Report to the Board of Directors
The New Website: Why We Rebuilt It, and What the Numbers Told Us
August 2026 · prepared by Gary Ricke, Orbis Design
LIM's website moved off Squarespace and went live on its own platform this month. This report covers why that was necessary, what nineteen months of traffic data revealed about how people actually find and use the site, and what the board should watch over the next two quarters.
1 · Why we left Squarespace
The move was not about preference. Three things forced it:
- Nothing on the site could do real work. Squarespace could publish pages, but it could not run an application, gate a form, take a registration into a reviewable queue, or connect our giving form to our advertising. Every one of those needed a separate paid service bolted on.
- We were paying for tools to work around the tool we were paying for. The Tree of Life application lived on Jotform. Healing group assessments went out as PDFs by hand and mostly never came back. Post-session surveys were heading to Survey Monkey. Each was a subscription and a separate place for our data to live.
- We could not see whether any of it worked. Meyer Partners was running advertising into a site that could not report a conversion back. We were spending on ads without knowing what they produced.
The new site is a set of pages we own outright, hosted on Netlify, with the ministry's own tools built directly into it. There is no page-builder subscription, and no per-form fee.
2 · What nineteen months of traffic actually showed
Before switching, we exported the full history from Squarespace Analytics — 1 January 2025 to 30 July 2026 — and captured a Google Search Console baseline. Both are archived. The findings shaped what the new site emphasises.
19 months
just four pages
16 months
from those
Four pages carry the entire site. Home, Healing Groups, About and Donate accounted for 19,881 of 41,431 pageviews — 48%. Everything else, including more than 1,400 archived devotions and news posts, shared the remainder.
| Page | Views | Avg. time | Bounce |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home | 8,927 | 1:34 | 68% |
| Healing Wounds of Trauma | 4,802 | 3:29 | 81% |
| About | 3,332 | 2:42 | 77% |
| Donate | 2,820 | 1:35 | 63% |
The healing groups page is the second most-visited page on the site, and people stay on it for three and a half minutes — longer than any other main page, and more than twice as long as the homepage. That is not idle browsing. It is people reading carefully about trauma healing because they need it. The new site is built around that finding: healing groups are now reachable from the homepage, sessions are listed by location with dates, and registration happens on our own site.
Google already shows LIM to an enormous audience, and almost none of it converts. Over sixteen months Google displayed the site 497,000 times and those impressions produced 5,910 clicks — a click-through rate of 1.2%. The pattern underneath is the interesting part:
| Search query | Impressions | Clicks | CTR |
|---|---|---|---|
| “lutheran indian ministries” | 1,980 | 754 | 38% |
| “lutheran sacraments” | 7,569 | 51 | 0.7% |
| “matthew 26:41” | 17,135 | 28 | 0.16% |
When someone searches our name, they click 38% of the time. For everything else it is under 4%. And people searching our name are a vanishingly small share of the total — under 1% of all impressions. The overwhelming majority of people Google shows us to are looking for scripture, doctrine, and answers about faith and Native identity — not for our organisation. They are being shown a result that either ranks too low to click or does not look like it answers the question.
Average position improved from 13.9 over sixteen months to 9.7 over the last three — from the middle of page two to the bottom of page one. The trend was already in our favour before the rebuild.
3 · What we did about it
- Archived everything first. All 1,459 pages and every image, going back to 2013, are saved outside Squarespace. Nothing was lost when the subscription ended, and any devotion can still be rebuilt.
- Rebuilt the highest-demand content. Pastor Ricky Jacob's seven-part “What Do Lutherans Believe?” series — roughly 1,500 views and the driver behind those 7,569 “lutheran sacraments” impressions — had been redirecting to the homepage. It is a real page again.
- Preserved our search standing. Every old address now forwards to its correct new home rather than dumping visitors on the homepage, which Google treats as a broken page and eventually drops from its index.
- Brought the ministry's own tools in-house. The Tree of Life application, healing group registration with a staff review queue, an events editor staff can use without a developer, and a flyer generator now run on our own site.
- Made giving work on our page. The donation form is embedded in our own site and tested end to end, with conversion tracking connected so Meyer Partners' advertising can finally be measured.
4 · How to read the numbers from here
Do not compare the new site's visitor counts directly against the old Squarespace numbers. They are measured differently. Squarespace counted every visitor from the server. Our new analytics only counts visitors who accept the cookie notice, which privacy law requires us to show. The new figure will always read lower even if actual traffic grows.
Google Search Console is the honest comparison — it measures the domain itself, so before and after are directly comparable. The numbers to watch, in order: impressions should hold steady; average position should beat 9.7; and clicks and click-through rate are where the new site should win.
5 · The Google Ad Grant — what it is, and the honest case both ways
A board member asked about this, so it is worth setting out properly.
Google offers registered nonprofits up to $10,000 per month of free advertising on Google Search. The figure is real and it is not a match — it is a genuine grant. Roughly 115,000 nonprofits worldwide use it.
Our own search data makes the case. Google already shows LIM 497,000 times a year for scripture and doctrine queries, and almost nobody clicks because we rank too low. Grant advertising would place us at the top of those same searches — the ones people are already making. We would not be buying a new audience; we would be reaching the one we already fail to convert.
It also answers a question this team has raised directly: “why don't we come up when you search Native American ministries?” Other Native ministries appear and LIM does not. Grant advertising is the fastest available fix for that particular gap.
It takes real work to use. The grant must be actively managed — campaigns built, keywords chosen, results monitored — and Google enforces performance rules. Accounts that sit idle or fall below a 5% click-through rate get suspended. Most nonprofits that “get the grant” never spend a meaningful share of it.
The agencies that approach us charge for that management. Every unsolicited pitch LIM has received has been an agency offering to run the grant for a monthly fee. That fee is the real cost.
Search itself is changing. Google is moving users toward AI-generated answers that resolve a question without a click. That does not make the grant worthless, but it does mean the value of a top search placement is less certain in three years than it was in the last ten.
Ads need somewhere worth landing. Sending paid traffic to a page that does not convert wastes the grant. This is a large part of why the rebuild had to come first.
Recommendation. Apply, and treat it as a channel to grow into rather than a windfall. Applying costs nothing but Google for Nonprofits verification. Start with a small number of campaigns aimed at what we can already prove people search for — the scripture and doctrine queries, and the “Native American ministries” terms where we are currently absent. Measure it against the devotion-archive work, which targets the same demand organically and does not carry a management fee. If the grant outperforms, invest further; if it does not, we will have spent nothing but time.
6 · Donor acquisition, not just awareness
A point raised in review, and it reframes the whole discussion: the website should not be judged only on whether people find our services. It is also our donor acquisition front door. Organisations that have grown their operating budgets substantially over the past decade have generally done it by investing deliberately in donor acquisition and retention, not by broadening awareness alone.
That has practical consequences for what we build next. The giving page needs to work as hard as the programme pages. We need to capture mailing addresses as well as email, so a supporter can receive a printed appeal and not only a newsletter. And the devotion archive matters twice over — the people searching scripture are not only potential participants, they are potential donors who share our convictions and have never heard of us.
7 · What comes next
- The scripture and doctrine archive is the biggest untapped opportunity we have. Hundreds of thousands of impressions a year are going to devotions that currently redirect to the homepage. Rebuilding more of those 1,459 archived posts is the single highest-return work available, and it costs staff time rather than money.
- Assessment and intake forms for healing groups, so pre-assessments, waivers and post-session surveys are completed on our site and returned reliably, replacing the paid survey tool.
- Supporter list. The site now has a signup for the first time — previously the only addresses we collected came from event registrations. We are extending it to capture mailing address as well as email, so a new supporter can receive printed appeals and not just email.
LIM had a website that looked fine and did very little. It now has one that carries applications, registrations, assessments and giving, that can prove what our advertising produces, and that we own outright. The traffic data says the healing ministry is what draws people most, and that our devotional archive is a far larger opportunity than anyone realised.
Sources: Squarespace Analytics full export, 1 Jan 2025 – 30 Jul 2026 (41,431 pageviews; page-level detail archived). Google Search Console, property lutheranindianministries.org, 16-month and 3-month windows captured 31 July 2026 before the domain switch. Archive of 1,459 pages retained. All figures as measured; none estimated.