What Is a Webmaster?

The word combines web and master. Merriam-Webster defines it as a person responsible for the creation or maintenance of a website, especially for a company or organisation, and dates its first known use to 1993. The German Duden lists it as someone in charge of creating, organising and maintaining websites. The Spanish dictionary of the Real Academia Española does not include it.

The term also has a technical use. RFC 2142, from May 1997, sets webmaster@ followed by the domain as the mailbox that receives queries and reports about an organisation's web service, just as postmaster@ does for email. It accepts www@ as a synonym.

A webmaster's tasks follow the life of the site. First the site has to go live: register the domain, rent the server, install the CMS. Then it has to be maintained, with updates, backups and renewals. And someone has to check that it works: that pages load, forms arrive and search engines can crawl the site.

How much of this one person handles depends on the size of the site. In 2015 Google described the users of its webmaster tools as a mixed group: hobbyists, small business owners, SEO experts, marketers, programmers, designers, app developers and, of course, webmasters. What they share, according to Google, is a wish to make their work available online and findable through Google Search.

The word is in decline, and Google has documented it. In May 2015 it renamed Google Webmaster Tools as Google Search Console, which has its own entry in this glossary, because the traditional idea of the webmaster reflected only some of its users.

In November 2020 Google also renamed Google Webmasters as Google Search Central. According to Google, a user experience study showed that very few web professionals still call themselves webmasters. They are more likely to say SEO, online marketer, blogger, web developer or site owner. Its former Webmaster Guidelines are now called Google Search Essentials.

What has not gone away is the job. Someone has to be accountable for the site, whatever the role is called. If nobody holds that responsibility, tasks such as renewing the domain or updating the CMS have no owner.

• Name one person responsible for the site, even if the job title is not webmaster.
• Keep the domain's webmaster@ mailbox, or an equivalent contact, working, as RFC 2142 provides.
• Store access to the domain, server and CMS in a shared place.
• Keep the CMS, plugins and the site's certificate up to date.
• Document technical changes so that someone else can carry on the work.

• Expecting a single technical profile to do everything on a large site, where the tasks are split between several people.
• Leaving the domain or server registered to someone who has left the company.
• Searching for Google's Webmaster Guidelines, which are now called Google Search Essentials.
• Confusing the webmaster with the SEO specialist: SEO is one of the possible tasks, not the only one.
• Publishing changes to the site without a backup first.