12 Website Best Practices for Nonprofits and Social Impact Organizations

Do you find yourself asking, “What’s the point of our website, anyway?” You’re not alone.

A lot of nonprofit websites are treated like digital brochures: places to store information, explain programs and prove the organization exists.

But if that’s all your website does, it’s probably underperforming.

There’s a lot that goes into making that kind of website. Here are 12 principles we apply when we build our clients’ websites.

Before we dive in, let’s zoom because there are four key things every nonprofit website should accomplish.

Before you evaluate design, copy, SEO or performance, start with purpose. A nonprofit website should help people:

Your website not a junk drawer; it’s a place that should help people do something.

These four jobs create the foundation for every decision that follows, from navigation and page structure to content, accessibility and analytics. The best practices below are not separate tactics. They are the pieces that help those four jobs happen.

Most nonprofit websites don’t fall apart all at once. They drift. New pages are added without a clear structure. Programs change but navigation stays the same. Copy gets rewritten until it becomes stale, disconnected. Tools and plugins are added to solve immediate problems.

Over time, the website becomes harder to manage, harder to understand and less connected to the organization it represents.

That doesn’t always mean everything needs to be rebuilt. But it always means that you need to evaluate your website as a system, not a collection of pages.

Your brand is the story of how your organization is uniting people to transform the world. You should express it consistently across every channel, from social media to your real-world location to, yes, your website.

It’s conveyed through your logo, colours, fonts, photography and copy.

But it’s much more than that. It shapes the ideas you share and how you share them, the way you organize information and the feelings people get when they engage with you.

Strong brands build trust. Clear messaging, consistent visuals and thoughtful storytelling signal credibility and help people feel confident engaging with your organization.

Your website is just one of many touchpoints your audience has with your brand. The branding work needs to come first. If you’re not sure where to start, when website problems are actually brand problems is a good place.

I want to talk about the word “users” first.

It’s a common term in design and technology circles. User-centred design is all about putting yourself in your audience’s shoes to create the best possible experience for them. But the word actually backfires. It creates distance by reducing people to their relationship to the website.

We’re creating for people. Real people trying to accomplish something meaningful. Thinking about them that way encourages empathy and helps teams build better websites.

A website is a tool that somebody uses to do something specific. Good websites make it easy for them to do that. Everything that gets in their way creates friction and needs to go. That’s the most fundamental principle of a website.

If you can obsess about your audience, learn what they want, understand what’s getting in their way and keep improving their experience, your website will keep getting better.

Good design puts people first. But it can do much more than help them meet their needs. It can turn a usable experience into a powerful one that connects with people profoundly.

Think about a government site. Intentionally designed with no frills, meant to get out of people’s way so they can complete tasks quickly. But as a visitor, you still can’t help thinking “get me out of here.”

Government websites are the airports of the internet. Someone may have designed them for efficiency, but they forgot to make an experience worth having.

Great design doesn’t just make a website attractive. It guides people through the experience. Clear navigation, visual hierarchy and thoughtful layout help people understand what matters most and where to go next. When design is done well, people move naturally toward the actions that matter most.

Modern websites also need to work beautifully across every screen size. Designing for mobile first helps teams prioritize what matters most and keeps the experience clear and usable on smaller devices.

“People don’t read anymore.”

I hear this a lot and it couldn’t be further from the truth.

We read more than ever. What we don’t have time for is mediocre content. Your organization is full of ideas worth sharing, ideas that can change the world. So don’t shy away from words, but use them well.

Your challenge is to write copy so good you dare your reader to look away.

Take the space you need to give your reader real value. No more, no less. Whether that’s 200 words or 2,000, a single paragraph or twenty, the measure isn’t length. It’s whether every sentence earns its place.

Strong copy also builds trust. When writing is clear, helpful and direct, people feel more confident in your organization and more willing to engage.

Further reading: Writing for the Web: Best Practices for Nonprofit Organizations

Much of the internet, like much of the world, isn’t built in ways that are inclusive or accessible for all audiences.

Accessibility means making sure everyone can use your site, whether they live with a disability, have low internet connectivity, or aren’t native speakers. It’s about removing barriers and making your website more usable and your content easier to understand.

But here’s the other cool thing about accessibility: it’s better for everyone.

Adding closed captions to videos doesn’t just benefit people who are hard of hearing. It also helps the parent watching a video while putting their baby to sleep. Writing alt text to your images doesn’t just help people using screen readers. It also helps people whose connection is too slow to load images. Making sure your text has enough contrast with its background isn’t only good for people like me who forget to wear their glasses. It helps those who might be looking at their phones on a bright sunny day.

Creating an accessible world centres people we’ve traditionally excluded from our work, and ultimately creates a better world for all of us.

Further reading: Accessible Web Design for Nonprofits

Every website gathers information from its visitors.

Most organizations will never directly use that data. But companies like Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple collect data from visitors, and one of the ways they do that is through tools that run on our websites.

That means we have a responsibility to our audience: disclose what information we collect, how we collect it, and what we use it for. Most importantly, people must be able to choose whether they want to share that information.

This is called consent management, and it’s a critical part of running a website today.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is how you help people find you when they’re searching for answers on Google or other search engines. Answer engine optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) help people find what they’re looking for on AI platforms (from Alexa and Siri to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini…)

On the other end of each of these platforms are people who are looking for answers. Answers you can provide.

Search is changing, but the basic job is still the same: you need to understand what people are asking so you can publish useful, clear answers. It’s all about putting people first.

For nonprofits, that means creating the best possible content to answer the real questions your audiences, donors, partners and communities are already asking.

A blog or insights section is the most effective way to do this and grow an audience over time.

Further reading: SEO Beyond Keywords

Unfortunately, we live in a world where you have to protect yourself from actors who try to take websites down just because they can. With AI coming on the scene, we’ve seen cyber attacks increase, and no organization is too small to be a target.

But it’s not just your organization at risk. It’s your audience too.

If you accept donations or collect personal information, you have a responsibility to make sure people can browse safely.

The two best ways to do this are research and maintenance. Keeping software up to date, monitoring for breaking changes, and avoiding tools that are no longer maintained all help protect your website. Research plugins carefully too. Poorly maintained ones can introduce malware or create vulnerabilities that put visitor data at risk.

The people who publish content on your site are also users with real needs.

I’ve worked with too many nonprofits where publishing a blog post meant manually linking it in a dozen places across the site. There was a shared document listing every location, thumbnail dimensions and headline character counts. Updating the site took half a day, work that could have been automated with one click.

The backend should make it easy to publish, connect and update content. A site that’s hard to update is a site that stagnates.

One of the best things about websites is that they’re dynamic. I often tell clients: you’re not printing thousands of copy that you have to recall when you find a typo. If something’s not working, you can change it.

In fact, there is always something to improve on your website.

So how do you know what’s working and what’s not? By measuring.

Every website should use analytics tools to understand how people are interacting with the things we have designed for them:

These insights are invaluable and you look for them to continuously improve the experience you’re providing.

Setting up GA4 is quick. Check our guide to setting up GA4.

Your website is a tool people use to accomplish something. That tool needs to perform. Maintenance is one key way to make sure it continues to work as it’s intended. Things change all the time on the internet and code gets depecrated.

Load time is another important factor, one that you’ll have more control over if you’re not a developer. Choose good hosting, set up proper caching, and upload images in the right size and format (when we design, we include a performance budget to lighten the load of every page).

Research shows that if people wait more than one second for a page to load, they’re 33% more likely to leave.

All that thoughtful design and carefully written copy won’t matter if nobody sees it.

Everything here will help make your website more successful, but it’s not all or nothing.

Weak copy doesn’t make your site useless. A design you don’t love doesn’t mean you should hide it. Limited capacity for SEO right now doesn’t mean the whole website is a failure.

Every organization should start with a clear website strategy. What’s the purpose of your website? Who’s it for? What problems does it solve for your audience and for your organization? How will you know if it’s working?

A strong strategy helps you focus on what matters most and tune out the noise. It connects all the principles in this article, helps you decide what to prioritize, and turns this list from overwhelming into actionable.

Your website can invite people to join you in making a difference. It can multiply your reach and amplify your impact.

Or it can sit quietly online, like a brochure in a doctor’s office.