Nonprofit Website Maintenance and Security You Can Count On

At Giant Rabbit, nonprofit website maintenance is never an afterthought. When we build a site, we’re ready to keep it healthy for years to come.

We diligently maintain our clients’ sites,whether they’re built on Drupal, WordPress, Backdrop CMS, or a Javascript frontend over a headless CMS. Even if we didn’t build your site, we can still maintain it. We start with a thorough onboarding process to get to know your setup, then we take responsibility for it, from security updates to site backups, with personalized day-to-day support available when you need it.

Whether we build a site or not, our thorough onboarding process keeps your site secure and sets us up to provide reliable, efficient updates and support going forward. Every site we work on is set up in version control to distinguish between the core platform code, optional extensions and plugins, and custom code and patches, which allows us to apply updates with confidence and keep an eye on customizations to look out for problems. We’ll create staging and testing environments, where we can stage changes for review, and you can safely experiment with changes. If you want to make a change or add a feature, you’ll reach out to a team that knows your site inside and out.

We monitor your site and back it up every night

We continuously monitor your site’s uptime so that we know about problems before they interrupt your organization’s work. We run a daily backup, and a custom script checks the backup’s integrity to ensure that we can recover your site and your data if something goes wrong. 

With over two decades of experience helping organizations that handle donor records, membership data, and sensitive constituent information, we understand how important it is to know that your nonprofit’s site is in good hands.

Proactive security keeps your data safe

No matter how positive your mission, there are bad actors on the internet looking for vulnerabilities and weak spots to exploit your data, stuff your website full of spammy links, or even take over your server to participate in attacks on other sites. The vast majority of these threats are automated, but some organizations we support are individually targeted for their work. We can help you evaluate your organization’s level of risk and prepare a right-sized security approach that keeps your data safe. 

We’ll keep your data encrypted at rest and in transit, we’ll help you follow security best practices, establish data retention policies, and evaluate the constant parade of security notices and warnings that come along so we can respond to the ones that matter, and ignore the ones that don’t.

Resilient nonprofit servers and custom security solutions

Our baseline server setup is highly secure, preventing many common attacks through server-level configuration choices. We’ll also support your configuration of domain-level security (using Cloudflare, where appropriate, to mitigate bots and other threats) and leverage open source threat mitigation tools when called for. Our security baselines are strong, and our toolkit for dealing with bots and other attackers gives us a range of options to keep your site secure, without breaking the bank.

What’s more, we’re transparent and collaborative any time we’re talking about security. Security can seem like a black box (and sometimes a very expensive one), but with Giant Rabbit, you’ll get cost-effective recommendations along with plain-language explanations of what we’re up against, what we know and what we don’t, and what we recommend and why.

We apply updates with care

Complex platforms like WordPress and Drupal are continually releasing updates and security patches, along with every plugin, module, or extension in use on your site. When a vendor discloses a security flaw in software your site uses, a Giant Rabbit developer evaluates the update for your specific configuration. If it’s urgent, we apply it, test it to make sure nothing breaks, then launch it right away. 

Our website maintenance services for nonprofits

Security & updates

• Security patch evaluation and application
• CMS version upgrades
• Plugin and module updates
• PHP and server software updates
• Bot / DDOS mitigation
• Security audit and recommendations

Monitoring & backups

• Continuous uptime monitoring
• Nightly database and file backup and verification
• Email deliverability monitoring