Nonprofit WordPress Support for Mission-Driven Teams
Giant Rabbit’s nonprofit WordPress support spans design, development, managed hosting, and maintenance. 20+ years’ expertise meeting nonprofit technology needs.
Giant Rabbit has spent over two decades building and supporting nonprofit websites, and WordPress is one of the platforms we work in most often.
Whether you’re weighing WordPress against other platforms or you want more from the WordPress site you already have, our team works with yours to build a plan that fits your content, goals, and capacity.
With over 400 nonprofits served and more than 100 active clients, we know how to find the right solution for your team, operations, and budget. We help organizations across a variety of sectors, including:
We handle nonprofit WordPress support, from design and development to maintenance and security
WordPress websites are ubiquitous for a reason: the platform is flexible and powerful, and the plugin ecosystem is vast. In fact, the website you’re reading right now is built with WordPress!
There’s a lot you can do in a WordPress instance (even if you’re not a developer), and the page-building experience, when it’s set up correctly, can provide a consistent look and feel while still offering a lot of freedom. Our WordPress services cover the full WordPress lifecycle, from initial ideation through design, build, long-term evolution, and ongoing security. Our services include:
Selection
If you’re weighing whether WordPress is the right platform for your nonprofit, or whether an existing WordPress site still makes sense for your organization, we’re ready to help. We’re platform-agnostic, so we’ll give you an honest assessment rather than a sales pitch.
WordPress has a well-deserved reputation for being relatively easy to use and for offering powerful tools to site administrators. Of course, all of that power and flexibility comes with potential pitfalls. Plugins can make WordPress do anything! But it’s not always what you want; they don’t always play nicely together, and a WordPress website with the wrong combination of plugins or too much ill-advised custom code can end up in a bad state.
Giant Rabbit’s role is to help you decide if WordPress is right for you. If it is, we’ll help you play to the platform’s strengths while avoiding its weaknesses. If it’s not, we’ll help you choose between simpler DIY platforms for smaller sites or more complex CMS platforms for advanced features.
Migration
Migrating your content is one of the challenges of moving to a new website, but it’s also an opportunity to streamline, focus on what matters, and provide clear user journeys. We’ll help you develop clear pathways to engagement for your new visitors and easy-to-navigate menus for people who know what they are looking for.
We’ll bring over your old content to support your new goals, migrate structured content with updated tags for easy searching and sorting, and build effective new landing pages. We’ll assess what’s on your current site, plan how it maps onto WordPress, then carefully migrate your content, test everything, and launch, so your site’s content and search rankings come through intact.
Design
WordPress gives us the opportunity to work on unique design without over-engineering the underlying framework. Our design and development go hand in hand, so what we design is built with your CMS and your team’s workflow in mind. We begin with discovery to understand your goals, audience, and story, then build a shared design vocabulary before creating a site that’s striking, user-focused, and uniquely yours. We scope design work around your needs, whether that’s a full rebrand or a focused refresh, rather than restricting our clients to a fixed package.
Development
Our developers ask the “why” behind every feature, and they’ll craft your WordPress site with usability in mind, for public users and staff editors alike. Every line of code we write is peer-reviewed, and we follow WordPress-specific best practices, using well-maintained plugins and avoiding unnecessary bloat, to keep your site stable, efficient to support, and flexible for whatever your organization needs to build next.
WordPress has plenty of room for custom, sophisticated functionality when a project calls for it; we’ll first try to meet your needs with out-of-the-box tools, but when something truly custom is needed, our in-house developers can build it. We build WordPress sites to last, in part because we’re usually the ones maintaining them for years afterward.
Managed hosting
Good hosting is essential for a stable, reliable WordPress website—both for the sake of human users and to achieve the load times that search engines like to see when they crawl your site. We offer managed hosting for WordPress, which allows us to take fine-grained control over firewall configuration, bot mitigation, and caching, as well as server-level security settings that shut down many common security vulnerabilities.
Moreover, our managed hosting is distributed, which means you’ll directly own your own AWS or DigitalOcean account, while relying on us for configuration, maintenance, and security. Since the site is yours, you can grant access to whomever you want, and the site is in your name if you ever want to move on.
Security
We can maintain your WordPress website and keep it safe from malicious bots and hackers. This starts with our foundational server setup, with file-system-level permissions that prevent WordPress from rewriting itself, which in turn shuts down many of the worst WordPress security vulnerabilities. We update your WordPress site via server-side scripts, which ensures that no malicious code makes it into your live site.
WordPress, like any actively developed platform, regularly releases updates and security patches, along with updates to every plugin your site relies on. When a vulnerability is disclosed, a Giant Rabbit developer evaluates it for your specific setup and applies it right away if it’s urgent, then tests it to make sure nothing breaks before it goes live. We also run nightly backups with integrity checks, continuously monitor your site’s uptime, and keep your site under version control so we can apply changes with confidence and roll back if something goes wrong.
Clear communication before, during, and after
Whatever your project may be, we want to help bring your nonprofit’s staff along with us. You may know exactly what needs improvement, or not, we’re here to help either way. We work with your team to understand where your current systems and workflows are falling short and chart a clear path forward. We then make recommendations that align with your organization’s goals and budget. Once we’ve confirmed the plan, we get to work, with plenty of check-ins built into the process.
One of the most important steps we take is helping your team acclimate to the changes we make. After all, what good is a new or improved site if no one on your team feels confident updating it? Whatever we build, we make sure day-to-day maintenance, adding pages, managing media, and updating content, stays approachable for your staff. Our work is geared toward sustainability, and part of that is setting your staff up for long-term success. We lead training demos and walk through everything that’s new in plain language, so your team can navigate your new and improved site with confidence.
Nonprofit WordPress support FAQs
Meet our clients
Ready to get started with nonprofit WordPress support?
Whether you already have a WordPress site or are thinking about getting started with one, we’re here to help.