What this guide is, and what it is not
There is no charity client on this site. Nothing below is a case study in the sector, and this is a method rather than evidence.
It is also, deliberately, light on statutory claims. There is a lot of confident advice online about what a charity must display on its website, and some of it asserts requirements that the legislation does not contain. The section below says exactly what the relevant section of the Charities Act does and does not cover, and where it stops.
Where this page does carry a figure, it is either our own measured search data — published in full on the charities industry page, in a table you can add up — or a named source with the date it was read.
The two journeys, and why one gets built
Every charity site is commissioned by people who are worried about income, and that is reasonable. Income is the constraint. But it produces a predictable site: a homepage about the cause, a Donate button in the header, a page about the appeal, a page for corporate partners, and somewhere in the middle, a section called "What we do" with four paragraphs in it.
Now arrive as the other audience. You are the person the charity exists for, or a relative of theirs, at eleven at night, on a phone, possibly in distress. You want to know whether you qualify, what happens if you get in touch, whether it costs anything, whether it is confidential, and how long it takes. The site offers you four paragraphs and a phone number for office hours.
That gap is the single biggest thing wrong with most charity websites, and it is worth saying that fixing it also fixes the fundraising case. A funder reading a site with fifteen clear service pages, each with eligibility and a process, is reading a credible organisation. A funder reading four paragraphs and a Donate button is reading a cause.
Structurally, that means the service is a top-level section, not a subsection. One page per thing you provide, named the way the person needing it would say it, with eligibility, cost, confidentiality, what happens after they make contact, and how long the wait is. Every one of those pages is also a search somebody is making tonight.
Impact in numbers, with a year on it
The donor half of the site has one job: make it credible that money given here does something. Almost all of them attempt it with adjectives.
What works instead is specific, dated and checkable:
- A number with a unit and a year. "4,812 meals in the year to March 2026" survives scrutiny. "Thousands of meals every year" does not, because a sceptical reader cannot tell whether it means two thousand or ninety.
- A cost per unit where you can stand behind it, and silence where you cannot. A stated cost per outcome is the most persuasive single line on a charity website and the easiest to get wrong — if the real figure includes overhead you would rather not mention, publish it with overhead included and explain why that is the honest number.
- The annual report linked from the page the claim is on, not only from the footer. A reader who can check a claim usually does not; a reader who cannot check it discounts it.
- One case, told properly, with consent, and marked as one case. A single named story does more than six stock photographs, and a composite presented as a real person is a risk not worth taking.
And put the year on everything. An undated impact figure reads as old, because most of them are.
The donation flow and the Gift Aid wording
Two practical points about the part of the site that takes money.
The first is that a donation page asking for a reason to exist is a donation page losing money. The highest-performing version is usually the plainest: suggested amounts with what each one does, a single-step form, a clear statement of whether this is one-off or monthly, and no navigation to wander off into. If you can only improve one page on the site this quarter, this is usually not it — but if you can only fix one form, it is.
The second is Gift Aid, where the wording matters and is frequently rewritten. HMRC does not issue a compulsory form, but it does publish model Gift Aid declarations, including one for a single donation, and its guidance is that charities use the model adapted to the period the declaration covers. A declaration has to identify the donor, confirm the donation is to be treated as Gift Aid, and make clear the donor’s own tax position — which is why the model wording includes the donor understanding that they must have paid at least as much tax as the charity will reclaim.
The failure to avoid is the tidy-up: somebody improving the site shortens the declaration into a tick-box saying "Add Gift Aid" with no statement of what the donor is confirming. That is a claim HMRC may not accept, which makes it a financial problem rather than a copy problem. Start from HMRC’s model wording and adapt the period, not the substance.
This is a web studio pointing at where published guidance lands on a website. It is not tax or legal advice, and your Gift Aid claims are between you and HMRC.
Stating your charity status — what the law actually says
This is the point most often overstated in sector advice, so here it is precisely.
Section 39 of the Charities Act 2011 applies to a registered charity whose gross income in its last financial year exceeded £10,000. Where it applies, the fact that the body is a registered charity must be stated in legible characters in three groups of documents: all notices, advertisements and other documents issued by or on behalf of the charity and soliciting money or other property for its benefit; all bills of exchange, promissory notes, endorsements, cheques and orders for money or goods purporting to be signed on its behalf; and all bills it renders, and all its invoices, receipts and letters of credit.
What section 39 does not do is name websites. That is the honest position, and it is why this page does not tell you the law requires your charity number in your footer.
What follows is practical rather than legal, and subsection (4) is the reason. It provides that the first group has effect whether the solicitation is express or implied, and whether or not the money is to be given for any consideration. A fundraising appeal published on a website is, on any sensible reading of that, a notice or advertisement soliciting money — so the cautious course is to treat it as one. Separately from the Act, the Charity Commission’s expectation of transparency and plain donor confidence both point the same way: registered name, registration number and registered address on the site, where someone can check them against the public register in thirty seconds.
So the recommendation is to display it — but as good practice and good fundraising, not because a statute says websites. Anyone who tells you section 39 covers your website is adding something to it. This is not legal advice; if the threshold or the document list matters to your particular case, work from the current text of the Act and the Commission’s guidance.
One of the hardest markets we have measured
Our own figures for this sector, published in full on the charities industry page, are the strangest set in the whole of our research.
Those are terms a studio selling to charities competes for rather than terms your donors search, so treat them as a description of our market, not yours. But the pattern is instructive anyway, and it is the reason this sector is an outlier: the charity web design market is crowded with specialist agencies who have all written the same page, while nobody has bothered with the search half. A twenty-times price difference between two phrases about the same work is a market where everyone has copied each other on one term and ignored the other.
The lesson that does transfer to your own fundraising and service search: the obvious phrase is usually the contested one. Where a charity actually gets found is the specific need, named the way the person needing it says it — which is, again, the service pages from the second section of this guide.
What to check on your own site
- Is the service a top-level section with a page per thing you provide, or a subsection with paragraphs?
- Can somebody who needs help find eligibility, cost, confidentiality and what happens next, without ringing?
- Does every impact figure carry a unit and a year?
- Is your annual report linked from the pages that make claims, not only from the footer?
- Is your Gift Aid declaration based on HMRC’s model wording, or has it been shortened into a tick-box?
- Are your registered name, number and address on the site where a donor can check them?
- Is there a route for somebody who wants to help in a way other than money — volunteering, referral, a professional offer? Those are often the most valuable enquiries and the hardest to make on most charity sites.
- Google operates an Ad Grants programme offering eligible nonprofits in-kind search advertising. Eligibility and the current allowance are on Google’s own pages and change, so check there — but if you have never looked, look.
The first two are the ones that change whether the website does the charity’s actual job.
