With a few tweaks, you can save your organization money, while offering your audience the best web experience possible.
Get tips from our own team members, who spearhead these proactive check-ups for our clients: Producer Amanda Young and Back-End Developer Scott Foster.
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1. Review your hosting platform bill: Are you spending too much?
Your hosting platform can be the difference between your site working flawlessly or failing during a critical moment.
But that doesn’t mean you should overspend for capacity that your site doesn’t need.
Regularly review bills for hosting resources that your website uses — like servers, databases, and load balancers — and consider whether they’re needed or if they can be scaled down for awhile.
By keeping tabs on hosting platforms, our team recently saved clients an average of $850 per year.
“Amazon Web Services said, ‘This is an old version of the database. It’s fine if you want to keep that version, but we’re going to start charging 10 cents per hour to keep running that database.’ And that gets passed on the client, so it’d be $73 additional a month — and we don’t want that for our partners.”
-Scott
[Read: For a Better Digital World, Put Caring Over Coding]
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2. Audit third-party vendors and plug-ins: Adjust subscriptions as needed
Many of us also have subscriptions to websites and apps that we’ve forgotten about and no longer use.
The same goes for vendors and plug-ins for a site — it’s easy to overlook these unnecessary costs.
Chances are, when you launched your site you estimated the levels of service you needed for image hosting or other plug-ins. An audit of those subscriptions after your site has been in use can reveal areas where you are spending more than necessary.
“With imgix, the more images you upload to your site, the more you have to pay, but clients aren’t always uploading the max number of images, so we’ll bump them down a subscription level. It can be a significant cost savings of hundreds of dollars per month.”
-Amanda
[Read: Here’s How We Work to Protect Against a 3rd-Party Security Breach]
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3. Apply for assistance: Nonprofits can get free services
Nonprofits are eligible for a lot of free digital services — so you might not need to pay for some of the subscriptions you are using.
Carving out time to research and apply for assistance can be well worth it.
Some of our partners get the highest enterprise-level account for tools, including Cloudflare, which offers free website protection to public interest sites through its Project Galileo initiative.
This offering specifically applies to “organizations working in the arts, human rights, civil society, journalism, or democracy.”
We’ve also steered partners towards the Google Ad Grants program, equipping nonprofits with up to $10,000 per month of free search advertising — and helping them exceed previous financial goals.
[Read: Think Your Website Is Accessible to Everyone? Try These 8 Simple Tests]
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4. Maintain ADA compliance: Avoid accessibility challenges
There’s been an influx of businesses being sued for inaccessible sites under the Americans with Disabilities Act — and some businesses are spending thousands of dollars to settle.
Avoid costly lawsuits — and create a better experience for customers — by making your website easier for everyone to navigate.
At Lifeblue, we focus on making our partners’ websites as usable for as many people as possible.
Here are five tips to make your site more user friendly:
- Pay attention to your alt text
- Make sure your text is readable
- Color should not convey meaning
- Make forms easy to navigate
- Help your users avoid keyboard traps
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