When a staff member leaves your school—especially someone in admissions, communications, or marketing—what else leaves with them? For many classical schools, the uncomfortable answer is: access. To the website. To the forms. To the domain. To the core infrastructure you depend on to run enrollment.

This isn’t a scare tactic. It’s a real risk we’ve seen play out over and over again. And it’s completely avoidable if you structure your web presence with clarity and continuity in mind.

Why Website Ownership Actually Matters

Your school’s website isn’t just a digital flyer—it’s your most powerful recruitment and retention tool. But for too many schools, it’s also a fragile single-point-of-failure. One person gets hit by a bus (or accepts a job somewhere else) and suddenly you’re locked out of your domain, your WordPress login, your DNS records—everything.

We’ve seen businesses go weeks without being able to update a phone number or post open house info because they didn’t know who to call. The web designer ghosted. The host said “we need the original billing email.” And no one had the passwords.

Best Practice: School-Owned Content, Partner-Managed Infrastructure

At Paired Inc., we believe the healthiest model for classical schools looks like this:

• Your school owns the brand, the content, and the mission. That means you control what’s on the site, what it says, how it looks, and who can update it. We build around your values—not a generic template.
• We manage the infrastructure on your behalf. You don’t need to know what Rocket.net or Cloudflare is. You just need it to work. So we host your site on premium servers, keep everything updated and secure, and act as your translator and firewall between you and the tech stack.
• You choose how hands-on you want to be. Want to manage blog posts and staff bios yourself? We’ll train you. Prefer to email us every change and let us handle it? That works too. Most of our clients fall somewhere in the middle—and we flex with you.

We’ve been doing this for over 14 years. And one pattern has become very clear: even when schools and businesses insist on owning their own hosting, they still call us when things break. Which is fine—we’re happy to help—but it’s far more efficient and stable when we manage it from the start. You get better performance, faster support, and fewer vendors to juggle.

Plus: we accept checks. Try getting GoDaddy to do that.

Don’t Put All Your Access in One Inbox

If your current website setup relies on one person to access all of the following, you’re exposed:

• Domain registrar (e.g., GoDaddy, Namecheap)
• Website hosting provider
• WordPress administrator login
• DNS panel (often separate from hosting)
• Google Analytics and Search Console
• Email contact forms (Gravity, WPForms, etc.)
• Google Workspace or other email platforms
• Social media admin privileges (especially if linked on site)

The fix is simple: consolidate these logins in a secure, shared password manager. Create a digital infrastructure handoff doc. Ensure someone in leadership—not just the comms person—has access.

Who Actually Owns Your Domain?

We’ve had schools and businesses come to us not knowing where their domain is registered—or worse, discovering it’s owned by a former employee or a freelance designer they haven’t spoken to in years.

Here’s how to check:

• Go to who.is and look up your domain.
• Check the registrant and contact info. If it’s a personal email you don’t control, initiate a transfer immediately.

If your school doesn’t control your domain, you don’t own your online identity.

What If a Staff Member Leaves Tomorrow?

Let’s say the person who’s been running your site moves on. What happens?

• Do you know where to log in to make updates?
• Can someone else post an open house banner without calling tech support?
• Do you know who to contact if the site goes down?

If the answer is no, that’s not just a digital risk—it’s an enrollment one.

Every week you’re scrambling to update content is a week you’re bleeding trust with prospective families.

Your Web Vendor Shouldn’t Be a Gatekeeper

But they should be a guardian.

Some firms hold access hostage so clients can’t leave. Others hand over everything with no guidance and disappear the moment the invoice is paid.

We’ve seen both. That’s why we position ourselves differently: we partner with your school and give you as much—or as little—access as you want.

Our goal isn’t control. It’s continuity.

Need us to manage every plugin and form? We’ve got it. Want to take over editing pages in-house? We’ll document the process and train your team.

Why Partnering With Us Actually Simplifies Things

Here’s what happens when we host your site:

• You don’t have to log into five platforms to troubleshoot an issue.
• You don’t have to translate tech jargon when something goes wrong.
• You don’t have to panic if a staff member leaves and no one knows the passwords.

We’ve built and hosted sites that have lasted longer than three different heads of school. We’ve helped schools migrate away from failing shared hosts and regain control of domains they didn’t realize they’d lost.

As we explain in our post on referable websites, stability and trust are silent signals to parents. A site that “just works” builds credibility, whether families realize it consciously or not.

We take this responsibility seriously. In fact, we’ve gone so far as to include instructions in our estate plan to ensure our hosted clients are taken care of—even in a worst-case scenario. That’s how committed we are to long-term continuity.

Staff Change Doesn’t Have to Mean Digital Disruption

The real goal isn’t just continuity of access—it’s continuity of mission.

Your values, your voice, your credibility online shouldn’t depend on whether a particular person is still employed at your school.

That’s why we recommend:

• Creating a shared “digital master doc” with all systems, vendors, and access points
• Documenting basic website tasks via video or Loom walkthroughs
• Setting quarterly check-ins with your web partner to make sure nothing is getting stale or missed

This isn’t overhead. It’s insurance. And it’s how the healthiest schools we work with operate.

You Can’t Outsource Responsibility—But You Can Share the Load

At the end of the day, your school is responsible for its digital presence. But that doesn’t mean you have to manage it alone—or lose sleep over what happens if your comms person quits mid-January.

We don’t just build beautiful, fast-loading sites—we help you build resilient systems that survive staff turnover and keep your mission online no matter what.

So: who owns your site?

If you’re not 100% sure, let’s fix that before it becomes a problem.