Updating Revive & Restore’s website had become a bottleneck. Routine changes caused formatting problems, pages were slow, and important project updates piled up.Then, a new developer gave the nonprofit a…
Routine changes caused formatting problems, pages were slow, and important project updates piled up.
Then, a new developer gave the nonprofit a fresh perspective and helped them identify what was holding its website back.
Revive & Restore moved its existing WordPress site to WordPress.com managed hosting and began improving its publishing workflow, with the goal of making project updates easier to publish.
Wildlife conservation through biotechnology
A diverse gene pool is crucial for wildlife’s ability to adapt to environmental changes or disease outbreaks.
Historically, to increase genetic diversity, conservationists would migrate healthy individuals from one unrelated population to another. Today, biotechnology opens up additional paths, from genome sequencing and biobanking to cloning and gene editing.
“Our website provides information on our program areas and projects, highlighting our unique role in bringing biotechnology solutions to wildlife conservation. While we partner with and fund researchers around the world to develop innovative solutions, our website is the one true source of information about what we do at Revive & Restore.”
Marmee Manack, Director of Operations, Revive & Restore
Black-footed ferret conservation has been a major focus of Revive & Restore’s work for many years.
When even a simple website update took too long
As with many nonprofits, Revive & Restore mainly communicates through its website, making it central to its mission.
The site highlights the organization’s mission, programs it’s involved in, latest news, upcoming workshops, and allows them to accept donations.
Yet, the team kept running into issues that made it increasingly difficult for the website to do its job.
“What should have taken minimal time to create a simple page update took too long and resulted in serious formatting issues that were difficult to fix. This resulted in a huge backlog of timely website updates that would have provided important updates on our projects. In addition, we experienced slow page load times.”
Marmee Manack, Director of Operations, Revive & Restore
Ryan Phelan, Revive & Restore’s co-founder and executive director, said the team was “on the verge of moving our Revive & Restore website away from WordPress entirely” after its developer claimed, “the platform couldn’t scale to meet our needs.”
Revive & Restore’s website presents research programs covering coral conservation, bird conservation, and black-footed ferret recovery.
Getting a second opinion
That advice could have changed the direction of the entire project. Instead, Ryan got a second opinion, and their findings told a different story.
The developer began with an audit, uncovering a theme that made page creation difficult and conflicting plugins that contributed to slow load times.
“WordPress wasn’t the problem,” said Marmee Manack, the nonprofit’s director of operations. The developer removed the conflicting plugins, and Revive & Restore moved its hosting to WordPress.com with migration assistance and discounted hosting.
WordPress.com handles the hosting infrastructure, security, and software updates, while the developer focuses on improving the site’s publishing workflow with the WordPress block editor and reusable page templates.
Ryan said: “We are currently migrating all existing content to the streamlined, core WordPress Gutenberg editor. This shift will simplify our operations and ensure a lighter, faster, and easier-to-manage website for the long term.”
Revive & Restore’s homepage introduces its conservation mission and highlights featured research projects.
Making the website easier to update
Moving its hosting to WordPress.com was one part of the project. Revive & Restore still needed to tackle the problem its team faced every day: creating and updating pages.
For Marmee, this is a familiar challenge in the nonprofit world. Many organizations have “a single comms professional tasked with planning, building, implementing, and maintaining active communications channels, including the website.”
When that person struggles to publish a simple update, it can affect the organization’s entire communications operation.
Working with its developer, the nonprofit began rebuilding its site with a lighter theme, the WordPress block editor, and reusable page templates. The goal was to make routine updates less time-consuming and avoid the formatting problems that had caused its backlog.
With its new page templates ready, Ryan says the team is “well on our way” as they move existing content into the updated layouts. The team hopes to relaunch the updated website this fall.
Revive & Restore’s News & Media page carries project updates — the timely content its team needed to publish.
A better home for their WordPress site
Before making costly changes to a website, it pays to understand what’s actually wrong.
For Revive & Restore, getting expert help meant identifying the underlying issues and finding a clear path forward without starting from the ground up.
WordPress.com provided the other piece of the puzzle: managed hosting that takes care of the technical infrastructure, security, updates, and backups, while retaining the flexibility of WordPress.
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