Set up analytics properly.
Google Analytics 4 is free and, once configured correctly, tells you what you need to know: where visitors come from, what they do on your site, where they drop off, and whether they convert. If you’re not tracking conversions (donations, sign-ups, form submissions), you’re flying blind. The setup takes an hour; the insight lasts years.
Review monthly, not annually.
A quick monthly check — what’s your top-performing content, what’s your conversion rate, where are people leaving — takes 15 minutes and keeps you informed. Annual website reviews often lead to expensive redesigns that could have been avoided with incremental improvements.
Test and iterate.
If your donation page conversion rate is 2%, can you get it to 3%? Try changing the headline, reducing form fields, or adding a trust signal (like “100% of your donation goes to programs”). Small improvements compound over time. This is called conversion rate optimisation (CRO), and it’s often the highest-return investment a nonprofit can make in its website.
Plan for AI discoverability.
Increasingly, people find information through AI systems rather than traditional search. Make sure your robots.txt file doesn’t block AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot), consider adding an llms.txt file to help AI systems understand your site, and structure your content with clear headings and direct answers that AI can cite. The nonprofits that do this now will have a significant visibility advantage over those that don’t.
