5 Intuitive WordPress Strategies for Your Nonprofit - Anne Stefanyk

If your organization uses WordPress as its content management system (CMS), you’re in good company. WordPress powers 39.5% of all websites — this means millions of sites are hosted on this robust platform.

As a nonprofit marketing professional, you’re always thinking of ways to improve your website to act as a comprehensive digital hub for spreading awareness of your organization. There are several intuitive strategies you can use to turn your WordPress website into a tool to drive audience engagement and boost fundraising success. Your organization should:

Practice regular website maintenance.
Use mobile-friendly design.
Choose strategic plugins.
Implement SEO best practices.
Design your website with user experience in mind.

You can implement these ideas on your own or turn to the help of a website design professional to spark your nonprofit’s digital transformation. Either way, these tips will put your nonprofit in an excellent position to make the most of the features, functionality, and integrations available on WordPress.

1. Practice regular website maintenance.

Have you ever been working in the backend of your WordPress website and come across a notification for a system update? Perhaps you were notified that one of your plugins had an update available, or there was an opportunity to refresh your site’s security.

These updates are critical to maintaining your website’s functionality. Regularly updating your CMS ensures that it stays healthy and that all of your features and tools are functioning properly.

If you don’t conduct regular WordPress maintenance, here’s what can happen:

Your site may be vulnerable to hacking if you don’t implement security updates.
Your search engine performance will suffer because search engines prioritize ranking sites that are frequently updated.
Your plugins might stop working due to compatibility issues.
Your clunky, out-of-date website will not impress audience members.

Luckily, there are a few intuitive and simple fixes you can implement to ensure your site stays up to date. Kanopi’s WordPress maintenance guide recommends the following:

Update themes and plugins: Updates are released for themes and plugins to help plug security holes or offer new and improved features. Initiating these updates as soon as they’re released enables you to avoid jumping between major updates, which is a longer process. You also won’t risk plugins going out of date or breaking.
Update after new Core releases: The WordPress platform itself is always evolving, and new versions are released intermittently. Keeping up with WordPress’s Core updates allows you to gain access to the newest security features and other functionality.
Backup your site: Most WordPress hosts offer site backup plans to ensure you can restore your content in case you accidentally delete anything you needed. This can help you avoid major problems such as losing important content. Choose a host that provides both daily automatic backups and manual backups to ensure you can promptly recover any lost content.

Designate a specific team member to stay on top of these updates so none of them fly under your radar. These strategies can help you avoid any compatibility or maintenance issues down the road, and you can implement them in a matter of minutes.

2. Use mobile-friendly design.

Because everyone is on their phones nearly 24/7, optimizing your organization’s website for mobile screens is no longer optional — it’s necessary to reach audience members effectively.

Luckily, WordPress offers a few intuitive tools for improving your website’s mobile view. To optimize your website content for mobile devices, your organization should:

Use a mobile-responsive website theme. Ensure the site’s core structure can automatically adjust to mobile screens. If you’re using a template to design your site, choose a mobile-friendly theme that allows you to build a naturally mobile responsive website.
Preview and edit your blog posts in the mobile viewer before publishing. A fully mobile-friendly site requires mobile-friendly blog posts as well. WordPress allows you to assess your posts in desktop, mobile, and tablet views to ensure they’re optimized for all screen sizes. You can also make adjustments to each view if any formatting elements are off.

Your goal is to ensure visitors have an equally positive experience on your organization’s site, whether they’re using their laptop, phone, or tablet to connect with you. Taking a special look at how your website appears in each screen type ensures that you aren’t accidentally glossing over any design or formatting issues.

3. Choose strategic plugins.

Your nonprofit may require a variety of additional tools or features, depending on the activities you need your site to facilitate. For example, every nonprofit requires an online donation form, and nonprofit membership organizations may require member forums or gated content.

WordPress plugins add more functionality to your site. Plugins are software add-ons that contribute specific features and integrate seamlessly with the WordPress CMS.

Strategically choose a variety of plugins that fit into your backend process and expand your site’s capabilities. You may be interested in plugins that can handle the following activities:

Accepting donations: Your online donation tool should be streamlined, user-friendly, and accessible for all audience members. In addition, it should accept a variety of payment options and facilitate recurring donations. Plugins like WP Forms or Donorbox are popular options for nonprofits looking to improve their site’s donation capabilities.
Site caching: Website caching is the process of storing website files so that visitors can access content quickly upon subsequent visits. Plugins like WP Rocket can help manage website caching to improve load speed.
Enhancing SEO value: SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of designing your website so that it ranks higher in search engine results. A higher search engine ranking means more traffic to your website, so it’s important to choose intuitive plugins that make the SEO process simple. For instance, Yoast SEO is one of the most popular SEO plugins available. This plugin rates your web pages’ performance regarding SEO and readability.
Marketing: Marketing plugins allow you to craft a strategic website marketing strategy with the help of digital tools. For example, you can use the Jetpack plugin to assess website analytics and share content on social media platforms.

Browse the WordPress site for the most popular plugins available to find the right tools for your organization. Your plugins should make your site easier to use and ultimately help you promote it to a wider audience.

4. Implement SEO best practices.

Besides using SEO plugins, there are plenty of other strategies your organization can adopt to improve your WordPress website’s SEO performance.

When your site performs well in search results, you can introduce your organization and its mission to a broader audience of potential new supporters.

Use these additional SEO strategies to improve the ranking of your WordPress website:

Include popular keywords in your content. Keywords are the words or phrases that a user types into the search bar when they’re looking for something on a search engine. When you include popular keywords in your website’s content, you can boost your site’s search results rankings. However, ensure that you aren’t just throwing in keywords for the sake of it — incorporate keywords naturally into valuable educational content, or search engines will diminish your site’s rankings.
Use headers to structure your content. Headings and subheadings help search engine crawlers assess your website content more easily. This makes it clear to search engines what your pages are about, which can help them rank higher for your targeted keywords.
Incorporate valuable links into your content. Linking to other pages on your website within your internal content signifies to search engines that the pages are related. Be sure to use links to point visitors to your most comprehensive pages so search engines know that these sources are valuable for relevant keywords.

This is just a brief overview of SEO best practices, but you can dive deeper into this concept by partnering with a website design firm. These experts can help you design your website in a way that incorporates effective SEO strategies naturally, providing a seamless experience for both search engine crawlers and users trying to navigate your website.

5. Design your website with user experience in mind.

Your ultimate website goal is likely to engage your audience and deliver them the information they need in a timely, convenient manner. To achieve this goal, you must improve the user experience (UX) of your WordPress website.

User experience is the way users engage with your website’s content. A positive user experience helps generate more satisfied visitors.

Re:Charity offers several web design best practices to enhance your website’s UX:

Use simple, straightforward design: Ensure your WordPress theme isn’t cluttered — you never want to sacrifice usability for a flashy, overly complex design or website structure.
Provide visitors with direction: Use call-to-action (CTA) buttons that encourage visitors to take desired actions. For instance, your CTAs might direct visitors to donate, register for a volunteer opportunity, or sign up for your newsletter. Ensure your buttons use eye-catching colors and active language.
Maintain consistent branding: Your WordPress website should give visitors a cohesive, professional impression of your organization. Remain consistent with your fonts, colors, logos, and imagery across all website pages. This establishes trust and brand recognition among your audience.

To ensure a positive UX, use A/B testing to optimize each of your web pages. A/B testing is the process of creating two different versions of the same web page to determine which is more effective for driving audience engagement.

Test out different versions of your CTAs, page structures, and design elements to determine which version is most appealing to your audience.

ANNE STEFANYK

As Founder and CEO of Kanopi Studios, Anne helps create clarity around project needs, and turns client conversations into actionable outcomes. She enjoys helping clients identify their problems, and then empowering the Kanopi team to execute great solutions.

Anne is an advocate for open source and co-organizes the Bay Area Drupal Camp. When she’s not contributing to the community or running her thoughtful web agency, she enjoys yoga, meditation, treehouses, dharma, cycling, paddle boarding, kayaking, and hanging with her nephew.