Nonprofits need a good quality online presence. WordPress is a content management system that can make your nonprofit website both relatively easy to modify and flexible. While we are not affiliates of WordPress, we generally recommend them – especially to small or mid-sized nonprofits that do not have team members dedicated to their websites.
Every nonprofit is different of course and you might want to think about other options. But we wanted to make the case for choosing WordPress and offer some notes about other considerations before you go ahead and choose them. Switching at a later date is, in general, no easy task. If you already have a website and are not using WordPress, you might want to check your website’s health first for free without rushing to spend the time to switch.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is known as a content management system or CMS. As such, it allows you to relatively easily manage the contents of your website.
It should not be confused for the WordPress which sells blog hosting (this is via wordpress.com). WordPress the organization with the free CMS (wordpress.org) is, in fact, free to use. Most website hosting services have some easy way to install WordPress free of charge. Some hosts offer a WordPress installation package but to be honest, you generally do not need to pay to have help installing it. Paying to get help actually building your website is another story.
Reasons for considering WordPress for your nonprofit website
More websites are built on WordPress than any other content management system
This has led to tons of developers working on improving it – some specifically for nonprofits.
It’s not very difficult to learn the basics of WordPress
Many nonprofits work with volunteers or employees that could leave the organization to build their website. If the website is created in a very complex way, then you risk losing the ability to change it in the future. WordPress is not incredibly intuitive, but in an hour or two on Youtube or with your web developer you can learn how to make basic changes.
There is a vast array of themes available on WordPress – many geared towards nonprofits
You can search thousands and thousands of ways you want your website to look and work.
There are many ways to add functionalities to your website with WordPress plugins
You can add extra security, social media sharing buttons, newsletter sign-up pop-ups, use Google Analytics, etc. Many of these are free – a great price for cash-strapped nonprofits. Here is an overview of plug-ins and some plug-ins your nonprofit should consider.
WordPress works very well for SEO or search engine optimization.
With good SEO you can help search engines like Google or Bing show your nonprofit’s website to the right people, at the right time. Check out our other article for an overview of SEO for nonprofits. WordPress has a lot of SEO best practices built into it – plus there are plugins that can help with SEO. And trust us, as tedious as it can be, SEO is something you need to be thinking about – you do not want to make these SEO mistakes.
Before deciding on WordPress for your nonprofit, here are some things to think about:
Biggest doesn’t always mean best – make sure with your team and budget you can do what you want to do with WordPress
WordPress is easy to learn, but maybe drag and drop is best just so you have something. Or maybe you want even more flexibility with another way to manage your site. Maybe you prefer to host your website using an online platform built for nonprofits.
Some developers prefer using a different CMS or manner of building your website
It’s OK to defer to their expertise. But push them on why they don’t want to work with WordPress – at the very least to ensure that if you want the flexibility to work on your site later without hiring another team of software engineers.
Conclusion
Many questions can arise when building or restructuring your nonprofit website. If you’re going at it on your own, with limited expertise, WordPress offers a great combination of flexibility and ease of use. One question you don’t need to answer: some way, somehow, you need an online presence.