Govern a global website estate by establishing what it contains, defining explicitly what is fixed centrally and what each market decides, giving every property a named current owner, matching review requirements to the actual risk of the content, and auditing on a fixed cycle. A written policy that is never checked describes an estate rather than governing one.
Industrial estates grow by accumulation: country subsidiary sites, product microsites from a trade fair, distributor portals, and brand domains inherited through acquisitions. The first pass usually finds properties with no owner, no maintenance and unpatched software, which is why the inventory comes before the policy.
Take the domain list from the registrar accounts rather than from the marketing team, and add every subdomain, subsidiary site, product microsite, distributor portal and brand domain inherited through an acquisition.
Record the platform, hosting, software versions, analytics property and last update for each. Properties with no identifiable owner are the ones that carry unpatched software and outdated certification claims.
Decide what holds across every market: brand system, platform, template library, legal and privacy framework, and the source of product data. Then decide what each market determines: distributor and contact details, local references, event and recruitment content, and the language and terminology used.
Where the boundary is left implicit, every local request becomes a negotiation and the answer depends on who is asked.
Certification scope, availability, technical claims and application guidance sit between the two. A statement that is accurate in one market may not hold in another where the approval differs or the product variant is not sold.
Treat these as centrally owned content with a defined local adaptation route, rather than as either fixed text or free local copy. It is where governance either works or is quietly bypassed.
Every property needs a named owner today, with a deputy, recorded somewhere other than in one person’s memory. Ownership disappears most often through reorganisation, when the person who commissioned a site moves on and the property continues running unattended.
Review the ownership record after each reorganisation, not only on the annual cycle. See website governance for how the record is maintained.
An event announcement and a statement about certification scope do not warrant the same approval path. Define which content types need technical sign-off, which need legal or compliance review of product claims, and which a market can publish directly.
Review requirements applied uniformly to everything are the most common reason a process gets worked around. See technical and legal sign-off workflow.
Set a fixed cadence to re-check the inventory, ownership, software versions, certification statements, broken links and analytics coverage across the estate, and report the exceptions rather than the whole picture.
Where an audit repeatedly finds the same deviation, the rule is usually impractical rather than ignored. Reviewing the rule is often more effective than adding enforcement to it.
Build a complete inventory from the registrar accounts, define explicitly what is fixed centrally and what each market decides, give every property a named current owner and deputy, match review requirements to the risk the content carries, and audit on a fixed cycle. The inventory comes first, because a policy cannot cover properties that were never recorded.
Brand system, platform, templates, legal framework and the source of product data are usually held centrally. Distributor and contact details, local references, events, recruitment and the terminology used are usually local. Certification scope, availability and technical claims sit between the two and need a defined adaptation route rather than being left to either side.
A named lead with responsibility for the estate, supported by a point of contact in each country subsidiary or regional organisation. A central function with no local visibility tends not to see drift until an audit, and a purely local model produces inconsistency. The combination gives markets a route to raise a practical exception.
Decide per property whether it is retired with its URLs redirected, absorbed into a governed platform, or kept with an owner assigned. Retiring without redirects breaks any external links the property accumulated. Unowned properties carry the highest risk in an estate, since they run outdated software and outdated claims without anyone seeing either.
The inventory and ownership record at least annually, and again after any reorganisation or acquisition, since those are what break ownership rather than time passing. The rules themselves are worth reviewing when an audit finds the same deviation repeatedly, which usually indicates the rule does not fit how the markets work.
Look at whether they can be followed before adding enforcement. Rules bypassed consistently across several markets tend to be impractical in daily work: a review path with no defined timescale, or a template that cannot express something a market requires. Adjusting the rule usually restores compliance more reliably than escalation does.
Tell us how your markets are structured and we will set out a governance model that would hold.