Every marketing team reaches the point where the website needs a clear owner. Campaign pages wait in a queue, redirects get forgotten after a rebrand, and nobody is sure who updates the plugins or the framework.
The usual answers are hiring a developer, contracting a freelancer or retaining an agency. Each works in the right conditions, and the wrong choice shows up as slow pages, lost rankings or a backlog that never shrinks.
What Running A Marketing Website Involves?
Running a marketing website covers far more than publishing posts. It includes landing pages for campaigns, technical SEO (redirects, metadata, sitemaps and structured data), performance against Core Web Vitals, security and dependency updates, and integrations with the CRM, analytics and consent tools. Each owner option handles a different share of that list well.
Write the list down for your own site before comparing options, and mark which items happen weekly and which only a few times a year. Frequency matters more than difficulty, because it decides whether you need someone on hand or someone on call.
When An In-House Developer Makes Sense?
An in-house developer fits when the website sits close to the product, changes every week and needs context only an employee builds up, such as pricing logic or sign-up flows. The trade-off is concentration: a single developer is also a single holiday calendar, a single resignation letter and a single set of skills.
If you hire, plan for code review and holiday cover from the start, and write down how the site is built and deployed so a second person can step in without a week of archaeology.
When A Freelancer Is Enough?
A freelancer suits a small, stable site with occasional changes: a new landing page each month, a form tweak, a framework update. You pay only for the hours used. The risk is availability, since a good freelancer is often booked for weeks, and an urgent fix before a campaign launch cannot always wait.
Agree response times in writing and ask who covers when the freelancer is away. A short handover document kept in the repository makes it far easier to bring in help at short notice.
When A Specialist Agency Is The Better Fit?
An agency makes sense when the site is large, changes often or is heading into a migration. A team brings design, front end, CMS and technical SEO skills together, covers holidays and reviews its own code. You pay more per hour, and the arrangement works best when the same people stay on your account for years.
Continuity is what turns an outside team into part of yours. Pagepro, a Next.js and Sanity migration specialist (https://pagepro.co/), has worked with GP Notebook since 2022 and still runs weekly delivery meetings under an active SLA, 4+ years in. Andrew Hawryluk, co-founder of Learn Squared, described the effect on delivery speed:
“We’ve absolutely seen an increase in development velocity with the Pagepro team, through initial development and even into the initial weeks of our first SLA… the turnaround time from ideation to feature launch has been a marked improvement upon our previous development solution.”
Choosing, Or Combining, The Options
A common setup is a hybrid: marketers edit content in a headless CMS without developer help, and a specialist team on a retainer handles code, performance and releases. The split works when the content model gives editors enough freedom and when one person on your side owns the priorities for both.
| Option | Fits when | Watch out for |
| In-house developer | The site is part of the product and changes weekly | One person as a single point of failure |
| Freelancer | A small, stable site with occasional changes | Availability and holiday cover |
| Specialist agency | A large or migrating site with many integrations | Higher hourly cost, onboarding time |
| Hybrid | Editors in-house, code on a retainer | No clear owner for priorities |
To decide, sort last quarter’s website requests into content changes and code changes. If most were content, fix the CMS so editors can do them alone; if most were code, size the development capacity to that volume and pick the option that can supply it.
