If you’re running a nonprofit and thinking about redesigning your website, you’ve probably already started researching your options. A board member might have mentioned Squarespace. Your communications director saw an ad for Wix. Someone on staff built a site on one of those platforms for their kid’s soccer league and thought it seemed simple enough.
These are reasonable starting points. But before you commit to a platform for your organization’s most important digital asset, it’s worth understanding what you’re actually choosing between.
Here’s the baseline: WordPress powers 43.3% of all websites on the internet and holds a 60.7% market share among sites using a content management system. WordPress is the foundation of the modern web.
The question isn’t really whether WordPress is capable of handling your nonprofit’s website. WordPress can handle it. What matters is whether you have the right team setting it up and maintaining it for you.
Understanding the Real Difference Between Platforms
When nonprofit leaders compare website platforms, they usually focus on the wrong things. Templates get compared. Monthly prices get weighed. Demo videos make drag-and-drop editing look simple.
What they don’t see is what happens two years down the road.
The Ownership Question
When you build a website on Squarespace, Wix, or similar platforms, you’re not buying a website. You’re renting space on someone else’s system. The content lives on their servers, the design exists within their templates, and the functionality depends entirely on what features they decide to offer.
This matters more than most people realize.
Opensource.com explains that because WordPress is open source, “you truly own your website and you have the freedom to do whatever you want with it.” If the company that hosts your WordPress site changes its pricing or goes out of business, you can take your entire website—every page, every image, every blog post—and move it somewhere else. Your site continues to exist because you own it.
Proprietary builders don’t work that way. Forbes Advisor specifically highlights the “lock-in” risk of these platforms, noting that if you decide to leave, you often have to rebuild your entire site from scratch. All those hours spent perfecting your donation page, writing your program descriptions, uploading photos from your annual gala—you might lose access to all of it if you decide to switch platforms.
For a nonprofit that’s invested years of work into its website content, that’s a significant risk.
Why This Matters for Long-Term Planning
Nonprofits aren’t startups that pivot every six months. Most of the organizations we work with have been serving their communities for decades. They need a website that can grow with them over five, ten, or twenty years.
TechRadar’s 2025 comparison notes that while all-in-one builders offer convenience, they restrict you to their hosting infrastructure. WordPress gives you the flexibility to choose a hosting environment that matches your specific needs for performance, security, and budget. If those needs change over time—and they will—you can adjust without rebuilding everything.
This is especially important for nonprofits that handle sensitive information. If you work with vulnerable populations, process donations, or maintain databases of client information, you need to know exactly where that data lives and who has access to it. With WordPress on your own hosting, you control those decisions.
The SEO Reality for Nonprofits
Most nonprofits we talk to have the same problem: they’re invisible online. They do incredible work in their communities, but when someone searches for services in their area, they don’t show up.
Their website structure is usually the cause.
What Search Engines Actually Look For
Google’s job is to match people with the information they’re looking for. When someone in Indianapolis searches for “autism support services,” Google crawls through millions of pages trying to find the most relevant, authoritative, and useful results.
The structure of your website determines whether Google can understand what you do and who you serve.
Forbes Advisor’s 2024 review states directly that “WordPress gives users far more control over their website’s SEO than Squarespace does.” This includes the ability to customize code, control how pages are structured, and use specialized plugins that help search engines understand your content.
For nonprofits trying to reach donors, volunteers, or the families who need your services, SEO determines whether people can find you at all.
The Traffic Correlation
Search Engine Journal’s analysis of CMS market share data shows that WordPress is “clearly favored by sites with more traffic.” Sites that need to rank well in search results tend to choose WordPress because it gives them the tools to compete.
If your nonprofit’s growth strategy depends on reaching new people online—and in 2026, whose doesn’t?—you need a platform built for visibility.
Local Search for Indiana Nonprofits
For organizations serving Central Indiana communities, local SEO is particularly important. When someone searches for services in Carmel, Westfield, Noblesville, or Zionsville, you want to appear in those results.
This requires location-specific pages, properly structured content, and technical optimization that most page builders simply don’t allow. WordPress gives us the ability to build service pages for each community you serve, optimize them for local search terms, and structure them so Google understands your geographic coverage.
Addressing the “WordPress Is Too Hard” Concern
We hear this regularly from nonprofit leaders who’ve either tried WordPress themselves or heard complaints from colleagues at other organizations.
“WordPress is overwhelming.”
“There are too many updates.”
“I just want to log in and change something without breaking the site.”
These are legitimate concerns. The default WordPress experience can feel cluttered and intimidating, especially for people who aren’t technical. Most of the frustration comes from poor setup, not the platform itself.
The Dashboard Problem
When you install WordPress out of the box, the dashboard shows everything. Plugin updates. Theme options. Widget areas. Menu settings. User roles. Security notices. SEO tools. Analytics. Comments. Media libraries.
Most of this you’ll never touch. But it’s all there, demanding attention every time you log in.
At Higgens Media, we customize the dashboard for every client. When you log in, you see what you actually need: the pages you edit, the blog posts you write, the forms you check. The technical options are still there for us to access when needed, but they’re not cluttering your view.
This change makes a real difference in how often staff are willing to log in and make updates.
The Update Anxiety
WordPress requires updates. The core software needs security patches, plugins receive new features, and themes get compatibility fixes. If these updates don’t happen, your site becomes vulnerable to security issues and eventually stops working correctly.
On most WordPress sites, these updates are the site owner’s responsibility. That means logging in, seeing a notification that 12 things need updating, and either spending time doing it yourself or worrying about what happens if you don’t.
We handle all updates for our clients. You don’t see notifications because there’s nothing you need to do. We monitor the updates, test them to make sure nothing breaks, and apply them on a schedule that keeps your site secure without any effort on your part.
The Email-to-Update Workflow
Here’s what website maintenance looks like for nonprofits on our PRO Plan:
You have a new blog post to publish. Instead of logging in, finding the blog section, creating a new post, formatting the text, uploading images, optimizing those images for web, adding alt text, setting a featured image, and hitting publish—you send us an email.
Write the post in your email or attach a Word document. Include the photos and let us know when you want it published. We take care of everything else.
New staff member needs to be added to the team page? Send their photo and bio. Event details changed? Forward the updates. Need a new program page? Share the content and we’ll build it.
This workflow exists because we watched how nonprofit staff actually work. They’re already in their email all day. They’re already writing content in emails and documents. Asking them to learn a content management system on top of everything else they do creates friction that leads to outdated websites.
When updating your site is as simple as sending an email, it actually gets done.
The Plugin Situation
WordPress has over 59,000 plugins available. TechRadar notes that this library allows for “unlimited customization,” giving WordPress a clear advantage over website builders that limit you to the features and integrations they decide to support.
This flexibility is one of WordPress’s greatest strengths, and also where most WordPress sites get into trouble.
What We See on Nonprofit Sites
When we audit a nonprofit’s existing WordPress site, we often find 30, 40, sometimes 50 or more plugins installed that a previous volunteer might have added several years ago that nobody remembers. Others duplicate existing functionality, haven’t been updated in years, or slow the site down significantly.
Every plugin adds code that runs when someone visits your site, requires ongoing updates, and creates another potential point of failure or security vulnerability.
Our Approach to Plugins
Over years of building and maintaining nonprofit websites, we’ve compiled a list of plugins we trust. These tools are actively maintained and receive regular updates. They have solid documentation and don’t conflict with each other.
When a client needs functionality—a new form, a donation integration, an event calendar—we install a plugin we’ve already vetted. These tools have a track record of working reliably, staying updated, and not conflicting with other plugins on the site.
More importantly, when you want a new feature, you don’t have to guess which plugin to install. You tell us what you need, and we handle the implementation. You’re not reading reviews, comparing options, and hoping you picked the right one.
The Overlap Problem
One issue we see constantly: multiple plugins doing the same thing.
Someone installed a security plugin three years ago. Then a different staff member installed another security plugin because they didn’t know the first one existed. Now the site has two security plugins running simultaneously, sometimes conflicting with each other, always using unnecessary resources.
We audit every site we take on and remove redundant plugins. Load times improve, errors decrease, and the site becomes simpler to maintain going forward.
Hosting That Actually Performs
Your website is only as fast as the server it runs on. This is true for any platform, but it matters more for WordPress because you have control over where your site lives.
The Shared Hosting Problem
Most cheap WordPress hosting puts your site on a server with hundreds or thousands of other websites. You’re all sharing the same resources. Traffic spikes on neighboring sites slow yours down, and security breaches on one site can expose the entire server.
We use dedicated hosting with resources allocated specifically to our clients. Your site isn’t competing with other sites for processing power. It loads quickly because it has the resources it needs.
Behind-the-Scenes Optimization
Site speed requires ongoing optimization: caching so pages don’t have to rebuild from scratch every time, image compression so photos load quickly without losing quality, database cleanup so old data doesn’t slow down queries.
We handle all of this as part of our maintenance. You never need to think about why your site loads quickly. You just experience a site that works the way it should.
The Community and Longevity Factor
When you choose a technology platform, you’re betting on its future. You need to know if it will still be supported in five years, whether it will evolve to meet new requirements, and if developers will be available who know how to work with it.
TechRadar notes that because WordPress powers such a massive portion of the web, it has a global community of developers and support that ensures the platform remains secure and up-to-date. Smaller builders might discontinue features or shut down entirely. WordPress has the scale and community to remain viable for decades.
Google’s own Open Source documentation cites WordPress as a prime example of a “thriving ecosystem” where the core product is stable while a massive community of contributors provides additional functionality. The platform evolves faster than any single company could manage because thousands of developers around the world are improving it simultaneously.
For nonprofits thinking about long-term sustainability, this matters. The site you build this year needs to work in 2030 and 2035. WordPress has a track record of evolution and backward compatibility that proprietary builders simply can’t match.
What Working with Higgens Media Looks Like
We work primarily with Indiana nonprofits and small businesses who need more than a template but don’t have an IT department to manage complex systems.
The Discovery Process
Every engagement starts with a conversation. We want to understand what your organization does, who you serve, what’s working on your current site, and what’s causing problems. We look at your analytics to see how people actually use your site. We review your content to understand what story you’re telling.
We need to understand your situation before we can recommend a solution, so these early conversations focus on learning about your organization rather than pitching services.
The Build Process
We design and build WordPress sites using Elementor, a visual builder that makes future editing more intuitive. Your hosting gets configured with proper security and performance settings. Email delivery gets set up so your contact forms actually reach you. Custom dashboards ensure your team sees only what they need.
Throughout the process, we’re thinking about who’s going to maintain this site in three years. Everything gets documented. Your team receives training on the parts they’ll use. The systems we build are designed to survive staff turnover.
Ongoing Support
Your website needs regular attention after launch. Our quarterly support packages give you a bank of hours each quarter for updates, new pages, troubleshooting, and strategic discussions.
Monthly reports show what we worked on. Near the end of each quarter, you’ll get a reminder if you have unused hours. When something urgent comes up, we respond quickly.
Is This Right for Your Organization?
WordPress with Higgens Media isn’t the right fit for everyone.
Organizations with a volunteer excited to learn web development might prefer letting them experiment with a simpler page builder. A basic one-page site with no growth plans might not need our level of involvement. And if you’re comfortable managing hosting, security, and updates yourself, you might prefer to keep that control.
But if you want a website you actually own, one that ranks well in search, loads quickly, and stays updated without constant attention from your team, we should talk.
Starting the Conversation
If your nonprofit is planning a website redesign in 2026, we’d be glad to talk through your situation. We’ll look at what you have, discuss what you need, and give you an honest assessment of whether we’d be a good fit.
You can schedule a discovery call using the link below. We’ll spend 30 minutes getting to know your organization and answering your questions.
Higgens Media is a full-service creative and digital agency in Indianapolis. We help nonprofits and small businesses share their stories through video, web design, and digital marketing.