Insights
What every campaign website needs before launch day
Here’s a moment every campaign underestimates: the night you announce.
Your name goes out in a press release, a social post, maybe a local news segment. Within minutes, hundreds of people do the exact same thing — they pull out their phone and type your name into a search bar. That first wave is the most curious, most persuadable audience your campaign will ever get for free.
Most campaign websites aren’t ready for it.
We’ve reviewed a lot of candidate sites over the years, and the failures are rarely exotic. It’s the same short list every time: a missing page, a donation flow that dies on mobile, a site that takes six seconds to load on cellular. So before your launch day, walk through this list. It’s not long. That’s the point.
The pages that matter
You need fewer pages than you think, but each one has a single job:
- Home — your name, your face, your race, and one clear action above the fold. A voter should understand “who and for what” in three seconds.
- About — the biography that answers “why you, why now.” Write it for a neighbor, not a press release.
- Issues or priorities — three to five, in plain language. Ten bullet points read as none.
- Get involved — volunteering should take one form and under a minute.
- Donate — a compliant payment platform, linked from every page, built for phones.
That’s it. Every additional page is something else to keep accurate under deadline pressure.
Test the donation flow like your budget depends on it
Because it does.
Most contributions now happen on a phone, often within a minute of a voter deciding they like you. Every extra field, redirect, or slow-loading step in that minute costs real money. Here’s the test we run before every launch: pull up the site on an actual phone, on cellular data — not the office Wi-Fi — and time yourself making a $10 donation. If it takes more than a minute, something in that flow is leaking supporters.
Security is not optional
Your site carries your name and handles your donors’ trust. The baseline: HTTPS everywhere, security headers configured, software kept current, and no plugins you can’t name a reason for.
We’re blunt about this one because the downside is asymmetric. A hardened site is invisible. A defaced one is a news story with your name in the headline. (We wrote up the security risks that actually hit local campaigns separately, because nobody budgets for them.)
Speed is a message
Voters judge competence by feel. A site that loads instantly says “this campaign has its act together” before anyone reads a word. A site that stutters says the opposite, and no amount of good copy recovers from it.
Aim for under one second on a mid-range phone. Compress images, keep scripts minimal, and measure with Lighthouse. A 100 score isn’t a stretch goal — it’s achievable on any well-built site, and it’s the standard we hold our own work to.
Make it findable — by people and by AI
Search engines still send most first-time visitors, but a growing share of voters now ask an AI assistant about candidates instead. Structured data, accurate page titles, and a crawlable site mean both Google and AI tools describe you correctly.
If they can’t read your site, they’ll answer from someone else’s.
The final pass
Before you announce: click every link, submit every form, read every page out loud, and hand your phone to someone over sixty. What confuses them will confuse voters.
Then take a breath. Launch day is the one day everyone looks — and if you’ve walked this list, what they’ll find is a campaign that has its act together.