Who should manage your website? Your agency, or your marketing team?

Sometimes a website gets locked down for a good reason. Sometimes it gets locked down because no one has revisited the plan since launch, or because it protects someone else’s revenue more than it protects your business. Telling those two things apart is the first step to fixing it.

A marketing manager at a mid-size B2B company recently described a familiar version of this problem: website edits needed to pass through an outside development team. Every landing page change, every small headline edit, even a single word swapped on a call-to-action button, needed to go through the agency as a ticket. That meant an increase in turnaround, taking anywhere from days to weeks, resulting in billing attached to minor copy fixes that were done in minutes (source: Reddit).
Leadership was open to letting the marketing team manage the site directly, until engineering raised the point: the last time someone outside the development team touched the live site, it caused a half-day outage. The team was stuck wanting more control, but not wanting to trade a bottleneck for a performance risk

That tension, control versus stability, comes up constantly with B2B marketers and the other teams who manage company websites. The pertinent question for companies is not whether marketing or engineering should control the website. The question worth answering is: Which specific constraint is actually true for your organization, and what would need to change to empower marketing and in-house teams to have more control?

When Does Restricting Website Access Make Sense?

There are valid reasons why companies constrain who can edit their website to an outside development team. These include:

• Website built on product infrastructure. When the marketing site shares infrastructure, a codebase, or a design system with the core product, a change made in one place can affect the other in ways that are not obvious to someone who does not work in that code every day.
• Strict compliance requirements. Organizations that operate under compliance, security, or accessibility requirements can require clear documentation and review paths for any change to a live, public-facing property.
• Built for a single, technical administrator. If the site was never built with delegation in mind, then templates, layout, and content are tangled together in a way that makes any edit risky. This is typically a result of prioritizing cost and speed to launch over recurring maintenance and ownership. The result is a site locked down because the build never separated what is safe for marketers to touch from what is not.

If one or more of these describes your situation, changing permissions settings for marketers could add legitimate risk. A bigger conversation is worth having about whether the site needs to be rebuilt, or the product and marketing properties need to be separated, before broader access makes sense.

Should your website be managed by your marketing team

Even in situations where a business website is managed by an outside development agency, there can be signs that marketing should have more control. These include:

• Content edits that can reasonably be managed in-house. If an agency is billing for changes that don’t require technical expertise, your marketing team may be able to take on those responsibilities. These include text edits, swapping images, or simple layout edits.
• Turnaround time doesn’t match business needs. When turnaround of change requests is measured in weeks for changes that are quick to implement, this is usually a signal that business needs and your website maintenance scope are not aligned. Bringing more control of the site in-house can expedite the speed of edits without adding new cost.
• The CMS allows for control that the site doesn’t provide. Website content management systems like WordPress are designed to support modular, permission-based editing. If different user roles were never built into the site, that may indicate no one has proposed adding new roles, not a functional constraint of the site.
• Your organization’s needs have changed since launch. Company needs and resources evolve. As marketing matures and moves more in-house, the access and training for the website may simply need to catch up to the new business reality.

These issues don’t point to technical requirements that constrain who is allowed to manage a website. They point to a critical conversation that has not happened yet. Whether that conversation is with an agency that has taken on more than it can service well, or an internal engineering team that has never been asked the question directly, it’s a conversation worth having.

Should An Agency or Your In-House Marketing Team Own Edits To The Website?

Companies tend to solve the problem of site administration in one of three ways, and each comes with a real tradeoff.

Agency-managed websites

Some websites are fully agency-built and agency-managed. Done well, that means real design and development expertise. It ensures the agency is accountable for integrations and security, and provides a dedicated team with the necessary skills and training to manage anything genuinely complex. For websites with robust integration, performance, or compliance requirements, this can help companies spread the cost without adding more headcount to their team. The issues with this approach arise when the company doesn’t have the technical requirements or scope to justify full agency management. This leads to the exact bottlenecks described above: every change waits in a queue, whether or not the change actually needs a developer.

In-house managed websites

Some websites are fully in-house, built and maintained by someone on the company’s marketing team. This gives your in-house marketing team control of edits and management entirely. It also puts the full weight of security, accessibility, integrations, and ongoing platform maintenance on a team that was hired to do marketing, not to run infrastructure. This approach can work well for smaller, simpler sites. It gets harder to sustain as a business’s integrations and compliance needs grow.

Hybrid site management

The approach BNP Engage builds toward is a hybrid of the two. An agency partner handles the initial build and launch that requires technical expertise up front.

This includes:

• Establishing global design elements to ensure the brand is applied to every page template
• Integration setup and testing with CRM, ERP, email, and analytics tagging
• Accessibility, security, and performance best practices built into the site’s theme and templates

The result is a site built for marketing teams to own after launch. That means a marketing team can genuinely manage changes, including creating new pages, editing copy and images, and revising page layouts for areas they touch daily. The site templates, theme, and core code elements still carry real risk if mishandled, so access to those can be tightly controlled and stay with people who do that work full time. When this approach is paired with a workflow to ensure edits are made in a staging environment on a managed hosting platform, the result is lower maintenance costs and higher confidence.

How BNP Engage builds websites

1. Requirement gathering. We plan a site’s architecture around how a client’s marketing team actually works before writing code or building pages.
2. Iterative web design using Elementor. By leveraging WordPress, Elementor page builder, and our CoreUX framework, we build templates that give real control over content while protecting design and layout.
3. Custom development and integrations. Based on site requirements, we build custom site elements focused on site performance and ease of administration. This can include custom headless builds with WordPress-managed content, new page controls or post types for company-specific needs, and anything in between.
4. Web Accessibility compliance built in. Our design and development team includes members certified through the Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies program, so standards are built in from the start rather than treated as a restriction added later.
5. Built for visibility in search and AI. We plan site architecture, optimize content, set up trackable conversion events, and implement redirects to ensure websites launch optimized and findable on search and AI
6. Hosting and maintenance. Once launched, Engage can provide hosting on a secure, managed hosting environment. Maintenance includes a dedicated team and process for updates, testing, and support, so a marketing team is never left guessing what happens after they make a change.

Hybrid site management, where a company and agency partner share responsibility for a website, tends to hold up better over time than either extreme. A fully agency-locked site drifts toward becoming a bottleneck as the business grows. A fully in-house site can drift the other way, resulting in accumulated technical debt, accessibility risk, and security gaps, as marketing teams shift priorities from the website to other initiatives. Splitting the work along the line of what should stay expert-managed and what should be team-owned tends to hold up under both kinds of pressure.

Should your company website management be locked down?

There’s no universal answer to whether a hybrid agency/in-house team site management approach is always best. When a company’s marketing site shares a codebase with its core product, or operates under strict compliance requirements, the site may genuinely need a more locked-down process.

If your company’s marketing site and resources live separately from your core application, it is usually a strong candidate for a hybrid model where in-house marketing teams have more control.

Sterilex, a food safety and sanitation company, was in this exact position: they had a marketing site and blog, not a shared application, and no extreme compliance lockdown driving the original site build. But edits required marketing to know HTML and took hours, not minutes.

BNP Engage rebuilt the site around a clearer content structure and a more intuitive editing experience; agency-managed where it needed to be, team-owned everywhere else. Sterilex told us their marketer’s time spent on website upkeep dropped from the majority of her week to a small fraction, freeing an estimated 24 hours a week that now goes back into marketing work instead of website maintenance. Read the full Sterilex case study.

Questions to ask your website agency

Not sure if your company’s website edits should be managed by your in-house marketing team? Here are a few questions worth bringing to the conversation directly with the agency managing your site:

• Does our site share infrastructure or a codebase with any other systems we run? If so, how does that affect what we can safely manage ourselves?
• Can our team edit the pages we need to without a developer? If not, what would need to change so that we could?
• Is there a tested, staged process for bigger changes, so an update does not risk taking the live site down?
• Which parts of the site need to stay protected? Which elements of the site’s code and theme control design, integrations, compliance sensitive code? Which elements just control copy, images, and layout choices inside existing components?
• If our needs have changed since launch, when did we last revisit whether the site still fits how we work?

Some of those answers will point to a real constraint worth respecting. Others will point to an old assumption worth revisiting. A good agency should be able to answer all five questions clearly, and a great one will have already asked itself the same questions before you did.

If you want a second opinion on which category your website situation falls into, we are glad to help you think it through.

Find Out What Your Marketing Team Should Control