What Website Reliability Means for Nonprofits
The reliability of your website can play out in different ways depending on the mission of your nonprofit. Website reliability can mean a few different things, but we typically are talking about a few key areas: styles and layout, front-end manipulation, integrations, back-end code, and hosting. When we talk about website reliability for nonprofits, maybe the thing that might come to mind for you is the reliability of your donation form. This could be an integration with a platform like Givebutter and ensuring that the form is embedded properly and that the layout of your donation page works on all devices. Or, perhaps you are experience layout issues on mobile or desktop.
When your website isn’t reliable, you might see pages with critical errors, broken layouts, broken functionality, and issues with your forms. As a nonprofit, this can hurt your mission, make it difficult to gain support, prevent people from taking action on a new campaign, and possibly impede some from accessing critical resources.
The Role of Hosting Uptime and Monitoring
One critical part of website reliability for nonprofits is the hosting provider. If your nonprofit is experiencing downtime across the website, impacting access to the campaign pages, resource library, and donation form, take a closer look at your hosting provider. What plan are you on? Do you have shared or dedicated hosting? Shared hosting means you are on a server with other websites. Dedicated hosting means your nonprofit’s website is on its own server. Shared hosting can be highly advantageous, especially for keeping costs lower, as dedicated hosting setups can cost thousands of dollars per year. However, with big-name hosting providers, you can be on a server with hundreds of other websites and no guarantee that they have been recently updated.
At CH Web Agency, we approach hosting a little differently. If you’re having to think about hosting, it means something isn’t working. We make sure your hosting setup is designed for your site, which means that the website won’t experience hiccups as a result of inadequate resources or other websites on the same server causing performance drains. We also monitor websites 24/7 for downtime. Downtime is extraordinarily rare, and our website hosting service provider offers up to 99% uptime.
Planned Updates vs Emergency Fixes
Our team understands the critical role that nonprofits play in our communities. We are dedicated to providing the same level of support and care in our updates as you put into your mission every day. This means performing regular updates to your nonprofit’s website to keep it secure, functional, and looking great. One of the reasons our team doesn’t encounter as many performance issues as our competitors is that we plan website updates.
Every month, we perform these routine updates to the website, including security patches. Each update is scheduled, and we conduct a series of compatibility checks to ensure that performance and layout remain unaffected. Emergency fixes are when an unexpected error appears on the website and needs to be resolved quickly. Emergency fixes are where the cause of the error may not be immediately apparent. Because of our systematic approach to updates, emergency fixes are rare. For routine updates and questions, our team is easy to reach, with after-hours support available for emergencies. We deliver the responsiveness and hands-on support of an in-house team. Nonprofits need a reliable website support team and often don’t have the resources to pay for a dedicated staff member to manage the website expertise. Our agency can provide the responsiveness and level of support that comes with an in-house team at a significantly lower cost.
Why Dedicated Support Teams Matter
A dedicated and competent website support team for your nonprofit removes the headache of managing a website. They keep the website secure, address issues quickly, and provide recommendations. They can help you post content, create landing pages, and help you build and measure your campaigns. We believe that your website support team should feel like a natural extension of your nonprofit’s team.
Our website design and development experts at CH Web Agency build and support websites for nonprofits. Our team has worked with large nonprofits in North Carolina and across the U.S. Not only do we build and launch impactful websites, but we provide fast, professional, and cost-effective support long after launch. Our development process is designed to mitigate the chances of encountering performance issues like those discussed above. If you’re experiencing constant website bugs and an unresponsive web development team, contact one of our website experts today. We offer website audits and fixes for nonprofit teams with existing websites who may not be ready for a full rebuild just yet. Our team is just a chat, Zoom call, or in-person consultation away.
Building Trust Through Website Reliability for Nonprofits
Nonprofits need a reliable website partner to keep their resources available, donation forms active, and mission visible to help grow their grassroots movements. When your nonprofit’s website starts to experience performance issues, broken resource libraries, and errors with your intake forms, it can negatively impact your mission and impede the reach of your campaigns. A real-world example would be you send a newsletter out to 40k subscribers. If 2% of subscribers click through at the same time, that’s 800 people visiting your website at the same time. This may not sound like a lot, but if you don’t have the right website infrastructure and support, it can crash your website for many of those users.
You can trust that CH Web Agency will be there when you need us. For websites that we build and support, the types of errors we discussed in this article, while not impossible, are rare. We also provide support for websites that were built by different developers. In these cases, reliability depends on how the website was built; however, during our initial audit and takeover, we will make recommendations to enhance the long-term reliability of your website. Our goal is that worrying about website reliability is a thing of the past once you partner with our team.
