How to Do a Nonprofit Website Content Audit, in Six Steps

You've made the decision to conduct a content audit of your nonprofit’s website - to scan and tag each page based on criteria like relevance, redundancy, and quality. Maybe you read my article about a content audit’s benefits and costs, or have just known for a long time that you need to do it for some time.

It’s not a incredibly complicated process, but it really helps to make a plan up front. How do you get started?

1. Define who will be auditing

Ideally, one person should conduct the entire content audit to ensure consistency in tagging and more easily identify duplicate content. However, if your pages are clearly categorized with little overlap, you can split the work among a few people. 

The person doing the audit doesn't have to be a subject matter expert. Even someone quite junior can do the work effectively as long as they’re reliable. Try to find someone who doesn’t actively hate the idea of scanning and tagging every single one of your articles for quality. Breaking the task into smaller chunks and putting on some music can make the process less daunting.

A contractor could also be a good choice for this role. They can dedicate a substantial amount of time over a month without getting distracted by other priorities, while your staff members are often better utilized for their expertise in writing articles. You’re not likely to find contractors who specialize in content audits, but $40- $60 writers or researchers may be willing and qualified.  

2. Design your audit

Before you start the audit, decide what criteria you'll use. Your content auditor will fill out a spreadsheet with a row for each website page and a column for each criterion. The more criteria you have, the longer it will take to review each page. But once you've started reviewing a page, it doesn't take much time to add more tags or scores. So it's better to decide on all the criteria before you start reviewing any pages. Some typical things to review for include:

• When was the article last updated? You can find this information in your content management system (CMS).

• When was it last reviewed? This is different from the update date. You can update an article without reviewing it, or you can review it and decide that it doesn't need to be updated. If this information isn’t in your CMS, it may be difficult to know.

• Does it appear to be redundant with other articles? When you are systematically looking at articles by category or tag, it’s fairly easy to identify articles that are redundant with each other. You can add notes to your audit to capture more details about the redundancies.

• Is it obviously outdated? For some sites and subject matter, you can walk through some basics with the person doing your audit to define what types of things make an article likely out of date. For example, an article about COVID procedures from early 2020 is probably not still relevant.

• Does it seem likely to be evergreen? Some articles are unlikely to go out of date, based on their subject matter. In content strategy circles, this is called “evergreen.”

• Is it important and applicable to the focus of your site? Over time, it’s common for things that are somewhat random or irrelevant to slip in.

• Does it clearly need to be reviewed? You likely want to have a tag to simply mark that something’s wrong with the article and it needs to be looked at. A notes field can capture more detail.

• Is it well written for the web? Is it scannable, with fairly short sentences, and short paragraphs?

• Is the reading level appropriate? It will obviously take longer, but you could run each page through an online tool to gauge the reading level and flag those that are too high for your audience.

• Does it follow visual standards? Are the headers and text formatting generally correct? Are images used appropriately, with captions and high contrast?

• Should it be archived? Take the time upfront to define criteria so your content auditor can tag pages that should obviously be immediately unpublished from the site. 

The auditor should be able to quickly make a judgment call based on the criteria, so don't make the tagging too complicated. If a Yes/No answer won't work, a High/Medium/Low scale usually will. For example, it may not make perfect grammatical sense to say that an article has a "Medium" level of redundancy, but that likely works well enough to flag that there are some issues, but they're not urgent.

3. Prepare your data collection mechanism

You will almost certainly need to use a tool other than your CMS to do your audit. A spreadsheet view is the best way to do this, as it allows the auditor to quickly enter the date or tag for each criterion for one webpage and then easily move on to the next. Excel or Google Sheets will work in a pinch, but something like AirTable might be worth the (minimal) investment.

To prepare for audit data entry:

• Export your list of articles from your CMS. Create a giant spreadsheet or database of articles, with their name, URL and whatever other information you have on them. Including the existing category or tags from your site is helpful if you can.

• If possible, combine your web analytics data. You may well have the number of visitors to each page on your site from your analytics tool. This is useful for determining whether a page should be archived. For example, if a page is both somewhat redundant and hardly ever viewed, you can likely tag it for archiving. Export the metrics from your analytics tool and match it to the page list based on the URL. 

• Create columns for each of your criteria. Use checkboxes and drop-down lists to make data entry quick and error-free, as much as possible. If you can save 10 seconds per article, that's almost three hours saved across 1000 articles.

4. Conduct your audit

Once you’re set up, all that remains is to actually do the audit. 

• Sort by subject. Sorting so that you can review things in approximate order of category or content area makes it much easier to identify redundancy. 

• Don’t try to make too many decisions. If something should obviously be archived or is obviously evergreen, mark that, but don’t bog down on anything that requires thought. Just rate it and move on. The goal is to get through everything.

• Don’t plan on spending more than a few hours per day. This process can obviously get a little tedious, and trying to do it too quickly will affect the quality of the audit (not to mention the sanity of the person doing it). Depending on the tolerance of the auditor, a 40 hour audit should take more like a month than a week.

5. Move forward with the results

There’s no point in doing an audit unless your nonprofit plans on taking next steps to address issues. Defining recommendations is a strategic process worthy of it’s own blog post, but a few things that generally come up:

• Archive articles that are clearly not needed. This is the low hanging fruit— I’ve seen sites where 20-30% of the content can be archived right away.

• Define high priority but low effort tasks, and assign owners and due dates. There are often tasks that won’t take a lot of time, like reviewing articles for accuracy or figuring out which of a set of redundant articles should be used. Start with these types of tasks for high priority articles.

• Determine your overall approach to updates. You’ll likely need a writer, subject matter experts, a process, and a project plan to update articles. You might decide to take these on right away, or in a slow, incremental process.

6. Make a plan for ongoing updates 

Don’t finish your update project without defining a process for updating articles as part of your ongoing content cycle. How often will you review articles to see if they need updates? Who will do that? Who will do the updates themselves? How does all of that fit into your budget?

A solid content update strategy will ensure your organization’s website isn’t just back in the same place in a few years.   A content audit doesn’t need to be daunting… but that doesn’t mean you should just keep planning to do them over and over.