# What every campaign website needs before launch day

By BallotCraft — https://ballotcraft.com/insights/campaign-website-launch-checklist
Published: 2026-06-15

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](/insights/campaign-website-security) 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](/insights/ai-search-changes-how-voters-find-you). 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.