Do you know who controls your website?

When it comes to your marketing and the overall success of your business, your website is probably your most valuable asset- but do you know who’s really in control of your site?

It’s a simple enough question, but one that too few businesses have an answer to.

Throughout our years of delivering digital marketing, we’ve seen time and again new clients who think they’re in control, only to find out too far down the line that they aren’t. The process of fixing the problem can then become time-consuming, costly, and damaging to the growth of their business. 

What does having control mean?

If you have full control over your website, you’ll own your own domain, hosting account and have access to your site’s admin. 

This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to manage the development, day-to-day running or maintenance of your site. You can leave that to your developer, marketing agency or IT support team with the assurance that if you want its management to change hands or move in-house, it’s an easy process. 

This may all sound pretty standard, but if you’ve outsourced your site build, ownership isn’t always straightforward, which isn’t ideal if you choose to take it in-house or the relationship with the third party breaks down. But there’s more to having full control than just having accessibility- it’s also about what you do with your site when you have access.

In this article, we’ve highlighted some of the benefits of having control over your websites and why it should be a priority within your business. 

What are the benefits of controlling your own website?

1. You won’t get locked out

Imagine waking up one day and no longer having control over your website. Not being able to update your site or keep up with its maintenance could be detrimental to your business. Your Google rankings can plunge significantly, and if you manage to recover it, it could take months or even years to get back to where you were in terms of your progress with SEO.

This may sound extreme, but we’ve seen it happen more than once. If you don’t control where your site is hosted, and you’ve left it under the authority of your developer or agency, it could be at risk.

Having control over your site is an easy way to mitigate this unnecessary risk and provide you with peace of mind. 

2. Automatic security checks

Site security is one of those things that many businesses leave at the bottom of their priority list, but it’s crucial that you’re able to act fast when your site is at risk.

Security breaches are a common occurrence. One small business in the UK gets successfully hacked every 19 seconds, so it’s not something you should neglect.

Your site should have automatic security checks in place, and if you have full control over your site, you’ll be able to react immediately when you receive an alert. This means you’ll find out about a breach before your customers do, and you can fix it before any reputational damage is done. 

If your security is compromised, having the right kind of hosting will mean that your website is automatically backed up, and you should be able to quickly restore your site without needing any technical expertise. 

3. It’s legally very clear who the website belongs to

We believe that your site should be fully your own. Even if you’re outsourcing your site maintenance or management, no one can dispute who the site belongs to when you’re in full control.

If your site is set up on a hosting account that you don’t have access to or under a domain that isn’t your own, there’s nothing stopping you from being locked out and having to start from scratch. If you do find yourself in this predicament, you can find out what it takes to recover your site here.   

4. It’s easy to edit your website’s content

Have you ever spotted a typo on your own website? You won’t be the only one.

Typos and grammatical errors can easily be missed on a big site, so being able to make quick edits when you spot them is important for your SEO as well as maintaining credibility. 

When you have access to your site, it takes only a moment to log in to admin, access the page you want to edit and save any changes. It’s easy, convenient, and you don’t need to wait or pay for someone else to do it on your behalf. 

5. You can add and delete pages

To build your Google rankings, you’ll need to add new pages, and in some cases, delete old ones from your site. When you have control over your site, it couldn’t be easier to do this yourself.  

Businesses evolve at an incredible rate these days, so it’s important that you’re able to add new products and services as well as deleting those that are obsolete. This keeps your content relevant and ensures your site can grow and adapt along with your business. 

6. Do your own SEO

When you have control over your website, it’s easy to upload new content and, with the assistance of handy Yoast plugins available on WordPress sites, you can optimise it so that it falls in line with the best practices for Google’s algorithm. 

If you haven’t done it before, SEO might seem like an alien task, but for the most part, it’s not as difficult as you think- and we can easily show you how it works during a digital marketing coaching session.

This means that, as you get into the routine of regularly adding new optimised content and updating older content, you should begin to see your search engine rankings improve over time. 

7. It lowers the cost

One of the biggest appeals of having control over your website is that it keeps costs down. After all, why pay through the nose for tasks that would only take a second to complete yourself? 

As well as being able to make simple alterations on your site yourself, there are other ways to lower costs while improving the reach and visibility of your business online. 

Free tools available on some hosting platforms can increase your site’s speed by communicating faster with the server (improving SEO), while others enable copies of your site’s pages to be held locally in other countries, making international trade quicker and easier. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, having control over your website means peace of mind for your business and being able to respond quickly to changes in both digital marketing and your competitive environment- so if you’ve outsourced your website development or management, it’s well worth your time to figure out who has ultimate control over your site. 

At KUB, we ensure all of our clients stay in full control of their websites and, on an increasingly common basis, are helping clients who have been ‘burnt’ in the past by a developer to recover control.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that when you have full authority over your site, keeping on top of updates, maintenance and security can be a full-time job on its own. If you don’t have the time to manage it yourself like so few business owners do, outsourcing it to someone you can trust who is happy for it to stay under your control is what we’d recommend. 

If you’re a business owner, we have created the essential 72 marketing questions you should be asking for growing a business.

If you want help to recover control of your site or need help with its maintenance, we can help. Click here to get in touch.