Release Notes #3 - A new homepage!

Posted March 26, 2024

There's no place like home.

We’re excited to share we’ve released the biggest update to the ineedana.com landing experience since its inception!

screenshot of the new ineedana.com

Our goals with this redesign were to

#1 have a landing page that Google likes better

#2 Give folks who may not need an abortion today some clear ways to learn more about their options and how they can support ineedana.com

Goal #1 - being friendlier with Google

We designed ineedana.com to be as small of a digital footprint as possible. You can find everything you need to know to get an abortion on *one url.* This feels really good to us as people who’ve had abortions. We know that there are many reasons people may want to keep their abortion search private and also forget to use incognito or another tool to protect their privacy.

Unfortunately, the algorithms at Google *hate* this. To them, they think the thousands of people who come to I Need an A every day are “bouncing” because they never go “deeper” in the website (forget they’re averaging 18 minutes actively using it according to our privacy-minded Plausible analytics).

This means Google doesn’t “trust” ineedana.com and ranks it lower than it should be. Which means fewer abortion seekers benefit from the comprehensive and easy-to-understand information we offer. We’ve tried other strategies to combat this like buying Google ads and releasing search engine optimized state and city landing pages (like this one for Texas and this one for Dallas) and they helped some, but not as much as we’d hoped.

So, this new homepage has users click through to search. The entire search experience will still be done on one url - ineedana.com/search. Nothing has changed there. We still aren’t collecting the data you input. Everything is personalized and prioritized. It’s just going to take most folks an extra click to get there. Our hope is that by making this change, we’ll be able to reach more people. We’ll be closely monitoring our privacy-minded Plausible analytics and our search engine rankings to see what happens.

Goal #2 - being friendlier with people who don’t need abortions today

“Don’t worry - I didn’t actually use the search myself.”

We can’t count the number of times we’ve had supporters, friends, and potential funders say this to us. For the record - there’s nothing you can do to hurt the search! You don’t mess up any of our data, because we’re not collecting anything!

Regardless, we heard this enough that we starting to ask ourselves “what’s really going on here?” And our hypothesis was that these were people who wanted to know about I Need An A or the state of abortion access in their area, but we hadn’t designed a clear way for them to find that info. We’ve been so focused on designing for abortion seekers, we kind of ignored everyone else (oops!).

This new homepage has clear calls to action for these people.

a screenshot of a new section on I Need An A that directs users to find their state laws, learn what an abortion costs, and get involved.

We’re hopeful this new information gives people more insight on what it takes to get an abortion Post-Roe and how they can help make that easier.

As always, if you have feedback, questions, or ideas - don’t hesitate to let us know! team@ineedana.com