How to keep your credit union’s website clean and member-focused

Congrats! You’ve launched a spiffy new website or redesign for your credit union. It’s simplified, optimized, and all around a sleek, lightning-fast, results-oriented, member experience powerhouse, with tightly focused navigation, and a mobile-first interface based on the latest and greatest principles of behavioral analytics.

And then the requests start trickling in. “Hey, can we add just one itty-bitty little link to X,Y, and Z? There’s an urgent security alert we need to put on the home page. Can we add a popup on the home page to tell members they shouldn’t click pop-ups? Can we have a car driving around on the home page to promote auto loans? One member said they couldn’t find something and now we’re all in a 4-alarm panic…

Pretty soon, all those “one little things” make your home page look like a yard sale, with overstuffed navigation and blobs of content everywhere vying for attention and making your brand look, well, sloppy. How do you keep this from happening, while keeping everyone happy?

Website governance

The solution is to have a framework for making modifications to your website. The boring term for this is “website governance”, but you don’t need to set up a whole bureaucracy. It’s simply a set of principles and processes everyone agrees to follow for making changes to the website.

So if a change request comes in, especially for the home page or something that might affect the overall interface, have a process for thinking about the guiding principles for building the website in the first place, and consider how the change (and similar future changes) might affect these goals. Of course, you sometimes also need to think about technical limitations, like the space available for menus, or Accessibility concerns.

Thinking ahead while building the site is important. For example, make sure there’s room in your website design and governance plans for things like urgent announcements of weather closings and technical outages. At the same time, make sure you have a plan for expiring and prioritizing these announcements so members don’t get urgency fatigue.

Over the past few years, the biggest shift we’ve seen in credit union website principles has been a strong focus on simplicity; instead of overwhelming members with options, we’ve been building websites on a set of more curated principles. The idea is to guide and focus member attention, especially on mobile. So it’s more important than ever to preserve these principles as your website grows and changes over time. 

Run the numbers

When considering an addition, check your Analytics, Google Search Console, behavioral analytics, and internal search logs to get an idea of just how much of a priority this needs to be. Do you really need to stuff in another top-level navigation item for something used by two or three people a week, or could this become a link in the footer? Or maybe changing a callout in the middle of the page would better fit the actual level of interest and importance. Maybe placing important information like phone and routing numbers directly in the internal search interface would help people find these without even searching. 

Prioritize the mobile experience

If you’re like most credit unions, over 50% of your website visitors are on mobile devices. So when considering changes, make sure you give top priority to the mobile experience, not what you see on your desktop computer screen. 

For example, on keystone pages we often change, show, or hide content based on the device to ensure that mobile users get the best and fastest possible experience. Sometimes this is as simple as hiding images on mobile devices, rearranging how elements stack up on mobile, or slightly rephrasing content for mobile users. 

Mobile users also have different needs, which we often prioritize with things like mobile toolbars with links for calling, locating, or texting the credit union.

Leverage internal search

One interesting thing we’ve found is that more and more CU website mobile users (now over 50% at most CUs) tend to rely on the site’s search engine (often using voice input) rather than rummaging through the navigation or scrolling through the page. So not EVERYTHING needs to be in the menu, as long as you have a robust search engine and they can still easily find what they need. 

At the same time, it’s very important to keep your site clean and tidy – make sure test pages or old pages and blog posts aren’t hanging around to muddle search results with incorrect information (delete them, place them in draft mode or hide them from search), and make sure you use varied, natural language instead of rigid CU jargon. Plus, keep an eye on your internal search stats to see what real members are really looking for and address any gaps.

Get regular professional help

If you’re thinking about a change to your website, get your website developers involved early on in the process, and ask for ideas and alternatives for solving the underlying concern or problem. Quite often, our broader experience and expertise will lead to a much better solution than you had in mind.

In fact, it’s a great idea to have regular check-ins with your web team to review the site’s performance and go over ideas and plans for evolving and improving the site. The best CU websites are never done; they’re built around continuous improvement and evolution.

Brian Wringer
Latest posts by Brian Wringer (see all)

Email this article to a friend or coworker.