Nonprofit Website Redesign Checklist: A Step-by-Step Plan

A redesign is one of the largest communications projects a nonprofit takes on. It touches fundraising, programs, events and the board, and it can quietly break things that work today, from search rankings to donation forms. A nonprofit website redesign checklist keeps the project honest. Use the one below to plan the work in six phases and launch a site that performs better than the one it replaces.

Signs your website needs a redesign

Not every problem needs a full redesign. A refresh or targeted fixes may be enough. A redesign is usually justified when several problems show up at once. The site no longer matches your brand, programs or strategy. Changing a staff photo means emailing a developer and waiting a week. Pages crawl on phones. The volunteer form drops entries into an inbox nobody checks, and donation data has to be retyped into the CRM by hand.

Look under the hood, too. If an accessibility audit shows widespread issues, or the content management system (CMS) or theme is no longer supported or secure, patching rarely holds for long. And if the front desk keeps taking calls from people who could not find program information online, the site is failing at its most basic job.

If you are unsure what the new site should achieve, start with a nonprofit website strategy. It will make every decision below faster.

Phase 1: Audit and baseline

Measure the current site before you change it. You cannot prove a redesign worked without a baseline.

• Export 12 months of analytics: visits, top pages, traffic sources, devices, conversions.
• Record fundraising numbers, including donation page conversion rate, average gift and form completion rates.
• List every URL on the site, including PDFs and old campaign pages. A crawler tool or your sitemap will help. Flag the pages that earn search traffic and backlinks, because they need special care.
• Inventory integrations: donation platform, CRM, email, event ticketing, maps, chat.
• Run a quick accessibility and speed check. Google’s PageSpeed Insights reports Core Web Vitals for real users where data exists.

Then talk to people. A few short conversations with donors, volunteers and program participants about what frustrates them will tell you things the analytics cannot.

Phase 2: Scope and budget

Write a short project brief. It becomes your guide for decisions and, if you hire help, the core of a request for proposals (RFP).

• Goals and KPIs, each with its baseline from Phase 1
• Priority audiences and their top tasks
• Must-have features and integrations, and nice-to-haves
• CMS preference, hosting and security needs
• Accessibility target (most organizations choose WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 Level AA)
• Budget range, including content, photography and the first year of maintenance
• Decision makers and one internal project lead with time to do the job
• Hard deadlines, such as a gala, campaign launch or year-end giving season

Avoid launching in the weeks before a major appeal. If a deadline is fixed, cut scope rather than testing time.

Phase 3: Content and structure

Content is where most redesigns stall. Plan it early and assign real owners. Go through your URL list and make a call on every existing page: keep, rewrite, merge or delete. Then build the new sitemap around visitor tasks, not internal departments, and write a simple style guide for tone, terms and formatting so five writers sound like one organization.

Draft the most important pages first: home, donate, your top programs and about. Gather photos, stories and data along the way, with permission to use them. Plan page titles, meta descriptions and headings for search as you write, not in a rush the week before launch. And create a content calendar that runs past launch day, so the new site does not go quiet the moment it goes live.

Write real content before final design. Designing around placeholder text hides problems until it is too late to fix them cheaply.

Phase 4: Design and build

Design should follow the structure and content, not the other way around. Start with wireframes for the key templates: home, program, story, donation, event and landing page. Then apply your brand and design for phones first. Reusable components matter more than any single layout, because they let staff build next spring’s campaign page without breaking the design. Give the donation page and forms the same care as the home page.

Build accessibility in from the start: color contrast, heading order, alt text, keyboard access and labeled form fields. Our guide to nonprofit website accessibility covers the details. Set performance targets as well. Google’s Core Web Vitals define “good” as a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less.

Before launch, connect every integration and test each one with real transactions on staging. Train staff on the CMS before launch, too. We find that teams who practice on staging take ownership of the new site much faster than teams handed a manual on launch day.

Phase 5: Launch and redirects

Launch day is where a redesign can lose years of search equity in an afternoon. The fix is a complete redirect map.

1. Map every old URL to its best new URL. Do not send everything to the home page.
2. Use permanent server-side redirects. Google’s site move guidance recommends 301 or 308 redirects and redirecting straight to the final URL rather than through chains.
3. Carry over page titles and meta descriptions for pages that rank well.
4. Remove “noindex” settings from staging before going live, and make sure staging stays private.
5. Check analytics, conversion tracking and tag manager on the new site.
6. Test donations, forms and email confirmations end to end.
7. Submit the new XML sitemap in Google Search Console.

Pick the day with care. Launch early in the week, with the team available to fix issues, not on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend.

Phase 6: After launch

The first 90 days decide whether the redesign pays off. For the first two weeks, check for 404 errors every day and add any missing redirects. Someone will click a link in a three-year-old newsletter, and it should still land somewhere useful. At 30, 60 and 90 days, compare your KPIs to the baseline from Phase 1.

Collect feedback from staff, donors and program participants, fix the top problems first, then settle into a regular cycle of small improvements. Put a maintenance plan in place for updates, backups, security and uptime before the launch glow wears off.

Common website redesign mistakes

The most common mistake is starting with looks. A new design will not fix unclear goals or weak content. Close behind is too many decision makers: when every department head approves every page, the project stalls, so name one project lead and a small approval group. Teams also underestimate content. Writing, gathering photos and getting approvals usually take longer than anyone expects.

The rest show up around launch. Skipping redirects means lost search traffic and broken links in old emails and reports. Launching right before a big campaign leaves the new site no time to settle. And with no owner after launch, a site without a maintenance plan starts to decay immediately.

A real-world example

In 2022, LightMix redesigned the website for the SCORE Foundation, an arm of SCORE, the national free business advice organization, and has continued to support its website and visual communications for later campaigns. Ongoing support after launch is what keeps a redesign from aging quickly.