Updated August 2026. First published in October 2023.
A website strategy is the set of decisions that establish what your site is for, who it serves, how success will be measured, and who maintains it once it is live. Most website projects do not fail because the design was wrong. They fail because those decisions were never made, or were made by default, one request at a time, by whoever asked last. Settling them early is the difference between a site that improves after launch and one that starts degrading the week the project team disbands.
We published a version of this article in 2023. The shape of good strategy work has held up. What has changed is where visibility comes from, how content gets produced, what regulators now require, and how much of the ongoing work an internal team is expected to carry. This is an updated account of how we think about it.
What a website strategy actually decides
Projects rarely go off course all at once. They drift.
The most common cause is goal stacking. A project starts with clear intent, and then marketing, IT, membership, development, and leadership each add a requirement. None of the additions are unreasonable on their own. Together they produce a site that serves every department a little and no audience well. We wrote about this in Why Your Website Needs More Than a Goal, It Needs a Hierarchy, because the fix is not fewer goals. It is a stated order of priority that holds when the requests conflict.
The second cause is treating launch as the finish line. A launch date concentrates attention, and when it passes, the people who understood the reasoning move on to other work. The site stops being a product and becomes a maintenance item. Six months later, no one remembers why the navigation was built that way, and the first structural change undoes the strategy without anyone noticing.
The third cause is diagnosing the wrong problem. Flat traffic and a dated homepage feel like the same problem, and they usually are not. A redesign is an expensive answer to what is often a content problem or a positioning problem. Before recommending a rebuild, we look at whether the site is the actual constraint, which means checking whether the existing pages rank and convert for the terms that matter, whether the content is current, and whether the platform can support the change without being replaced. We have talked two clients out of redesigns this way, and wrote up the reasoning in Your Nonprofit Doesn’t Need a New Website and When You Need a Website Redesign, and When You Need Brand Strategy.Why website projects lose direction
How we run website strategy: Understand, Align, Grow
Our process has three stages.
Understand
We start by learning how the organization actually works, not how the org chart says it works. That means stakeholder interviews across departments, a review of existing content and analytics, and an honest look at the platform and integrations already in place. We are trying to avoid building the wrong thing, which is the most expensive mistake available on a website project.
For a health system, that might mean finding that patients call the main line because provider pages do not show current availability. For a credit union, it might mean learning the membership application starts on the website and finishes in a system the marketing team cannot see. These are strategy problems with technical symptoms, and they do not surface in a design review.
Align
Misalignment is expensive, and it is cheapest to fix before anything is built. In this stage we bring leadership and working teams to the same understanding of direction, priority, and what success will look like. Wireframes and prototypes are part of that work, but the real output is a set of decisions people have agreed to in writing: the priority order of audiences, the metrics that will be tracked, the scope that is out of scope.
Strategy engagements typically run four to eight weeks and produce information architecture, content strategy, technical requirements, a success metrics framework, and a prioritized roadmap. The roadmap matters as much as the design. It is what tells a team what to do in month seven.
Grow
Grow is a cycle, not a final stage. Build, launch, learn, then do it again with what you learned. A launch is the point at which the strategy starts generating evidence, and the evidence should change the site.
This is where most website strategies stop being followed, which is why we build the mechanism into the engagement rather than leaving it as a good intention. That means the measurement setup, a review cadence, and a backlog that survives the project team. The practical version is in The Real Work Begins: ROI After Your Website Launch, and the three stages are laid out on our approach page.
What changed since 2023
Four things belong in a website strategy conversation today that did not need to be there when we first published this.
Search returns answers, not just links
AI Overviews and assistant-generated answers now sit between your audience and your site. The effect on clicks is measurable. Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 U.S. adults across roughly 69,000 Google searches in March 2025 and found that users clicked a traditional search result on 8% of visits where an AI summary appeared, against 15% where one did not. They ended the session entirely on 26% of pages with a summary, compared with 16% without.
Nonprofits are seeing it in their own numbers. The 2026 M+R Benchmarks study found organic search traffic to participating nonprofits declining month over month through 2025, which the study attributes to AI search tools and zero-click results.
This does not make the website less important. It changes what the site has to do: be the source those answers draw from, and be the place people land when they need more than a summary. In practice that means structuring content so it can be quoted accurately, keeping factual pages specific and current, and treating sessions as one signal rather than the headline number. The signals that matter more now are branded search volume, assisted conversions, qualified form completions, and whether your organization is cited in AI answers to the questions your audience actually asks. We covered the mechanics in AI Overviews, SEO, and the Future of Website Traffic.
AI in the content operation is a governance decision first
Most teams are already using AI to draft content, whether or not a policy exists. The organizations getting durable value from it did the internal work first: where human review is required, what the voice standards are, which content types are eligible, and who is accountable for accuracy. Tools come after that.
For organizations in healthcare, nonprofit, and membership work, the accuracy stakes are not abstract. A wrong benefit detail or an outdated clinical page carries real consequences. Our AI services start with an assessment and a governance framework rather than a platform recommendation, because the governance is what makes the tools trustworthy enough to use at volume.
Accessibility and security became compliance deadlines, not launch checklists
In 2023 these were good practice. For a large share of our clients, they are now dated obligations.
The HHS Section 504 rule requires web content and mobile applications of organizations receiving HHS financial assistance to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. A single Medicare or Medicaid payment can bring an organization into scope. HHS extended the compliance dates by one year in May 2026, moving them to May 11, 2027 for organizations with 15 or more employees and May 10, 2028 for smaller ones. The extension moved the technical deadline. It did not change the underlying obligation to provide accessible communication, which has been in effect since July 2024.
That makes accessibility an architecture decision rather than a remediation project. Retrofitting conformance onto a site whose components were not built for it costs considerably more than building it in during design, and the extension gives teams planning a rebuild a real window to do it properly.
Security belongs in the same conversation, and the 2023 version of this article had one insight worth keeping: users read security signals as brand signals. Uptime, valid certificates, sensible privacy controls, and forms that handle data properly all register with visitors even when they could not name what they noticed. For a member organization or a health system, the site is often where trust is either confirmed or lost without a word.
Internal teams are being asked to carry more
Across our engagements over the past two years, we have watched internal teams take on more of the ongoing work with the same headcount. The M+R study puts the average nonprofit digital team at six people, five at smaller organizations. That is the team expected to run the site, produce the content, and report on performance.
The practical consequence is that maintainability is now a strategic constraint rather than an implementation detail. A CMS your team can actually use determines how much of a site’s potential is ever realized. Across our own post-launch measurement, clients who launch with well-structured content models and documented editorial patterns have reduced developer-dependent content updates by about 60%, which is the difference between a team that can run a campaign this week and one waiting on a ticket.
We design for that deliberately. The goal is a system your team can understand, manage, and change without depending on us for routine work. We have also productized the far end of it: our In-House Handoff engagement exists for clients moving work to an internal team or another agency, covering asset transfer, documentation, and training. Building toward that occasionally costs us follow-on work. We consider it the right trade.
How to tell whether the strategy is holding
Six months after launch, a few questions tell you more than a traffic chart.
Can your team explain why a page exists and point to the decision behind it? Are content updates happening without a ticket to an outside vendor? When a new request arrives, is there an agreed way to decide whether it fits? Are the metrics chosen during Align still the ones being reported, or has reporting drifted back to page views because the original measures were never instrumented?
The best evidence we can offer is duration. We are on our seventh website with Sports Backers across more than ten years, which only happens when each build leaves behind something the next one can work from rather than a site that has to be started over. With Virginia Credit Union, the strategy work carried through to measurable movement, a 32% year-over-year increase in website leads and a 42% increase in monthly revenue, on a platform built to meet accessibility requirements rather than to pass a launch review.
If most of those questions come back no, the strategy did not fail. It was never operationalized. That is fixable, and it usually does not require a new website.
Where to start
If you are considering a redesign, start by determining whether the website is the actual constraint. If you are mid-project and requests are piling up, the useful next step is a stated priority order, not a longer requirements list. If you launched in the last year and nothing has changed on the site since, the strategy work is still there to be finished, and ongoing support is usually the cheapest way to pick it back up.
We help mission-driven organizations make these decisions with enough clarity that their own teams can carry them forward. If you want a second opinion on where your site stands, let’s talk.
