A good nonprofit website has a harder job than most business websites. It may need to help someone access a service, convince a donor to give, recruit a volunteer, provide information to a funder, promote an event and explain the organization’s impact, sometimes all within the same visit.
That is why the best nonprofit websites are not necessarily the biggest or the most visually impressive. They are the ones that make it easy for different people to understand the organization, find what they need and take the next step.
If you are planning a new website or wondering whether your current one is still doing its job, these are the 15 things we think every nonprofit website should have in 2026.
What Should a Nonprofit Website Include?
At a minimum, a strong nonprofit website should clearly explain the organization’s mission and programs, provide simple navigation, make donating and volunteering easy, demonstrate impact, work properly on mobile devices, meet appropriate accessibility standards and give staff a practical way to keep the site current. It should also be built to appear in search, protect visitor information and measure whether people are actually completing the actions that matter.
The exact mix will vary. A national charity with dozens of programs needs a very different website from a small community organization run by five staff members. The goal should not be to add every possible feature. It should be to build the website around the people your organization serves and the jobs you need the site to perform.
That is the same principle we use when approaching nonprofit website design: start with the audiences, goals and real-world needs of the organization, then decide what the website actually requires.
1. A Clear Explanation of What Your Organization Does
This sounds obvious, but it is one of the most common problems on nonprofit websites. Organizations often become so familiar with their own language that they forget a first-time visitor may know almost nothing about them.
Your homepage should quickly answer a few basic questions: Who do you help? What do you do? Where do you do it? Why does it matter?
A mission statement can be part of that explanation, but it should not be the only explanation. Phrases such as “building stronger communities” or “creating meaningful change” may accurately reflect your values, but they could also describe thousands of other organizations. Visitors need enough concrete information to understand what you actually do.
If you provide housing support in Waterloo Region, say so. If you run recreation programs for children with disabilities across Ontario, say that. Clear language does not diminish your mission. It makes the mission easier to understand.
The same principle applies throughout the site. Internal program names, acronyms and sector terminology may make perfect sense inside your organization but create unnecessary work for the public. Write first for the person who has never attended one of your meetings.
2. Navigation Built Around the People Using the Website
A nonprofit website often serves several very different audiences. Someone looking for a program has different priorities from someone considering a donation, and both are different from a corporate partner evaluating a sponsorship opportunity.
The website structure should recognize those differences.
This does not necessarily mean creating a separate menu for every audience. It means organizing information so that the paths people are most likely to take are obvious. Programs and services should be easy to find. Donation and volunteer opportunities should not be buried. Information for partners, funders or members should live somewhere that makes sense.
We dealt with exactly this challenge when rebuilding the Volunteer Waterloo Region website. Their site needed to work for people looking to volunteer, workplaces that wanted to get involved and community organizations using their services. The solution was not simply adding more information. It was giving those audiences clearer paths through the information that was already there.
When reviewing your own navigation, try approaching the website as a visitor rather than as a staff member. Pick three or four common tasks and see how quickly you can complete them. If you already know where everything lives, ask someone outside the organization to try.
3. Clear Calls to Action
Once someone understands what you do, the website should make it obvious what they can do next.
That next step will vary by organization and by page. It could be donating, volunteering, registering for a program, attending an event, contacting a staff member, joining a mailing list or accessing support.
The mistake is assuming visitors will figure it out themselves.
A page about a program should tell people how to access that program. A page about volunteering should lead to current opportunities or an application. A fundraising page should provide a clear route to give. Even an About page can guide interested visitors toward impact information, programs or ways to get involved.
Descriptive calls to action usually work better than vague buttons such as “Learn More.” If the destination is a volunteer application, say Apply to Volunteer. If the visitor is about to see available programs, say View Our Programs.
Good website design reduces small moments of uncertainty. Clear calls to action are one of the simplest ways to do that.
4. Useful Program and Service Pages
For many nonprofits, programs and services are the most important content on the entire website. They are also frequently given far less attention than the homepage.
If someone is looking for help, they should not have to download a PDF, read three paragraphs of organizational history or call your office just to determine whether a program is relevant to them.
An effective program page should explain what the program does, who it is for, where it is available and how someone accesses it. Depending on the service, it may also need to cover eligibility, cost, referral requirements, schedules, locations, accessibility or what happens after someone applies.
Separate pages for important programs can also significantly improve search visibility. People do not always search for the name of an organization. They search for the service they need. A focused page about a specific service gives Google a much clearer page to show for that search than a two-sentence description buried on a general programs page.
This is an area where writing for people and writing for search engines are largely the same thing. Specific, well-organized information helps both.
5. A Donation Experience That Makes Giving Easy
Putting a Donate button in the navigation is a good start. It is not the entire donation strategy.
Before giving, people often want reassurance that they understand the organization and the impact their contribution can make. Your website should make that case clearly, then remove as much friction as possible once someone decides to donate.
A good donation path might include a concise explanation of the need, tangible examples of impact, options for one-time and recurring gifts, and a donation form that works properly on a phone. If you use CanadaHelps, Zeffy or another external platform, the transition should feel clear and trustworthy rather than sending the visitor somewhere unexpected with no explanation.
It is worth going through the entire process yourself periodically, especially before major fundraising periods. Start on the homepage using your phone and make a small donation. Count the steps. Look for confusing messages, unnecessary fields, awkward redirects or anything else that might make a donor hesitate.
We created our free Giving Season Website Checkup around exactly this idea: look at the website from the donor’s point of view rather than simply checking whether a Donate button exists.
6. A Real Path for Volunteers to Get Involved
Volunteers are essential to many nonprofits, yet volunteer information is often scattered across old PDFs, news posts and outdated application forms.
Someone who arrives motivated to help should be able to quickly understand what opportunities exist, what is involved and how to get started.
That may mean maintaining a current opportunities page, explaining different types of volunteer roles or creating a simple interest form for organizations that do not recruit for specific positions year-round. If certain roles require training, age minimums, background checks or a regular commitment, explain that before someone applies.
It is also worth thinking beyond recruitment. Current volunteers may use the website to access schedules, training resources, forms or event information. If those needs are common enough, making that information easier to find can reduce administrative work for your staff as well.
The goal is not simply to advertise volunteering. It is to make the jump from “I’d like to help” to “here is what I do next” as short as possible.
7. Evidence of Your Impact
People visiting a nonprofit website are naturally going to ask whether the organization makes a difference. Your website should help answer that question.
Impact can be communicated in many ways. Numbers are useful when they are meaningful: meals provided, families supported, volunteers placed, kilometres of habitat restored, students served or whatever measures actually reflect your work. Annual reports and financial information can provide deeper detail for donors and funders who want it.
Stories matter too. A short case study or first-person account can make the work much more tangible than a page full of statistics. The strongest websites often use both, giving visitors concrete evidence of scale while showing the human impact behind the numbers.
Keep this information reasonably current. An impressive statistic from 2019 starts to raise questions when it is still being presented as the organization’s latest result in 2026.
Impact information also builds trust beyond fundraising. Prospective employees, volunteers, funders, community partners and journalists may all use it when deciding how seriously to take the organization.
8. Real People, Real Stories and Authentic Photography
Nonprofits have one major advantage over many commercial brands: they usually have real stories worth telling.
Use them.
Where privacy and consent allow, photography of your actual programs, staff, volunteers, events and community will almost always communicate more than generic stock photography. It shows that the work is real and gives visitors a much stronger sense of the organization.
The same applies to writing. Testimonials, short participant stories, volunteer experiences and project updates can make an organization feel much more human than pages filled entirely with institutional language.
That does not mean every page needs an emotional story. In some settings, particularly organizations working with vulnerable populations, privacy and dignity are more important than marketing. The goal is authenticity without turning the people you serve into promotional material.
Good nonprofit storytelling should help people understand the work while respecting the people at the centre of it.
9. A Strong Mobile Experience
A nonprofit website that only works well on a desktop computer is no longer a functional website.
Visitors may arrive from social media, an email campaign, a QR code at an event or a Google search on their phone. Someone could be looking up a program from a bus stop, donating after seeing a social post or trying to find your address while already on the way there.
Important tasks need to work comfortably on a small screen. Navigation should be simple, buttons large enough to tap, forms manageable, text readable and critical information easy to find without endless scrolling.
Donation forms deserve particular attention. Every extra field and every awkward interaction becomes more noticeable on a phone. The same goes for event registrations and volunteer applications.
When evaluating mobile usability, do not just shrink your browser window on a desktop computer. Use the website on an actual phone and try to complete the same tasks you expect visitors to complete.
10. Accessible Website Design
Accessibility should be part of the website from the beginning rather than treated as a plugin or a final compliance check.
In practice, that means paying attention to colour contrast, text size, keyboard navigation, heading structure, link descriptions, form labels, image alternative text, video captions and the many other details that determine whether someone can successfully use the site.
For Ontario nonprofits, there can also be formal legal requirements. Under the AODA, designated public-sector organizations and businesses or nonprofits with 50 or more employees are required to make public websites and applicable web content conform with WCAG 2.0 Level AA requirements, subject to the rules and exceptions in the regulation. Smaller nonprofits may not fall under that specific website requirement, but accessibility remains an important part of serving the public well.
You can review the province’s current AODA website accessibility requirements to understand which rules apply to your organization.
More broadly, accessibility is simply good website practice. Clear headings, readable type, descriptive links and straightforward navigation tend to make websites easier for everyone to use.
11. Fast, Reliable Website Performance
Nonprofit websites can become surprisingly heavy over time. Large photographs are uploaded without optimization, fundraising tools add scripts, old plugins accumulate and pages get rebuilt repeatedly without anyone looking at what is happening underneath.
Eventually, the website starts to feel slow.
Performance matters because every visitor experiences it. A donor arriving from an email campaign should not have to wait for an oversized homepage video. Someone looking for urgent program information should not be staring at a loading screen.
Keep the build as simple as the organization reasonably needs. Optimize images before uploading them, remove plugins and features that no longer serve a purpose, use reliable hosting and test important pages regularly.
This is also one reason we caution nonprofits against equating a more expensive or sophisticated website with a better one. In our guide to how much a nonprofit website costs in Canada, we make the same point from a budgeting perspective: there is no benefit in paying for complexity the organization does not actually need.
12. A Website Built to Be Found in Search
Search engine optimization matters for nonprofits because people often search for the problem, service or opportunity before they search for the organization providing it.
Someone might search for youth volunteering in Kitchener, caregiver support in Ontario, community mental health services, environmental organizations in Canada or where to donate winter clothing. If your organization provides the answer but Google cannot clearly understand your website, another organization may appear instead.
Good nonprofit SEO starts with website structure. Important programs deserve focused pages. Page titles and headings should describe what the content is actually about. Locations should be clear where geography matters. Internal links should help visitors and search engines understand how related information fits together.
The content itself needs substance as well. Search engines have become increasingly good at identifying pages that provide useful answers instead of simply repeating a target keyword. Write the best explanation of the program, topic or question that you reasonably can.
The same work increasingly helps your organization appear in AI-driven search experiences. Clear organization names, specific services, locations, well-structured pages, credible information and useful supporting content all make it easier for search systems to understand who you are and what you do.
SEO should therefore be part of the planning process for a new website, not a task handed to someone after all of the pages and URLs have already been decided.
13. Privacy, Security and Control of Your Digital Assets
Nonprofit websites can collect sensitive information through donations, newsletter registrations, program inquiries, volunteer applications and other forms. Organizations need to think carefully about what information they collect, where it goes and who can access it.
Use secure forms and reputable third-party platforms for sensitive transactions. Keep WordPress, plugins and other website software current. Remove old administrator accounts when staff or contractors leave. Use strong passwords and multi-factor authentication wherever it is available.
Ownership matters too. Your organization should know who controls the domain name, website hosting, Google Analytics account, Search Console property, donation platform, email marketing account and other important digital systems.
An outside agency can manage those things for you, but the organization should not discover three years later that an old freelancer owns the domain or that nobody knows how to access an important account.
Treat the website as organizational infrastructure, because that is what it has become.
14. A Content Management System Your Team Can Actually Use
A nonprofit website is not finished when it launches. Programs change, staff members leave, events are announced, reports are published and campaigns come and go.
If every one of those changes requires a developer, the site becomes expensive to operate and eventually starts falling out of date.
We build our website design projects in WordPress partly for this reason. Routine content should be manageable by the people responsible for the website, without asking them to become developers.
That was an important part of our work with the Canadian Sport Film Festival. Their programming changes each season, so the website could not be something that looked good at launch but required an agency every time the lineup changed. We built a structure their team could continue updating themselves.
The right solution will depend on the organization, but the principle is the same. Design for the person who will be maintaining the site six months after launch, not just for the people sitting in the redesign meetings today.
15. Analytics That Measure What Actually Matters
Website traffic is useful, but knowing that 4,000 people visited your site last month does not tell you whether the website is accomplishing anything.
A nonprofit should identify the actions that matter and track them.
Depending on the organization, those actions could include completed donations, clicks through to an external donation platform, volunteer applications, program registrations, contact forms, newsletter signups, resource downloads or event registrations.
Google Analytics and Search Console can provide useful information about how people arrive and what they do, but measurement should start with the organization’s goals rather than with whatever metrics happen to appear on a dashboard.
If donations are a major objective, know whether people are reaching the donation page and where they are coming from. If program access matters, understand which service pages are being found through Google. If you spend time publishing resources, see whether anyone is actually discovering and using them.
You do not need a 40-page monthly analytics report. You need enough information to tell whether the website is helping people take the actions that matter and where there may be friction worth fixing.
How Many of These Does Your Nonprofit Website Have?
A strong nonprofit website does not need every new design trend, complicated animation or piece of technology an agency can put into a proposal. It needs to support the real work of the organization.
People should quickly understand what you do and how to access your programs. Donors should be able to see the impact of their support and give without unnecessary friction. Volunteers should know how to get involved. Funders and partners should see an organization that looks credible and current. Staff should be able to maintain the site without fearing that one wrong click will break everything.
If your website already does most of those things well, you may not need a complete redesign. Sometimes the best investment is improving a few weak areas rather than replacing everything.
If the underlying structure is getting in the way, that is a different conversation.
Evergreen provides nonprofit website design for charities and nonprofit organizations across Canada. We build around the people your organization serves, the people who support it and the team that has to manage the website after it launches.
If you are considering a new site but are not sure what level of project your organization actually needs, you can also read our guide to nonprofit website costs in Canada or talk to us about your website.
