Charity WordPress Site: Strategy Guide For Beginners (2024)

For years, digital presence is a necessity for any legal entity, even charities. If non-profit organizations want an engaged digital community, they need a well-developed website that offers a unique user experience.

Charity has numerous benefits from its website, from sharing successful stories with the audience to publishing call-to-actions that will increase the number of donations. When creating a website, a charity has a chance to show the world why its cause matters.

When choosing among platforms a charity website will be built upon, one solution has an advantage over all others. WordPress is a great website platform for non-profits, charities, NGOs, social enterprises, community groups, and clubs. This conclusion is based on several factors. Among them are WordPress price, customizability, and content management features.

Also, WordPress is a very stable choice, and its support is excellent because of the huge number of enthusiasts who uses WordPress for their businesses.

In this guide, we will go through the whole process of creating a successful charity WordPress site, filling it with content, and optimizing the site to increase its reach.

Why You Need To Invest In Your Website

Building a website for charity isn’t a new strategy. If you are a new player in the market, it is highly possible that all your competitors already have an established online presence. Although saturated, the charity market is big enough to adopt your charity as well. That is possible only if you are willing to invest resources into the creation of a high-quality website that will catch the attention of potential donors.

charity donation — Photo: Wallpaperflare

Charities have limited funding and cannot afford to invest much money into website creation, but they can use their unique pitches to create engaging websites. A strong website has numerous benefits for charities:

It will allow you to engage supporters, donors, and partners a lot more quickly and efficiently than just offline efforts or social media sites.
Charity website often serves as the first point of contact with potential customers. A well-designed and user-friendly website creates a positive first impression, which can lead to increased engagement and conversions.
The website can be quickly updated with fresh news and event announcements.
Investing in user experience (UX) design can make your website easy to navigate and appealing to the eye.
You have a tool for easier brand building and raising awareness for your cause.
The website can be used for creating an email list which can be further used for email marketing.
Credible content can help attract high-value donors and partners.

Usually, smaller charities go with the basic websites based on simple templates, because they believe hiring a web developer who will create a charity WordPress site is too costly. Also, they don’t want to waste their time on setting up a website manually because they believe it is too complicated.

But, that is not true. Using WordPress for creating a charity website is both cheap and quick. WordPress is the world’s leading free content management system (CMS) used by millions of sites with over-the-roof customizability options. You just need to invest enough time into the design, and you will get a highly functional charity website that will help you attract a vast audience.

Is WordPress charity website free?

Simply put, the installation of WordPress is free, but you will have costs during the process of website building. Those costs include:

Hosting expenses
Costs of purchasing a premium WP theme (if you are not satisfied with the free one)
Web development (if you hire someone outside your organization)
Costs of designing your visuals
Costs caused by content creation (if you hire professional copywriters)
Costs of time spent on the whole process of building the WordPress charity website

As you can see, many of these expenses can be avoided. For example, you, or a person from your charity, can create your logo or other visuals for free. But, if you are not experienced, you will lose both time and credibility. It is always better to hire a professional and invest in design if you want better results. The same applies to content creation. If you don’t have knowledge or experience, your best bet is to delegate this work to a professional copywriter.

Realistically, you will need at least 10-14 days and up to 500-600 pounds or dollars to get a decent website that you can use for your charity.

As a charity, you can count on some benefits and deals like free Google Adwords credits and discounts on web hosting. Many web agencies and freelancers offer good deals for charities and most offer payment plans.

There are numerous free resources you can find online and use when building a charity website. Here are our picks, grouped according to what they are for:

The goals of a charity website

Before starting with the technicalities of your website, you must first define the goals you want to accomplish. Meaning, what are the main purposes of your charity WordPress site?

A website that isn’t designed to serve a specific purpose is unlikely to be useful, so every page, category, and article you create needs to be built and structured very carefully.

You can start with some general things before focusing on the specifics of your charity. The main objectives of every charity WordPress site should be:

Raising awareness of your cause. You should educate your audience about your vision and how you plan to accomplish it. There you can include statistics and the importance of the problem you try to resolve. You can also share with them all the difficulties you are facing on your journey.
Collecting donations. Your website should make it easy for visitors to donate, offering clear instructions and a secure platform for online donations. You can even create a system that will accept recurring payments if donors want to support your cause in the long term.
Recruiting volunteers. Just like donations, every charity can prosper only if enough people are supporting the cause. One of the parts of the site needs to be dedicated to the benefits of volunteering where people of all ages can apply.
Promote discussion about your organization. You can even create a small community on your site where people can gather and discuss your cause, goals, and progress made.
Promote transparency. Everything you do needs to be completely visible to all your stakeholders. By building trust between your charity and them, you will ensure the prosperity of the whole process.
Merchandising. One more way to secure funds for your cause is by selling branded products, such as T-shirts, greeting cards, or similar items. Selling a product gives a tangible reward that requesting a donation does not.
Advertise your events. Your website needs to be a board where you will announce all your future actions, give detailed reports of the finished events, share inspirational stories with videos and pictures, and show opportunities for corporate sponsorship.

Along with these general objectives, you will tailor your specific goals which need to be included within the site. You need to define them in the early stage because you will cater your website development process accordingly.

Pro tip: Spend some time mapping out your buyer personas to help you clarify all the different users your website needs to serve. You will need different pages for corporate partners, volunteers, and others.

Planning of charity WordPress site architecture

After you are done defining your goals, you will have a complete picture of how your website should look like. You will know which pages you need, which categories, and what features to include.

Here are some potential pages and features to think about:

Informative home page
About us section
Where we support
Who we support
Why our cause matters
History of our cause
Future of our cause
Donate page
Get involved/volunteer
Contact us page
Blog/Community news
Event calendar
Corporate/Partners
Terms & conditions
Privacy policy.

You don’t need to add all those pages when you are just starting. They can be added later when you have enough content for them. For starters, just go with basic pages that can be found on every site.

Charity WordPress site design

If you want to separate your charity from similar ones, a unique design is the best way of doing so. A charming and emotionally compelling website will help you to engage donors and spread your word.

Here are the basic design elements you’ll need for your charity website:

Branding elements (logo, colors, font(s))
Favicon
Team pictures
Hero images and videos
Blog post images in high resolution
Images for social media
Clear call-to-action

Footer information (include essential information, such as contact details, links to important pages, and social media icons)

As you can see, we mentioned images three times. That is why, besides text copy, photography will be your greatest pitch. Consider hiring a professional photographer to help you create a database of high-quality pictures you will be using for future promotion and documentation of events.

If you are limited by the budget, you can take pictures by yourself (or ask someone from your team), but you (or they) must have appropriate equipment.

Here are some ideas for web photography:

Headshots of key team members
Some pictures of the team together
Pictures of premises/office space
Service user/model shots in a variety of scenarios
Soothing nature, city, or crowd shots (these are easily found for free online).

Why WordPress is a smart choice for a charity website

You are surely wondering why we are recommending WordPress for a charity website. Besides the already mentioned benefits of WordPress, such as scalability and a friendly interface, it is a smart choice for a charity website due to its numerous advantages and features that align well with the needs and goals of charitable organizations. Here are some reasons why WordPress is an excellent platform for building a charity website.

You can use it for free, without fancy templates and paid plugins. Because it is open-source, many of the good ideas that are expensive today may become available for free tomorrow. But most importantly, developing and maintaining a website is completely free with this platform.
WordPress offers a vast collection of themes and plugins that correspond to different design preferences and functionality requirements. Charities can choose from a wide range of themes specifically designed for non-profit and charity websites, saving time and effort in custom development. You can even choose plugins for donations and volunteer management.
It offers superb responsiveness and configurability. WordPress allows easy integration with various third-party tools and services, such as email marketing platforms, social media, and analytics tools, enabling charities to extend their online presence and reach.
WordPress development is cheap. If you need a site change that you can’t handle in-house, you won’t find it hard to get hold of an affordable developer. Places like Upwork are flooded with capable WordPress developers, and Upwork protects you (the buyer) with secure messaging and payments.
It is pretty much secure. Although it is an open-source project, WordPress still takes security seriously and regularly updates its product. You can even employ some of the plugins to enhance security measures.
Great content management. WordPress enables charities to use its content management system (CMS) to organize and publish various types of content, such as blog posts, event updates, impact stories, and more.

Of course, there are many alternatives to WordPress, such as Wix or Squarespace, but none of them isn’t nearly as functional as WordPress. It has the most active community on the web, and you can easily address any issue you face during the site’s creation. And, most importantly, WordPress is very SEO-friendly, especially if you use plugins like Yoast or Rankmath.

Registering a good non-profit site domain

Your web domain will be the web address of your website – the first thing your audience will look after. We don’t even need to mention how important it is for your efforts. Here are some tips on how an ideal domain should look:

You will want to keep it as short as possible. The longer domains are not so convenient. They are difficult to type and hard to explain to someone who never heard of your charity before. Not too many people enter URLs manually, but still, you want to keep it simple.
Easy to remember. A domain name that consists of recognizable words and minimal symbols is vastly preferable to a confusing string of letters and numbers. For instance, “examplecharity” is easy to remember, while “ex-cha_official” is not. Avoid hyphens and numbers in the domain name.
Pointing to your course of action. Of course, this is something you think we don’t need to mention, but you’ll be surprised how many non-profits make this mistake. The best way to do so is to include the name of your charity, and the word “charity” and to obtain a .org extension, exclusively reserved for non-profits.

Try searching for appropriate domain names using GoDaddy’s .org domain search. Once you find something that meets the above criteria (and isn’t overly expensive), buy it — assuming your charity is fairly stable, be sure to get the domain for several years at a minimum so you won’t need to worry about the registration status soon.

Securing some high-quality website hosting

After choosing a domain name for your charity WordPress site, you’ll need to have proper hosting for it. Don’t overlook this step because your hosting provider is ensuring the stability of your website and accessibility to the audience. By choosing a poor hosting provider, your website will go down often, be slow, or produce numerous errors. All of that will deplete your resources and cause frustration to visitors.

Luckily, these days a lot of quality hosting providers offer their services. When choosing the right one, keep in mind your specific needs – how much audience you expect, what kind of media you’ll put on your site, or what interactive elements you’ll include throughout the pages. Some of the best hosting providers you can choose between are:

Kualo

This WordPress-compatible hosting company not only offers free lifetime use to charities and 24/7 support but is also fully powered by renewable energies, making Kualo a superb choice to help you get established online.

Bluehost

Bluehost is a popular hosting provider known for its reliability and excellent customer support. They offer a range of hosting plans, including shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated hosting. Bluehost also provides free SSL certificates, a user-friendly control panel, and 24/7 customer support.

SiteGround

SiteGround is known for its cheap packages created for charities. It has outstanding performance and customer service. SiteGround provides free daily backups, security features, and a user-friendly interface.

Dreamhost

This is one more reputable hosting provider for non-profits. Dreamhost offer shared hosting, managed WordPress hosting, and VPS hosting. It also provides unlimited storage and bandwidth and free SSL certificates.

A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting is known for its speed and performance optimization. You can count on some affordable hosting plans for charities and SSD storage.

Whatever of our recommendations you choose, be sure that the uptime of your site will be superb. Once your site has been created, you can start adjusting it to suit your goals, starting with the design.

WordPress themes for a non-profit website

Something we already mentioned several times throughout this guide – one of the main causes of WordPress’s popularity among charity owners is access to a huge amount of charity-friendly website themes. You can choose one that suits you the best and install it in just one click. Or you can search for premium themes, and purchase the one that comes with specialized customer support that can be customized further.

All those themes have one great perk – they save you a lot of time and effort you would put into adjusting all the elements. Don’t get us wrong, you will still need some time to adjust everything to your taste, but that time frame will be far less, and you will have enough time to concentrate on more important things. You can change fonts, colors, layouts, images, icons — pretty much anything you want to experiment with.

When changing fonts, remember that you can use free fonts or even create totally unique ones. Unleash your creativity and make something associated with your charity website that will help your organization stand out and attract people to your cause.

When we are talking about premium themes, you can try:

GivingPress Pro – powerful non-profit WordPress theme with easy-to-use customization options
Charity WP – feature-rich and flexible WordPress theme designed specifically for charity and non-profit organizations
Hope – a modern and visually appealing WordPress theme for non-profits and charities.

Tips for choosing a charity WordPress site theme & adjusting it to your needs

When looking for a perfect theme, you will often see a dummy text written all over the pages (so-called “lorem ipsum” text). Don’t let that confuse you, it is written only to show you how the final product will look like. Concentrate on other visual elements, such as carousels, panel shapes, and animations. Those elements are the most difficult to add later, so it is better to have them from the start.

Check out the number of installations and user reviews. If you can find the address of a website that uses a specific theme, even better. You can see how others use its potential.

Never forget to check the support a theme developers offer. How often do they update its theme, and what functionalities do they add? See if they have a forum where you can ask questions and post up-to-date.

Images are going to be important, so remember to use high-quality photos and logos, and put some time into your copy — you can either task someone in your charity will do the writing, or get someone in to help out (there may be a copywriter willing to work for free or a reduced rate for a good cause).

Best plugins built for ecommerce or charity WordPress site

When you are finally finished with setting up your website and filling it up with content, you can take a look at extras offered in paid or free form. Those features are called plugins and can be installed if they are compatible with the theme you have chosen. Plugins can address technical issues, help you write strong content, or add handy new features to your site.

In the next few lines, we will recommend you several WordPress plugins that you should look into:

WooCommerce

It is the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It provides a wide range of features, including product management, a shopping cart, secure checkout, payment gateways, and order management. It is highly customizable and supports various extensions to enhance its functionality further.

WP Crowdfunding

WP Crowdfunding is a powerful plugin that enables you to create crowdfunding campaigns for various projects or causes. It allows you to set funding goals, offer rewards to backers, and manage contributions easily.

Donorbox

Donorbox is a donation platform that offers a WordPress plugin for easy integration. It provides secure and customizable donation forms, supports recurring donations, and is compatible with multiple payment gateways.

PayPal Donations

PayPal Donations is a simple plugin that allows you to add a donation button to your website, enabling visitors to contribute directly using PayPal.

This is just a glance at the plugins available for your charity WordPress site. Some of them you will install right after setting up your site, such as SEO plugins, cache plugins, or library extensions. By using plugins, you will automate essential processes of your website and ensure its operation independently of you.

Improving the security of your charity WordPress site

Lately, more and more charity websites are being hacked. Cyber security is very important these days, and you should take all the necessary precautions upon launching your site.

The majority of online guides that focus on improving the security of your website recommend the following:

Always keep all WordPress elements up-to-date (theme, plugins, WP version).
Use strong passwords for accessing the admin panel and implement two-factor authentication.
Choose a reputable hosting provider that enables an SSL certificate.
Install a plugin that restricts the number of login attempts to prevent brute-force attacks.
Disable directory listing in the web server configuration.
Schedule regular backups of files and the database of your site.
Set appropriate file permissions to limit the access rights of different files and directories on your server.
Use a content delivery network (CDN) and disable PHP error reporting.
Implement a Web Application Firewall (WAF).

Remember, you need to carefully monitor site activity to react to any unusual behavior. Keep an eye on all login attempts and file changes.

Creating a website strategy

Your website is part of your charity’s overall digital strategy. Think about all the different ways your charity can provide support, find funding, and educate using your website as an essential tool.

The main purpose of a marketing strategy that focuses on your website is to reach a vast audience and convince them to donate to your cause. You need to show them why your cause matters.

You have several powerful techniques at your disposal to successfully implement a marketing strategy. We will start with copywriting, as an essential element of a charity WordPress site. If you tailor unique and engaging content, your visibility will be increased. Use competitor research to inspire you and ensure you edit everything thoroughly. SEO is about more than just keywords these days, it’s about comprehensive copy, supporting the user, and a solid technical base. You will need to cover all the topics related to your mission and regularly post updates to your blog content.

Whenever possible, collect emails from donors, collaborators, supporters, and others and create a mailing list. That list should be used for email marketing, where you will send newsletters to everyone interested in supporting your cause.

Apart from using a website for direct engagement, you can use social media for the same purpose. Posting stories about your events, videos, and images of people you help are very engaging. You can reach various audiences on different social networks, so you can experiment with all of them.

Don’t forget old-fashioned tools – press pages will help you build invaluable media relations. Newspapers and online publications love featuring stories from charities.

Some more resources for charity website marketing we already covered on our site:

Final notes

You went through all the effort of setting up a successful charity WordPress site, from registering a domain, finding proper hosting, adjusting visuals to your liking, and installing of necessary features to advertise your cause. But your work is far from over.

You should never stop trying to improve your website. Over time, keep an eye on changing design standards and user preferences, and make changes accordingly.

Also, a good thing for website development is to listen to feedback from your audience, particularly your volunteers, staff, and donors — if they tell you something they don’t like about the site, you should make an effort to change it.

The golden rule is – the better your website gets, the more it will support you in raising money and awareness.