Your Website Isn’t Broken. You’re Just Not Using It.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been exploring why the typical website redesign cycle is flawed, and how a more sustainable path lies in the idea of digital stewardship. Redesigns are tempting because they promise a fresh start. But too often, they fail to address the underlying issues that made the site feel ineffective in the first place.

Today, I want to explore this idea from a different angle. Specifically, I want to propose that the frustration you feel with your website isn’t necessarily a sign that it’s fundamentally broken. In many cases, it’s a sign that your site is simply being underutilized.

The “blah” moment you’ve had before

Let me try to name something you’ve probably felt, but haven’t fully articulated.

It’s Tuesday morning. You’re juggling a dozen things when someone asks you for a URL from your website. You open the homepage to grab the link, and immediately get that familiar, low-grade “blah” feeling.

There’s nothing obviously wrong with the site. But something about it feels stagnant. The messaging is a little off. The images look tired. The homepage is still promoting a campaign that ended two months ago. You feel mildly annoyed when it takes longer than expected to find the page you need. And that quiet thought surfaces: if you can’t find what you’re looking for, what chance does someone new to your organization have?

You finish the task, copy the link, and get back to your inbox. But the feeling lingers.

There’s a quiet recognition you’ve had for a while: “We should probably do something about the site.”

Still, it doesn’t feel urgent. It’s not broken. It’s just not great. And because you’ve been around the block before, you know what “doing something about it” likely means: a months-long redesign process full of internal opinions, budget approvals, vendor evaluations, and a million little decisions about colors and structure and navigation labels. You push the thought aside. There’s no time for a big project right now.

This is how it usually goes. The site slips further out of sync with your organization’s current work. Eventually, it becomes so disconnected that someone says, “We really need a redesign.” And the cycle starts again.

But what if the problem isn’t the design? Or the platform? What if your website’s not broken, it’s just not being used?

The quiet cost of underutilization

Here’s what I see over and over again: nonprofit websites aren’t broken in a technical sense. They’re structurally fine. They load, the navigation works, they use a well-established website platform, and nothing’s crashing.

But they’ve stopped being actively used to support the organization’s goals. They’ve become static. Forgotten. Out of step with the evolving needs of the organization.

And that underuse shows up in ways that are easy to miss, but slowly compound.

Maybe your homepage is still highlighting an initiative that wrapped up months ago. Maybe your calls to action are generic or misaligned: “Learn More” buttons that don’t lead anywhere meaningful, or “Donate” buttons buried where no one will click. You have analytics installed, but no one has logged into the dashboard since the last board report. There’s a newsletter signup form, but the list it feeds into isn’t emailed consistently (if at all).

This isn’t about negligence. It’s about the reality of competing priorities. Most nonprofit teams are stretched thin. When no one’s explicitly responsible for the site, or when the process to make changes feels slow or frustrating, it quietly slides down the list.

And here’s what makes underutilization so tricky: it rarely announces itself as a crisis. There’s no error message or outage. Everything technically works.

But over time, small signals like outdated content, unclear navigation, or a lack of compelling next steps will add friction to the user experience. They make your site feel just a little harder to trust, a little harder to use, a little less aligned with the vitality of your real-world work.

Visitors don’t always name what feels off, but they sense it. The site feels a little dated. The messaging feels vague. The experience feels… neglected.

And when a website feels neglected, people start to wonder if the work behind it is, too.

The natural response is to fix it with a redesign. Wipe the slate clean. Get a fresh look. Sometimes that’s necessary, especially if your brand has changed or your tech stack is truly outdated. But more often, the issue isn’t that your site is fundamentally broken. It’s that it’s been left on autopilot.

It’s not about the work, it’s about the capacity to do it

Now, if you’re reading this and nodding along, you probably already know what needs to happen.

You know your homepage should reflect current campaigns. You know there are too many navigation items. You know the donation flow could be improved, and that you should be looking at analytics more often. These aren’t revolutionary insights.

The real challenge is that most small and mid-sized nonprofits simply don’t have the internal digital leadership, structure, or capacity to act on what they already know.

Maybe your communications person is also managing social, email, events, and five other things. Maybe they want to fix the donation form but don’t have the data (or the authority) to prioritize it. Maybe the person who “owns” the website isn’t technical, and has to submit a ticket for even the smallest change. Maybe no one knows whose job it actually is to review the site’s content in the first place.

This isn’t an idea gap. It’s a capacity (aka stewardship) gap.

And the longer that gap persists, the more your website drifts out of alignment with the rest of your organization. It becomes harder to use, harder to trust, and harder to fix, until the only option feels like starting over.

Closing the gap between knowing and doing

At Brooks Digital, we’ve come to believe that closing this gap is the real key to unlocking the potential of your website, not just once during a project, but over the long haul.

We’re evolving our focus to help nonprofits bring the leadership, structure, and capacity needed to steward their sites well. That might mean creating routines to review and improve key content. It might mean clarifying internal ownership. It might mean helping teams identify small, high-impact changes and supporting them to follow through.

But at its core, this work is about helping nonprofits use what they already have, with more clarity and less friction.

Your website doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be used intentionally, consistently, and with support from people who understand the digital side of your mission.

In future articles, I’ll share more about what that looks like: how to build habits, set up feedback loops, and move from one-time launches to ongoing digital impact.

But for now, I want to leave you with this:

Your website likely isn’t broken. What’s missing is the space, leadership, and support to use it the way you want to.

It’s not behind. It’s simply waiting for someone to take the lead.