For enterprise companies in any industry, managing a large-scale website isn’t just about keeping content up to date. It’s about delivering an exceptional customer experience. Every touchpoint on your website, from content and design to navigation and accessibility, impacts how potential clients engage with your brand.
Poor website management can frustrate users, erode trust and hurt business. This is where website governance comes in.
Website governance involves creating policies and procedures that guide your site’s content, technical upkeep and compliance. It ensures your website consistently delivers a positive customer experience.
Why website governance matters to customer experience
Website governance directly impacts the customer journey by ensuring:
- Consistent messaging and branding
- Seamless navigation
- Fast loading times
- Up-to-date, relevant content
- Legal and accessibility compliance
Without governance, your website can become cluttered, hard to navigate and inconsistent. This leads to a poor customer experience. On the other hand, a well-governed website makes it easy for customers to find what they need, trust your brand and take action.
What’s at stake varies by industry
Website governance in B2B
B2B companies have complex sales processes, strict regulations and longer sales cycles. Their websites must balance the competing priorities of marketing, sales and legal. What’s more, global B2B companies must manage content in multiple languages and regions. All these factors make effective website governance challenging, but also imperative for success.
Website governance in health care
Health care websites must balance the complex needs of patients, caregivers and health care providers. Good website governance practices can ensure your digital properties provide accurate, up-to-date information and maintain patient trust. It can also help ensure that your sites are compliant with strict HIPAA regulations and accessibility standards.
Website governance in internal communications
Site governance isn’t just key for public, consumer-facing websites. It can also ensure that internal platforms, such as intranets and employee portals, deliver accurate and up-to-date information. A governance policy can help internal communication professionals streamline workflows, manage access and stay compliant with company policies and data privacy regulations. It even helps maintain a compelling employer brand.
Website governance in B2C
Consumer websites must balance diverse user needs, brand consistency and rapid market changes. Effective governance coordinates marketing, customer service and IT to deliver personalized, secure experiences. It ensures compliance with data privacy regulations while remaining agile enough to adopt new technologies. Strong governance practices help consumer websites stay engaging, trustworthy and competitive in the dynamic digital marketplace.
Five steps for improving website governance
Here’s how you can make website governance a cornerstone of your strategy to boost customer satisfaction and business success.
1. Define roles and responsibilities for better customer focus
One of the biggest challenges in website management is a lack of clear responsibilities. When no one knows who’s in charge of content, design or user experience, things fall through the cracks—and customers notice.
Action steps:
- Identify content owners: Assign a content manager for each section of your website. For example, your product team might own the product pages, while marketing manages the blog.
- Set up a governance team: Include stakeholders from marketing, IT, design and compliance to ensure cross-departmental coordination.
- Create a content approval process: Before anything goes live, ensure all content meets standards for tone, voice, readability and brand alignment.
2. Build content governance around customer needs
Your customers don’t visit your website to admire your modern design or impressive mission statement. They’re there to solve a problem, get information or make a purchase. A key part of website governance is ensuring that your content speaks to your customers’ needs.
Action steps:
- Perform content audits: Regularly review your site’s content to ensure it is still relevant to your audience. You can use data from Google Analytics to track the performance of specific pages.
- Create customer-centric content guidelines: Tailor your content strategy to answer common customer questions and solve their pain points. Use customer feedback, surveys and sales data to guide your content updates.
- Implement content archiving and updating processes: Keep your site fresh by archiving content that no longer serves users. Update high-performing pages with new information. Just because something’s been on your site forever doesn’t mean it should stay.
Make sure your content is concise and to the point. Your customers are busy people—they’re not going to sift through 1,500 words when 500 will do.
3. Prioritize SEO for customer discovery
If content is the destination, then SEO is the GPS system that helps customers find their way. Think of SEO governance as laying down a breadcrumb trail so that search engines and users can easily find what they’re looking for.
Action steps:
- Monitor SEO performance: Use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to track keyword rankings and organic traffic. Focus on optimizing high-value pages that customers visit most.
- Improve internal linking: Guide users through their journey by linking to related pages within your content. This not only enhances user engagement but also boosts SEO.
- Optimize for mobile: More than half of web traffic comes from mobile devices, so your site must be fully responsive to meet user expectations. You’re more likely to attract mobile search traffic.
4. Enhance security and compliance for trust and protection
Security breaches and non-compliance with regulations like GDPR or ADA can damage your reputation and erode customer trust. Strong website governance ensures that your site remains secure and accessible, giving customers confidence in their interactions with your brand. Addressing web accessibility is the right thing to do and can even advance accessibility within your company culture.
Action steps:
- Enforce access controls: Limit who can access your content management system (CMS) to prevent unauthorized changes or security risks.
- Schedule regular security audits: Routinely review your site for vulnerabilities, such as outdated plugins or weak passwords. Set up automated backups. Make sure you have a recovery plan in case of data loss.
- Ensure accessibility compliance: Use tools like WAVE to audit your site’s accessibility. Focus on ensuring that users with disabilities can easily navigate and interact with your content.
5. Use customer feedback to continuously improve
Good governance doesn’t end once your policies are in place. It’s an ongoing process that requires input from real users. By building feedback loops into your governance strategy, you can continuously optimize your website based on what customers actually need.
Action steps:
- Implement on-site surveys: Tools like Hotjar or Qualtrics can help you gather real-time customer feedback on how easy your site is to use and where they encounter friction.
- Analyze behavior analytics: Use heatmaps, session recordings, usability testing and click-tracking tools to see how customers interact with your website. This data can uncover hidden usability issues or opportunities for improvement.
- Regularly review feedback: Hold quarterly reviews with your governance team to assess customer feedback and adjust content, design and navigation as needed.
Governance drives better customer experience
By focusing on governance, you’re creating a structure that keeps your website secure, user-friendly and consistently aligned with your customers’ needs. And behind the scenes, you’ll have a system that makes your life a lot easier, too.
Ready to improve your website?
If you’re looking to optimize your website governance and enhance customer experience, drop us a note at [email protected]. We can help you build a governance plan that keeps your site running smoothly, your customers happy and your team sane.
