A webmaster is a person responsible for maintaining one or more websites. The title may refer to web architects, web developers, site authors, website administrators, website owners, website coordinators, or website publishers.
The duties of a webmaster include:
Creating, editing, and publishing content on the website, either independently or with other content creators
Content placement
Managing a website's appearance, user access rights, and navigation
Ensuring that the web servers, hardware and software are operating correctly
A/B testing
Analysing traffic through the site
Ensuring the website is up to date and functioning correctly, e.g. installing updates, fixing bugs and errors, and optimizing performance
Optimizing the website's content and structure to improve its ranking in search engines (SEO), e.g. keyword research, link building, and optimizing meta tags and titles
Keeping the site secure, e.g. installing security software, monitoring for threats, and implementing practices for data protection
Analytics, e.g. monitoring the website's traffic and performance to make informed decisions about its content
Customer support, e.g. troubleshooting any issues that users may be experiencing.
Due to the RFC 822 requirement for establishing a "postmaster" email address for the single point of contact for the email administrator of a domain, the "webmaster" address and title were unofficially adopted by analogy for the website administrator. RFC 2142, which turned this common practice into a standard.