In my previous article, “Closing the Digital Performance Gap,” I made the case that web effectiveness is a business issue, not a marketing metric. The website is no longer just a reflection of your brand – it is your brand. If it’s not delivering measurable business results, that’s a leadership problem, not a team problem.
But there’s a deeper issue underneath that: Who actually owns web performance?
The truth is, many companies don’t have a good answer. Or they think they do until something breaks. The SEO team doesn’t own the infrastructure. The dev team isn’t briefed on platform changes. The content team isn’t looped in until after a redesign. Visibility drops, conversions dip, and someone asks, “Why isn’t our SEO team performing?”
Because they don’t own the full system, no one does.
If we want to close the digital performance gap, we must address this root problem: lack of accountability.
The Fallacy Of Distributed Ownership
The idea that “everyone owns the website” likely stems from early digital transformation initiatives, where cross-functional collaboration was encouraged to break down departmental silos. The intent was to foster shared responsibility across departments – but the unintended consequence was diffused accountability.
It sounds collaborative, but in practice, it often means no one is fully accountable for performance.
Here’s how it typically breaks down:
- IT owns infrastructure and hosting.
- Marketing owns content and campaigns.
- SEO owns visibility – but not implementation.
- UX owns experience – but not findability.
- Legal owns compliance – but limits usability.
- Product owns the content management system (CMS) – but doesn’t track SEO.
Each group is doing its job, often with excellence. But the result? Disconnected execution. Strategy gets lost in translation, and performance stalls.
Case in point: For a global alcohol brand, a site refresh had legal requirements mandating an age verification gate before users could access the site. That was the extent of their specification. IT built the gate exactly to spec: a page with the statement to enter your birthdate and three pull-down options for Month, Day, and Year, and a check of that date to the U.S. legal drinking age. UX and creative delayed launch for weeks while debating the optimal wording, positioning, and color scheme.
Once launched, the website traffic, both direct and organic search, dropped to zero. This was due to several key reasons:
- Analytics were not set up to track visits before and after the age gate.
- Search engines can’t input a birthdate, so they were blocked.
- The age requirement was set to the U.S. standard, rejecting younger, yet legal visitors from other countries.
Because everything was done in silos, no one had considered these critical details.
When we finally got all stakeholders in a room, agreed on the issues, and sorted through them, we redesigned the system:
- Search engines were recognized and…
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