What to Check Before Switching Your Nonprofit's Website Platform
Switching website platforms is one of those projects that looks like a design decision from the outside and turns into a data-and-ownership project once you're inside it. A short list of questions, answered honestly before you commit, saves most of the pain.
Can you actually get your data out?
Ask directly: if you leave, what do you walk away with? A real export gives you your donor list, donation history, and event/registration records in a usable format, not a PDF of a dashboard screenshot. If a platform can't answer this question specifically, treat that as the answer.
Who owns the domain?
Your website's domain should be registered in your organization's name, at a registrar your organization controls, not registered by an agency or platform on your behalf under their account. If you don't know the answer to "who owns our domain," that's worth resolving before any migration, not after.
Where does your payment processor account live?
This is the custodial versus non-custodial question again, and it matters most at exactly this moment. If your existing platform holds your donations in its own account, "canceling" isn't as simple as turning off a subscription, there may be a transition period where funds are still settling through the old system. If your organization has its own connected Stripe or similar account, that account and its history move with you regardless of what happens to the website.
What happens to old links?
Every organization has links out in the world it doesn't fully control: a Google search result, a link in an old email newsletter, a bookmark a donor saved two years ago. A platform switch that changes every URL breaks all of them unless someone deliberately sets up redirects from the old paths to the new ones. Ask whether your new platform supports that, and plan the redirect list before launch, not after someone reports a 404.
What's the actual downtime?
Some migrations involve a real cutover window where the old site is down and the new one isn't fully live yet. Others are designed so the new site is built and reviewed on a separate address, then the domain is simply pointed at it once everything is confirmed working, with effectively no downtime. Ask which kind of migration you're being offered, and plan a donation-heavy campaign accordingly.
The short version
Before you sign anything: confirm you can export your real data, confirm who owns your domain, confirm where your payment processor account lives, ask what happens to your existing links, and ask what the actual cutover looks like. None of these are hard questions for a platform to answer honestly. A vague answer to any of them is worth taking seriously.
Have a specific question about your nonprofit's site?
Tell us what you're working with and we'll talk through what would actually help.