Introduction
Your nonprofit’s website is not just your operational face — it can be a authoritative tool in your efforts to grow donors, promote campaigns, and involve with the community. But when it is not maintained properly, wonder what would happen. Website maintenance services are vital for maintaining the health of your nonprofit website and keeping it effective, secure and user friendly. This guide covers the most important elements of nonprofit website maintenance, along with how a website maintenance company can help keep everything running smoothly.
Nonprofit Website Maintenance Best Practices
Nonprofit organizations usually operate on a very narrow budget, and saving every penny is more than important. Given this, it is easy to understand why the work of maintaining a site may seem like an unimportant expense and therefore be skipped over.
A staggering 76% users say a website that looks broken (poorly maintained) makes a company seem untrustworthy —Hub Spot When donors have a poor experience on your website because of broken links, outdated content, or slow page loading times, you might be losing potential donations AND volunteers. It also makes you susceptible to security risks; almost 43% of cyber-attacks are directed at small and nonprofit organizations (Forbes).
Keeping up with website maintenance services is crucial if you want to make sure your nonprofit is safe and working well, thereby reaching its intended audience efficiently.
Essential Features of Nonprofit Website Care
1. Regular Content Updates
Content updates don’t just help you keep the most recent campaigns for your nonprofit appearing prominently. Google and other search engines also tend to reward regular updates – meaning that new content will improve your site’s visibility. It an essential in keeping pace with information.
Make sure that important updates like upcoming events, donation drives, etc. are published on a regular basis. By having a blog on your site you have more opportunity to upload new content, say articles, success stories or industry news that strikes home with the supporters.
2. Security Checks
Nonprofits store sensitive information, including donor and volunteer contact information. Cyber Peace Institute, 60% of non-profits still lack cybersecurity policies to defend against data breaches Security audits, firewalls, and plugin updates protect your site against threats from harmful hackers.
When you engage a reliable professional website maintenance company, all the security protocols are presently in use. Besides, allows them to keep an eye on the vulnerabilities and fixing harm forms before its utilization for cyber-attacks.
3. Performance Monitoring
The other major factor in user experience is web performance. According to a Google study, the most common given reason for mobile user’s dismissal of a site is that it required more than 3 seconds to load and on average abandons after waiting up to 5 seconds. In the world of nonprofits, that might translate into a potential donor or volunteer who leaves never having read about your cause.
Website maintenance services meanwhile, are meant to optimize the speed of your site and make sure it runs smoothly on all devices while diagnosing things that may be causing it to slow down. You must maintain your nonprofit website operating at its peak to avoid discouraging those who visit it.
When Do You Need a Website Maintenance Company?
While some nonprofits may have the in-house capabilities to handle flaring issues, others will benefit from outsourcing their website maintenance to a professional website maintenance company. This is especially useful if you have a high maintenance website or requires some security protocols that might be difficult to implement.
But here are some ways a professional maintenance company can help:
They also leverage monitoring 24/7 for issues so they can spot and fix problems before you or I even know there is an issue.
Manage SEO optimization — A company can make sure that your content is optimized to draw in visitors.
Regularly back up your site – When you crash your blog, you can never have too recently done a backup.
Make sure to update plugins and software Outdated tools might lead your site to crash, or create security holes.
A web maintenance company helps you out with your back end technical management so that you can focus on the social causes close to your heart!
How to Select a Website Maintenance Service?
If you are a nonprofit and considering hiring one of the many website maintenance companies, choose those with tailored plans that suit your organization. As with all nonprofits you may not need as much to maintain it, depending on how simple/complex your website is and how much maintenance support is needed from the sheer volume of traffic/configurable options, etc that would be using some of Amazon’s services for email reasons.
Below are some questions that should always be on your mind:
What Have They Done with Nonprofits? Some companies focus on helping non-profits and so they get the challenges those folks have to deal with.
Do they transparently provide their services? A reliable website maintenance company will be transparent and have clear pricing and services.
Is it a total package of services? Make sure they include all aspects from security, updates and backups to performance improvements.
The Price to Pay for a Neglected Website
Neglecting regular website maintenance services is probably the biggest mistake you will make as a site owner. The average data breach incident will cost the nonprofit $4.35 million according to a recent report by IBM. Nonprofits, of course, are still largely run on a shoestring and often have difficulty bouncing back from these attacks. Furthermore an abandoned site can disrupt your income by reducing trust and engagement.
Conversely, when you have a maintenance process in place (another conflicting word is not to invest), it keeps your website running smoothly, secure and aligned with your nonprofit’s goals.
Conclusion
For continual consideration, maintenance is essential, just like any other part of your core job as a developer or site owner. Do you make use of internal solutions as well, or you decide to outsource your maintenance operations to a website management service provider, keeping your organization and working at its best is crucial for the success of your nonprofit.Your Website Should Not Get in the Way of Your Mission Give website maintenance services the gravity they deserve and see how they aid in enabling your nonprofit to flourish in the digital space.
Regular maintenance allows nonprofits to concentrate on what really counts—making the world a better place. When it comes to keeping a nonprofit website, we like to say that “a little care goes along way”.
