Website Management For Small Businesses: A Complete Guide

As small and medium business owners have realized since the physical world shut down in 2020, a digital presence is necessary for most businesses to survive today. In a nationwide (US) survey by The Zebra the following year, 19.6% of respondents cited strong competition as the reason behind their businesses closing, and only 37.4% had a company website.

We can infer from these findings that having a website is of utmost importance for small and medium businesses. However, creating a website is not the end-all solution for a small business owner to beat the ever-increasing competition in the SME sector – you’ll have to maintain and optimize it to realize its full potential.

In this blog, we have compiled a guide that any SME owner can refer to get more insight into their website management needs. Read on if you want to find out the best tools, tricks, and principles to make website management of your small business less of a hassle.

Why Websites Have Become a Necessity

As our communications networks have improved to the point where the internet can be accessed almost anywhere on the Earth, information has become commoditized. Consider smartphones, which constitute over 97% of Google’s searches in the hands of a huge population – and the first platform to promote a business.

That is why websites, that can be scaled to load smoothly and provide a solution for the customer and yourself are of utmost importance.

There are other ways for a small business to reach customers through the Internet too, such as:

• Google My Business Profile
• Social Media
• PR
• Partnerships with other companies.

However, a website can tie all of these up with a little bow and act as a testing platform for marketing strategy and customer research. That’s on top of becoming another sales funnel.

What is Website Management?

As a small business owner, you might have hired a freelancer or asked someone from your tech team to build you a company website. But as you get started with the website, many other things that need your attention come into focus.

All of the things that you need to get off the ground to have a working website are listed in the table below, along with their average cost estimates:

All of these services that we mentioned are not only needed to get your website up and running but also require regular maintenance (at least once a year).

That is on top of paying an in-house website manager around $4000 a month, to oversee these tasks. This is another reason why most businesses choose to outsource their website management.

Components in a Website and How They Are Managed

While we have provided the main components of a website that require regular management, we have not gone into how they work and how they must be maintained to ensure that they keep working as intended. This section focuses solely on answering these two questions.

Domain Name

Domain names refer to the address of your website, which you have to buy from domain name providers like GoDaddy. As this appears in the URL of your website, it is one of the most important prerequisites to having a business website.

Hence, domain names have to be bought, and their cost varies depending on how much the name in question is in demand. You only have to pay a fee once a year to renew your domain name or someone else could purchase it and force you to find a new one.

SSL Certificate

An SSL certificate is a digital file that encrypts traffic to and from your site, protecting your business’s and customers’ data. Since your website might involve online transactions, a free SSL certificate might not cut your security needs. A paid license will cost between $8 –  $80 or more, depending on whether you need enterprise-grade security or not.

A website manager can take care of the whole process, which when completed, gives your site a secure “https” connection:

• Choosing a Certificate Authority (CA), like Let’s Encrypt.
• Generating a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) and its private key
• Submitting the CSR to the CA
• Validating your domain with the CA
• Installing the SSL Certificate on your web server using automated tools
• Configuring Your Website to Use HTTPS.

Website Hosting Services

Another important aspect of website management is the provider who hosts your website on their server for your users to access through the internet. This drains a considerable sum depending on which type of web host you choose.

The prices depend on factors like upload and download speeds, traffic on your site, security features, and physical costs associated with the server. Website hosting services also provide additional features that’ll help you set up and manage your website, such as:

• Website builder or CMS
• Web apps
• Firewalls
• SEO tools
• Cpanel

What Goes Behind the Making of a Website for a Small Business

Now that we’ve explored the main components of a functional website, let us take a look at a few tools commonly used to make and maintain small businesses’ websites.

Content Management System & Website Builder

Gone are the days when one would need to learn programming languages to build a website. Even basic HTML skills can only get you so far (printing “Hello World” in so many colors), and today’s websites incorporate a lot more complexity than that.

That’s where these Content Management Systems (CMS) or website builders come in. With the help of these tools, making a website has become as easy as dragging and dropping templates (or blocks) to arrange your content. Even Damon Burton agrees:

“Stop reinventing the wheel or overpaying for custom backend development. Small businesses can easily build massively successful websites using open-source software such as WordPress. I’ve seen $80,000 “custom builds” recreated for $10,000 in WordPress. Do you have concerns about WordPress? The build is as good or as bad as the developer.”

Other than WordPress, the most popular website builder cum CMS that can almost do it all using extensions, a few other good services exist. WordPress though, is free and open-source, though you can pay for added benefits. 

E-Commerce Management Tools

E-commerce management tools are another route that small businesses can take if they want to build an online store-first website. These kinds of software automate and simplify a lot of the backend processes of maintaining an online storefront, with inbuilt or plugin-based features such as:

• Inventory management
• Website templates
• App/Plugin store
• Payment integration
• Automatic tax calculations
• Customizable shipping
• Built-in reporting
• WordPress integration.

The most popular E-commerce management options are Shopify and WooCommerce.

Online File Management

While security-focused businesses might need to invest in hardware drives to store their data, most businesses find it easier to subscribe to online file management providers that provide enterprise-grade security and storage solutions in their cloud. Some of the most popular cloud file storage and management services are:

• Google Cloud
• DropBox
• Box
• Mega

The Nitty Gritty of Website Management

If what we’ve covered isn’t enough technical information already, maintaining a website (making sure it attracts visitors that convert), requires way more. The tools we’ll list further on can be divided into three main categories, though their functionality often bleeds into the others:

1. Marketing Tools
2. Analytics
3. SEO Tools

HubSpot

HubSpot offers marketing management software, whose free version provides lead capture forms, analytics, and email forms to aid in your business’s marketing strategy. Though the upgrade can be costly for most small businesses, it makes sense for larger businesses that require marketing automation and deeper personalization options.

HootSuite

The fact that businesses need multiple social media accounts across all the popular platforms to reach customers is acknowledged by all. Social media marketing is often repetitive, and managing all of them may require you to hire a whole social media team. HootSuite is a social media management dashboard that allows you to manage and schedule posts (10 each) for up to 3 accounts.

Upon purchasing paid plans, you can upgrade to more social profiles and scheduled updates and manage paid social advertising within the dashboard.

Google Analytics

This free tool is invaluable for marketing, be it for businesses big or small. That is why most marketing professionals swear by Google Analytics when it comes to measuring the performance of a website. Some of the features in this comprehensive package include:

• Traffic acquisition
• Goal conversion
• Funnel analysis
• Integrations
• Page performance
• Audience insights
• Tag management
• Behavior tracking.

Semrush

One of the greatest SEO tools that all marketing professionals happily pay for, Semrush offers 45+ tools that aid in SEO, content, PPC, social media, and competitive research. Its website is trusted by over 7 million marketers for reviews and recommendations to great partner agencies. Some of the key features that make Semrush a must-have for any marketing team include:

• At-a-glance competitor analysis in organic and paid search
• A keyword research tool with metrics like difficulty, volume, trends, CPC, and more
• A market research tool
• Best backlink analytics tool on the market!

Yoast SEO

Plugins like Yoast SEO are what make WordPress one of the most versatile website solutions. This free tool comes with SEO optimization features like:

• Real-time suggestion-based interface for on-page optimization
• Keyword optimization
• Biannual alerts for stale content
• Easy to generate reports

Of course, there is a paid upgrade that offers more features, but the free version is a crowd-favorite as it offers a way for anyone to get started with the basics of website SEO.

Wrapping Up

Launching a full-fledged website that has to drive conversions to make it a good investment for a small business is no joke. Of course, with today’s easy-to-use technology, anyone can make their website with a little time invested in learning to use tools like Google Analytics, WordPress, Shopify, and Yoast SEO.

However, that might not result in a website that brings a return on the time invested, which is why most companies, even marketing agencies, choose to outsource their website management. This strategy brings down the cost, time, and manpower investments while bringing in the tools, expertise, and experience of seasoned professionals in the online search industry on your team.