Two kinds of change
Every change to a website is one of two things. It is content: words, prices, photos, people, hours, the things that describe the business today. Or it is structure: how the pages are laid out, what fields exist, how the menu works, what the site does. Content changes constantly and should be yours to make in minutes. Structure changes rarely and should go to whoever built it.
Most frustration with "I can't update my own website" comes from a site where that line was never drawn, so the owner is either afraid to touch anything or is editing layout by accident.
What you should change yourself
If the site was built properly, these are fields or blocks you can edit without touching anything else:
- Prices. In the price field on each service, not typed into a paragraph in three places.
- Opening hours, including holiday hours. One place, shown everywhere.
- Staff. Adding a new team member with photo, role and bio; removing one who left; updating a bio.
- Services. Adding a new one from the same template; editing the description of an existing one; retiring one.
- Photos. Swapping a photo in an existing slot; adding to a gallery.
- Text on existing pages. Fixing a typo, rewording a paragraph, updating a testimonial.
- News, posts, announcements. Anything in the blog or news section.
- The announcement bar or holiday notice, if the site has one.
- FAQ entries.
- Contact details. Phone, email, address, in the one place they are stored.
These should take you five minutes each, on your phone if need be, and none of them should be able to break the layout. The recorded walkthrough shows each one on your own site.
What to send to us
- A new page type or section the site does not have: a careers page, a gallery, a second location layout, a pricing table where there was none.
- Menu structure changes. Adding a top-level item, reorganising the dropdown.
- Layout changes. "Can the team page be three columns instead of two." "Can the prices show on the home page."
- New features. Booking integration changes, a new form, a chat widget, a newsletter sign-up, a members area.
- Anything in Settings, Plugins, Appearance or Theme. These menus are where the site can break.
- Anything involving code, embed snippets, tracking scripts, or a third-party service's "paste this into your header".
- Redirects, SEO metadata beyond the page fields, structured data.
- Anything you have tried to do yourself and the result looked wrong. Stop, do not keep trying, send it.
The reason is not gatekeeping. It is that structural changes need testing on a staging copy, checking on a phone, and thinking about what else they affect, and that is the work.
Why the line is drawn here
The line is between things that change how the business is described and things that change how the site works. It is drawn there because:
- Content edits are frequent and small; making them wait for a developer costs the owner time and costs the developer goodwill.
- Structure edits are rare and consequential; doing them without testing produces the broken-layout-on-mobile emergencies.
- A site built with proper fields makes content edits safe by design. A site where prices are typed into free-text blocks makes every edit a layout risk.
If you are afraid to edit your own prices, the site was not set up with the line in the right place, and that is a fix worth making before the next price change.
How a site is set up so the line is obvious
- Structured fields for structured content. Services, staff, locations, prices and hours live in fields with labels, not in page layouts. The editor sees "Price" and types a number.
- Locked layouts. Page templates and patterns where the design cannot be dragged out of shape, only the content changed.
- A restricted editor role. The owner and staff log in as Editors, not Administrators. They see content, not settings. The administrator login exists and is theirs, for the rare day it is needed.
- The recorded walkthrough, covering exactly the list above.
- A one-line rule in the handover document: "If it is a word, a number, a photo or a person, change it. If it is a layout, a menu, a setting or a snippet, send it."
Sending it
For care plan clients, the changes that go to us are covered by the plan's included hours where they are small (a menu item, a new section on an existing template) and quoted where they are projects (a new page type, a new integration). Send them by email with the page URL, what you want, and, if it is a layout change, a sketch or a screenshot with arrows. Most are done the same or next working day.
Where this sits
Drawing this line, and building the site so that it holds, is a deliberate part of every website we deliver, because a site the owner can update is a site that stays current, and a site that stays current is one that keeps producing enquiries. The care plan picks up everything on the second list, so that the owner never has to choose between leaving the site out of date and risking breaking it.