Eleven Plugins and One Donate Button on a Charity Homepage

WordPress is why your charity’s website is slow.

I’ve said that out loud in a boardroom, with a straight face, and I’d like most of it back.

Part of it holds up and I’ll get to that part. But I rebuilt one of those homepages last year without touching the platform at all, and the thing got quick anyway.

Why the question comes up here more than anywhere else

Your sector went at WordPress harder than most. 47.8% of the nonprofit sites I audited run on it, where 36.4% of the small business sites I check everywhere else do, and free software plus a volunteer with a laptop is a hard combination to argue against at a board meeting.

Squarespace takes 11.6% of these sites and Wix takes 10.8%, and my platform detection is blunt rather than clever, so one site can answer to two of those names and a fair number answer to none that I recognize.

Has your board had the WordPress conversation yet? Every board I’ve sat in front of has had it, most of them twice, usually about ten minutes after someone says the site feels tired.

None of which told me a useful thing about the page I want to describe to you.

Before

The page belonged to a food rescue outfit. Two vans, a cold room, eleven staff and about ninety volunteers, moving food that supermarkets would otherwise throw out.

At the top, a slider: three photographs rotating every four seconds. A volunteer in a hairnet, a van with the logo on the door, and a group shot from a barbecue where half the faces had moved away since.

The donate button sat in the top right corner, grey on grey, about the size of a postage stamp.

Below the slider was a countdown clock to a gala that had already happened in the spring.

And behind all of it, eleven plugins.

A slider plugin, a gallery plugin, a form builder that had quietly stopped sending mail in February, two search plugins arguing over the same job, a cookie banner, an events calendar, a social feed, a page builder, a donation widget from a company that had gone under, and a security plugin whose license ran out in 2021.

Could you name the ones running on your own site tonight? I’ve asked that in maybe fifty meetings and got an answer twice.

Every one of those is a bundle of code your visitor’s phone has to fetch and run before your page settles down, whether or not the feature it belongs to ever turns up on the screen she’s looking at.

Your own homepage may have no slider on it, and good. But I’d bet there’s something up there that arrived for a decent reason in 2019 and has been loading for every visitor since.

Standing in their parking lot on my own phone, I watched that homepage take the better part of five seconds to stop moving. Some of that was the cold room wifi. Most of it wasn’t.

What a slow page costs a charity

The sector as a whole comes out at 54 out of 100 on the phone test I run, under the 58 I average across everything I test, and a score down in that range is the sound of people leaving before your page finishes loading.

You never meet them. There’s no bounced email, no voicemail, no note from a donor explaining she meant to give twenty dollars in December but her phone was tired of waiting.

Would you have waited five seconds? You wouldn’t, and you like these people.

What I took out, and what I left alone

Same WordPress. Same hosting. Same logo, same photographer, same cold room.

• The slider became one photograph, the hairnet one, because a face beats a van.
• Eleven plugins came down to three. The form builder got swapped for one that emails two people, since a single inbox is one vacation away from a lost volunteer.
• The countdown clock went in the bin, where countdown clocks go.
• The headline stopped saying Welcome To Our New Website and started saying that they collect food supermarkets would throw out and get it to nine pantries by Friday.
• The donate button got big enough to hit with a thumb without aiming, and it sits above everything else on the page.
• A short form landed on the first screen with three choices on it: give food, give money, give a Saturday.

Notice how little of that is design work. One photograph got chosen and one sentence got written, and the rest was deleting.

After

Same warehouse, same vans, same website software, and a homepage that arrives in about a second and a half on my phone.

The first thing on it is now a sentence a stranger can understand without knowing anything about the food system, and under it are three buttons that finish the thought.

That sentence took longer to write than the rest of the job put together. Charities are staffed by people who love words, and then the line a search result prints under your name goes unwritten here more than in any sector I audit.

Could a stranger say what you do and hand you something inside ten seconds on your own homepage? The bar sits right there, a good deal lower than any rebuild proposal makes it sound.

I turned a flower shop’s rebuild down last spring for the same reason and did three cheap jobs instead.

The form goes to a real person and a backup. The events page is a line of text that someone edits when there’s an event, which happens about four times a year and never justified a calendar.

Their treasurer emailed me in March to ask what I’d changed, because donations had started arriving through the site from people nobody in the office recognized.

Strangers, in other words. When did a stranger last give your charity money on a phone?

So was I wrong about WordPress?

Mostly. WordPress didn’t slow that homepage down.

Eleven plugins did, and eleven plugins is what happens when a website is looked after by whoever happens to be around, for ten years, with nobody owning the thing.

Each one arrived for a decent reason, and I’d bet the ones on your site did too.

A board member wanted a calendar. A summer student wanted a social feed. A grant application asked about accessibility and someone installed a plugin that promised to handle it.

Nobody’s job was ever to say no, and nobody’s job was ever to take one back out. So who says no at your place?

I’ll guess it belongs to the person who happens to know the password, which means it belongs to nobody at all.

My boardroom line was aiming at something real and hitting the wrong target. Free platform, donated labor, nobody who owns the thing.

I used to carry the same prejudice into plumbing audits, skipping ahead the moment I saw what the site was built on, and the software kept turning out to have done its half of the job.

The score underneath all this

Add my ten checks up and nonprofits land on 72 out of 100, and changing platforms would shift that by almost nothing.

If the board wants the argument settled anyway, I’ve set the easy builders against WordPress and said which one I’d hand a volunteer.

Your website isn’t behind because of what it’s built on. It’s behind because eleven things got switched on over ten years and nothing ever got switched off again.

Has your homepage ever gotten shorter? Adding is the fun part, and every volunteer, board member and grant officer you’ve ever met arrives with an idea for one more thing to put on it.

Most of the nonprofit sites I take on arrive looking like that one did, and my first week on them is mostly subtraction. The tidy version, once it’s done, looks like the nonprofit sites I keep here, which all get the first screen right.

If it were my charity, I’d open the plugin list tonight, count them, and delete every one I couldn’t explain to a donor in a sentence. Then I’d leave the platform exactly where it is.