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3 Simple Website Redesign Strategies for Nonprofits

Your website is one of the most powerful tools in your nonprofit’s toolkit. However, if you’re noticing a dip in conversions or less traffic than usual, it might be time to revamp your digital presence.

A website redesign might sound overwhelming, but with the right tools and strategies, you can easily create the website of your dreams. Updating your digital presence leads to more visibility, traffic, and conversions on important actions, like donating to your cause. 

In this guide, we’ll cover three best practices to elevate your nonprofit’s website and engage your site visitors.

Track your current performance

Start your website redesign by identifying the gaps in your digital strategy. Take a look at performance metrics and use these insights to inform your approach. Specifically, you should track: 

Page views

Page views refer to the number of times a webpage is viewed, such as your homepage, ‘About Us’ page, or donation page. If your page views are low, this could mean that:

Your website needs to be optimized for search engines to increase its visibility on search engine results pages.
Your website has navigation or technical issues and visitors are struggling to find valuable pages, like your donation page. 

In either case, your nonprofit needs to increase the user experience of your website and improve content quality to attract more visitors. 

Time spent on page

Time spent on page measures how long visitors spend engaging with a given page on average. If users are quickly bouncing away, this could indicate that a webpage has technical issues or is visually unappealing. 

For example, let’s say users land on a blog post about your animal welfare organization’s adoption program. However, the content is just one long block of text and the font is small. In this instance, you’d need to improve the readability of your content and add more visual elements to inspire audiences to stick around. 

Conversion rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of users taking important actions on your nonprofit’s website, such as signing up for your email newsletter, applying to volunteer, and giving a donation. For example, if the conversion rate on your donation page is only 5%,, this could mean that your form has a poor user experience or that it doesn’t seem credible.

Use conversion rate metrics to discover the areas of your website that need improvement and determine the source of these issues. Then, set new goals and associated key performance indicators (KPIs) to motivate your team and track your progress once you start updating your site. 

Leverage website templates

After diagnosing the problems on your website, it’s time to launch into the redesign process. However, revamping your digital presence can be a difficult task, especially if your team doesn’t have experience in website development.

Instead of trying to redesign your website on your own, streamline the process by using a content management system (CMS) with built-in website templates. Morweb explains that nonprofit website templates take the guesswork out of web design, empowering you to drag and drop your content into a ready-to-go format. 

Look for a CMS that offers website templates with these attributes:

SEO-optimized: Improve your website’s visibility with SEO-optimized templates. This means you can quickly add meta titles, meta descriptions, and custom URLs, to pages and blogs—with no coding necessary. 

Accessible to all: Templates should have built-in accessibility tools like alt tags and descriptions, custom URLs, and an accessibility widget. With the widget, users adjust the viewing experience to their needs by increasing the font size of the text on their screens, changing colors to grayscale, and highlighting links.

Mobile-friendly: With over 57% of nonprofit website traffic coming from mobile devices, it’s essential that your website is optimized for mobile. Rather than configuring this on the backend, work with a CMS that automatically resizes your content to fit any size device, promoting a positive user experience for your mobile supporters.

Look for a nonprofit website builder that also comes with an integrated form builder. If your donation page or event registration forms need a revamp, you can quickly generate a streamlined form and export the data you receive to your CRM.

Update your branding

Branding your website helps supporters understand who you are and why they should care. You might need to undergo a branding redesign if:

Your brand doesn’t effectively communicate your purpose.
Your brand has become outdated or no longer resonates with its target audience.
Your mission or values have shifted and you want your brand to more accurately represent your organization.
Your brand is too similar to other organizations.

If your nonprofit falls under any of these categories, it’s time to refresh your brand and your website’s visual presentation. This is especially useful if your nonprofit struggles with bringing in consistent traffic and reaching your digital goals. 

The right website builder will allow you to customize pre-built templates to incorporate your updated branding elements. When revamping your brand, hone in on these visual elements on your website: 

Logo: Getting Attention explains that a strong nonprofit logo should stand out in your supporters’ minds and align with your mission. For example, a hunger relief organization might incorporate an image of an outstretched hand offering food in its logo to encompass its mission of serving those in need.

Color scheme: Use the same color scheme throughout your logo and website to create a cohesive feel. Different colors elicit different emotions, so pick the ones that best represent your organization and how you want supporters to feel. For example, red is often associated with urgency and health, and green is closely tied to innovation and environmental causes.

Fonts: Choose a title and body font from the sans-serif family, which is widely used because of its legible and straightforward design. Ensure that the font size across your site is appropriate and facilitates a positive reading experience.

Visuals: Choose visual elements (such as photos, videos, or graphics) that get to the heart of what your organization stands for and why you’re worthy of donors’ support. For example, you might share high-quality images of beneficiaries, volunteers, and staff to show your work in action.

Tone and messaging: Set guidelines for the way you describe your mission, values, and vision for the future to avoid confusion about what your organization does. It’s important to consider what you say on your website and how you say it, which is where tone comes into play. If your nonprofit is appealing to younger donors, for example, you might adopt a more friendly, welcoming tone. Or, if your organization addresses disaster relief and needs to show the urgency of the issues at hand, you might take on a more professional and direct tone.

After reconfiguring your branding, assemble these instructions into a style guide that your staff and volunteers can reference at any time. This ensures that everyone is on the same page about how to effectively represent your nonprofit to the world through your website and other marketing materials. 

Wrapping Up

With a concrete plan and user-friendly website builder on your side, you’ll be well-prepared to strengthen your nonprofit’s digital presence through your website. Do your research on the most comprehensive, user-friendly website builders to make the process convenient and simple for your team.