Nonprofit website best practices: How to develop a successful online presence

A charity website is a fundamental platform to showcase your nonprofit and the ethos that acts as your foundation. 

It’s therefore important to remember that a modern charity website is more than a digital brochure - it’s a fundraising and engagement engine. By following crucial nonprofit website best practices, you can ensure that your website operates to its full potential, allowing you to:

• Improve user experience
• Increase donations
• Build trust and credibility
• Boost SEO rankings
• Facilitate mobile responsiveness
• Reflect your missions and brand clearly

By meeting nonprofit website development targets such as these, it will be far more likely for your organisation to resonate with supporters, who will in turn significantly contribute towards your nonprofit’s development.

Read our definitive guide to charity website development

The best place to start is with a simple website design that is accessible to all. If your website is complicated to use, the likelihood is that users will leave your website shortly after arriving - leading to a high bounce rate!

You can avoid this by ensuring the following steps are put into place.

Step 1: Prioritise clear navigation 

Whether it is making a donation, applying for a volunteer role, or signing up for an event, you want users of your website to find what they’re looking for within a few clicks. This makes ensuring clear navigation and an intuitive user journey essential for keeping these users engaged throughout their short journey to complete a meaningful action.

Simple actions to take can include:

• Creating a simple menu structure (enabling the user to find their desired page within 3 clicks!)
• Including clear call to actions e.g. ‘Make a donation today!’
• Design the website from the user’s perspective

Step 2: Facilitate mobile responsiveness 

With over 60% of all website traffic coming from mobile devices, mobile responsiveness is a necessity that can’t be ignored. With this being the case, it’s essential that your website functions and looks just as effectively on a smartphone or tablet as it does on a desktop.

This can be supported by:

• Adopting responsive design frameworks – which ensure page layout and images automatically adapt to different screen sizes
• Optimising page speed for mobile – which compresses elements such as images to ensure quick load times

Step 3: Ensure web accessibility

As a nonprofit, you want to be as welcoming as possible to people from all walks of life. By ensuring web accessibility, it means that people with impairments that include hearing, motor, or cognitive are able to engage with your website. 

Accessibility examples include:

• Alt text for images
• Screen reader support
• Keyboard navigability
• Colour contrast and readable fonts
• Accessible forms and buttons

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Your organisation is unique – so make sure you stand out from the crowd! By adopting clear messaging and branding, you can ensure that users immediately acknowledge your brand and buy into your ethos.

You can support this by doing the following.

Using a consistent visual identity and tone

Establishing a consistent visual identity and tone helps to establish strong trust signals, while encouraging an emotional connection with your audience. Deliver a cohesive experience and strengthen your brand by ensuring:

• Visuals are kept on-brand
• Tone is maintained across pages
• Digital and print materials are aligned
• Design inconsistencies are avoided

Prominently displaying your mission and impact

Clearly displaying your mission helps visitors to understand your purpose and feel inspired to get involved. You can help showcase your mission by:

• Prominently featuring your mission statement
• Telling powerful stories e.g. individual success stories
• Using engaging images e.g. real-life photos
• Sharing testimonials that share impact

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When working on your nonprofit website development, it’s crucial to remember that donations and fundraising are the bedrock of your nonprofit. Without them, you won’t be able to reach your goals and make your mission statement a reality. A main priority for your website is to ensure optimisation that facilitates donations and fundraising throughout.

You can support this by including:

• Eye-catching donation buttons – ideally, these should be visible on every page to increase the chances of donation
• Multiple payment options – including credit card, PayPal, and Direct Debits
• Gift Aid option – include this within the donation option and boost your income!
• Fundraiser pages – pull on your supporters’ heartstrings and encourage them to donate to your great causes!
• One-click or recurring donation options – make the donation process as simple as possible and be rewarded in return!

Find out more about how to boost online charity donations

While donations are obviously crucial for your nonprofit to function, you don’t want users to think that their money is all you want from them. Remember, you’re a nonprofit, it’s good to give – so why not give something back to your supporters? By taking this approach, it will help to build a stronger rapport and lead to your target audience supporting you over the long term.

Common approaches can include the following:

• Selling event tickets or memberships – allowing your supporters to feel a part of your organisation and your mission
• Include an online shop – where supporters can receive something for their money, including shirts, caps, mugs, and much more!
• Providing downloadable resources – such as research papers and whitepapers that educate supporters about certain areas of your mission

Find out more about what makes a good charity website

Content is king. And with the correct messaging and visuals, you can really drive home your nonprofit’s mission and the impact it has had on people’s lives. 

Common approaches can include:

• Regular blog updates or impact stories – that present a problem and how your organisation tangibly improved this for your community and beyond!
• Videos and impact stats – bring your impact stories to life with videos and stats that outline strong visual representations of the outstanding service you provide!
• News stories – that keep your supporters up to date with what is happening with your organisation and how they can potentially get involved
• Event calendar – that clearly shows upcoming events and provides the opportunity for your supporters to actively engage with your organisation

Find out how we can support you to manage your website’s content

Shouting about all the great work your nonprofit provides is all well and good – but can anyone actually see it?

This is where search engine optimisation (SEO) plays a crucial role. Optimising your website for strong SEO performance is essential, as it allows users to organically find your webpages on search engines such as Google. The stronger your SEO performance, the more visible your website will be!

We would strongly recommend considering the following areas of SEO.

Keyword-optimised content 

Using relevant keywords that your supporters would actively search for will significantly improve your visibility on search engines. With the support of keyword research tools such as Semrush, you will be able to drill down into these keywords by understanding how popular they are (search volume) and how difficult they are to rank (keyword difficulty).

Best practices to follow relating to keywords can include:

• Conducting keyword research
• Optimising page titles and headings with relevant keywords
• Creating valuable content that includes these keywords (but make sure not to overdo it!)
• Ensuring content remains up to date

Fast-loading pages and secure hosting 

Fast-loading pages are a significant ranking factor for search engines. The faster a page loads, the more likely it is to rank higher. In addition, using secure HTTPS hosting ensures that sensitive data is protected which acts as a trust signal to those wishing to visit your website. Ticking these boxes will soon establish online credibility.

You can achieve this by:

• Compressing large files such as images
• Using a reputable hosting provider that offers SSL certificates
• Regularly checking page speed
• Implementing HTTPS across your entire site

For nonprofits, protecting donor, volunteer, and service user data is not just a best practice - it’s a legal and ethical responsibility. It’s therefore essential that your website is secure and fully compliant with regulations like the UK GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) or other regional privacy laws.

You can ensure data safety by:

• Adhering to GDPR
• Minimise data collection
• Being transparent about data collection
• Having a clear data retention policy
• Offer opt-out options

Are you in the market for a new charity website builder? Now that you have a deeper insight into what nonprofit website best practices to follow, you can feel confident in investing in a piece of software that can take your organisation’s visibility to the next level.

Access Charity Websites provides a scalable solution that allows for you to manage your own website, while also providing additional external nonprofit website development support where required.

Our team are more than happy for an initial chat and answer any questions you may have.

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