Updating your website yourself: what should be easy

You should be able to update the everyday parts of your own website in a few minutes, from your phone or computer, without calling anyone: opening hours, prices, a sentence of text, a photo, a new review, a holiday notice. If any of those needs a developer, a login you do not have or an hour of fiddling, the problem is the setup, not you. Here is what should be easy, how each change usually works, and what to do if your site makes it hard.

The changes you will make most often

Think about what changes in your business over a year. For most trades, shops and practices, it is a short list:

Hours, including holiday closures and seasonal hours.
Prices, on a price list, menu or service page.
Services, a new one added, an old one dropped.
Photos of recent work, new products, the team.
A short notice, like "Closed Thanksgiving week" or "Now booking spring cleanups".
Reviews from happy customers.
Contact details, if a phone number or address changes.
Staff, when someone joins or leaves.

These are the things customers check before they call, and they are the things that go stale first. Everything else on a site, such as the layout, the colors and the menu structure, changes rarely and can be left to whoever built it.

How long each change should take

A fair yardstick, once you have logged in a couple of times:

Change your hours: a minute or two. You should click on the hours, type the new ones and publish.
Change a price: about the same. Click the number, type the new one.
Edit a sentence: a minute. Click into the text, change the words, save.
Replace a photo: two or three minutes. Click the photo, choose a new one from your phone or computer, check it is not awkwardly cropped.
Add a review: a few minutes, copying the words and the customer's first name.
Add a holiday notice: a few minutes, and just as easy to remove afterward.
Add a whole new service: longer, maybe twenty minutes, because you are writing new text. That is normal.

If what you need takes much longer than this, or if you avoid doing it because it is a chore, your customers are seeing out-of-date information.

Making each change without breaking anything

Text

Change the words in place rather than deleting a whole block and retyping it; deleting a block can delete its formatting with it. Keep headings as headings. If you paste text from a Word document or an email, paste it as plain text (many editors have a "paste without formatting" option, or press Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows, Cmd+Shift+Option+V on a Mac) so strange fonts and colors do not come along.

Prices

Check prices everywhere they appear. A price on the home page, a service page and a PDF menu means three places to update. Where you can, keep each price in one place and link to it.

Photos

Use a photo roughly the shape of the one you are replacing. A tall phone photo dropped into a wide space gets cropped, and heads or the finished job may vanish. Shrink large photos before uploading; a few hundred kilobytes is plenty for the web. Then add a short description of what the photo shows in the image settings, for people using screen readers.

Hours

Check that your hours on the website match your Google Business Profile, Facebook page and any directory listings. Customers trust Google's version, and a mismatch causes wasted trips and angry reviews. Keeping business hours right has a routine for this.

Always

Look at the page on your phone after you publish. Most visitors will see it there.

Signs your site makes updates too hard

You are not the problem if any of these is true:

You do not have a login, or the only person with one is a designer who takes days to reply.
Your hours or prices are in a picture, such as a designed graphic, so changing them means making a new image.
The menu or price list is a PDF that has to be recreated and uploaded each time.
The editor is full of boxes, columns and settings, and moving one thing shifts everything else.
Editing on your phone is impossible, so changes wait until you are at a desk.
You are charged for each small change.
Every update risks breaking the layout, so you stopped making them.

What to do if your site is hard to update

There are a few routes, depending on how bad it is:

Ask for a login of your own. If a designer built the site, you are entitled to ask for access to your own content. Ask for an "editor" login that lets you change text and photos without touching the design.
Ask for the fiddly parts to become text. Hours, prices and menus that live in images or PDFs can usually be turned into plain text on the page, which you can then edit in seconds.
Ask for a short handover. Twenty minutes on a video call where the designer shows you how to change hours, a price and a photo is worth a lot.
Decide who should own which changes. Some owners prefer to hand all edits to someone else. That can work well if it is fast and affordable. Who should update your website compares the options honestly.
Replace the site if the editor itself is the obstacle. Some older builders and heavily customized WordPress setups are simply hard to use, and no amount of training fixes that. What a website panel or editor should let you change is a good checklist to take to any new provider.

A five-minute test of your current site

Try this now. Log in to your website and, without help:

change one word in your home page headline and change it back,
update one opening time,
replace one photo with a recent one from your phone,
check all three on your phone.

If you finished within five minutes, your setup is fine and the job now is just remembering to do it. If you could not log in, could not find where to click, or broke something along the way, you have learned exactly what to fix.

What to do this week

Run the five-minute test.
Make sure you personally have a login to your website, not just your designer.
Write down the three changes you will need most often in the coming year.
Move any hours, prices or menus out of images and PDFs and into plain text.
Compare your hours on the site with your Google Business Profile.

If your current site cannot pass the five-minute test, you can see your site rebuilt first with a simple panel for text, prices and photos, and try the same test on it.