For most charities, the website is the front door. It’s where a potential donor decides whether to give, where a volunteer decides whether to get in touch, and where someone who needs help decides whether you’re the right place to turn.
Yet charity websites are often built on tight budgets, passed between volunteers, and updated whenever someone finds a spare hour. That’s completely understandable. But a handful of simple things make a big difference, and none of them require a big budget.
Here are the five I’d check first.
1. Say what you do, and who you help, straight away
A first-time visitor should understand your cause within a few seconds of landing on your homepage. Not after scrolling, and not after reading a long “about us” story.
A good test: show your homepage to someone who has never heard of you for five seconds, then ask what the charity does. If they can’t tell you, your opening message needs work.
Aim for one clear sentence at the top of the page that covers three things: who you help, what you do, and where. Save the history, the values and the full story for deeper pages.
2. Make the main action obvious
Every charity wants visitors to do something: donate, volunteer, attend an event, get support, or sign up for updates. The problem comes when a homepage asks for all of them at once.
Decide what the one most important action is, and make it impossible to miss. A clear button in the header, repeated further down the page, works far better than five competing options of equal weight.
Secondary actions still have a place, but they should support the main one rather than compete with it. And whatever the action is, check how many steps it takes. If giving or getting in touch takes six clicks and a long form, you’re losing people along the way.
3. Build trust with real people and real impact
People give to people. Generic stock photos and vague claims don’t build confidence, but real faces, real stories and honest detail do.
A few things that help:
- Real photos of your team, volunteers and the work itself, rather than stock images
- Specific impact, such as “we run a weekly lunch club for 30 older people” rather than “we support the community”
- Your registered charity number and registered name, visible in the footer. This is good practice for every charity, and a requirement for many registered ones
- Clear information on where money goes, even if it’s just a short, honest paragraph
- Straightforward contact details, so people can see there’s a real organisation behind the site
Trust is rarely built by one big thing. It’s built by lots of small signs that you’re real, open and doing what you say.
4. Make it easy for your team to keep it up to date
This one gets overlooked, and it’s often the reason charity websites go stale.
If updating an event, adding a news story or changing a contact detail needs a developer, it simply won’t happen as often as it should. Out-of-date information, like an event that finished months ago or a volunteer contact who left last year, quietly damages trust.
The fix is a site built on a content management system (CMS) that your own staff or volunteers can use confidently, without touching code. When you’re choosing or rebuilding a site, ask a simple question: “Can someone on our team update this themselves?” If the answer is no, that’s worth knowing before you commit.
It also helps to agree who is responsible for the website. A site that belongs to “everyone” often ends up belonging to no one.
5. Make it work for everyone, on every device
Many of your visitors will be on a phone, and some will be using assistive technology such as screen readers, or will find small or low-contrast text hard to read. A site that works well for them works better for everyone.
The basics to check:
- It’s easy to use on a mobile, with text you can read without zooming and buttons large enough to tap
- Text has good contrast against its background
- Images have descriptive alt text, so screen reader users know what they show
- Forms are clearly labelled and easy to complete
- Pages load quickly, because slow sites lose visitors, especially on mobile data
Accessibility isn’t only about compliance. For a charity, it’s about making sure the people you exist to serve, and the people who want to support you, aren’t shut out.
Where to start
You don’t need to fix everything at once. Pick the one area where your site is weakest, and improve that first. For most charities, that’s either the clarity of the opening message or the main call to action.
If you’d like a second opinion, I offer a free website audit. It’s a plain-English review of what’s working, what isn’t, and the quick wins that could make the biggest difference, with no jargon and no obligation.