What you should manage on your website (and what you really shouldn’t touch)

If you’re not technical but you have access to your company’s website, it’s important to know where your job ends and your developer’s job begins. Some things are perfectly safe, even smart, for you to manage. Others can break the site, cause security issues, or hurt your SEO if touched the wrong way.

Let’s keep it simple: here’s what you should be doing yourself, and what you should absolutely leave alone.

What you should manage

These are areas you’re expected to take care of. No developer needed.

Content (text and images)

Updating headlines, team bios, product descriptions, or homepage text is your job. It keeps your site relevant and helps with SEO. You don’t need to call your dev every time you change a sentence.

Blog posts and updates

Publishing blogs, news articles, or case studies is a good idea. You know your business and your customers. Regular posts show activity and help you stay visible in search.

Images and media

Adding new gallery photos, replacing banners, or embedding videos from YouTube is usually fine as long as you’re not uploading huge files. Keep things optimized so your site doesn’t slow down.

Contact info and hours

Changed your number or moved offices? You should be able to update contact details in a few clicks. No need to wait on a dev for that.

Newsletter or pop-up text

Running a campaign? You can change the text in your pop-ups or newsletter signup boxes. Just don’t mess with form settings or integrations unless you know what you're doing.

What you should never touch

These areas are risky. You could crash your site, mess up analytics, or kill your SEO. Stay away unless you’re 100 percent sure what you’re doing. Better yet, don’t touch them at all.

The code

Your site might let you access HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. Don’t. One missing bracket or semicolon and things will break fast. You’re not saving time, you’re just creating cleanup work for your dev.

Plugins, extensions, themes

Installing or updating plugins might seem harmless. It’s not. You could create security holes or cause conflicts that bring down the whole site. Leave this to someone who knows how to test and roll back safely.

Menus, links, and routing

Changing menus or link structures might make sense for UX, but it can break things behind the scenes. Internal links, SEO rankings, and even site functionality can be affected.

Tracking scripts and SEO tools

Don’t delete or change anything that says “Google Tag Manager,” “Meta Pixel,” “header scripts,” or anything similar. That’s how your analytics, ads, and tracking work. Break it, and your data is gone.

Hosting, database, DNS

This stuff isn’t even part of your website. It’s the infrastructure that runs it. If you log into DigitalOcean, AWS, or cPanel and don’t know what you’re looking at, log back out. If you make one wrong click, your whole site could go offline.

Final thoughts

Your website should feel manageable, not stressful. You should have full control over what’s relevant to your customers and business, and zero access to anything technical that could get you into trouble.

That’s why we build all of our websites and apps with a custom admin panel tailored to non-technical users. You get access to content, images, and blog posts, the parts that matter. We lock down everything else so you can’t break anything, even by accident.

Want a site like that? Let’s talk.