If your organization uses WordPress as its content management system (CMS), you’re in good company. WordPress powers 43.4% of all websites, meaning millions of sites are hosted on this robust platform.
Because of WordPress’s popularity, plenty of resources and tools are available to simplify its management. If you want to streamline your WordPress website while maximizing the platform’s available features, you’re in the right place!
This guide explores the following intuitive WordPress strategies for nonprofits:
Practice regular website maintenance.
Use mobile-friendly design.
Choose plugins strategically.
Implement SEO best practices.
Design your website with user experience in mind.
These tips will put your nonprofit in an excellent position to take advantage of WordPress's features, functionality, and integrations. As a result, you can create compelling and educational content that drives audience engagement.
1. Practice regular website maintenance.
Have you ever been working on the backend of your WordPress website and received a system update notification? Perhaps 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 your features and tools function properly.
If you don’t conduct regular WordPress maintenance, here’s what could happen:
Your site may be vulnerable to hacking if you don’t implement security updates.
Your search engine performance may suffer because search engines prioritize ranking sites that are frequently updated.
Your plugins might stop working due to compatibility issues.
You may lose audience and donor trust in your website’s security, which can lead to less traffic and fewer online donations.
Luckily, you can implement a few intuitive and simple fixes to ensure your site stays up to date. Kanopi’s WordPress maintenance guide recommends the following:
Update themes and plugins. Updates for themes and plugins are released to help patch security holes or offer new and improved features. Initiating these updates as soon as they’re available avoids jumping between major updates, which is a longer process. You also won’t risk plugins becoming outdated or breaking.
Update to new Core releases ASAP. The WordPress platform constantly evolves, and new versions are released intermittently. Keeping up with WordPress’s Core updates allows you to access the latest security features and other functionality. Stay updated on new releases by checking the WordPress News website.
Back up your site. Most WordPress hosts offer site backup plans to ensure you can restore your content in case you accidentally delete anything you need. This feature can help you avoid major problems like losing important content. Choose a host that provides daily automatic and manual backups to ensure you can promptly recover any lost content.
Designate a team member to monitor these updates so none of them slip under your radar. These strategies can help you avoid compatibility or maintenance issues down the road, and you can implement them in 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. According to the most recent M+R Benchmarks study, over half of nonprofit website traffic comes from users on mobile devices.
Luckily, WordPress offers a few intuitive tools for improving your website’s mobile version. To optimize your website content for mobile devices, your organization should:
Choose a mobile-responsive 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. A couple of mobile-responsive options include Astra and Divi.
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 adjust each view if any formatting elements are off.
Enable the “stack blocks on mobile” option. If your website uses a block-style editor, WordPress recommends enabling this functionality. This option ensures that any content presented side by side on desktop screens will automatically stack itself on mobile devices to fit more easily on smaller screens.
Your goal is to ensure all visitors have an equally positive experience on your organization’s site, whether using their laptop, phone, or tablet to connect with you. Taking a closer look at how your website appears in each screen type ensures you don’t accidentally gloss over any design or formatting issues.
3. Choose plugins strategically.
Depending on the activities your site needs to facilitate, your nonprofit may require various additional WordPress tools or features built for nonprofits. 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:
SEO. SEO, or search engine optimization, involves designing your website to rank higher in search engine results. A higher search engine ranking means more traffic to your website, so it’s essential to choose intuitive plugins that simplify the SEO process. For instance, Yoast SEO is one of the most popular SEO plugins available. This plugin rates your web pages’ SEO and readability and offers recommendations for enhancing your content to improve SEO performance.
Security. Security plugins like Wordfence or Solid Security Basic help block malware attacks, run security scans to check for vulnerabilities, and enable protections like two-factor authentication and passkeys.
Performance and website caching. Website caching is the process of storing website files so that visitors can access content quickly upon subsequent visits. Plugins like WP Rocket and PhastPress help manage website caching and other performance enhancements to improve load speed.
Online donations. Your online donation tool should be streamlined, user-friendly, and accessible to all audience members. It should also accept a variety of payment options and facilitate recurring donations. Plugins such as GiveWP and Donorbox are popular for nonprofits looking to improve their sites’ donation capabilities.
Be prudent about your chosen plugins, and avoid adding too many to your site. Too many or poorly designed plugins can slow down your site, creating a negative user experience. Read reviews and thoroughly research any plugin you want to add to ensure the tool is lightweight and requires minimal processing resources.
4. Implement SEO best practices.
In addition to using SEO plugins, your organization can adopt many other strategies 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.
Getting Attention’s SEO for Nonprofits guide recommends these additional SEO strategies to improve your WordPress website’s ranking:
Write educational, comprehensive content targeting popular keywords. Keywords are the words or phrases a user types into the search bar when looking for something on a search engine. You can boost your search rankings by including popular keywords in your website’s content. 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.
Make the most of your SEO plugin. SEO plugins like Yoast allow you to optimize your content for keywords, create optimized page titles and meta descriptions, and enhance the readability of your blog posts. They even let you add schema markup to your site—structured code that you can add to the backend of your content to help search engines better understand who you are and what your content is about. Ensure you use these features when creating new content to get the most out of your SEO plugins.
Keep your blog fresh and updated with new content. Search engines prioritize showing timely, updated content, especially for time-sensitive queries, such as “nonprofit events near me this weekend.” Regularly update your website’s blog and event calendar to show both search engines and audience members that your organization is active.
Structure your content with headers. Headings and subheadings help search engine crawlers assess your website content more easily. Headers clarify what your pages are about to search engines, helping content rank higher for your targeted keywords.
Incorporate valuable links across your site. Linking to other pages on your website within your internal content signifies to search engines that the pages are related. Use links to point visitors to your most comprehensive pages so search engines know 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 to engage your audience and deliver them the information they need promptly and conveniently. To achieve this goal, you must improve your WordPress website's user experience (UX).
User experience is the way users engage with your website’s content. A positive user experience helps generate more satisfied visitors.
Enhance your website’s UX with the following tips:
Keep it simple. Ensure your WordPress theme isn’t cluttered; you never want to sacrifice usability for a flashy, overly complex design or website structure.
Leverage calls to action (CTAs). Use 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, such as “Join the Fight” or “Become a Recurring Donor Today.”
Use a consistent nonprofit branding strategy. 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 to establish trust and brand recognition among your audience.
To ensure a positive UX, optimize your web pages using A/B testing. A/B testing is the process of creating two slightly different versions of the same web page to determine which is more effective for driving audience engagement.
For example, you can create two different versions of your online donation page—one with a group photo of volunteers and the other with a photo of one volunteer and one community member interacting. Then, you can show different versions of this page to different groups of website visitors to see which option drives the most donations.
When running A/B tests, change one element at a time to see which adjustments actually make a difference. Track data metrics such as conversions and time spent on the page to evaluate the effectiveness of your changes.
Sharing your nonprofit’s mission online is easier when you design your WordPress website with intuitive features that enhance both the backend editing and front-end user experience. With these tips, you can turn your website into a reliable, sustainable resource for engaging audience members and pursuing your mission.
Anne Stefanyk, Founder and CEO of Kanopi Studios
ANNE STEFANYK
As Founder and CEO of Kanopi Studios, Anne loves helping clients identify problems and empowering the Kanopi team to create intelligent, long-term solutions. She specializes in building rapport with clients and converting conversations into tangible results.
She first came across the Drupal community in 2006, and gained immediate respect for its people and their ongoing quest to grow their knowledge. After holding Director-level positions at a number of large Drupal agencies, she finally decided to open Kanopi Studios in 2013.
Anne’s background is in business development, marketing, and technology. This allows her to successfully manage all facets of the business and provide the technical understanding to interface with engineers. She has accumulated over 18 years of hands-on Drupal experience, from basic websites to large applications with high-performance demands. These include multiple and complicated integrations, along with e-commerce (both subscription and multi-tenancy).
Anne Stefanyk of Kanopi Studios has a background in business development, marketing, and technology. She is experienced in managing all facets of a business, and has the technical knowledge to communicate productively with engineers. She has 18 years of professional, hands-on Drupal experience, from basic websites to large Drupal applications with high-performance demands. These include multiple and complicated integrations, along with e-commerce (both subscription and multi-tenancy).
Anne's contribution to projects involves managing everything on the client side. One of her greatest strengths is her innate ability to understand client needs and translate them into functional web applications. She has worked in Drupal since 2006 and has held Director-level positions at a number of large Drupal agencies.
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Anne Stefanyk, Founder and CEO of Kanopi Studios
As Founder and CEO of Kanopi Studios, Anne provides digital strategy to clients and organizations in the nonprofit, higher education, healthcare, and corporate sectors. She opened Kanopi in 2013, upon seeing the untapped opportunities in the market for iterative web design and development. Anne has spent her career at the intersection of business development, marketing, and technology. She specializes in building rapport with clients and converting conversations into tangible results.
