The Nonprofit Website Audit: 10 Questions to Ask Before You Redesign

A website audit is a comprehensive, top-to-bottom analysis of your digital presence. It goes far beyond a simple design review. It’s an investigation into how your website is performing for your audiences, how well it’s serving your strategic goals, and how resilient its underlying technology is. It’s the process that uncovers the hidden cracks in your foundation before they become a catastrophic failure.

For many nonprofits, an audit is the first step toward a full redesign. It replaces vague feelings of dissatisfaction (“our site just feels old”) with a concrete, evidence-based diagnosis of the problems. This diagnosis is essential for building a compelling case for investment and for writing an effective RFP that attracts the right partners.

Many nonprofit websites are a patchwork of tools and platforms stitched together over many years. As one global nonprofit described it in a recent RFP, the result is often “a system that functions, but with increasing fragility.” Their technology stack included a heavily customized WordPress CMS, Salesforce for their CRM, multiple donation platforms, and a separate donor portal. Crucially, they noted that “critical integration paths depend on vendor memory rather than centralized documentation.”

This is what a technology audit is designed to uncover. It’s a deep dive into your digital infrastructure to identify risks. An auditor will look at:

The goal is to identify any areas of “technical debt”—the accumulated cost of choosing easy short-term solutions instead of more sustainable long-term ones. An audit tells you if you’re one staff departure or one software update away from a broken donation form.

Technology is only half the story. A website can be technically perfect but still fail if it doesn’t communicate your mission effectively. A brand and content audit asks whether your site is still a true reflection of who your organization is today. This is where brand identity and web design intersect — a site that’s technically sound but visually outdated or messaging-misaligned is still failing its mission.

This part of the audit evaluates your messaging, your visual identity, and your content strategy. Does your homepage reflect your current strategic priorities? Is your brand applied consistently across all sections? Is your content organized in a way that makes sense to your audience, or is it structured around your internal departments? An audit often reveals that a website’s content is a historical archive of past programs and priorities, not a dynamic tool for current engagement. It identifies redundant, outdated, and trivial content that can be retired, and it highlights the gaps where new, mission-critical content needs to be created. A key goal should be to refresh your brand without losing donor recognition.

More people now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Mode which organizations work on an issue before they ever visit a website. These tools draw on sites they can read and trust. A redesign is the right moment to make sure yours is one of them.

What about llms.txt? It’s a proposed file that gives AI tools a plain-text summary of your site. It’s cheap to add, and plugins like Rank Math can generate it. Add it if it’s easy, and put your real effort into the five checks above. AI tools now shape how people discover nonprofits, so a redesign should make your site easy for them to read, trust and cite.

Your answers can help your team identify what’s working, where the risks are and what needs attention first. Project6 helps nonprofits and foundations turn those findings into a practical plan for improving their websites, from targeted fixes to a full redesign. Talk with us about your website and what you’d like it to do better.