The opening question is wrong. Most charities ask "what should we put on our website?" when the better question is "what does someone need to find when they land here?"
Those two framings lead to very different websites. The first produces a site that covers everything the organisation wants to say. The second produces one that works for the people actually using it: funders doing due diligence, service users looking for help, volunteers considering applying, and donors deciding whether to give.
Here is what a charity website should include in 2026, and why each part matters.
A homepage that answers three questions immediately
When someone lands on your homepage, they have about eight seconds before deciding whether they are in the right place. Your homepage needs to answer three things before anyone scrolls:
- What does this organisation do?
- Who does it help?
- What should I do next?
These sound obvious. Most charity homepages do not answer all three clearly. They open with a mission statement, or a rotating slider with four different messages, or a welcome paragraph about the charity's history rather than its present work.
A short, plain-English sentence explaining what you do is more valuable than anything else on the page. "We provide emergency housing support to young people aged 16 to 25 in Greater Manchester" is useful. "Transforming lives, one person at a time" is not.
A donation page that keeps people on your site
If someone wants to give you money, the process should take as few steps as possible. Sending visitors off to a third-party donation platform mid-journey loses people. Some come back. Many do not.
A good donation page keeps the visitor on your site, reflects your brand, and makes the giving options clear. One-off gift, monthly giving, and Gift Aid should all be easy to find and understand. The Gift Aid declaration in particular is worth getting right. A lot of charities lose Gift Aid income simply because the wording on the form confuses donors.
Your impact, not just your story
Every charity has an about page. Fewer have a page that clearly shows what changes as a result of the work. Funders and major donors do not just want to know what you do. They want to know what is different in the world because of it.
Numbers help. Not because funders are purely data-driven, but because numbers make claims concrete. "We supported 340 families last year" lands differently from "we support families across the region." If you have annual reports or impact summaries, link to them. Make them easy to find.
Named people
Anonymous websites create doubt. If someone cannot find out who runs the organisation, who the trustees are, or who they would speak to if they got in touch, that creates friction before any conversation has started.
This does not mean you need headshots of every staff member. It means having a contact page with a real name and a real email address. It means listing your trustees somewhere. If you are a small organisation, the CEO or director being visible and contactable is a strong trust signal to funders and commissioners who are used to being passed between departments.
A news section, only if someone will maintain it
A news section with the most recent post dated fourteen months ago does not reassure visitors. It does the opposite. It suggests an organisation that meant to keep its website updated and ran out of time.
If you cannot realistically post updates once a month, do not have a news section. A static website that is accurate and clearly maintained is better than a "live" one that looks abandoned.
If you can commit to regular updates, a news section earns its place. It keeps the site fresh for search engines, gives supporters something to return for, and lets funders see the organisation is active.
A contact page with a real person behind it
This sounds basic. A lot of charity contact pages have a form and no indication of who receives it, when someone might hear back, or what happens next.
Add a name. Add an approximate response time. If you get specific types of enquiry, make that clear. A contact page that communicates "a real person will read this" converts more visitors into conversations than one that feels like it goes into a void.
The free Charity Safety Content Audit checks the things this article covers: whether critical content is visible without scrolling, whether contact details are easy to find on mobile, and whether your key services are clear from the homepage. Seven questions, under three minutes.
Take the free audit →Accessibility built in, not added later
The people you serve are often the people most likely to rely on screen readers, keyboard navigation, or other assistive technology. A site that does not work for them is failing at its core purpose.
Good accessibility means sufficient colour contrast, meaningful alt text on images, forms that work without a mouse, and headings used in a logical order. These are not expensive changes if they are designed in from the start. They become expensive when they are retrofitted.
We have written a plain-English guide to WCAG and charity website accessibility if you want to understand what this means in practice.
A note on AI visibility in 2026
When someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI Overview about charities supporting a particular cause in their area, the organisations that get mentioned are the ones with clear, well-structured content that answers those questions directly.
If your website clearly explains what you do, where you operate, and who benefits from your work, you are better positioned to appear in AI-generated answers. This is not about tricks. It is about having a website that communicates clearly, which is what you should be doing for all your other audiences anyway.
What to leave out
Splash pages. Auto-playing video with sound on. Sliders with more than two or three panels. PDFs that open without warning. Navigation that requires hovering to reach sub-pages on mobile. Social media feeds that have not been updated in months. Pop-ups that fire immediately when someone lands on the page.
None of these things serve your visitors. Most of them slow the site down or frustrate people who are trying to find something specific.
The goal is not a website that impresses people in a meeting. It is a website that works every day for the people who need to use it.
