The Truth About DIY Non-Profit Websites: Is It Really Worth It?

Building a powerful and notable brand is important. However, this will be more difficult with a DIY website design. All DIY platforms generally use stock templates. They offer the same navigation structures, layouts, and styles. Every website built through that DIY platform will lack unique characteristics. Also, those platforms offer somewhat limited options to change the design. Basically, there will be hundreds if not thousands of other websites that are identical to yours. In this situation, building a unique brand for your non-profit becomes nearly impossible.

Poor or no SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Regardless of the appearance, your website becomes completely useless if no one can find it. Search engines like Google and Bing should be able to locate your website and drive traffic toward it.

The whole process of making your website “visible” to those search engines is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO depends on the structure of the website, navigation options, load speed, user-friendliness, content, meta, and many other criteria. You cannot expect any of this from a DIY website you have built with a stock template.

Bad content

A good website should always have fresh, meaningful content that is relevant to its cause. With fresh content, your website will accomplish several important goals. It can:

• Share the mission of your non-profit with your audience
• Build your brand and showcase you in the best light possible
• Provide detailed information about your non-profit
• Show your expertise in your respective niche and field
• Boost your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings

With poor content, you can’t expect any of the above. Poor content will damage your professional image, credibility, and increase the bounce rate. If your website is DIY, you are also responsible for creating your own content. In fact, creating professional content is not an easy task and requires a professional’s assistance.

Poor responsiveness

Responsive websites automatically adapt to the screen it is displayed and are now the norm – basically making sure your website looks amazing on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. This is a very important feature because many people browse the internet through mobile phones.

If your non-profit’s website doesn’t appear well on mobile phones, visitors are more likely to abandon it.

The problem with DIY websites is that they often are not designed well for responsiveness. DIY websites offer limited options for modifications to make the site properly responsive as they don’t allow for custom CSS or coding.

Frequent issues and uptime reliability

Your website must be up and running all the time, so you don’t lose traffic. If you build a DIY website, you’ll likely run into frequent problems. You’ll likely experience broken links, error messages, incompatibility, broken design, and the site will likely suffer from disorganization. Also, the loading speed of the site might be slow and the site’s elements may stop working all of a sudden. Making all those things worse, you get a limited amount of support from the respective platform, or you’ll end up paying a web agency for support to fix the problem.

The preceding shows why a DIY website is not the best idea for your charity website. The best approach is to choose a well-experienced web developer and let them help you build your site from scratch.

Backups and hackers

Do you have a background in security best practices for websites?  Probably not. With a DIY website, you’ll need to make sure that regular backups are taken, tested, and available for restore should something nefarious happen. Wouldn’t it be easier to pick up the phone or email a trusted vendor to resolve? Or even better, having them perform routine maintenance and upkeep to prevent issues from happening in the first place?

Is there another option?

Yes, there’s another way to handle your website.  It’s called MightyNPO!

We believe that easy access for non-profits, charities, community groups, and the like, should be able to get online as easily and as quickly as possible. Running an organization takes a lot of time and willpower, why bother learning another tool and take up your valuable time when you could be out there changing the world?

That’s why we created MightyNPO.

All you have to do is sign up, and fill out a couple of web forms. From there, our experts will customize the theme for your brand, put your content in, make updates for you, and do everything else for you so you can get back to helping the world.

Not only that, you get a free CRM and if you’re a registered non-profit or charity, you’ll get a donation platform that issues tax receipts for free!

What are you waiting for? Get your website today!

For a limited time, use coupon MNPOLIFE70 at check out to get 70% off the service forever!