5 Strategies to Start Immediately After Your Nonprofit Website Launch

Anyone who has gone through a website redesign, or created a new site altogether, knows it’s no easy feat. It takes many months of research, strategy sessions, content development, design reviews, and development testing to get to the moment you go live. Once launch day arrives, a celebration is definitely in order. And while taking pause to celebrate is rightly justified, this isn’t the end of your website work. In fact, the work is never quite “over.” I like to think of websites not as projects with finite completions, but as products with continuous lifecycles. It’s important to know what’s coming your way post-launch.

Websites are living and breathing representations of your organization, and should be built to evolve with you. Over time, your organization will inevitably change-new strategic plans may form and goals may get refined-and in turn, your site will need updating. These changes might be as small as updating a name on the staff page or as large as restructuring an entire section. Either way, there will be a need for some level of ongoing website work.

Whether your organization decides to maintain your site in-house or via an ongoing relationship with an agency, here are five strategies you can use post-launch to keep your website fresh, relevant, and most importantly, true to the goals you set out during the redesign.

Web designers use their expertise to make educated decisions, but dedicated user research and testing of site features with audience goes a long way in confirming the site is serving its intended purpose . If you haven’t done this during the website redesign, it’s a good idea to do it in the first year of your site going live to ensure you’re getting expected outcomes and ROI.

In the same vein of “getting to know your site better,” concentrating on SEO and analytics will give you insight into how your users find your site using search engines like Google or Bing (i.e., organic traffic) and how users navigate around your site (i.e., engagement metrics). You can take these findings and implement specific content and technical changes to improve the way people find and engage with your site.

Sometimes organizations build upon their digital footprint not by adding and updating features on their site directly, but by extending this new design to other properties. If you find yourself cross-linking the redesigned site to another website you own, consider the connection between the two.

As you may have picked up on, these initiatives aren’t simple to-do’s that you can quickly check off a list. For the most part, they’re longer-term commitments that take time, energy, and reflection. But taking the time to invest in any number of the strategies above really stands to benefit your organization internally and externally. It might seem overwhelming, but luckily you don’t have to rush to address all of these right away! In the year(s) to come, you can put any of these strategies to use to better understand your website’s current performance in greater depth and make continual improvements. And remember, these aren’t one-time tactics-you can (and should) revisit them regularly. Just as you took the time to redesign your website, it’s important to take the time to keep up the work after you go live. The site launch may be finished, but you’re just getting started!

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