Rules for who can publish what, so the site stops drifting after launch.
Website governance defining who can publish what, under what review, and with what consequence for the sections a site accumulates over time — the structure that keeps a launched site coherent rather than drifting the way most eventually do.
Every well-built site drifts eventually without governance: a campaign page added without review, a section nobody owns, a design pattern that starts diverging from the system. The build was never the problem; the absence of rules for what happens after launch was.
A governance model defining roles, permissions and review requirements, documentation of what can be published freely versus what needs sign-off, a content ownership map, and periodic audit to catch drift early.
We define the governance structure and roles for your website, then hand it over — your team runs the ongoing editorial process day to day, inside a framework built to hold up without us in the room.
The scope our website governance work has operated within.
What actually goes wrong without governance differs by company. Website governance starts from that risk.
What comes up when defining publishing governance.
No, good governance speeds up routine publishing rather than slowing it down. It clarifies which content types can go live without review and reserves approval steps for pages where regulatory, legal or brand risk is highest. The result is faster low-risk publishing, with scrutiny concentrated only where it matters, instead of the same friction applied to every page regardless of what it contains.
No, we define the governance structure — roles, approval thresholds, escalation paths — and your team operates within it day to day. We are typically involved again only when the structure needs revisiting, for example after a reorganisation or a new market joining the group. Ongoing editorial decisions stay with your team, since they are best placed to make them.
Closely — the same governance framework typically extends to how affiliate markets publish their own content. See local affiliate websites for how the global-local boundary connects to publishing governance specifically, since affiliate markets often need a lighter approval layer for local-only content than the central team requires. Making that boundary explicit avoids repeated escalation on routine local updates.
That is common, and it usually means the existing rules are not practical for the team using them day to day, not that enforcement is weak. We would review the current rules against real publishing volume and revise them to be realistically followable — reserving mandatory review for real risk and removing steps that add no value. More enforcement rarely fixes rules people cannot use.
Website governance often connects to these related problems.
A site that has drifted since launch, or one about to launch without any governance defined. Tell us your team structure and we will tell you how we would approach website governance.