97% of marketing leaders and 94% of technical leaders say their own team owns website strategy, according to Webflow's 2026 State of the Website survey of 1,000 leaders run by Vanson Bourne. Both cannot be right. That gap explains most of the other numbers on this page: the tickets, the waits, the missed deadlines and the developers who say they are doing work that should not be theirs.
This page collects the published survey data from 2024 to 2026 on who controls the marketing website, how dependent marketers are on developers, how long a change takes to go live, and what the friction costs each side. Most of the data comes from vendors that sell website platforms, and each figure is labelled with its publisher and sample.
Both teams think they own the website
The clearest data on ownership is in the second chapter of Webflow's 2026 report. The survey asked 700 marketing leaders and 300 technical leaders, all director level or above at organisations with 50 or more employees in the US, Canada and the UK, which way control of the website leans. The fieldwork ran in June and July 2025.
| Answer | Marketing leaders | Technical leaders |
|---|---|---|
| "My team owns website strategy" | 97% | 94% |
| Website leans more marketing controlled | 61% | 33% |
| Control of the website is balanced | 35% | 50% |
| Website leans more engineering controlled | 4% | 17% |
| Leans marketing, among those completely satisfied with their site | 66% | 49% |
| Leans engineering, among those completely satisfied with their site | 4% | 12% |
Source: Webflow and Vanson Bourne, The 2026 State of the Website, chapter 2, 1,000 respondents, vendor survey
Two readings matter. First, the same organisation can be described as marketing-led by its marketers and balanced by its engineers, so a single "who owns it" answer from one side is not reliable. Second, among respondents completely satisfied with their website, both groups report more marketing control: 66% of marketers and 49% of technical leaders. That is a correlation in a vendor survey, not proof that handing marketing the keys fixes a site, but it points the same way as every other source here.
The 2024 edition put the same problem in different words. In a survey of 500 marketing leaders in the US and Canada, fielded in July and August 2023, 81% said their team is restricted by developers and other teams, and Webflow's report heads that section "Website ownership is a persistent challenge for 81% of marketing teams". In Webflow's write-up of the same data, 36% said their team wants full ownership of the website but does not have it.
How dependent marketers are on developers
The dependency numbers vary with the question, and they cluster between 80% and 95%.
| Finding | Figure | Source and sample |
|---|---|---|
| At least somewhat reliant on developers, agencies or outside expertise | 93% | Webflow 2026, 700 marketing leaders |
| Rely on developers for basic updates | 81% | ButterCMS 2025, 600+ marketing professionals |
| Team restricted by developers and other teams | 81% | Webflow 2024, 500 marketing leaders |
| Want more direct control over web content without needing a developer every time | 87.42% | Netlify 2024, 150 marketers and 150 developers |
| Marketing and development collaboration is ineffective or nonexistent | 40% | Storyblok 2024, 300 IT and marketing leaders |
| Believe they could collaborate more effectively with engineers and developers | 96% | Webflow 2025, 500 marketing leaders, as reported by Digidop |
Sources: Webflow 2024, 2025 and 2026; ButterCMS 2025; Netlify 2024; Storyblok 2024; all vendor surveys
The developer side of the Netlify survey is the useful counterweight. 57.61% of developers say they lack an understanding of what marketers need, 68.21% think their marketing colleagues do not fully use the tools they already have, and 63.91% of all respondents see a gap in translating marketing objectives into technical requirements. Dependency is not only a tooling problem; part of it is a briefing problem.
We covered the build decisions that create most of these tickets, and the rules that remove them, in our guide to a website the marketing team can edit. This page sticks to the measurement.
Time to publish: hours for a page, days for a change, weeks for a campaign
Publishing time is measured very differently from survey to survey, so the table lists each definition next to its number.
| What was measured | Result | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Publishing a new page once all assets are approved | 37% under 1 hour; 49% 1 to 3 hours; 14% a day or more | Storyblok State of CMS 2025, 1,300 users |
| Changes that take multiple days to complete | 45% of marketers | ButterCMS 2025, 600+ respondents |
| Simple copy edits that take at least two weeks | Roughly a third of marketing leaders | Webflow 2024 survey, 500 leaders, fielded 2023 |
| Developing a landing page | 13 days on average | Netlify 2024, 300 respondents |
| Launching a new marketing campaign, start to launch | 53.2 days on average | Netlify 2024, 300 respondents |
Sources: Storyblok, ButterCMS, Webflow, Netlify; vendor surveys
The Storyblok figure is the narrowest and the most useful. It isolates the CMS step: the content is written, approved and ready, and the question is only how long it takes to get it live. Even then, 63% need more than an hour. Storyblok's 2025 sample was split evenly between technical and non-technical users, so this is not a marketer-only complaint. The same report names time-consuming processes as the leading CMS pain point, cited by 43% of users.
The Webflow 2024 figure, a third of marketing leaders waiting at least two weeks for a simple copy edit, measures something else: the queue. A ten-minute change that waits for a sprint slot is a two-week change.
What the handoff costs the engineering team
The 2026 Webflow survey is the first in this set to ask technical leaders the same questions at scale, and their answers are as negative as the marketers'.
| Finding | Share |
|---|---|
| Some level of friction between technical and non-technical teams when changing the website | 91% |
| Platform and process gaps pull their team into work non-technical staff should handle | 96% (100% on headless CMSs) |
| Developers report frustrations working on the organisation's website | 93% |
| Those frustrations caused hiring or retention problems in the past 12 months | 58% (76% on headless CMSs) |
| Technical debt affects their ability to manage the website | 97% |
| Completely satisfied with their website | 34% (29% on custom builds) |
Source: Webflow and Vanson Bourne, The 2026 State of the Website, chapters 2 and 3, 300 technical leaders, vendor survey
The headless figures deserve a second look. Headless architectures are often chosen to free marketers from developers, yet in this sample 100% of technical leaders on headless CMSs said their teams get pulled into non-technical work. Where the editing experience is not built for marketers, the developers end up publishing anyway. Webflow sells a visual platform and competes with headless CMSs, so read that comparison with the sponsor in mind.
Volume is rising faster than either team can absorb
Three findings show why ownership has become a pressing question in 2026 rather than a long-running grumble. In Webflow's 2026 survey, 92% of organisations say website update requests are growing in size and complexity, and 95% say they receive more web project requests overall. Framer's State of Sites 2026, a survey of more than 1,900 designers, marketers and front-end developers, finds that 53% of website work is general edits and fixes and that 70% of website projects are deprioritised because they are too slow or difficult to ship.
The delivery record follows. Only 28% of organisations in the Webflow 2026 survey always deliver web projects both on time and within budget; 46% struggle to deliver on time and 53% struggle to stay within budget. By platform, 60% of custom-build teams struggled with time and 66% with budget, the worst of the groups reported. ButterCMS's 2025 survey traces the knock-on effect: 70% report delays bringing products to market and 66% report slower campaign launches.
Staffing does not absorb the load either. The Content Marketing Institute's 2025 B2B benchmark, the one non-vendor source on this page, found that 54% of B2B organisations with a dedicated content team describe it as two to five people, and 24% have no dedicated content staff at all. Only 26% say they have the right technology to manage content across the organisation, down from 31% a year earlier. Small teams, rising request volume and a site that needs a developer for routine changes is the combination behind most of the numbers above.
When the answer is a new platform
Ownership friction is one of the main reasons organisations change CMS. In ButterCMS's survey, three in four marketers say they are considering a rebuild or replatform, and they estimate a rebuild on a new platform at more than $66,000. Storyblok's 2025 report finds 61% of teams juggling two or more CMSs, and says half of those are actively trying to leave. Our CMS migration statistics cover how often organisations actually switch and what the move costs.
A new platform does not settle ownership by itself. The Webflow 2026 data shows the same friction on every platform type it measured, including its own category of visual builders, and the Netlify data shows a briefing gap that no tool removes. For the wider picture of how B2B buyers use the site that these teams are arguing over, see our B2B website statistics.
What this means for deciding who owns your website
Write the ownership split down before the next build, by task rather than by team. Copy, pages built from approved sections, CMS items, SEO fields and redirects can sit with marketing. Templates, global components, integrations, tracking and security sit with whoever maintains the code. Then measure the one number that tells you whether it works: the time from approved content to live page. If most changes take more than a few hours, or any simple copy edit waits for a sprint, the split is not working.
We build marketing sites in Webflow and applications in Next.js, so we have a bias towards visual platforms for the marketing site, and most of the sources here are platform vendors too. Our marketing-site process runs four weeks, laid out in our four-week build plan, and we would put the ownership split into the handover rather than leave it to be negotiated after launch. Our marketing websites service page explains how we scope that work.
