Spooky season is here, and while your office (or home office) may be full of plastic skeletons and fun-size candy bars, the scariest things for a website are rarely ghosts.
They’re more likely to be an expired domain, a donation form that quietly stopped working, or an urgent situation where no one knows who’s supposed to update the website. These risks don’t jump out at you. They lurk until the worst possible moment. So this Halloween, take some time to check the dark corners of your site, starting with four questions.
Who needs to be paid to keep your website running?
Your website may depend on more paid services than you realize. At minimum, you have a domain (www.yourURL.org) and a website host, and these are often two different companies with two different bills. If your site runs on WordPress, you may also pay annually for one or more plugins. High-traffic sites may rely on a security provider like Cloudflare that’s critical to keeping everything working. Make a list of all of these services, including where to find the login info, the expiration date of the credit card on file, and what email address notifications are going to.
Have you tested your third-party tools lately?
Donation tools, email signups, and other third-party tools on your site can become disconnected over time. Because everything still looks fine from the outside, it’s easy to not realize something is broken. Test each of these tools at least every few months. For your donation tool, that means putting through an actual small donation. Confirm that notification emails reach the right staff inbox and that confirmation emails to donors look correct.
What’s your website plan for a crisis?
If something happens that you urgently need to communicate about, people may well come to your website for information. That’s not the moment to start figuring out the process. Decide now how you’ll quickly put up urgent information: where it will go on your site, and who’s in charge of writing it.
Who’s in charge of the website overall?
Fundamentally, who’s in charge of all of this? It can absolutely make sense to have different people responsible for different parts of your site. But someone needs to step in when those responsibilities slip through the cracks. Decide where the buck stops. Otherwise, the answer to “Who’s handling this?” may be the scariest silence of all.
Deep Dive
Domain vs hosting: Why your website has two “homes” | DME Marketing Colorado
If “domain” and “hosting” have always blurred together for you, this quick read sorts them out in a few minutes. It uses an everyday comparison: your domain is your street address, and your hosting is the actual house where everything lives. That’s a handy picture to keep in mind when you’re tracking down who gets paid for what.
Define the guardians of your web pages | Nonprofit Website Insider
If something goes bump in the night, no one should be wondering whose job it is to fix it. This article breaks nonprofit website oversight into six clear roles: page owners, a homepage owner, a CMS support lead, a guardian of the writing style, a visual style curator, and a final decision-maker. In a smaller nonprofit, one person may wear several of those hats, and that’s fine.
Last-minute nonprofit year-end giving website checklist | MayeCreate Design
Year-end giving season is right around the corner, and this blog post and podcast episode go deeper into the things you should check in advance. It organizes 15 tasks into three groups, starting with five critical must-dos built around making sure your donation form works.