“The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Socrates
Your website doesn’t announce when something stops working. A broken link stays broken. A slow page keeps loading slowly. An inaccessible element keeps turning visitors away. The organization keeps operating, and the website quietly falls behind.
These five checks are not a redesign. They are a discipline – a way of confirming that the website you built is still doing what it was built to do.
They are worth running at least once a year, regardless of whether anything feels wrong. The issues that matter most rarely announce themselves.
1. Speed & performance
Why it matters: a slow website communicates something before a visitor reads a single word. For organizations whose credibility depends on first impressions: funders evaluating a nonprofit, visitors researching a museum, patients assessing a healthcare provider, load time is a trust signal, not a technical detail.
What to check: load time on both desktop and mobile, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Time to Interactive (TTI), and hosting environment performance.
Tools: Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, WebPageTest.
2. Accessibility
Why it matters: for nonprofits, educational institutions, and healthcare organizations, accessibility is both an ethical obligation and in many cases a legal requirement under the ADA. A website that excludes visitors with disabilities is not serving its mission fully, regardless of how it looks.
What to check: heading hierarchy, alt text on meaningful images, color contrast ratios, and keyboard and screen reader navigation.
Tools: WAVE Web Accessibility Tool, Axe DevTools, Lighthouse Audit.
3. Mobile responsiveness
Why it matters: most of your visitors arrive on a phone or tablet. A layout that works on a desktop but breaks on mobile is not a minor inconvenience – it is a credibility gap that your visitor notices before you do.
What to check: how the layout adapts on tablets and phones, touch target sizing on buttons and links, and scrollability and navigation flow across screen sizes.
Tools: BrowserStack, LambdaTest, Responsively App.
4. SEO & metadata
Why it matters: a well-structured website that cannot be found is not serving your organization. Metadata, internal linking, and structured content determine whether Google surfaces your site to the right people – and whether AI tools can accurately represent your organization in search results.
What to check: page titles and meta descriptions, heading structure and internal linking, keyword relevance and image alt tags, sitemap and robots.txt configuration.
Tools: Rank Math, Screaming Frog, Google Search Console.
5. Conversion path
Why it matters: a visitor who cannot find what they need will not ask for help – they will leave. For organizations that depend on donations, program inquiries, membership sign-ups, or funder interest, a clear path from landing to action is not optional.
What to check: whether CTAs are visible and specific, whether the donation, sign-up, or inquiry process is frictionless, and whether a first-time visitor can navigate to their goal within three clicks.
Tools: Hotjar, Google Analytics, Maze.
A note on what these checks reveal
Running these tests is straightforward. What they surface is often not. A performance issue may trace back to a hosting decision made years ago. An accessibility gap may reflect how content was structured from the beginning. A broken conversion path may reveal that the site was built around internal assumptions rather than visitor behavior.
If the results raise questions about whether the site needs more than maintenance, that is a different conversation – and a useful one to have before committing to another year on a site that is quietly working against you.
“Small improvements, consistently made, lead to stunning results.” – Robin Sharma
At minimum, once a year. Quarterly is better for organizations whose websites carry significant institutional weight – where funders, board candidates, or community partners are likely to arrive and form a first impression without any prior relationship.
Not for the initial audit. Most of the tools listed above are designed for non-technical users and will surface the findings clearly. Where you need a developer is in interpreting what the findings mean for your specific site and deciding which issues to prioritize – that judgment call is where expertise matters.
That depends on what the issue is and how long it has been present. Some findings are straightforward maintenance items. Others indicate that the site has structural problems that incremental fixes will not resolve. The Executive Website Clarity Assessment was built for exactly that situation – when an organization needs an honest read on whether the site is still the right foundation before investing further in it.
Frances Naty Go is the founder of Goldlilys Media, where she helps mission-driven organizations turn their websites into clear, durable systems that support meaningful work over time. She works with museums, nonprofits, health and wellness brands, higher education, life sciences, travel organizations, and expert-led businesses.
With a background in Computer Science from UC San Diego, Frances brings a thoughtful, strategic approach to building digital experiences that educate, orient, and build trust, without unnecessary complexity.
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