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Your website is a critical tool for engaging your audience, promoting your mission, and driving donations and support. However, ensuring your website performs well – especially during high-traffic periods like fundraising campaigns – can be a significant challenge.
The hosting service you choose plays a major role in your website’s speed and security. Many nonprofits opt for basic, consumer-grade hosting plans, but these often fall short when it comes to the specialized needs of a high-traffic, mission-critical website.
Most hosting providers will place your website on a shared server, where you have no control over who else is using the same server resources as your website. Even if your own website isn’t the one causing high server loads, one of your “server mates” – the other websites hosted on the same physical server – could be taxing the system, leading to disruptions and lag times for your own site. This lack of isolation and unpredictable performance is a major downside of shared hosting plans.
Look for a hosting provider that offers features tailored to the needs of nonprofits, such as:
With over a decade of experience hosting websites, we’ve researched hosting services extensively to find the fastest and best performing hosting service for our SabraCare+ clients, and the clear choice for us is WP Engine. Learn why WP Engine is hands-down the best WordPress hosting service around.
Website downtime can be devastating for nonprofits, disrupting your ability to engage supporters, process donations, and communicate your message. Implementing a reliable backup system is essential to ensure you can quickly restore your site in the event of any issue.
Aim for a hosting solution that provides automated, daily backups of your entire website. This way, if something goes wrong – whether it’s a coding error, plugin conflict, or even a malicious attack – you can quickly get your site back up and running with minimal downtime and data loss.
With SabraCare+, your website is backed up every day and we maintain a 30 day archive of your website’s backups. This enables our team to diagnose what happened and get your website back online same-day at no extra charge.
Technology is constantly evolving, and it’s important that your website keeps pace. Outdated WordPress versions, plugins, and PHP code can lead to security vulnerabilities, compatibility issues, and poor performance.
Develop a routine for regularly updating your website’s core software, plugins, and other components. You should also be aware that sometimes plugin upgrades can cause unforeseen hiccups on your website, so make sure you have a developer that you can reach out to in case further intervention is required.
Good web maintenance plans, like SabraCare+, offer managed updates to handle this process for you, ensuring your site is always running the latest, most secure and optimized versions.
For instance, PHP 8.2 was recently released, and in the coming year, older versions of PHP will become obsolete. To ensure none of our SabraCare+ clients are caught off guard, we’ve been proactively transitioning them to PHP 8.2.
Additionally, any new SabraCare+ clients will also be onboarded directly onto PHP 8.2 from the start. By staying ahead of these technology changes, we can provide our clients with the best possible website performance and security, without them having to worry about managing complex software updates themselves.
Any time a plugin is updated, a new version of PHP comes out, our developments are on top of it. If one of your plug-ins becomes obsolete, we will also help you find a replacement and help you set it up on your website.
Our team plans out system updates months in advance to keep your site working smoothly behind the scenes. Each month we’ll send you a Website Report listing out all the plugin updates that were made as well as a full Google Analytics Report.
Nonprofit websites often rely heavily on visuals, such as photos and graphics, to engage their audience. However, large, unoptimized images can significantly slow down your website’s loading times, frustrating users and potentially impacting your search engine rankings.
Consider using an image optimization tool, such as Imagify, to automatically resize and compress your images without compromising quality. This can dramatically improve your website’s performance, especially on mobile devices.
When onboarding new SabraCare+ clients, we always add Imagify to their website. Imagify automatically resizes any large images you publish on your website, even photos that you’ve already published, greatly reducing load times and file sizes.
By choosing the right hosting provider, implementing reliable backups, keeping your site up-to-date, and optimizing your images, you can ensure your website is prepared to handle spikes in traffic and deliver your content quickly and efficiently.
As a SabraCare+ subscriber, you’ll have access to all these performance-boosting features and more, allowing you to focus on your important work while we handle the technical details behind the scenes. With our expert guidance and ongoing support, you can be confident your website is operating at peak performance, no matter how much your organization grows.
Contact us today to learn more about how SabraCare+ can help elevate your nonprofit’s online presence.
From advanced website analytics to seamless content management, our comprehensive SabraCare+ plan delivers the tools and support you need to maintain, secure, scale, and enhance your nonprofit’s online presence, helping you thrive in the digital space.