Critical Website Optimization Tips for Nonprofits.
Today you can create a webpage on a ton of different CMS systems without actually coding a website. This makes it super easy for anyone to create a beautiful website quickly. Your website should be designed with your users or audience in mind. Does the website help answer your audience's questions, does it load fast and is it easy to navigate?
Keep these three topics in mind to optimize your website and ensure it loads quickly and correctly on all devices.
Why Mobile-Friendly Sites Matter
Most users consume content on their mobile devices while on the go wherever they are. You need to be able to reach those users so your site should work well across all devices, especially on mobile and tablets. Users consume content on the go, so it is important to ensure that your site loads quickly and correctly on mobile devices as well as desktop devices.
What does mobile responsive mean? It means that the content on your site adjusts to fit multiple screen sizes. Your copy and images should be able to be viewed on a desktop screen but then also on a mobile screen.
Tip: Test your site on your own mobile device. Make sure text and images are not cut off and that they are aligned correctly for a smaller screen size.
Why Site Speed Matters and How to Improve It
Images are important as a visual aid to help users understand the content on your site. You should make it a best practice to resize and compress your images whenever possible. The image should be resized to the size that you want it to be on your website. I see this issue across many nonprofit websites.
In addition to ensuring that your images are the appropriate size, another way to ensure images load quickly is by compressing them. According to Google Gemini AI, image compression is defined as the process of reducing the size of an image file without significantly affecting its quality.
Large images take a longer time to load and will impact your website by slowing it down. Site load times can impact how your site is ranked by the search engines, but more importantly, it will impact user engagement. A user on their mobile device is likely to navigate away from your site if it takes a long time to load.
Widgets, plug-ins, and integrations oh my. The more images, widgets and social plugins you add to your site the slower it will load. Of course, you want a visually appealing site so my guideline would be if the widget doesn’t bring value to your user, don’t add it to your site. Of course, if that widget or plug-in is important to your end user, go ahead and add it to your site.
Tips:
Link to your social media channels via your website using social icons in your header or footers.
Don’t integrate calendars or a lot of tools directly into your site. Create a button with a “Schedule Time” Call to Action (CTA) and have it link to your calendar page externally.
Test, Adjust, and Improve
As you make updates to your site, test your site's speed and experience how it loads in real time. You can use Google’s Page Speed Insights tool to test the speed of your site on both mobile and desktop. You will get a readout of items that could be impacting your site when you run your URL. Google’s Page Speed Insights tool uses Lighthouse Performance Scoring to calculate your page speed performance. It simulates what a normal user would see while trying to navigate your site in real time over different connections. Your results will fluctuate from test to test.
Work with a web developer to understand and make updates to your site based on the items Lighthouse indicated in the report. Also please note, CMS platforms like Wix and Squarespace do not give you access to the backend code. You may not be able to make some suggested updates in these systems outside of image resizing, compression, and removing widgets. You will have access to the code in systems like WordPress but I would highly suggest working with a web developer or WordPress pro before making more complicated updates.
Plan site updates and keep them in place long enough to track results. It will take time for the search engines to re-crawl your site. So it is important to keep updates in place for two to four weeks. Plan your updates, possibly rolling them out via a schedule. Also, refrain from making too many large revisions at once but rather, make small experiments.
Review data and determine the next steps. Like any good experiment, you should have an actionable outcome that will help inform further revisions. All updates should work for site speed, but more importantly for your users. Review your findings from the data collected. Did you get the intended result? Were users happy with the change, or not? Based on the data collected, determine if additional updates are needed. At all costs, do not sacrifice user experience.
Please contact me to let me know if you found this content helpful if you have questions or something to add.