10 Website Tasks Nonprofits Should Be Doing Regularly
Your nonprofit website may not need attention every day, but it should never be treated as a set-it-and-forget-it project.
A nonprofit website is often the first place people go to learn about your mission, register for an event, make a donation, become a member, find resources, or contact your organization. If something is broken, outdated, insecure, or difficult to use, people are likely to leave without taking any action.
The challenge is that many nonprofits do not have a dedicated website manager or IT team. Website responsibilities often fall to a staff member, volunteer, board member, or whoever happens to know how to log in.
Good website maintenance for nonprofits is not just about fixing a broken page when someone reports it. It means regularly checking the systems, content, security, and functionality that keep your website working for your organization and the people you serve.
10 Website Tasks to Add to Your Regular Maintenance Routine
1. Update Your Website Software
If your nonprofit uses WordPress or another content management system, updates should be part of your regular maintenance schedule.
That includes the website’s core software, plugins, themes, extensions, and other components.
Updates can introduce new features and performance improvements, but security fixes are especially important. In 2025, WordPress continued to release security updates, including releases that addressed vulnerabilities and recommended immediate installation. WordPress also ended security support for versions 4.1 through 4.6 in July 2025.
The important point is not simply to click “Update” whenever you see a notification.
Before making significant updates, make sure you have a current backup and that important functions such as donation forms, membership forms, and integrations continue to work afterward.
For nonprofits, website maintenance for nonprofits should include a process for updating software safely rather than leaving updates to whoever happens to notice them.
2. Check That Your Donation and Contact Forms Work
A form can look perfectly normal while failing behind the scenes.
Your nonprofit may rely on forms for donations, volunteer applications, membership registrations, event sign-ups, contact requests, newsletter subscriptions, or program inquiries.
Test these forms regularly.
Submit a test entry and confirm that:
- The form submits successfully.
- The confirmation message appears.
- The appropriate person receives the notification.
- Automated emails are being delivered.
- Payment or donation processing works correctly.
- Information is being recorded in the appropriate system.
- Any connected CRM, email platform, or database is receiving the information.
This is particularly important for donation forms. A problem that prevents someone from completing a donation is not simply a website inconvenience. It can directly affect fundraising.
3. Review Your Website Content
Not every website problem is technical.
Information can become outdated just as easily.
Review your major pages regularly to make sure your nonprofit is presenting accurate information about its programs, services, staff, leadership, locations, contact information, and current initiatives.
Pay particular attention to information that changes frequently, such as:
- Staff and board member listings
- Office hours
- Contact information
- Program details
- Upcoming events
- Application deadlines
- Donation instructions
- Volunteer opportunities
- Annual reports
- Policies and downloadable documents
You should also remove information that no longer serves a purpose.
An event from two years ago does not need to remain on your homepage.
A former staff member should not still appear on your team page. And an outdated PDF can be just as confusing as an outdated webpage.
A website should reflect what your nonprofit is doing now, not what it was doing several years ago.
4. Test Your Website on Mobile Devices
Your website may look fine on your laptop and still be frustrating to use on a phone.
Test your most important pages on mobile devices, particularly your homepage, donation page, contact page, event registration pages, and forms.
Look for practical problems:
- Buttons that are difficult to tap
- Text that is too small
- Images that do not resize properly
- Menus that are difficult to navigate
- Forms that are awkward to complete
- Pop-ups that cover important content
- Pages that take too long to load
Performance matters here as well. Google recommends monitoring Core Web Vitals, which measure loading performance, responsiveness, and visual stability. Its current guidance identifies targets for metrics including Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift.
You do not need to turn your nonprofit team into web performance specialists, but you do need to notice when your website is making basic tasks unnecessarily difficult.
5. Check Your Website Security
Security should not only become a priority after something goes wrong.
Regular website maintenance for nonprofits should include reviewing security updates, administrator accounts, login protections, backups, SSL certificates, and other basic safeguards.
Start with access.
Who can currently log into your website?
A volunteer who left last year may still have administrator access. A former employee may still have credentials. An outside contractor may have permissions they no longer need.
Remove unnecessary accounts and make sure current users have only the access they actually need.
Multi-factor authentication should also be enabled wherever it is available, particularly for administrative accounts. CISA recommends MFA as an important protection against account compromise and recommends stronger, phishing-resistant methods where possible.
Security does not have to be complicated, but it does have to be maintained.
6. Back Up Your Website and Know How to Restore It
Having a backup is not the same as knowing you can recover your website.
Your nonprofit should have current backups of its website and understand where those backups are stored, how often they are created, and how they would be restored if something went wrong.
Backups can become especially important after a security incident, failed update, hosting problem, or accidental deletion.
CISA’s recent ransomware guidance continues to emphasize maintaining backups, having a recovery plan, keeping software updated, and using MFA.
At minimum, your maintenance process should answer four questions:
What is being backed up?
How often is it backed up?
Where are the backups stored?
Has anyone tested the restoration process?
If nobody knows the answer to the last question, your backup strategy may not be as reliable as you think.
7. Check Links, Downloads, and Important Pages
Links break.
Files get moved.
Pages get deleted.
Websites are constantly changing, and those changes can leave behind links that no longer work.
Regularly check your website for broken internal and external links. Pay particular attention to pages people rely on to take action.
For nonprofits, that could include:
- Donation pages
- Volunteer applications
- Membership forms
- Event registration
- Contact pages
- Program applications
- Resource libraries
- Annual reports
- Financial documents
- Partner websites
Also open important PDFs and downloadable files to make sure they still work.
A broken link on an old blog post may not be urgent. A broken “Donate Now” button is.
8. Review Accessibility
Accessibility should be part of ongoing website maintenance, not something considered only during a redesign.
Review your website regularly for common accessibility issues, including missing or unclear alternative text, poor heading structure, insufficient color contrast, inaccessible forms, unclear link text, and navigation problems.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, provide an internationally recognized framework for making websites and digital content more accessible. WCAG 2.2 was published as a W3C
Recommendation in October 2023 and added nine new success criteria compared with WCAG 2.1.
For nonprofits, accessibility is particularly important because your website may be a primary source of information about services, programs, resources, and community support.
You do not need to solve every accessibility issue in one afternoon. Start by regularly identifying and addressing the issues that make your website harder to use.
9. Review Your Search and Analytics Data
Your website analytics can tell you what visitors are actually doing, rather than what your organization assumes they are doing.
Review your analytics regularly to identify:
- Your most visited pages
- Pages with declining traffic
- Popular resources
- Referral sources
- Search queries
- High-exit pages
- Donation or conversion paths
- Mobile versus desktop behavior
Also check your search performance for important nonprofit-related topics and services.
For example, if your organization provides food assistance but your services page receives very little traffic, it may be worth reviewing the page’s content, structure, search visibility, and internal links.
Analytics should not become a monthly report that nobody reads. Use the information to decide what needs attention on the website.
10. Review Your Domain, SSL, Hosting, and Other Web Services
Some of the most important parts of your website are the things visitors never see.
Your nonprofit should know who manages its:
- Domain name
- DNS
- Hosting account
- SSL certificate
- Business email
- Website platform
- Donation platform
- Forms
- Third-party integrations
- Analytics accounts
Keep track of renewal dates, account owners, billing information, and administrator access.
This matters because losing access to a domain or hosting account can create a much bigger problem than a broken webpage.
It is also worth documenting who owns each account. A nonprofit should not discover that its domain is controlled by a former employee, volunteer, board member, or outside contractor when an urgent change is needed.
A basic web operations document can save hours of confusion later.
How Often Should Your Nonprofit Do These Tasks?
Not every task needs to happen on the same schedule.
A practical maintenance routine might look like this:
Monthly
- Check website software and security updates.
- Test donation and contact forms.
- Review important pages and upcoming events.
- Check backups.
- Review website security alerts.
- Look for obvious broken links or errors.
Quarterly
- Review user accounts and administrator access.
- Test website functionality on mobile devices.
- Review analytics and search performance.
- Check downloadable documents.
- Review accessibility issues.
- Check domain, SSL, hosting, and service renewal information.
Annually
- Conduct a more comprehensive website review.
- Review the website’s structure and navigation.
- Remove outdated content.
- Review third-party services and integrations.
- Confirm ownership and access to all critical accounts.
- Evaluate whether the website still supports your nonprofit’s current programs and goals.
Download the Website Security Checklist here.
The exact schedule can vary depending on the size and complexity of your organization. A nonprofit running a large membership website with online payments will have different maintenance needs from a small organization with a five-page informational site.
The important part is having a schedule in the first place.
Keep Your Nonprofit Website Ready to Serve
A nonprofit website does more than provide information. It helps people find your organization, understand your work, donate, volunteer, register, apply for services, and get in touch.
That means keeping it operational is part of supporting your mission.
Regular maintenance does not require your team to spend hours inside WordPress every week. It requires a system for making sure the important work gets done before a small issue becomes a major problem.
If your nonprofit does not have the time or technical resources to manage these tasks internally, website maintenance for nonprofits can be handled as an ongoing service rather than another responsibility added to your staff or volunteers.
All-in-One Website Maintenance for Nonprofits
We provide ongoing website operations and support for nonprofits, including hosting, domain and DNS management, security, updates, backups, troubleshooting, design, development, and integrations.