What Your Political Campaign Website Actually Needs
Campaign websites have a tendency to get wildly overcomplicated.
Someone wants an issues page with 14 dropdowns. Someone else thinks you need a separate page for every endorsement you’ve ever received. Your consultant has strong feelings about the homepage. Your cousin knows HTML and would like to help.
We’re here to tell you: your campaign website probably needs to do about five things really well.
That’s it.
1. Tell people who you are
This sounds obvious. You would be surprised.
A voter who lands on your website should be able to figure out, almost immediately:
Who are you? What are you running for? Where are you running? Why are you running?
You do not need to tell your entire life story above the fold. In fact, please don’t.
A good headline, a strong photo, and a sentence or two about why you’re running will do more for you than six paragraphs of biography ever could.
2. Make it extremely easy to donate
Your donate button should not be playing hide-and-seek.
Put it in your navigation. Put it on the homepage. Put it somewhere people can find it without conducting a forensic investigation.
And make sure the donation experience works on a phone.
A huge percentage of the people seeing your campaign online are going to be doing it from their phones, often after clicking a link from an email, text, Instagram post, or news article. Do not make them pinch, zoom, hunt, or suffer.
3. Give voters a reason to care
You probably need an issues section.
You probably do not need a 2,500-word white paper on municipal drainage policy.
Pick the issues that matter most to your campaign and explain where you stand in normal human language.
What’s wrong? What do you want to do about it? Why does it matter to the person reading?
That’s usually enough.
4. Give people something to do
Not everyone who visits your website is ready to donate. Give them another way to join you.
That might mean:
Signing up for emails
Volunteering
Requesting a yard sign
Following you on social media
Signing up to host an event
Finding their polling place
Your website shouldn’t just tell people about the campaign. It should help turn visitors into supporters.
5. Look like a serious candidate
You do not need a $10,000 custom website to look like you know what you’re doing.
You do, however, need a website that looks intentional.
Consistent fonts. Good photos. Clear buttons. Enough white space. Colors that do not physically hurt to look at.
And, yes, it needs to work on mobile.
People make very fast judgments online. A professional website tells donors, endorsers, reporters, activists, and voters that your campaign is real and ready to compete.
What you probably don't need
While we're here:
You probably don't need seven pages of policy.
You definitely don't need music that automatically starts playing.
And unless you are running for President of the United States, we're begging you to reconsider the 19-item navigation menu.
Simple is good.
Build the website. Then go campaign.
Your website is important, but it should not become a three-week campaign project.
Get something professional online. Make sure people can learn about you, donate, sign up, and get involved.
Then move on to the approximately 4,782 other things required to run for office.
That’s exactly why we built Swayed.
Our Squarespace templates are designed specifically for political campaigns, so you can start with the pages, structure, and features campaigns actually need instead of building everything from scratch.
They’re easy to customize, mobile-friendly, donation-ready, and made for campaigns of all sizes.
Trusted by 250+ campaigns nationwide, from city council to Congress.
Because your website should look like you spent a fortune on it. You do not actually have to.
