How to make a charity website that turns visitors into donors

TL;DR: How to make a charity website

This guide covers the public site for a small charity: choosing a domain, starting from a template built for a nonprofit, and the pages supporters look for first, including Our work, Donate, Volunteer and a Contact page with a real address on it. Yola website builder gives you ready-made Services and Galleries blocks, so a volunteer can lay out your programmes and add last weekend's photos without waiting on anybody. None of it needs code.

The second half covers photographing your work with consent, impact figures that say what they count and when, an enquiry form for volunteers, legacy gifts and corporate partners, the registration number, trustees and annual accounts a funder checks, a page of fundraising events and collection dates, and local search for phrases like "[cause] charity [city]". Work through the ten steps and you have a site your trustees can sign off and your team can keep true.

What to include

Top features of a charity website

How to make a charity
website in 10 steps

Your domain is what somebody types after seeing it on a collection tin, a banner at the summer fair or the bottom of a fundraising letter. Use the name people actually say out loud, which is often the short version rather than the full registered title, and take the .com or the .org if either is free. Both read as legitimate to a supporter. What matters more is that the name matches your register entry and your printed material, because somebody who lands on a near miss of your address has a fair reason to wonder whether they are in the right place.

Skip hyphens and numbers. Someone repeating "st-marys-trust-2" down the phone will drop both, and charity names get misheard often enough already. If your organisation is known locally by an abbreviation, register that as well and point it at the same site, then use one spelling of the name everywhere: your Google Business Profile, your shop front, your headed paper.

Yola website builder lets you search for and register a domain in the same place you build the site, and annual plans include a free domain for the first year. One thing to sort out before you build anything: if the domain currently sits in a former trustee's personal account, move it into an account the organisation controls while there is still somebody who can ask.

Nobody on your committee needs to write code. Yola lets you edit text, swap photos and move sections yourself, the same way you would edit a document, so the person who writes your newsletter can also fix a wrong date on the site.

Answer a few questions about the organisation and Yola's AI Website Builder puts together a first draft to work from. The full set of AI tools sits on the paid plans, and the free plan has basic AI. Treat whatever comes back as a starting point rather than finished copy, because anything describing how money is spent, and anything naming a person you support, goes past your trustees before it publishes. Plan that review in from the start and it costs a meeting; leave it to the end and it costs a month.

Hosting, an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups come with the site, so there is nothing to set up and nobody to call when something needs patching. Give at least two people the login and keep the details wherever your organisation keeps its passwords. Volunteers move on, and a site only one person can edit turns a two-minute correction into a committee item.

Start from a template

Charity templates to start from

Six pages do most of the work, and a small site that is right beats a big one that has drifted. Every extra page is another thing somebody has to re-read before the AGM.

Impact reporting is the exception worth planning for. It can start as a section on Our work and move onto a page of its own once there is enough in it to justify one. Build the six below first, get them signed off, then add.

Describe your programmes the way you would describe them to a neighbour, not the way you describe them in a funding application. "Outcomes framework for vulnerable adults" tells a local supporter nothing. "Hot meals delivered to older people on Sundays, across three estates" tells them exactly what their money buys and whether they know somebody who needs it.

Ways to give belong on the same list, because giving money and giving time are both things people arrive ready to do. Name the amounts and what each one covers, say what a monthly gift makes possible that a single gift does not, and make it clear that legacy gifts and company partnerships come with a named person to talk to rather than a form nobody answers. Community fundraisers need the same: somebody to email before they book the hall.

Yola's ready-made Services block handles this layout, with a programme name, a short description and a figure sitting together. Your own team edits it the week a project changes, which is the point of building it yourselves.

This is the step that decides whether somebody believes you, so give it more time than the rest. Photograph the work itself: the van being loaded, the session running in the church hall, the volunteers sorting stock at six in the morning. Your own photographs do something stock images never will, because a supporter can see the thing they would be paying for.

Consent comes first here, and it is not a formality. Get written permission before a photograph of anybody you support goes online, keep a record of it, and follow your safeguarding policy for children and for anyone who could be put at risk by being recognised. Where consent is not possible, photograph hands, equipment, the space or the volunteers instead. No photograph is worth the harm of using one you had to talk somebody into.

Put numbers beside the pictures, and say exactly what each number counts. "412 food parcels delivered between April and March" is checkable and useful. "Thousands helped" is neither, and a funder reads it as marketing. Give every figure the period it covers and the source, which is usually your own records or your annual report, and review them on a fixed date rather than when somebody notices. Where a figure went down, the honest version costs you less credibility than a rounded-up one that nobody can verify.

Name image files for what is in them, like riverside-food-bank-volunteers.jpg rather than IMG_4471.jpg, and write the same description into the alt text, so your photos can turn up in image search. Yola's ready-made Galleries block holds a set like this, and on a paid plan a custom code block lets you build a gallery that looks like nobody else's. Leave a slot empty until the real photograph exists.

Two different people need a form here. One wants to volunteer and has ten minutes of enthusiasm to spend on it. The other wants to talk to somebody about a gift in their will, payroll giving, or making you their company's charity of the year. A short form catches both, and it catches the supporter who will never phone an office during working hours.

Keep it to the fields that let you reply well: a name, a way to reach them, and what they are interested in. You choose exactly which fields appear, because the Yola contact form is customizable rather than fixed, and the Forms block help article walks through setting it up. Leave dates of birth, references and anything else your volunteer application needs off a public form. That belongs in your own process, once you have replied and know who you are dealing with.

A submission is an enquiry, not a donation and not a vetted volunteer. Yola sends an automatic confirmation so the sender knows it arrived, and it is worth saying in that confirmation who will get back to them and roughly when. Then get back to them the next day. Enthusiasm for volunteering has a short shelf life, and a fortnight of silence is usually the end of it.

Somebody who has just heard about you from a friend is asking one thing: is this organisation real, and who answers for the money. Put that answer on the home page and in the footer of every page, not on an About page three clicks in.

Show only what your organisation actually holds. Where you are registered, the registration number and the register you appear on do more work than any sentence about transparency, and a funder will check both. Name your trustees or board with a line on what each one does, publish your governing document and your most recent annual report and accounts, and give the year you were founded. Where you have signed up to a fundraising code or an accreditation scheme, name it and the year you joined. Where you are not registered, because you are small or newly formed, say plainly what you are instead and who oversees you. A clear description of an unregistered community group reads far better than a vague hint at something you are not.

A charity year runs on dates: the summer fair, the sponsored walk, the quiz night, volunteer inductions, supermarket collection days and the AGM. One page carrying all of it, kept current, saves your office the same three phone calls every week.

Each entry needs the date, the start time, the place, what it costs if anything, and how to reserve a spot, which points at your enquiry form rather than a separate ticketing tool. This is a page you edit by hand, which takes a couple of minutes, and the sensible move is to put the whole year in during one sitting after the committee has set the diary. Leave past dates up with a photograph or a total raised beside them. A list of events that actually happened says more about an organisation than any promise about the next one.

People look for a cause the way they look for anything else local: a place name and a few words. Your Google Business Profile and a handful of pages written in local wording are what put you in front of them. Yola's SEO Optimized Website capability covers the technical side, and the rest is work you do on Google and on your own pages.

Before you tell anybody the site exists, go through it on a phone the way a supporter would. Tap the phone number, follow the donate button all the way to your donation platform and make a small gift yourself to be sure it lands in the right account, submit the volunteer form, and check the confirmation arrives.

Check that the pages carrying the work load quickly, and read the donate page out loud. If it takes a paragraph to reach the ask, it is too long. Yola sites are mobile optimized and responsive, so the layout adapts on its own between phone and laptop, and every site gets an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups.

After launch the job is keeping it true. Impact figures get a review date, the trustee list gets updated after the AGM, past events get their totals added, and last year's appeal comes down when this year's goes up. A site that changes holds its search ranking better than one left alone. More to the point, somebody who looked you up in March and comes back in October can see the organisation is still moving.

Common charity website mistakes to avoid

The same handful of mistakes turn up on charity sites, and each one costs you either a gift, a volunteer or a grant.

How much does a charity website cost?

The website itself is the cheap part of this. On Yola it starts free, and a paid plan is $9.95/mo when you want your own domain, more pages and the full AI tools. Annual plans include a free domain for the first year. Whatever your donation platform charges per gift sits outside that and stays with the platform.

Having the site built for you costs a good deal more. A freelancer or a small agency building something comparable often runs from a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, and agencies that work with the charity sector usually add a maintenance retainer on top. That money comes out of funds raised for the work, which is the part trustees tend to weigh hardest.

The real cost for a charity is not the software, it is the sign-off. Trustees read the copy, somebody checks the figures against the accounts, and your safeguarding lead looks at the photographs. Building it in-house removes none of that. What it changes is what happens after the review: a volunteer makes the correction the same afternoon, instead of emailing a change request to an agency and waiting a fortnight for one sentence.