Editorial
The Gist
- Reactive website management is costly and ineffective. Many marketing teams still wait for issues to surface before fixing them, leading to repeated problems, higher costs, and increased risk exposure.
- AI enables a shift to proactive web management. Automation, intelligent prioritization, and continuous monitoring can prevent issues, uncover hidden risks, and optimize content before problems occur.
- Focus on six core fundamentals for long-term success. Experience, SEO, integrity, accessibility, privacy, and environmental efficiency should guide proactive strategies to protect brand value and compliance.
Digital marketing teams love to anticipate the direction of the market and the needs of their audience. They plan web experiences, campaigns and content. They then optimize these experiences through testing and experimentation. This is essentially a proactive approach that seeks to stay ahead of trends and the competition.
However, when it comes to actually managing websites – both in terms of navigating risks but also increasing value – much of the approach is essentially reactive rather than proactive.
With reactive website management, teams monitor for problems and then act. They rely on a range of diagnostic tools and additional manual or semi-manual audits that identify issues to then remedy. This reactive approach is perhaps convenient, but ultimately it is a short-term approach that is also ineffective. The same problems and issues keep on occurring year; for example, the poor accessibility of websites has changed very little over the last few years.
What can we do to change this reactive approach that ultimately holds us all back? To a certain extent, the technology at our fingertips, the solutions and products we use, the resourcing of web teams and even the mindset of the industry have all helped to sustain this reactive approach.
But AI now gives us an opportunity to take a different, more proactive approach and finally flip the default switch from reactive to proactive by:
- Applying automation at scale that can prevent many of the issues happening in the first place rather than just retrospectively reporting on them.
- Provide a more intelligent approach to monitoring that delivers genuine insights, enabling prioritization, better decision-making and drives engagement with senior management.
- The ability to keep up with the evolving world of compliance and reporting that will change as AI influences information and areas such as environmental impact rise up on the corporate agenda.
Hidden Costs of a Reactive Website Management Approach
Managing your web estate or digital footprint has never been easy, but arguably it’s gotten more complex in the past few years with a number of challenges.
A cocktail of regulation and compliance considerations that continue to proliferate at the jurisdiction level. Ongoing cybersecurity and privacy challenges. More demanding visitors who will simply turn to your competitors who have better page load times. Rapidly changing information habits that are decimating the world of SEO. And a digital footprint that might be somewhere between sprawling and even hidden from view.
Websites are a critical source of revenue. They’re your shop window, your delivery channel and more. According to a recent report from Webflow, 91% of marketing teams say their website drives more revenue than any other marketing channel. So how you manage your website matters; but taking a reactive approach is arguably not the best way to go about it.
Reactive Website Management Leads to Cascade of Problems
Essentially, we wait for problems to surface and then only deal with them once they are revealed, after a site is launched, or when a crisis demands it. This approach leads to:
- Wasted time and effort, throwing money to fix the same problems again and again, rather than preventing them in the first place, leading to excessive costs.
- Increased risk exposure by only fixing issues after the fact and allowing some problems to fester and grow.
- Taking a more tactical rather than strategic approach to managing the digital estate which only leads to underinvestment and maintaining the unsatisfying status quo without moving forward.
- Failure to prepare for the future, both in seizing the potential presented by new channels and evolving audience habits, as well as being ill-prepared for associated risks.
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What Does Reactive Web Management Look Like?
Let’s dive into some of the characteristics of reactive web management that contribute to this situation.
No Effective Prioritization
Website issues are not all equal. Diagnostic tools and site audits can produce lengthy reports with a list of issues that need to be fixed or improvements that can be made. While, dashboards and scorecards do counter this approach, all too often there is a 40-page PDF report which does not actually convey a sense of which fixes will have actually the most real-world value or the associated effort (and cost) that comes with the remedy.
All this leads to more noise than actionable insight and digital teams simply don’t know where to start. Instead, they tend to prioritize the problems that they are most comfortable dealing with, while ignoring what actually could have a more fundamental impact.
Not Enough Resources and Manual Approaches
Teams also simply do not have enough the bandwidth to fix the volume of issues that are presented to them. This is both down to the sheer volume of technical orientated issues but also the manual approaches adopted that are time-consuming and fiddly to carry out, and impossible to scale. Most teams don’t have enough hours in the day anyway and may have to rely on a third-party to make changes which again rack up the costs. This means digital teams never get on top of the issues presented and are always in catch-up mode.
Fragmented Skill Sets
Diagnosing issues and opportunities — and then taking the resultant action — touches upon multiple knowledge domains. Compliance, development, UX, brand consistency, SEO, privacy, accessibility and more. No single team or individual has the bandwidth to interpret and prioritize across so many disciplines. Things fall through the cracks.
Skills and knowledge remain within these specialist teams and roles. Cross-functional learning and development drives appreciation of problems (and resultant fixes) and can help embed processes that drive a more proactive approach. In my experience, this seldom happens.
Digital Sprawl Remains Left Untouched
Digital sprawl is a real issue, particularly in large organizations or where there is a decentralized culture, such as educational institutions. Campaign microsites, legacy landing pages and test environments get spun up, but are then never retired. I’ve worked with teams that have had as much as 40% of their digital estate completely “unknown” to the core web team. However, these orphaned pages and sites still carry your brand and risk. And in the age of AI, these may be feeding ChatGPT responses that impact your reputation.
Issues Over Insights So Web Management Remains Tactical
Existing reporting — yep that 40-page PDF again — are often way too technical to engage senior management. In my experience, web teams can also be reluctant to pass on numbers that require interpretation or explanation particularly when they show a high volume of issues. Overall, reporting neither engages senior executives or adequately presents the risk management perspective that unlocks investment.
Without a succinct, prioritized roadmap, boards can’t allocate budget or mandate change. The result is persistent underinvestment in critical areas that would lead to faster pages, better UX and a more robust approach to compliance.
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Rising Risk Exposure
Digital sprawl means that orphaned and outdated pages rarely get audited, leaving compliance gaps and security vulnerabilities unaddressed. Meanwhile, broken links and inaccessible content create legal liabilities. France’s recent crop of accessibility lawsuits shows just what can happen and how this can also be a reputational and brand issue.
Related Article: Digital Accessibility Drives Customer Loyalty and Inclusion
How AI Changes the Game: What Proactive Web Management Looks Like
AI isn’t a magic bullet that is going to solve everything, but it offers a real opportunity for teams to deploy a more proactive approach to website management. Perhaps that isn’t an overnight change, but some of the capabilities are already here. Let’s look what proactive web management looks like.
Automated Fixes at Scale
AI is being deployed into products in the customer experience space that are helping teams to automate the basics. Fixing simple issues that impact areas such as accessibility — like adding alt text to images — or making tweaks that improve SEO are obvious use cases for AI and can be deployed at a speed and scale that busy marketing teams cannot achieve manually. AI has the potential to end the energy-zapping cycle of being in endless catch-up mode when it comes to web issues.
Continuous Discovery and Optimization
Going forward either through prompts, scheduling or ideally agents, AI has the potential to continuously discover, monitor, optimize and fix new content that is being added to your digital estate and also find orphaned content that has compliance and reputational issues. This deals with two key issues that have previously grown your risk exposure:
- The hidden digital sprawl: now you can deal with legacy sites before they become liabilities
- The new content that is constantly added to websites that is often responsible for ongoing compliance issues: now AI can be embedded into the content management process and prevent an “issue” going live.
Intelligent Prioritization by Impact and Value
One of the key potentials for AI is to drive intelligent prioritization by identifying the issues which need immediate or the most attention, based on their potential impact and the risk, the value of the content where they appear and so on. Prioritizing what to work on can take in a lot of different variables and can change based on a range of internal and external factors which the AI can take into account based on the data it has, instructions from the digital team, machine learning and so on.
The future around intelligent prioritisation is genuinely exciting but in the shorter term it will liberate teams from the endless list of what to fix and guide them on what to work on, surfacing critical issues like a broken checkout link, before minor style or SEO tweaks.
Insights Rather than Just Issues
We’re already seeing AI being deployed into some of the digital experience platforms that can identify deeper insights to help optimize content based on audience data and user behavior. I believe it is inevitable that this “insights” approach will expand into other areas such as compliance and user experience and identify the deeper trends with suggested actions which move us towards a more proactive approach to web management.
Related Article: When UX Design Undermines Customer Experience
Evolving Reporting
AI also has the potential to create more intelligent reporting targeted to the needs of different groups, including reporting dashboards for senior management that can be more focused, relevant and engaging.
Improving Products
Products incorporating AI are already improving. This applies to dedicated web management and monitoring products but also features within content management systems that support proactive web management. The era of agentic AI will also bring additional agents that can help prevent issues before they happen.
The Importance of Focusing on Website Fundamentals
AI is not a magic solution that works all by itself, but it gives teams an impetus to focus on monitoring what is important, which can also start to drive rules for prioritisation. In my view there are six fundamental areas covering both the value of the experience and the compliance-related risk:
| Fundamental Area | Details |
|---|---|
| Experience (Value) | Page speed, uptime, and transaction flows that directly influence conversions |
| SEO (Value) | Crawlability, indexation health and structured metadata for discoverability |
| Integrity (Value) | Broken-link counts, valid certificates and up-to-date content |
| Accessibility (Risk) | WCAG compliance to open your site to all users and avoid lawsuits |
| Privacy (Risk) | Consent management and data-handling controls that meet GDPR, CCPA, and other regulations |
| Environmental Efficiency (Risk) | Hosting and delivery optimizations to reduce carbon footprint. |
A New Era of Proactive Web Management
AI provides an opportunity for digital marketing teams to manage their digital estate in a more proactive and strategic way, which better aligns with the mindset and approach to planning campaigns, content and digital experiences.
It’s time to replace reactive diagnostics that are hard to action with deeper, prioritized insights that support compliance, improve user experience and reduce cost and effort.
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