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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Web Administrator

💰 $55,000 - $100,000

Information TechnologyWeb DevelopmentOperationsDevOps

🎯 Role Definition

A Web Administrator is responsible for the reliable, secure, and performant operation of public-facing and internal web properties. This role owns day-to-day website operations, platform and server configuration, content publishing workflows, technical SEO and accessibility controls, incident response, and continuous improvement activities. The Web Administrator collaborates with developers, product managers, designers, security and infrastructure teams to maintain uptime, optimize performance, and deliver a high-quality user experience across devices and browsers.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • IT Support Technician with web responsibilities
  • Junior Web Developer or Front-End Developer
  • Systems Administrator / Linux Administrator

Advancement To:

  • Senior Web Administrator / Lead Web Operations Engineer
  • Web Operations Manager / Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • DevOps Engineer or Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

Lateral Moves:

  • Front-End Engineer / UI Engineer
  • Systems Engineer / Platform Engineer
  • Technical SEO Specialist

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Manage, deploy and maintain production and staging websites and web applications hosted on Linux and Windows servers (Apache, Nginx, IIS), ensuring high availability, scheduled maintenance windows, and robust rollback procedures to minimize downtime.
  • Configure, maintain and monitor cloud-based hosting and infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP) including EC2/VM instances, load balancers, autoscaling groups, and managed services to meet traffic and redundancy requirements.
  • Administer and maintain content management systems (WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore, Magento, or equivalent), including theme and plugin lifecycle management, security patching, performance tuning and content publish workflows with staged approvals.
  • Implement and manage DNS, domain registration, and zone configurations (BIND, Cloud DNS, Route 53), including TTL strategy, failover, CNAME/A records, and DNS security best practices.
  • Provision, manage and rotate SSL/TLS certificates (Let’s Encrypt, commercial CAs), configure HTTPS, HSTS, and TLS cipher suites, and implement automated renewal processes to ensure secure site connections.
  • Design, configure and tune Content Delivery Network (CDN) integrations (Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly) and caching strategies (edge, reverse proxy, browser) to reduce latency and offload origin servers for global audiences.
  • Actively monitor site health, performance and availability using APM and monitoring tools (New Relic, Datadog, Prometheus, Nagios) and create dashboards, alerts and runbooks for rapid incident identification and remediation.
  • Conduct vulnerability management and security hardening for web servers and applications, applying OS and application security patches, implementing WAF rules, rate limiting, IP access controls, and OWASP-motivated mitigation steps.
  • Manage web application and database backups and test disaster recovery and restoration procedures regularly to verify RTO/RPO goals and ensure data integrity for CMS and web application data stores.
  • Troubleshoot production incidents including slow pages, 5xx errors, deployment failures and third-party integration problems, performing root cause analysis and implementing long-term fixes and monitoring to prevent recurrence.
  • Maintain CI/CD pipelines for website deployments (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions), including automated build, test, deploy stages, blue/green or canary deployments, and version-controlled release artifacts.
  • Perform routine database administration tasks relevant to web apps (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL), including backups, replication health checks, query optimization and connection pooling to support stable web performance.
  • Manage user roles, accounts and permissions for CMS and hosting platforms, enforce least privilege access, integrate with SSO/LDAP/Active Directory where appropriate and audit access logs for compliance.
  • Coordinate content publishing schedules with marketing and content teams, implement editorial workflows, troubleshoot content publishing issues and automate routine content tasks where possible.
  • Optimize websites for search engines and search presence via technical SEO tasks: generating sitemaps, managing robots.txt, structured data markup, canonical tags, and ensuring crawlability and indexability.
  • Enforce web accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1) by auditing pages, coordinating remediation with design/development teams, and verifying keyboard navigation, semantic markup and ARIA usage across templates.
  • Conduct regular cross-browser and cross-device testing (desktop, mobile, tablet), implement responsive design checks and fix rendering or functionality regressions caused by new releases or third-party library updates.
  • Manage vendor relationships for hosting, CDN, WAF, analytics and third-party integrations, handle support escalations, negotiate SLAs and coordinate platform upgrades with external providers.
  • Execute website migrations and domain consolidation projects, including content migration, URL mapping, SEO retention strategies (301 redirects), database porting and end-to-end validation on staging and production.
  • Maintain comprehensive documentation: architecture diagrams, runbooks, deployment steps, maintenance schedules, configuration management files, and knowledge base articles so teams can operate and scale web systems reliably.
  • Analyze web analytics and performance metrics (Google Analytics, GA4, server logs) to provide actionable reports to stakeholders and identify opportunities for speed improvements, conversion optimization and cost reductions.
  • Implement and maintain log collection, centralized logging and forensic capabilities (ELK/EFK, Splunk), and use logs to investigate incidents, security events and application behavior.
  • Automate repetitive tasks using scripting (Bash, Python, PowerShell) and orchestration tools to reduce manual interventions, improve consistency and speed up recovery steps.
  • Manage cost optimization for hosting and CDN usage, identify inefficient resources, implement reserved instances or autoscaling policies and provide recommendations to balance performance and cost.
  • Ensure compliance with regulatory requirements relevant to web properties (PCI-DSS for e-commerce, GDPR data handling, CCPA) by collaborating with legal, security and compliance teams and maintaining required controls and audit trails.

Secondary Functions

  • Serve as the primary contact for day-to-day website operations and coordinate cross-functional teams during planned maintenance and unexpected outages.
  • Provide technical guidance and mentoring to junior web operations staff and developers on secure deployment practices and platform configuration.
  • Participate in sprint planning, code reviews and release planning to help ensure operational readiness of new features and code changes.
  • Support ad-hoc technical requests from product, marketing and design teams including environment provisioning, A/B testing setups, and content staging.
  • Run vulnerability scans and coordinate remediation with development teams, security engineers and external auditors.
  • Contribute to the web platform roadmap by proposing improvements in automation, scalability, security and deployment tooling.
  • Develop and run training sessions for internal stakeholders on CMS usage, content best practices, and incident reporting procedures.
  • Assist in procurement and evaluation of hosting, CDN, monitoring and security tools; draft technical requirements and participate in vendor selection.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Linux server administration (Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL) and Windows Server fundamentals for web hosting.
  • Web server configuration and tuning: Nginx, Apache HTTPD, IIS.
  • Hands-on experience with CMS platforms: WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore, Magento or equivalent.
  • Proficiency in HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and familiarity with front-end frameworks and responsive design.
  • Server-side language experience: PHP, Python, Ruby, Node.js, or ASP.NET depending on stack.
  • Relational database administration: MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server; backup and restore procedures.
  • Cloud platform experience: AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, Route 53), Azure or Google Cloud Platform and related managed services.
  • CDN and caching expertise (Cloudflare, Fastly, Varnish), plus experience configuring caching headers and edge rules.
  • SSL/TLS certificate management, HTTPS configuration, HSTS and TLS security best practices.
  • DNS management and domain lifecycle operations (registrars, zone management, DNSSEC).
  • CI/CD tooling and deployment automation: Git, Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Ansible, Terraform experience desirable.
  • Monitoring, alerting and APM tools: Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, Nagios, Grafana and centralized logging (ELK/EFK, Splunk).
  • Scripting and automation with Bash, Python or PowerShell to accelerate operational tasks.
  • Security tooling and practices: Web Application Firewalls (WAF), vulnerability scanners, OWASP mitigations, and incident response basics.
  • Technical SEO fundamentals and accessibility compliance (WCAG), including structured data and mobile optimization.
  • Experience with backups, replication, disaster recovery planning and testing for web platforms.
  • Familiarity with performance optimization techniques: image optimization, lazy loading, critical CSS, resource compression and HTTP/2 settings.

Soft Skills

  • Strong problem-solving and analytical thinking to diagnose complex production issues under time pressure.
  • Clear written and verbal communication to document runbooks, write post-mortems and coordinate with cross-functional teams.
  • Prioritization and time-management skills to balance urgent incidents, planned work and technical debt remediation.
  • Collaboration and teamwork mindset; ability to work with developers, designers, security and business stakeholders.
  • Attention to detail for configuration changes, release notes, and compliance requirements.
  • Customer-service orientation when supporting internal content owners and external stakeholders.
  • Initiative and ownership: drive improvements, own incidents end-to-end and follow through on permanent fixes.
  • Adaptability to evolving technologies, cloud services and modern web architectures.
  • Organizational skills to manage multiple environments, releases and vendor relationships.
  • Continuous learning mindset to keep abreast of emerging web platform and security trends.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Associate degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Web Development, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, or related technical discipline.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology / Systems
  • Web Development / Software Engineering
  • Network Administration
  • Cybersecurity

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 2–7 years of hands-on experience administering production websites, servers and CMS platforms.

Preferred: 3–5+ years of dedicated Web Administrator or Site Reliability / DevOps experience with cloud-hosted web applications, demonstrated incident response and recovery experience, and a portfolio of managed web projects or documented migrations.

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