afternoon is ruined when the contact form fails — which is precisely the kind of person who makes sure it does not.

So the instinct to consolidate ownership is sound. The question is not whether the website needs an owner. It plainly does. The question is whether that owner is best constituted as a single employee, and that is where it gets more interesting.

What you are actually hiring for

Write out what you want this person to handle and a curious thing happens: the list refuses to belong to one profession.

You want them to keep the site fast, secure and up to date — that is a technical, developer-shaped skill. You want them to fix things quickly when they break — support, again technical, and reactive in a way that does not sit neatly alongside planned work. You want them to keep the content fresh, the messaging sharp, the case studies current — that is a writer and a marketer, a completely different temperament. And underneath all of it you want someone who can think about whether the website is actually generating leads, which is a strategist's job, not a maintainer's.

The job spec for 'someone to manage the website' is really four job specs wearing one coat. The difficulty is not finding a person to fill it. It is that the person who is excellent at one of those four jobs is, almost by definition, ordinary at the others.

That is the heart of it. A brilliant developer who can keep your stack patched and your page speed sharp is usually not the person who will write a persuasive services page. A sharp content marketer who keeps the site saying true and current things is not the person you want hand-editing the server configuration at nine on a Friday night. These are different people. The market prices them differently, trains them differently, and they are good at different things. Asking for all four in one hire is asking for a generalist — and a generalist, by construction, is doing four jobs at the level of none of them.

The hire who can do all four

They do exist. There are genuinely a handful of people who can patch a server, write a clean page, diagnose why a form is failing and think strategically about lead generation — all to a real standard. We have met them. If you can find and afford one, hire them; we mean that without irony.

But be honest about the odds. A person with that full spread of skills is senior, expensive, and in demand. They are not applying for a £40k website manager role at a £8m manufacturer — they are running a digital team somewhere, or contracting at day rates that make a salary look quaint. The version of this person you can actually recruit at the budget you have in mind is not the unicorn. It is someone strong in one of the four areas, passable in a second, and frankly out of their depth in the other two — who will, sensibly, sub-contract the parts they cannot do. At which point you are back to the scattered-supplier problem you were hiring them to solve, except now there is a salary on top of it.

And there is the single-point-of-failure problem that no individual hire escapes. The day they are on holiday, the site-down emergency still happens. The fortnight they are off sick, the maintenance does not get done. The morning they hand in their notice, the entire knowledge of how your website works walks toward the door, and you are writing the job spec again — only this time with a recruitment fee and a three-month gap attached.

The maths of a dedicated hire

Suppose you press on anyway. What does the dedicated website manager actually cost?

A capable mid-level person — strong on the technical side, competent on content — lands somewhere around £40k to £50k in most of the UK. By the time you add employer National Insurance, pension and the apprenticeship levy, you are roughly 18 per cent above that before they have done a day's work. Add the recruiter's fee, typically a fifth of salary as a one-off. Add the software they will need on top — the analytics, the SEO platform, the testing and monitoring tools, the design software for content work. Add the three to six months before a new hire is genuinely operating at capacity. The all-in first-year cost of a £45k hire is comfortably north of £70k, and the steady-state cost after that sits around £60k to £65k.

For that money you have bought one person, good at perhaps two of the four jobs, with no cover when they are away and no bench when the work spikes — a rebrand, a migration, a serious SEO push — beyond what that single pair of hands can manage. We have set out the fuller version of this comparison in the honest maths of a retainer versus an in-house hire, and the conclusion holds here in its narrower form. The number on the salary line is not the number you are spending, and the capability it buys is narrower than the job needs.

None of which makes hiring wrong. It makes it a specific choice with specific conditions, and it is worth knowing what they are.

When hiring is the right call

We are honest with people about the cases where a dedicated hire genuinely is the better answer.

The first is scale. If your website is itself a significant operation — a large e-commerce estate, a platform with logged-in users, a site where changes ship weekly and the workload would keep a person busy five days a week — then you are not hiring a generalist to cover four occasional jobs. You are hiring a specialist to run a full-time one, and that is a sound hire. The second is regulation: if you are somewhere the work cannot be sent outside the building — security clearance, certain corners of financial services — then in-house is not a preference, it is a requirement. The third is simply that you know the specific person. If a genuinely capable individual you trust is available and wants the role, the general odds stop mattering. Hire the person you know over the spec you imagined.

Outside those cases, though, the four-jobs-in-one-coat problem reasserts itself, and the better answer is usually not an answer with a single name on it.

The shape that usually works

The pattern we see succeed, over years rather than months, keeps the thing the instinct got right — one clear owner — without pretending one person holds all four skills.

It looks like a team standing behind a single point of contact. The hosting sits on appropriate infrastructure, watched by people who do that for a living. The maintenance runs on a schedule, tested on a staging copy before it reaches your visitors, done by someone who patches sites all week and recognises trouble early. Support has a written response time, so a site-down Tuesday is treated differently from a misaligned button. And the content is owned by a marketer who keeps the site true, current and persuasive rather than merely standing. Four different specialists — but coordinated, so that to you it behaves like one owner who answers the phone, not four suppliers each assuming the others have the gap.

That is, frankly, the shape of a marketing retainer as we run it, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But the argument stands independent of who provides it. When you concentrate accountability in one relationship while distributing the actual work across people who are each genuinely good at their part, you get the thing the single hire was reaching for — clear ownership — without the single-point-of-failure, the holiday gap, the narrow skill set, or the salary that buys you two of the four jobs you needed.

Before you write the spec

If you are weighing up the hire, run the decision through these five questions first.

1. Is the workload genuinely full-time? Be honest about whether managing your website is five days of work a week, or one day of work spread thinly enough to look like five.
2. Which of the four jobs is the role really for? Hosting and maintenance, or support, or content and strategy — name the one that matters most, because that is the skill you will actually recruit, and the others are what you will be short on.
3. What happens when they are away? Map the holiday, the sick fortnight, the day they resign. If the honest answer is "the website is unmanaged", you have found the weakness in a single hire.
4. What is the all-in cost, not the salary? On-costs, recruitment, tools, ramp-up. Compare that figure — not the headline salary — against the alternatives.
5. Do you want one person, or one owner? They are not the same thing. You can have a single, accountable point of ownership without it being a single, fallible pair of hands.

If the answers point you toward a hire — the workload is real, the scope is clear, the person is available — then hire, and do it with your eyes open. If they point the other way, you are in the majority, and there is a better-shaped answer waiting.

Either way, it is a decision worth talking through before the job spec is written rather than after the hire has not worked out. If you would like a second opinion on which way your particular case points — including when our honest advice is "hire, don't retain" — that is exactly the kind of conversation we are happy to have — and our six-question fit check is a good place to start. Thirty minutes, no pitch deck: hello@ninestones.co.uk.