Website Work During a Staff Shortage

The week the updates stopped

In many small businesses the website is looked after by whoever is good with it. Often that is a junior employee, a summer student or a relative of the owner.

Then they leave. This week, with summer staff heading back to school, plenty of businesses are finding out what that person actually did.

The hours on the site stop changing. The specials page still shows August. Nobody knows the password, or which email address a password reset would go to.

None of it is dramatic. It is a slow drift that customers notice before the owner does.

What leaves with them

• Passwords saved in their own browser or phone.
• Recovery emails pointing at their personal address.
• Renewals charged to their own credit card.
• Routine tasks nobody else knew they were doing.
• Small habits, such as resizing photos before they go up.
• Contacts at the host, the developer and the booking system.

The fourth does the most damage, because it is invisible. Nobody misses a task they never knew existed until its absence shows on the site.

An access list on one page

Start with every account the website depends on, written on one page that the owner keeps.

The usual list: domain registrar, hosting, the website's admin login, business email, Analytics, Search Console and the Google My Business listing.

Then the rest: social accounts, the newsletter service, and any booking or payment system the site connects to.

For each, note who owns it, which email address controls it, where the password is kept and when it renews. The owner should be an administrator on every one, through a business address.

Passwords that belong to the business

Passwords saved in one person's browser leave with that person. A password manager the business controls keeps them in one place, shared with whoever needs each one.

Where a service allows several users, give each employee a separate login. One person's access can then be removed without disturbing everyone else's.

When someone leaves, change whatever they knew that same week, starting with the email and the hosting, since those can reset everything else.

Where two-step verification is offered, have the codes go to a phone the business owns, or to more than one person, never only to the employee's own phone.

The routine, written down

Next, list what the person actually did and how often. Ask them before they go if you still can; otherwise piece it together from the site's history.

Weekly: hours, specials, events and photos. Monthly: plugin and theme updates, a check that backups ran, a test of the contact form. Yearly: the domain, the hosting and the security certificate.

Each task gets a line saying where it is done and what done looks like. That line is what lets someone else pick it up.

A worked example

A cat cafe staffed by a dozen part-timers, mostly students, works with a local rescue. The cats living in the cafe are up for adoption, and each has a profile on the website.

One employee kept the site current. She added new cats as they arrived, marked them adopted when they went home, updated the calendar of private events and ran the Instagram account.

In the spring she finished her degree and moved to another province. Nobody else knew how to do any of it, and the logins were in her phone.

By July the adoption page still showed cats that had gone home weeks earlier, and visitors were arriving to meet a cat that was no longer there.

The work had never been anyone's job on paper. It was one person's habit, done in odd minutes on her own phone.

The owner asked her for the logins, which she sent, then changed every password and wrote one page of tasks: each new cat, each adoption, the events calendar, with who does each and when.

Two staff now share the tasks, and the cafe's web company handles updates and backups, so the site no longer depends on who happens to be on shift.

Covering the gap

Between one person leaving and the next learning the work, the site still needs attention, and that gap is usually longer than anyone plans.

Freeze anything optional: no redesigns, no new sections, no experiments. Keep the essentials current: hours, prices, closures and anything customers act on.

This is where a maintenance arrangement with a web professional earns its cost. Updates, backups and small changes carry on whoever is on staff.

A handover, if you can get one

If the person is still there, book an hour with them before their last day and go through the access list and the routine together.

Have them show you each task on your own screen, and write it down as they go.

Ask what they were meaning to get to. Half-finished jobs are often the ones nobody else knows about.

And find anything still paid on their own card, such as the domain or a plugin licence, and move it to the business's card before it next renews.

When someone new starts

A new person gets their own accounts, not the old person's login. Access can then be removed one person at a time.

Give them the routine page on the first day. If it is wrong or missing something, they will find out within a week, and the correction goes onto the page.

The counter-case

A business whose website rarely changes, such as a firm with a handful of service pages, has less routine to lose. The access list still matters; the task list can be short.

A business whose site is already maintained by a web company may find most of this written down already. Ask for a copy, and keep it with your own records.

For everyone else, write down every account and every routine task before the next person leaves, not after.

Before the next departure

1. List every account the website depends on.
2. Make the owner an administrator on each one.
3. Move recovery emails to business addresses.
4. Store passwords in a business-owned password manager.
5. Write down the routine and how often.
6. Change passwords the week anyone leaves.
7. Arrange cover for updates and backups.

Step five is the one most businesses skip. Access can be recovered with enough effort, but a routine nobody wrote down is only discovered when it stops.

Writing down what done looks like, so nobody has to guess, is the same habit as agreeing on what finished means.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.