The quality of your nonprofit’s website can seriously impact fundraising and awareness around your mission. It’s crucial that you regularly evaluate its’ efficiency and impact by conducting a website audit.
A website audit is a page-by-page review of your site’s content, functionality and structure to ensure you are meeting your goals, adequately communicating with your audience, and keeping them engaged.
Here are five things to consider when conducting a website audit:
1. Read through ALL content – no skimming allowed!
Your website’s content can seriously impact SEO. Duplicate content and grammatical errors steer people away and can make it difficult for anyone to even find your nonprofit on search engines.
Read through each and every page with your laymen hat on and get other perspectives by engaging your board and volunteers to review it as well.
Ask yourself these questions:
Is it easy to navigate to the content I’m looking for?
Is it concise?
Is it pretty to look at?
Make sure your content:
Aligns with the overall goal and purpose of each page
Has well-researched keywords and is optimized for mobile
Includes internal links to relevant pages and external links to reputable websites
2. Check for broken links and images with the click of a button.
If your website hasn’t been updated much in the past year, it’s likely that there are broken links or images. Having too many null references can lead to decreased site position in search results, and it is frustrating for the user.
Thank goodness there are tools that can easily scan your website for broken links with the click of a button! This helpful blog compares several different options.
Of course, this process can also be done manually, but it can be time-consuming depending on the number of pages and the amount of content on your website.
3. Make sure it’s easy for users to find your donation page!
This is a no-brainer, but there are still many organizations that take you on an elaborate treasure hunt before you can make a donation. Fundraising is the lifeblood of our work, so making it super simple for users to donate to your nonprofit should be a top priority for your website audit.
Work with your website team to evaluate the user experience. Is it confusing to make a donation or to find out how to get involved?
If donations aren’t your organization’s priority, then make sure you are emphasizing another call-to-action, like volunteering or attending an event. People want to know how to help!
Here are some additional suggestions for jazzing up your donation page from Nonprofit Tech for Good.
4. Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly.
According to Google Analytics, mobile devices drove 61% of visits to U.S. websites in 2020, up from 57% in 2019. Desktops were responsible for 35.7% of all visits in 2020, and tablets drove the remaining 3.3% of visitors.
Switching to a responsive website template is the simplest way to keep your website visitors from having to pinch or zoom in order to see your content.
If you have a newer website, it’s likely that your site was already built with a responsive design. And if not, the most common web hosting services, including Squarespace, WordPress and Wix automatically incorporate this feature for new websites.
You’ll also need to analyze the loading speed for your pages. An easy way to speed this up is by compressing images and reducing redirects.
Test how easily a visitor can use your website on a mobile device with the Test My Site Tool from Google.
5. Make sure your website is ADA compliant.
Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, websites need to be accessible for users who have hearing, vision or physical disabilities.
"The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provides technical specifications to improve the accessibility of web content, websites, and web applications on desktop computers, laptops, tablets and mobile devices for people with a wide range of disabilities — including auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech and visual disabilities.” (Essential Accessibility)
You can also use an online ADA Compliance Checker tool to see how your site fares. Check out this blog post comparing some of the most prominent tools.
There are, of course, other factors to consider when doing a website audit, but these five steps are key to making your website engaging and accessible to all.
If you’re looking for help with website copy, function, or a redesign, we are always happy to help! Email Caitlin to schedule a free, 30-minute consultation.