5 Signs It’s Past Time to Redesign Your Nonprofit Website

Websites are a lot of work. They take time, thought, effort, and money. Unfortunately, websites aren’t something you can set up and then forget about — they have to be updated regularly to stay relevant. Here are 5 signs that it’s way past time to redesign your nonprofit website:

1. Your rank on search engines is slipping

Try googling phrases associated with your website, preferably phrases that you have set up in your meta tags or in the copy on your website. Are you lower in the search results than you were a few months ago? It’s definitely time to work on your website.

Search engines look at a lot of different factors when they rank websites, and one of the most important things you can do to keep your page relevant is to add new content on a regular basis. If you have a website but never update it, search engines eventually think that your page is inactive. That means they won’t send traffic your way. Who wants to visit a dead website?

If you’re looking for ways to update your site, consider updating your web copy, images, colors, or news. Not only will it let search engines know that your site is still alive and kicking, it also gives your supporters something new to look at when they visit your page.

2. Online donations are decreasing

The nonprofit industry has experienced solid growth in online giving over the past several years — online donations have increased 4%-6% each year for a long time. If you’re not seeing similar growth in your own online giving, you probably need to update your site.

If your online donations are decreasing, ask yourself how you would react to your website if you were a donor. Would you be bored by outdated stories or stale images? Would you get frustrated with outdated navigation or broken links? Would you even know where to find the donation page? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, it’s time for a refresher.

A great nonprofit website will attract and engage donors, give them information they need, is easy to navigate, and makes viewers want to donate. Does yours?

3. You have to pinch and zoom to look at your page on mobile devices

Mobile internet traffic has officially overtaken traffic from traditional desktops and laptops. If your page isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re probably not going to hold your viewers’ attention very long. Pinching and zooming to view your page is annoying, and trying to click on navigation items on your phone is even worse.

Even more important is the fact that Google now prioritizes mobile-friendly sites if users are searching on their mobile devices. If your search engine ranking is already slipping, that will result in a serious decrease in traffic to your site.

4. Load times are long

People who are looking at your site on the internet do not have long attention spans. Estimates vary about the average length of time viewers spend on any given web page, but everyone agrees that they only wait a few seconds until they either find the information they want or navigate away. If your page takes forever to load, you can’t expect people to wait around to look at the content you’ve created for them.

Lots of different elements can lead to slow load times. Having tons of JavaScript elements on your page, using too many images, and having messy or awkward HTML or CSS on your page can all slow down load times. If it takes forever for your page to load, it’s time to clean it up and give it a redesign.

5. People spend less time on your page

Most solutions that measure user engagement on your website will include insights into how long users tend to spend on each page. If you notice that people are spending less and less time on your site, it means they aren’t engaging with you… and low engagement will almost undoubtedly result in low donor conversions and fewer donations.

There are lots of reasons people could be abandoning your page. Old content, dated pictures, awkward navigation, slow load times… see where we’re going with this? These are all issues that can be addressed in a site redesign, and they’re all changes that would have a big impact on your nonprofit’s bottom line.

Ready to give your site an update? Check out these design tips from Qgiv’s lead graphic designer.