A program officer or reviewer preparing for your renewal will open your lab’s website. Not because the guidelines require it, but because it takes thirty seconds and tells them things the proposal doesn’t: whether the group is active, whether the team matches what’s described in the budget, whether the outreach claims in the broader impacts section hold up.
Run through this list before that happens.
Publications list
Check the date on the most recent entry. A publications page that stops two years before the renewal reads as a group that stopped publishing, even if the CV attached to the proposal says otherwise. Update it, and link to the papers instead of listing titles alone.
Include preprints if your field uses them, clearly labeled as such. A reviewer scanning for recent output cares about momentum, and a preprint from last month shows more of that than a published paper finished two years earlier.
Team page
Every name in the current budget should have a matching bio, and every bio should have a current title. Former students and postdocs listed as current staff is one of the most common gaps, and one of the easiest for a reviewer to notice against the personnel section of the proposal.
The reverse gap matters too: a new hire not yet on the site, especially one the proposal is requesting funding to support. If the budget justifies a position, the site should show that the lab already has someone in that role, or is actively recruiting for it.
Broader impacts and outreach
If the proposal claims K-12 outreach, a mentoring program, or public engagement, the website should show it. A single paragraph with dates, numbers, and a photo does more than a page of description with nothing to point to. This is the section reviewers check hardest against what’s written, since it’s where proposals tend to promise more than gets documented later.
A dedicated outreach page, updated as events happen, does more for this than a paragraph reconstructed from memory during proposal season.
Funding acknowledgments
List current and recent grants with their funding source. A reviewer from one agency checking whether you’re also funded elsewhere shouldn’t have to guess. This also signals a track record of sustained support, which matters for a renewal decision.
Equipment and facilities
If the proposal budgets for equipment, the facilities page should reflect what the lab has and uses. A gap here reads as a lab that either doesn’t maintain its page or doesn’t use what it lists, and neither reading helps a renewal.
Data availability and code
More programs now expect a statement on how data and code from funded work get shared. If your lab has a GitHub organization, a data repository, or a standard statement about availability, the website is the natural place to point to it, and a reviewer checking compliance with a funder’s open data policy will look for exactly this.
Contact information
A working email, a current mailing address, and a link that doesn’t 404. Reviewers move fast, and a broken contact page is the fastest way to look unattended.
A simple timeline for the weeks before submission
Six weeks out, go through this list once and note every gap without fixing anything yet, so the scope of the work is clear before starting. Four weeks out, close the easy items: broken links, outdated titles, missing recent papers. Two weeks out, handle anything that needs someone else’s input, like a photo from a collaborator or a number confirmed by a co-PI. That leaves the final week for a last read-through instead of a scramble to find gaps for the first time.
Labs that leave this to the final few days almost always find at least one gap that needs something from someone else, a photo, a confirmed figure, a sign-off, and there’s rarely enough runway left to get it in time.
Building this into a normal routine
None of this takes a redesign. Most labs can close every gap on this list in an afternoon, and the difference between a page last touched in 2023 and one updated this month is exactly the kind of thing a reviewer notices without ever mentioning it in their comments. The labs that don’t scramble before a renewal are usually the ones that treat this list as a quarterly pass, not an annual emergency.
Common questions
Do grant reviewers look at a lab's website?
Often, yes, especially for renewals. It takes thirty seconds and tells a reviewer things the proposal text doesn't, like whether the personnel section matches who's in the lab right now.
How far in advance should we update the site before a renewal?
A few weeks, not the night before. That gives time to notice gaps, like a missing publication or an outdated team page, and fix them without rushing.
What's the single most common gap reviewers notice?
A team page listing former students and postdocs as current staff. It's an easy thing to let slide and one of the fastest ways to look unmanaged to someone checking the budget against the personnel.
Does the whole site need a redesign before a renewal?
No. Most labs can close every real gap in an afternoon of updates. A redesign is a separate project and rarely what a renewal needs.