Return of the webmaster?

At the Edge of Search SEO Conference 2026, Sally Mills presented “Return of the Webmaster”.

Early in the talk, Sally asked who remembered what a webmaster was, who had worked with one, and whether anyone had actually been one.

I put my hand up. There weren't many of us.

Sally described a webmaster as “a person responsible for the operation, maintenance, and overall management of a website.”

Hosting, uptime, robots.txt, sitemaps, canonicals, page speed, HTML, navigation, content, search and a long list of other things were all part of the job.

If you had a question about the website, or really anything to do with the web, you asked the webmaster.

Over time, those responsibilities became fragmented across developers, infrastructure teams, content teams, marketers, UX designers, SEO consultants and other specialists. Somewhere along the way, we lost the person looking at the website as a whole.

I agree with a lot of that.

But I left the talk with a question.

Did the webmaster actually go anywhere?

Someone needs to own the whole website

A website is a collection of interconnected systems. The CMS affects the HTML. The HTML affects accessibility and search. Infrastructure affects performance. JavaScript affects rendering. Content changes affect internal links. A domain migration affects redirects. A WAF rule can affect crawlers.

Decisions made in one part of the system have consequences elsewhere.

The webmaster doesn't need to be the deepest expert in every one of these areas. But they do need to understand how the pieces fit together, have access to the people and systems involved, be able to affect change, and know when to bring in a specialist.

SEO has been filling the gap

This was one of the strongest points in Sally's talk.

Businesses want their websites to rank, so they engage an SEO consultant. The SEO audits the website and starts finding things:

• pages aren't being indexed
• canonicals are wrong
• redirects have disappeared
• important content isn't internally linked
• robots.txt doesn't reflect what the business actually wants crawled
• JavaScript is preventing content from being available to some crawlers

Suddenly the SEO consultant is coordinating technical changes across the website. It starts to look a lot like the old webmaster role.

But there's an important distinction between identifying a problem and owning the system that produces it.

What is the webmaster responsible for?

A webmaster needs to understand the particular website: how it's built, deployed and hosted, how its CMS works and how its various systems fit together.

They should be responsible for its baseline technical health, including:

• semantic, server-rendered HTML
• performance and caching
• accessible implementation
• correct HTTP status codes
• canonicals, sitemaps and robots.txt
• structured data, metadata and Open Graph output
• JavaScript, CSS and image performance
• CMS and dependency updates
• server performance and log monitoring

Done properly, a lot of what we call baseline technical SEO is simply the result of good web development.

That doesn't eliminate the need for SEO. It helps define where the webmaster's responsibilities end and specialist SEO expertise begins.

What is SEO responsible for?

A good SEO should be deeply technically literate. They should understand HTTP status codes, crawling, indexing, rendering, robots.txt, canonicals, redirects, structured data and web performance.

They should be able to audit a website, identify problems and opportunities, investigate likely causes and define the desired outcome.

They don't necessarily need to understand the working details of a particular project's code. Every website is different. SEO concepts apply across websites, while implementation is specific to the application.

For example, an SEO might identify that important content isn't present in the server-rendered HTML and explain why that's a problem.

That doesn't mean they should prescribe how server-side rendering needs to be implemented in that particular application.

The webmaster and the SEO should work together. The SEO identifies the problem or opportunity, investigates it and defines the desired outcome. The webmaster understands the application and determines how that outcome should be achieved.

Content SEO, competitor and keyword analysis, content opportunities and deeper technical SEO investigations are specialist disciplines where SEO brings expertise beyond baseline technical website maintenance.

Some problems don't belong to either role

Not every problem discovered in an SEO audit is a technical problem.

If a campaign landing page has been published without any internal links pointing to it, that's primarily a content problem. If editors move hundreds of pages and leave broken internal links behind, that's a content governance problem. SEO tools like Screaming Frog are excellent for identifying and validating those issues.

The webmaster's responsibility is to make sure the CMS provides appropriate tools for managing redirects and that larger migrations can be handled properly at an application or server level.

The fact that an SEO tool discovers something doesn't automatically make it an SEO responsibility. Likewise, the fact that something affects SEO doesn't automatically mean it should be implemented by an SEO.

So what does a webmaster look like?

A webmaster is an experienced web generalist. They won't be the deepest expert in every discipline, but they have enough experience to understand how the pieces fit together, investigate unfamiliar problems and know when to defer to a specialist.

They need to:

• understand the website as a whole and how it's built
• have access to the code and be able to change it
• understand the CMS
• understand hosting, performance and infrastructure, or work with the people who manage them
• understand accessibility, technical SEO and analytics well enough to recognise problems
• understand how browsers and crawlers interact with the website
• regularly check the technical health of the website
• be willing to investigate unfamiliar problems and know when to defer to specialists
• …

Hang on.

That sounds an awful lot like an experienced web developer.

Maybe the webmaster never disappeared.

Your developer should be your webmaster

This is where I differ from the conclusion of Sally's talk.

Sally's argument is that SEO has increasingly taken on the responsibilities of the old webmaster, and that when businesses hire an SEO they are increasingly hiring the person who maintains and owns the website as an asset.

I agree with the first part. I'm not convinced by the second.

SEOs filling the webmaster role is a real phenomenon. But I don't think it's evidence that SEO has become the webmaster. I think it's evidence that, in many businesses, nobody else is fulfilling that role.

And often, that's because businesses have stopped maintaining an ongoing relationship with their developer.

A website launches. The developer steps away. The business takes over. A year or two later the business wants better results, so it engages an SEO consultant. The SEO audits the site, discovers technical issues and becomes the person trying to work out who can fix them.

That's not necessarily a new model for website ownership. It might just mean there's a hole where the webmaster should have been.

The best outcomes we've seen come from an ongoing relationship between the business and its developer, with specialists such as SEO brought in when their expertise is needed.

Your developer should understand your website as a whole, maintain its technical foundations, help you make decisions about it and know when specialist expertise is required.

In other words, your web developer is best placed to be your webmaster.

If your developer isn't currently fulfilling that role, talk to them about it. If they can't or don't want to, perhaps it's time to find a developer who will.

Or, of course, talk to me.

I own the shirt, after all.