What a charity website should cost, and what trustees should insist on before signing

Why charities are the exception

For almost every other kind of organisation the website is a brochure and the real demand is to be found in search. Charity inverts that. The site is the fundraising instrument: it is where the donation happens, where the volunteer signs up, where the grant officer checks you are real. It carries the transaction, not just the argument for it.

Which is why the design and build budget is worth defending, and why the cheapest option is frequently the most expensive one.

The bands, and what moves you between them

£1,495 to £4,000. A clear, fast, accessible site with your work, your impact, your people and a donation button that goes somewhere sensible. For a great many small charities this is the right answer and always was.

£4,000 to £12,000. A real donation journey with regular giving, a members or supporters area, events with bookings, or content that has to be maintained by several people with different permissions.

Above £12,000. Integration into a CRM you already run, complex grant or case management, or multiple audiences with genuinely different journeys. Legitimate, but the trustees should be able to name which of those is driving it.

What moves you up a band is almost never design. It is the number of things the site has to do reliably when nobody is watching.

The eight things to get in writing

This is the part that saves money, and it costs nothing to ask.

1. Who owns it. The domain in the charity's name, the code the charity's to take, the accounts under the charity's login. If any of those sit with the supplier, you are renting.

2. Accessibility, to a named standard. WCAG 2.2 Level AA, designed in rather than audited on afterwards. Retrofitted accessibility is more expensive and produces a worse result. Ask for a statement that names what falls short as well as what passes, because every honest statement has both.

3. What happens to donor data. Who is the controller, who is the processor, where does it sit, and what does the supplier have access to. If the answer is vague at quote stage it will be vague at breach stage.

4. The total first-year cost. Build, hosting, care, the donation platform's percentage, and anything licensed. A £2,000 build with £180 a month attached to it is not a £2,000 build.

5. What happens if the supplier disappears. Documented handover, exportable content, no proprietary page builder that only they can operate.

6. Who can edit it. Specifically, can a volunteer change the homepage text without breaking the layout or paying somebody. If not, budget for the paying.

7. Performance, measured. Ask for a Lighthouse score on a mobile profile at launch, not a promise that it will be fast.

8. What is excluded. The most useful sentence in any quote.

Where charity sites usually go wrong

Two failures, both common. The first is a site built around the organisation's structure rather than the visitor's question: five committees on the menu and no obvious way to give. The second is a donation journey with too many steps, on a platform chosen for its admin screen rather than its checkout.

Neither is a design problem and neither costs much to avoid. They cost a great deal to fix afterwards.

Procurement, and the questions that come later

Larger funders and public-sector partners ask a consistent set of due-diligence questions, and most small suppliers cannot answer them: security posture, accessibility, data protection, business continuity, whether source code escrow is available. Having those answers published rather than assembled under pressure is worth more than it looks, and it is on the capabilities page here.

What the sector needs from a website specifically, including where an off-the-shelf supporter CRM is the right answer instead of a build, is on the charity page. Ongoing changes and maintenance are from £49 a month, and a rebuild that keeps the search visibility you already have starts at £1,495.

Questions trustees ask

How much should a small charity pay for a website?

£1,495 to £4,000 for a clear, fast, accessible site with a working donation button. £4,000 to £12,000 once you add regular giving, a supporters area or events with bookings. Above £12,000 the trustees should be able to name the specific requirement driving it.

Does a charity website have to be accessible?

It should target WCAG 2.2 Level AA, and funders and public-sector partners increasingly ask for it contractually. Ask for it designed in rather than audited afterwards, and ask for a statement that names what falls short as well as what passes.

What should a charity own at the end of a website project?

The domain in the charity's name, the code, the content and every account under the charity's own login, plus documentation. If the site stops working or becomes uneditable when the supplier leaves, it was rented rather than bought.