Most charity trustees know when a website feels wrong. It's slow, or cluttered, or you can't find the donation button, or it looks like it hasn't been touched since 2014. But knowing what bad looks like is easier than being able to articulate what good looks like, especially when you're sitting in a board meeting deciding whether to commission a rebuild.

This article is for trustees and committee members who want a clearer picture of what they should actually be asking for, and what they should be holding an agency accountable to delivering.

Your website has more than one audience

The first mistake many charities make is designing their website for one type of visitor. In reality, most charity websites need to serve several distinct groups at once: people who need your services, people who want to donate or fundraise, volunteers looking to get involved, and professionals or commissioners who want to understand your credibility and reach.

These groups have very different needs. Someone in crisis looking for support needs to find what they're looking for within seconds, with no friction. A major donor researching your organisation wants to understand your impact, your governance, and your finances. A volunteer wants to know what commitment is involved and how to apply.

A good charity website acknowledges this and structures itself accordingly. That usually means a clear homepage that orients every type of visitor quickly, and distinct pathways that take each audience where they need to go without making them wade through content meant for someone else.

Clarity beats cleverness

Charities often feel pressure to have websites that look impressive, with full-screen video headers, animated statistics, and bold mission statements written in abstract language. In practice, this usually gets in the way.

Visitors to your website have arrived with a purpose. They want to know what you do, who you help, and what they can do next. If that information isn't immediately clear, they'll leave. The best charity websites communicate their core mission in plain, direct language, and get the visitor to an action or a piece of relevant content as quickly as possible.

This doesn't mean your website has to be plain or uninspired. Good design can be both visually distinctive and functionally clear. The key is that design choices should serve the content, not the other way around.

Accessibility is not optional

Web accessibility means building a website that can be used by people with disabilities, including those who use screen readers, navigate by keyboard rather than mouse, or have difficulty with certain colours or text sizes.

For charities, this matters especially. The people your organisation exists to serve are often among those most likely to face barriers online. Building an inaccessible website is at odds with the values most charities hold.

Beyond ethics, accessibility is increasingly a legal consideration. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) set out the standards, and public sector organisations in the UK are now legally required to meet them. Charities aren't currently subject to the same legal obligations, but best practice is moving in that direction, and many funders and commissioners are starting to ask about it.

When briefing a web agency, ask them directly how they approach accessibility. A good agency should be able to tell you which WCAG level they build to (aim for AA as a minimum) and how they test for it.

Your website should be easy for your team to manage

A website that requires a developer to update the text on a page is a liability. Staff change, budgets tighten, and the agency that built your site won't always be available at short notice.

A well-built charity website gives your team the ability to make day-to-day updates without technical knowledge. That means a content management system (CMS) they can actually use, with clear fields and an editing interface that doesn't require training every time someone new joins.

It also means your website should be documented. When your agency hands over the site, you should receive clear guidance on how to update content, how to add new pages, and who to contact if something breaks. If an agency isn't offering this as standard, it's worth asking for it explicitly.

Performance and speed matter more than most people realise

A slow website loses visitors. Research consistently shows that users abandon pages that take more than a few seconds to load, and the effects are worse on mobile. For charities, where many service users may be on older phones or slower connections, this is a genuine concern.

Page speed is also a factor in how search engines rank your website. A faster site is more likely to appear higher in search results, which means more people finding you organically.

Ask your agency how they approach performance. Are images compressed and optimised? Is unnecessary code removed? Is the site tested on mobile as well as desktop? These are reasonable questions, and a good agency will have good answers.

Trust signals are quietly important

Visitors to a charity website are often deciding whether to give money, share personal information, or reach out for help. All of those decisions involve some level of trust. Your website can either build that trust or undermine it.

The basics include displaying your registered charity number, having an up-to-date annual report or accounts, and making it easy to find your contact details. But trust is also built through design quality, through fresh content, and through the overall impression that your organisation is active and well-run.

An outdated website can quietly harm your reputation with donors, commissioners, and the public, even if the work your charity does is excellent. The website is often the first impression, and it carries more weight than most trustees appreciate.

What to ask when commissioning a rebuild

If you're going into a procurement process for a new website, here are some of the right questions to be asking agencies:

How do you approach accessibility, and what standard do you build to? How will our team be able to update the site once it's handed over? What documentation will we receive? How do you test performance on mobile devices? Can you show us examples of charity or nonprofit work you've done? What does ongoing support look like after launch?

The answers will tell you a lot about whether an agency is genuinely suited to working with charities, or whether they're used to building sites for clients who'll hand ongoing management back to them indefinitely.

A final thought

Your website is rarely the most important thing your charity does. But it is the public face of your organisation, and it shapes how every potential donor, volunteer, service user and commissioner forms their first impression of you.

Getting it right doesn't require the biggest budget or the most elaborate build. It requires clarity about who you're trying to reach, a commitment to making the site work for all of them, and an agency that understands the sector and takes handover and documentation seriously.

If you're a trustee or committee member thinking about your charity's web presence and would like a conversation, Sea Brand works with charities and nonprofits in Brighton and beyond. Get in touch to discuss what's right for your organisation.

‍