Is it time to redesign your nonprofit's website? A practical guide

Your website should make you feel good about sharing it. It should be easy to update, reflect your organization's quality, and work hard for your audience. If it's not doing those things, a nonprofit website redesign may be overdue.

When we talk with communications leads and executive directors about their sites, the same themes come up. The design feels dated, updates are a chore, or the site doesn't represent the work anymore. These are all signs worth paying attention to.

So, let's look at the specific signs that it may be time to rethink your nonprofit’s website and what a redesign might actually involve.

What are some reasons to consider a redesign?

When your site no longer reflects who you are

Organizations grow. Their work deepens, their impact expands, their story evolves. But websites don't always keep pace with that growth … we’ll get to this later.

Sometimes we meet a team that has genuinely leveled up. Stronger programs, clearer mission, real results. But their site is still telling the story of who they were three or four years ago. The design, the language, the layout all belong to an earlier chapter.

We've had more than a few conversations where someone shares their URL with a small laugh and a knowing look. They're not embarrassed by their work. They're embarrassed that the site doesn't reflect the quality of it.

That gap matters. A site that undersells your quality and your story does a disservice to your team and your community.

WeRobotics is a great example. An exceptional organization that supports meaningful work led by local experts across the global south with cutting edge technology. Their original site was rich in content but text-heavy. It was hard to get to the depth of their impact. And the design that delivered the content was dated. After the redesign, their Co-Founder shared: "We have had fantastic feedback from partners on the greatly improved clarity of our work and beautiful design."

A redesign is a chance to close that gap.

When your content organization is not serving your audience's needs

Maybe you've heard through the grapevine or just have that intuition that your site is just not easy to use. The needs of your audience are not being met. Visitors can't find what they need or it's too hard to track things down.

Maybe the navigation is too crowded, the section titles not so clear. Is your website making visitors think too much … and not in a good way?

New York Quarterly Meeting had a dual purpose for their site. They wanted to reach New Yorkers who were curious about Quakerism and invite them in. At the same time, they needed to serve their existing community of members and regular attendees across all five boroughs. Their old site had good information but wasn't structured around either group. Someone new couldn't quickly learn who NYC Quakers were or find a nearby meeting. And for active members, finding events and news for their specific meeting house took some effort.

We restructured the site to serve both better. Dedicated pages for each meeting location now surface local events and news. Of course, we also delivered their revised content in an attractive design. Within months of launch they saw a record 1,800 new visitors in a single month and email subscribers were up 54%.

These are all important issues that might merit a redesign to resolve them.

When managing your content is a disappointing chore

Great content management is a combination of technology, thoughtful implementation of said technology, and careful consideration of the structure of site content. Many content management systems (CMS) have an interface that isn't intuitive.

• Do you have to refer to a tome of a manual to remember how to create a page?
• Does your site make you wrangle with technology and html to make your content look good?
• Is keeping your content on brand a chore?

Sometimes the issue with a content management system is what you can't do with it. Your website should be a platform where you can tell your stories and share resources. If adding a call to action to inspire engagement or a grid of logos to showcase your partners to a page requires you to be a developer, it can be frustrating and expensive.

After the Mouse website redesign, their communications lead shared something that stuck with us. She could technically create new pages on the old site. Her CMS allowed it. But the way it was set up made something that should be easy feel cryptic. After the redesign, she commented with such excitement over being able to create a new page. The technology changed, but more importantly, the way it was implemented did. A good CMS, built thoughtfully, gets out of your way and lets your team focus on telling your story. We wrote more about this in A beautiful website inside as well as out.

These are all good reasons to consider a redesign.

When your site’s technology is failing at being modern

The expectations of a modern website are always evolving. In recent times the requirements seem to keep piling up. This is not a bad thing, it just means a lot of care needs to go into building a website to rise to the challenge. A nonprofit website today needs to address all of the following. Does yours?

• Responsive Design - Responsive design ensures the same content and a quality experience no matter the size of the web-enabled device that is being used. A website that isn't designed well for smaller devices will result in a negative experience with your organization.
• Accessibility - A website should be accessible to all, including those with disabilities. Not doing so is a missed opportunity and likely a liability.
• Loading Speed - Seconds do matter. A slow website can frustrate users and harm your search engine rankings.
• Security - Keeping a site secure is a combination of technology choices and maintenance. Using technology that is well supported and not relying on too many plugins is important. Being able to have support that updates the site’s technology to keep in current is critical.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - A strong technical SEO foundation plays an import role in helping your content be found in search.

WeRobotics operates across 40 countries, many of them in areas with slow or unreliable internet. Their old site could take up to 10 seconds to load under those conditions. That's a long time. After their redesign, load time dropped to under a second. As Co-Founder Sonja Betschart shared: "We have had much feedback on the speed of the new website, especially in low-bandwidth countries where our previous website took up to 10 or 15 seconds to load, while the new version built with MOD-Lab takes less than a second."

When your site is not built to convert and grow

A well-designed site should do more than look good. It should support your goals. This means being able to add and revise content without having to wrangle with technology.

If promoting your Giving Tuesday campaign or adding an event registration requires a developer (or hours of frustration), your site is working against you. The same goes for sites weighed down by too many plugins. They're costly to maintain and slow to evolve.

Common signs your site isn't built to grow:

• Adding a new call to action requires technical help.
• Updating your donation campaign means editing code.
• New pages are hard to create quickly.
• Regular maintenance is expensive relative to the value you get.
• Every new feature and refinement takes too long. Or, they are too expensive.

Not all websites are built to be easy to evolve. We've seen organizations stuck with sites that stagnate because updating them costs more than most small teams can absorb. That's a solvable problem, but it often takes a rebuild to fix properly.

Spark Kindness builds community through events, programming, and online giving. But their old website wasn't set up to support any of those things as well as they would have liked. Registering for an event meant leaving their site entirely. The donation experience wasn't smooth for supporters and was lacking in modern payment options. And accessibility, a core value for a team committed to inclusion, was lacking.

After the redesign, we integrated an Eventbrite widget for seamless event registration. We helped them evaluate and adopt GiveButter for a modern donation experience. Accessibility was built into the site's foundation. The result was a site that addressed critical concerns and gave them a foundation to grow from. Since launch we have continued to iterate to make ongoing improvements efficiently.

A website redesign can take many shapes and sizes

We have worked on sites that needed the works. The complete overhaul of technology, user experience, information architecture, navigation, and design.

Not every website needs a full redesign or a full rebuild and technology change.

We have also worked on sites that needed some refreshing. A design that needed a little polish and revision. A redo of the technology to streamline it. Some thoughtful adjustments to improve a visitor’s experience. In some cases we've rebuilt the website over time to meet the changing needs of the audience and organization.

When thinking about a nonprofit website redesign, keep in mind that a redesign effort can take many forms. Once you have a sense of where your current website is falling short then you can start exploring how to get it into confidence boosting form.

Building confidence through digital presence

A nonprofit website redesign should give your team something to be proud of. A site that reflects your real quality, serves your audience well, and grows with you.

Confidence comes from the design, the technology, and the knowledge that you're offering a useful, well-organized experience to every visitor. When all of that comes together, your team publishes more. Supporters engage more. Your community sees the organization you've worked hard to become.

We want to see our nonprofit and social good partners have a beautiful, modern website built to grow with them. With a team behind it that can support and evolve it for years after launch.

Something to think about

As you look at your site today, how many of these signs apply?

• Does your site no longer reflect who you are?
• Is it hard for visitors to find what they need?
• Does managing your content feel like a chore?
• Is your site's technology falling behind?
• Is your site built to grow and convert?

Sitting with these questions can help clarify when a redesign makes sense and what it should set out to do.