Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Website Administrator

🎯 Role Definition

The Website Administrator is responsible for the day-to-day technical ownership, operational stability and continuous improvement of public-facing websites, microsites, and web applications. This role manages hosting and infrastructure, implements security and compliance controls, performs deployments and content publishing workflows, troubleshoots production issues, optimizes site performance and SEO, and partners with marketing, product and engineering teams to deliver a reliable and measurable web experience. Ideal candidates combine hands-on systems and CMS experience with process discipline, strong collaboration skills, and an appetite for continuous optimization.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Junior Web Developer or Front-End Developer
IT Support / System Administrator
Content Manager or Web Content Specialist

Advancement To:

Senior Website Administrator / Lead Web Operations
Web Operations Manager or Web Production Manager
DevOps Engineer or Platform Engineer
Technical Product Manager for Web Platforms

Lateral Moves:

SEO Specialist or Digital Marketing Manager
CMS Architect or Content Strategist

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Manage and maintain the production web environment (hosting, virtual machines, containers, CDNs, DNS, load balancers) to ensure 99.9% uptime and fast page delivery across regions, including configuration and troubleshooting of cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and traditional hosting.
Administer content management systems (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Sitecore or headless CMS such as Contentful/Strapi), including plugin/module management, theme updates, content workflows, user roles, and permission governance to support marketing and editorial teams.
Plan, schedule and execute website releases and deployments using CI/CD pipelines and deployment tools (Git, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI), coordinate release windows with stakeholders, and perform rollbacks and hotfixes when necessary.
Monitor and optimize website performance using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, GTmetrix, New Relic, or Datadog; implement frontend and backend performance improvements (caching, asset optimization, HTTP/2, lazy loading, critical CSS) to improve Core Web Vitals and conversion rates.
Implement and maintain web security best practices including timely patching, SSL/TLS certificate management, Web Application Firewall (WAF) configuration, vulnerability scanning, security monitoring, and incident response procedures to protect user data and meet compliance requirements.
Configure and operate CDNs (Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly) and caching layers (Redis, Varnish) to reduce latency and improve content delivery reliability for global audiences.
Manage backups, disaster recovery plans, and recovery drills for databases, file stores, and infrastructure configurations to ensure business continuity and acceptable Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
Maintain and administer relational and NoSQL databases used by the website (MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB), including schema migrations, indexes, performance tuning, and routine maintenance tasks.
Administer and optimize search functionality and site indexing (Elasticsearch, Algolia, built-in CMS search), including relevancy tuning, schema mapping, and search analytics to improve user experience and conversions.
Manage domain registration, DNS settings, email deliverability (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), and third-party integrations that depend on DNS and domain configuration.
Perform security audits, penetration testing coordination with third parties, and remediation tracking to reduce exposure to OWASP Top 10 risks and to document compliance for internal and external audits.
Troubleshoot production incidents, perform root cause analysis, produce post-mortems with remediation plans, and implement monitoring and alerting to prevent recurrence of outages.
Maintain and refine analytics and tagging strategies (Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager, Adobe Analytics) to ensure accurate tracking of traffic, conversions, events and e-commerce metrics, and to support A/B testing and personalization programs.
Implement and support A/B testing and personalization platforms (Optimizely, VWO, LaunchDarkly) in collaboration with marketing and product teams, and ensure experiment instrumentation and result integrity.
Manage SSL/TLS lifecycle, certificate renewals and automation, and ensure secure connections for all subdomains, APIs and third-party integrations.
Build and maintain documentation covering runbooks, deployment checklists, site architecture diagrams, on-call procedures, and content publishing guides to reduce knowledge silos and accelerate incident response.
Oversee website accessibility remediation and QA (WCAG 2.1 compliance), perform accessibility testing, and coordinate fixes with front-end teams to provide inclusive experiences.
Coordinate cross-functional projects such as major site redesigns, migrations, or platform upgrades (CMS upgrades, PHP version upgrades, framework migrations), including planning, testing, cutover and rollback strategies.
Optimize SEO technical foundations: structured data/schema, canonical tags, robots.txt, XML sitemaps, hreflang implementations, and site architecture improvements to support organic search visibility and indexability.
Manage API integrations with CRM, marketing automation, payment gateways, and back-office systems; monitor data flows and reconcile failures between systems.
Implement and maintain logging, observability and tracing (ELK/Elastic Stack, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana) to surface performance regressions and anomalous behaviors proactively.
Maintain a testing and staging infrastructure that mirrors production, enforce content and code promotion workflows, and run automated and manual QA before production pushes.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Provide technical guidance and training for editorial and marketing staff on CMS best practices, image optimization and content publishing workflows.
Assist with vendor evaluation and management for hosting, CDN, security, analytics and SaaS platforms; negotiate SLAs and ensure vendor performance aligns with business needs.
Run periodic content audits, broken-link sweeps, and SEO health checks to identify content quality and technical issues and prioritize remediation.
Participate in on-call rotations to ensure 24/7 response coverage for critical website incidents and maintain clear escalation procedures.
Support privacy and consent management (cookie banners, consent logs) and coordinate with legal to ensure compliance with GDPR, CCPA and other relevant privacy regulations.
Contribute to continuous improvement initiatives, identifying automation opportunities (scripted deployments, automated backups, automated patching) to reduce manual toil and increase reliability.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Content Management Systems (CMS): Deep experience administering and customizing WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or headless CMS platforms, including plugin/module management, theming, roles and workflows.
Web Hosting & Cloud Platforms: Hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, GCP, or managed hosts; provisioning, scaling, and securing web hosts, including EC2, S3, RDS, Cloud Run, App Engine or equivalent.
Web Performance Optimization: Proven ability to diagnose and remediate performance issues using Lighthouse, WebPageTest, Chrome DevTools, CDN tuning, image optimization tools and caching strategies.
Deployment & CI/CD: Practical experience with Git-based workflows, automated builds and deployments using GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI, or similar tools.
Security & Compliance: Familiarity with vulnerability scanning, SSL/TLS lifecycle, WAFs, CSP, OWASP mitigation strategies, and incident response procedures.
Server & Database Administration: Experience managing Linux web servers, LEMP/LAMP stacks, and databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB), including backups, replication and performance tuning.
Networking & DNS: Strong understanding of DNS, CDN configuration, load balancing, reverse proxies (NGINX, Apache), and network troubleshooting.
Scripting & Automation: Comfortable writing scripts (Bash, Python, Node.js) to automate operational tasks like backups, log rotation and deployment orchestration.
Observability & Monitoring: Experience setting up and using monitoring and logging stacks (Prometheus/Grafana, New Relic, Datadog, ELK) and creating meaningful dashboards and alerts.
Analytics & Tag Management: Proficiency with Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager, event tracking, and ensuring analytics data integrity for reporting and experimentation.
SEO Technical Skills: Knowledge of schema.org/structured data, redirects, canonicalization, hreflang, robots.txt, XML sitemaps and general technical SEO best practices.
API Integrations: Experience integrating and troubleshooting RESTful APIs, webhooks, and third-party services (CRM, payment gateways, marketing automation).
Accessibility: Practical knowledge of WCAG guidelines and tools for accessibility testing and remediation workflows.

Soft Skills

Excellent communicator who can translate technical concepts into actionable guidance for non-technical stakeholders (marketing, content, legal).
Strong problem-solver with a structured approach to incident triage, RCA and prevention.
Collaborative team player who partners effectively across engineering, design, product and marketing to deliver web initiatives.
Detail-oriented with a bias for documentation, process, and repeatability to reduce operational risk.
Prioritization and time management skills to balance operational stability, project delivery and continuous improvement tasks.
Customer-focused mindset, understanding how site reliability, speed and SEO impact user experience and business KPIs.
Proactive learner, keeps up with web platform changes, security vulnerabilities, and emerging delivery optimizations.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Web Development, Digital Media, or related field.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science or Software Engineering
Web Development / Front-End Engineering
Information Technology / Systems Administration
Digital Marketing / Media (for CMS and SEO crossover)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

2–5 years of hands-on experience managing public-facing websites, CMS administration, hosting and web operations.

Preferred:

3–7+ years experience with enterprise websites, multi-site CMS environments, cloud hosting (AWS/Azure/GCP), and demonstrated ownership of site reliability, security and performance at scale.