Your nonprofit does not need a new website yet: five things to fix first
A checklist of five low-cost fixes for a nonprofit website, from account ownership to a form that actually delivers, plus an honest table of when a rebuild is justified.
Most nonprofit websites I look at do not need replacing. They need five cheap repairs: account ownership, a staff member who can edit a page, current contact and donation details, a form whose mail reaches an inbox somebody reads, and analytics the organization controls. A rebuild is a separate decision, and usually a later one.
Key points
- Domain, DNS, hosting, and donation logins belong to the organization, not a former volunteer's personal email. DNS is what points your web address at your site.
- One current staff member or officer needs edit access and a walkthrough of how to use it.
- Wrong hours and a broken donate button cost you more than a dated design.
- Contact forms break quietly. Test yours from an outside address on a schedule.
- Analytics and Search Console belong under an organization Google account, so history survives turnover. Search Console is Google's free report on how pages show in search.
- That is the nonprofit and civic work I do, and I will say when the five fixes are enough.
Who actually owns your domain?
Find out first. Everything else depends on the answer. Four things: the account the domain sits in, who pays the renewal, where DNS is hosted, and who can log into the payment service behind your donate button.
That knowledge leaves a room fast. I sit on two nonprofit boards, as treasurer of Beyond the Bell for Clinton County and as president-elect of Downtown Rotary. Terms end. The volunteer who set the site up years ago moves out of state, and the renewal notice goes to an address nobody checks.
The repair is boring paperwork. Open an account with your registrar, the company the domain is registered through. Use an organization email more than one officer can reach. Move the domain in and name the organization as owner on record, not a person. Do the same for hosting, email, and the donation platform. Write the list into a document the board can find.
Can one person change a page without calling anyone?
Often nobody can. A lot of the sites I get asked about are technically fine and functionally frozen, because the one person who knew the editor left.
That constraint shaped the Rotary Club of Downtown Lock Haven site, which I built for free. Nobody there took an officer position because they wanted to run a website, and the position changes hands. So the club got a narrow dashboard instead of the full admin screen of the system that stores its pages. The handoff each year fits in one conversation rather than a training session.
You may need none of that. On a hosted builder or WordPress, the fix is an admin account for a current staff member. Add a screen share where they edit one real page while you watch, plus a note on where things live. Do it while the outgoing person is still around and still willing.
Are the hours, phone number, and donate path right today?
Open your own site on a phone and check. What I find: stale hours, a phone number from a previous office, an address nobody updated after a move. Donate buttons point at a payment account nobody has checked against the books in a year.
This is the highest-return hour on the list, and it needs no developer. A donor who cannot finish a gift does not email you about it. They close the tab.
Volunteer Clinton County, the civic platform I co-founded with Rayne Burgin, treats stale content as a system problem, not a discipline problem. Listings expire on their own, and a one-tap email link lets an organization refresh a post without logging in.
Borrow the idea for free. Put a quarterly reminder on whoever owns content to walk the contact page and the whole donate flow.
Does your contact form reach an inbox someone reads?
Send yourself a message from an outside address, on a phone, off the office network. Check whether it arrived, how long it took, and whether it went to spam.
Form mail fails in ways nobody notices. The recipient address belongs to a staff member who left. Or a plugin update breaks the part that sends the mail, and the form shows a thank-you page while dropping the message.
What I want: mail routed to a shared inbox rather than one person, plus spam protection on the public form. I want every submission stored in a database too, so a lost email is not a lost donor.
Is your analytics under the organization's account?
Check whether your Google Analytics and Search Console sit under an organization account or under whoever set them up. If either is on somebody's personal Gmail, add an organization-owned account as an admin now, while that person still answers email. Analytics history cannot be recreated later. Search Console is where you learn that half your pages are missing from Google's index.
If neither exists, set both up this month. They cost nothing, and the data starts only when you turn them on.
When is a rebuild actually due?
Sometimes it is. I have talked a board out of one and lost the work. I have also told a board their site had become a liability. The difference is structural.
| What you have | Fix it in place | Rebuild is fair |
|---|---|---|
| Dated design, accurate content | Yes, spend on photos and writing | No |
| Slow on a phone, otherwise sound | Yes, images and hosting first | No |
| Abandoned theme and plugins, no security updates | No | Yes, this is a security problem |
| Staff cannot edit without a contractor | Sometimes, if editing access can be restored | Yes, if the platform has no editor |
| You need logins, records, RSVPs, or scheduling | No | Yes, a brochure site cannot hold records |
My line with boards: if the site loads fast, reads well on a phone, and your own people can update it, a rebuild is the wrong purchase. The argument changes when the site must hold records rather than paragraphs: member accounts, volunteer hours, gated documents, event registrations. Same standard on my websites and rebuilds page.
Common questions
What do these five fixes cost?
Mostly staff time. The account cleanup is paperwork plus whatever your registrar charges to move a domain. Checking hours and testing a form is an afternoon of somebody's attention. Analytics and Search Console are free to set up. If you hire it out, treat it as a small engagement rather than a project.
Our site was built by a volunteer who moved away. Where do we start?
Inventory first. Run a WHOIS lookup on your domain, the public record of who registered it, to find your registrar. Work outward through DNS, hosting, email, the site's admin login, and the donation payment service. Recover what you can into organization-owned accounts and note what you cannot. Only then should the board decide if the site is worth keeping.
Is there free software for nonprofit grant work?
Yes. GrantCue, the grant platform I built, is one. Nonprofits may apply for a free account, subject to approval. It rebuilds its catalog on a schedule from the federal Grants.gov database plus eleven state portals. It scores how well each opportunity fits your organization's profile, then tracks a pipeline from discovery through award.
Do you work with nonprofits outside Clinton County?
Yes. My board service is local to Clinton County, but the work is not. I take clients around Williamsport and State College, and remotely past that. A screen share covers most of what a conference room would. Being on a board here mainly means I have sat through the meeting where this gets decided.
If you want a second opinion before your board approves a rebuild, that is what my nonprofit and civic tech work is for.