You’ve just settled down around the table to enjoy a holiday meal with family – but your phone dings from across the room. You can ignore the first alert… but after the shrill notification interrupts three times you step away to silence it. Glancing down you see three texts from key stakeholders in your nonprofit organization. A chill runs down your spine as you read the words on the screen: “The fundraising site is down.”
Farewell, holiday meal. Farewell, rousing conversation with your family. Farewell, post-dinner nap on the couch.
Your fundraising site is a mission-critical piece of your funding strategy. During peak giving times, a website freeze gives you peace of mind to know that the one thing your site needs to be doing is fully functional.
What is a Website Freeze?
A website freeze is when you temporarily stop all updates to your site.
During a freeze, no new content is posted. No WordPress, plugin, theme, or custom code is updated. No non-essential users log into the site, and any non-critical processes, like reporting, are temporarily suspended.
A website freeze ensures that your site keeps bringing in donations, even while you are spending time with family and friends.
Why Website Freezes Matter
The power of WordPress is that a site owner has full control over their site. The flexibility of WordPress means that you can install plugins, themes, and other third-party code as much as you’d like. Unlike other web-building platforms, the data is yours. That includes (in the case of GiveWP) donor and donation data. You are not locked into accessing your donor and donation data within someone else’s site. It’s your site.
Because it’s your site, if things go sideways it’s your mess to clean up. In addition to best practices like offsite backup solutions, good managed hosting, and strong passwords, you can best treat special seasons with care. A website freeze is the way to do that.
WordPress is a huge ecosystem of plugins, themes, and other freely-available resources for managing your site. That awesome selection of resources puts the power in your hands, but also presents a mathematical impossibility: there’s no chance that a site with even the most popular 10 plugins has been tested by each of those plugin shops for compatibility.
If they did test with one another the probability of them having all the same settings, database configurations, and other site-specific server configurations as yours drops all the way to 0.
No site in the world is just like your site, so you need to test every update before putting it on your live site.
During the critical giving season (which always coincides with the time most of your volunteers, staff, and executives want to be spending time with family) there’s no time to fully test those updates. Instead, institute a freeze policy!
Either you overstaff the support teams for your organization and keep your developers on call during peak times, or you can implement a website freeze. We know which one sounds more feasible and it’s not staffing.
How to Implement a Website Freeze
Make it an organization-wide known thing: we don’t touch the website from {date} until {date}. It should go out via email to any stakeholders, volunteers, and staff. It should be posted in the break room, mentioned during staff meetings, and formalized as much as possible.
You could even change the permissions or user roles for all but essential personnel during the freeze, and re-issue those credentials after the freeze. This provides protection from accidental access to the site during the freeze.
Sample Website Freeze announcement:
Attention All Teams:
From 5PM Friday November 18th through 8AM December 5th, no new content or code changes will be made to our fundraising website. This includes blog content, media, images, and plugin/theme/core updates. If you need assistance adding anything to the site during that time, contact the System administrators on their on-call line.
During the website freeze, we ask that you not log into the site for any reason unless specifically directed to do so.
Own Your Website and Ensure Your Family Time
Your donation website is nobody’s responsibility but yours, and you need peace of mind during peak giving times.
A website freeze makes you a hero to your donors and your board.
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