NationBuilder SEO: What You Can Control and What You Can't
August 24, 2026SEO can get technical quickly, but there are plenty of things you can do yourself to keep your NationBuilder website healthy and search-engine friendly.
Many of the SEO issues I see on websites aren't highly technical problems at all. They're the result of everyday content management. Developing good habits when adding and managing content can prevent many of these problems. But there are also aspects of SEO that are controlled by NationBuilder or by the underlying code of your website. Knowing the difference can help you understand what you can address yourself—and when you may need a developer.
What You Can Do Yourself
Clean up old and orphaned content
Websites accumulate old events, outdated campaigns, test pages, and other content that's no longer being used.
Pay particular attention to orphaned pages: published pages that exist on your site but aren't accessible through your navigation or linked to from other pages. These pages are still crawlable and indexable and can create unnecessary clutter for search engines. Sometimes that's intentional and necessary, but you don't want dozens of forgotten published pages cluttering your sitemap.
Periodically review your content. Unpublish pages that are no longer in use, and archive or delete old material you know you'll never need again.
Use a proper heading structure
Headings establish the structure of your content, not simply how the text looks.
Your H1 should generally be reserved for the page headline. Use H2s for the main sections and H3s for subsections within them. Don't jump from an H2 to an H4 because you prefer how it looks.
Think of it like the outline of an old research paper: the hierarchy should make sense.
Pay attention to titles, slugs, and excerpts
When creating a page, use a concise, descriptive page title and slug. As a general guideline, keep your page title around 50–60 characters and your slug short and descriptive, ideally under about 60 characters. The slug is everything after your domain in the URL: yourdomain.com/the_slug.
Also remember the Excerpt field under Settings → SEO. You don't need one for every utility page, but important pages in your site structure and blog or resource posts should have one. Aim for about 140–160 characters that clearly describe what someone will find on the page.
So your practical targets would be:
Page title: approx. 50–60 characters
Slug: as short as practical, preferably under 60 characters
Excerpt/meta description: approx. 140–160 characters
Add alternative descriptions to images
When adding an image, fill out the Alternative description field with a useful description of what's in the image.
This provides search engines with information about your images and, more importantly, makes meaningful images accessible to people using screen readers and other assistive technologies.
Check for broken links
Links inevitably stop working as websites change. Periodically check your site for broken links using one of the many online tools available, and fix or remove them when you find them.
It's better for your visitors and for the overall health of your website.
What May Require a Developer
Some SEO elements aren't accessible through NationBuilder's content-management tools because they're generated by NationBuilder or built into your website theme. For example, your theme should output the page headline using the proper H1 structure, but that isn't always the case. Images built directly into a custom design may also need alternative text added within the code rather than through an editable field.
NationBuilder automatically generates your XML sitemap, so you also don't have the same granular control over it that some other platforms provide.
Other technical SEO issues that may require changes to the Liquid templates or theme include canonical URLs, noindex rules, structured data and schema markup, and automatically generated or duplicated elements.
Focus on What You Can Control
Not every warning in an SEO audit is equally important, and not everything can be fixed through the NationBuilder control panel.
But keeping your content organized, using headings properly, writing useful titles and descriptions, adding alternative descriptions to images, and fixing broken links can go a long way toward keeping your site healthy for both visitors and search engines—and none of it requires knowing how to code.
Not sure how healthy your NationBuilder site is?
My NationBuilder HealthCheck takes a comprehensive look at your site's SEO, accessibility, performance, content, and underlying setup to identify issues, prioritize what matters, and provide clear recommendations for what to tackle next.