7 Mistakes You’re Making with Your Nonprofit Website (and How to Fix Them)

Your nonprofit’s website may be the first place a potential donor, volunteer, community member, or service seeker turns to learn about your work. If it’s difficult to use or hard to understand, people may leave without finding the information, or taking the next step, they came for.

A useful website doesn’t need to follow every design trend. It needs to make your mission clear, help people find what they need, and work reliably for a range of visitors. Here are seven common website mistakes and practical ways to address them.

1. Starting with design before agreeing on the strategy

A new look can be appealing, but it won’t solve unclear priorities or confusing content on its own. If your team hasn’t agreed on who the website serves and what it should help them do, a redesign can simply put old problems in a new layout.

Before choosing colors or layouts, identify your most important audiences and their needs. A donor might want to understand your impact and make a gift. Someone seeking services may need eligibility details, hours, and a clear way to ask for help. Staff may need to update program information without relying on a developer.

How to fix it: Write down the main audiences, the tasks they come to the site to complete, and the actions that matter to your organization. Use those priorities to shape the site structure and content. A digital strategy process can help bring the right people into the conversation before design begins.

2. Making people work too hard to understand your mission

Visitors shouldn’t have to read several pages or decipher internal language to find out what your organization does. Broad statements about “creating change” or “empowering communities” may express your values, but they don’t always explain who you serve or how.

Put a straightforward description near the top of your homepage. Then help visitors move to the information that fits their needs. A first-time donor, a volunteer, and a person looking for services may all need different next steps.

How to fix it: Describe your work in plain language: who you help, what you do, and why it matters. Use clear page titles and headings, and give important actions descriptive labels such as “Find local services” or “Donate to the food program.” Keep the homepage focused on helping people choose where to go next.

3. Making the donation process feel harder than it needs to be

A visitor who decides to give shouldn’t have to hunt for the donation button, navigate a maze of options, or answer questions that aren’t needed to complete a gift. Each extra step or unclear instruction can create doubt at the moment someone is ready to act.

Check the whole giving journey, not just the donation page. Does the form look connected to your organization? Is it clear whether a gift is one-time or recurring? Can a person understand the amount, frequency, and next step before submitting?

How to fix it: Make the donation link easy to find, and give the donation page one clear purpose. Ask only for the information needed to process and acknowledge a gift. Explain optional fields, use clear error messages, and test the process from start to finish on both a phone and a computer. A nonprofit website redesign is also a good opportunity to review how your donation experience supports your goals.

4. Treating accessibility as a final check

Accessibility affects whether people can find information and complete tasks. Low-contrast text, missing form labels, inaccessible menus, or keyboard traps can create real barriers. An accessibility statement or automated scan can be useful, but neither one by itself makes a website accessible.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 provide a recognized framework for making web content more accessible. Accessibility should be considered during planning, design, content creation, and development, not only before launch.

How to fix it: Use headings in a logical order, provide text alternatives for meaningful images, make sure the site can be navigated by keyboard, and check text contrast and form labels. Test important tasks with assistive technology as well as automated tools. For guidance on your organization’s specific legal obligations, consult a qualified accessibility or legal professional.

5. Designing for desktop and treating mobile as an afterthought

A site can look polished on a large monitor but become frustrating on a phone. Small buttons, long forms, hard-to-read text, and menus that are difficult to operate can make basic tasks unnecessarily difficult.

How to fix it: Review your key pages on real phones, not only in a desktop browser preview. Make buttons and links comfortable to tap, use readable text, keep forms manageable, and ensure visitors don’t have to scroll sideways. Check that donation, contact, and service-information tasks work on smaller screens, too.

Good website design and development considers different screens from the beginning. That makes the experience more consistent for people, wherever they visit from.

6. Letting content become outdated, unclear, or difficult to find

Even a well-designed website can lose people if its program details are old or its language assumes too much. Visitors may not know which services are available, whether an event is current, or how to contact the right person. Over time, adding pages without reviewing existing ones can also make navigation harder to manage.

How to fix it: Review the content people rely on most: services, eligibility, locations, hours, events, donation information, and contact details. Replace internal jargon with familiar terms, and make important information easy to scan. Assign an owner and review date to key pages so updates don’t depend on someone noticing a problem by chance.

A simple content inventory can help your team identify duplicate pages, outdated details, and gaps. It can also make a future redesign more useful because you’ll know what content needs to move, change, or be retired.

7. Launching a redesign without a plan to measure and maintain it

A website launch is a milestone, not the finish line. Without a plan for maintenance and measurement, broken links, outdated information, and new usability problems can accumulate. A redesign can also change how visitors move through the site, so it’s worth checking whether the updates are helping them complete important tasks.

How to fix it: Before launch, decide what you’ll review and how often. Track practical measures such as donation-form completion, visits to key service pages, common search terms, and contact-form issues. Ask staff and visitors where they get stuck, and use that feedback to prioritize improvements.

Set aside time and responsibility for routine updates, software maintenance, accessibility checks, and content reviews. A durable website is one your team can manage as needs change, not just one that looks current on launch day.

Start with the problems that matter most

You don’t have to rebuild your entire website to make progress. Start by trying a donation on a phone, reviewing your highest-traffic pages, and checking whether visitors can find essential information without help. Those small tests can reveal where a focused update would make a meaningful difference.

For a nonprofit considering a larger redesign, the best first step is usually a clear picture of the current site: what’s working, what’s getting in the way, and what different audiences need from it. Snowberry Media builds strategy-first WordPress websites for mission-driven organizations, with a focus on practical, accessible experiences that support their work over time. Explore our work or get in touch to discuss what your website needs next.