How to choose a website platform for your charity (and how to leave it)

Somewhere in the UK, a charity manager is reading a renewal email and frowning. The website was built four years ago with grant funding. It looked good, it launched on time, and everyone moved on to the next fire. Now the platform’s price has gone up again, the site needs things the platform cannot do, and the person who chose it left in 2024. The question in the email thread is simple: can we just move it? The answer depends entirely on a decision made years ago, casually, by someone who is no longer there.

We build and support WordPress websites for UK charities, so you can probably guess where this article ends up. But the argument is not “WordPress is best”. Plenty of charities are well served by other platforms, and we will say so below, by name. The argument is that most platform comparisons ask the wrong question. They ask which option is easiest, cheapest or prettiest on day one. The question that actually determines what your website costs over its lifetime is different:

If your charity wanted to leave this platform in three years, what could you take with you, and what would you have to rebuild?

We call it the exit clause. You would not sign an office lease without reading the break clause. Your website, and the supporter data inside it, is a charity asset in exactly the same way. It deserves the same scrutiny before you commit, not four years afterwards.

Why this bites charities harder than businesses

Three things make the sector unusually exposed to a bad platform decision.

Websites are funded in bursts. A capital grant or a one-off fundraising push pays for the build. It rarely pays for year three, when the platform raises its prices, the design dates, or a new CRM needs connecting. Businesses absorb that from revenue. Charities go looking for another grant, and “move our website” is a hard thing to fund. (If you are in that position, our free Funding Finder lists UK grants that cover digital projects.)

The decision-maker moves on. The Charity Digital Skills Report 2026 surveyed 807 UK organisations and found a sector moving fast without a map: 81% reported making digital progress in the past year, a sharp rise on 2025, yet only 28% have a digital strategy, and 47% admit they are poor at investing in digital effectively. That gap between activity and strategy is exactly where platform decisions get made on instinct, by whoever happens to be in the room, and inherited by whoever comes next.

The stakes keep rising. The Charities Aid Foundation’s UK Giving research charts around six million fewer donors over the past decade and the first fall in total giving in five years. Every lost donor makes the website’s job harder and more important, because for most supporters it is now the front door. And the legal bar is real: the Equality Act 2010 requires reasonable adjustments so disabled people can use your services, websites included, and charities that are publicly funded or perform public functions can fall under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations, which mandate WCAG 2.2 AA.

Platform choice, in other words, is a governance decision wearing a technical costume. Trustees have a duty to protect charity assets. A website and a supporter database are assets. Treat the platform decision accordingly.

The exit test

Before we tour the options, here is the test in full. For any platform, ask what happens to four things if you leave:

1. Content. Do your pages, posts and copy export in a usable format?
2. Design. Does the look and structure of the site come with you, or is it rebuilt from zero?
3. Data. Can you extract every supporter record, form submission, donation record and mailing list?
4. Capability. Could another provider, or your own team, take over without starting again?

Every platform below is measured against those four. Including ours.

Squarespace: a high floor and a locked door

Let us start with credit where it is due. Squarespace produces good-looking websites with very little effort, bundles hosting, security and updates into one predictable bill, and requires no maintenance from you at all. It also sets a genuinely decent accessibility floor: in WebAIM’s 2026 analysis of the top one million home pages, Squarespace sites averaged 33.0 detectable accessibility errors against a web-wide average of 56.1. For a two-person charity with a brochure site and no technical support, Squarespace is not a compromise. It is a sensible choice.

Now the exit clause, taken from Squarespace’s own documentation. Their export guide explains that a site exports as a single .xml file designed for WordPress, and warns that not everything will export because “many features rely on our platform’s JavaScript and CSS”. Only one blog page can be exported. Images may transfer as reference links pointing back to Squarespace, which means they can break once your subscription ends. Their import and export overview adds that images cannot be bulk exported and uploaded videos cannot be exported at all. Your design, templates and custom styling do not export in any form. You cannot even move content from one Squarespace site to another.

Run the test. Content: partially, as raw text. Design: no. Data: contacts and mailing lists export as CSV, which is genuinely good. Capability: only within Squarespace.

That matters because of what it does to pricing power. In July 2026, Squarespace announced increases of up to 26% on some plans, with the popular Core tier moving from $23 to $29 a month on annual billing, initially for customers billed in US dollars. Whether UK pricing follows is almost beside the point. When leaving is expensive, the landlord sets the rent.

Wix: quick to build, slow to leave

Wix earns similar credit. It has the cheapest entry point of the mainstream builders, an enormous app market, and the same closed-platform accessibility benefit: 33.3 average errors per home page in WebAIM’s 2026 data, nearly as good as Squarespace and markedly better than the open web. If your charity needs a simple site live this week for very little money, Wix will do that.

The exit clause is the bluntest of any platform here, and again it comes straight from the source. Wix’s help centre explains that a Wix site can only run on Wix’s servers: the content you create belongs to you, but the site itself is built on proprietary technology that cannot be hosted anywhere else. There is no full-site export of any kind. On blogs, Wix’s own support page is a single sentence: “it is not possible to export blog posts to other platforms”. In practice, migration specialists lean on an RSS feed workaround for posts and rebuild everything else by hand: pages, layouts, apps, store setup, SEO configuration, all of it.

Run the test. Content: manual copy and paste, plus the blog workaround. Design: no. Data: contacts and product lists export as CSV. Capability: only within Wix.

Wix also follows the familiar pattern of attractive first-year promotional rates that step up at renewal. None of this makes Wix a bad product. It makes it a rental. Rent when renting is right, and know that you are renting.

Lovable and the AI builders: brilliant sprints, risky homes

The newest option on the table is a different species. Tools like Lovable, Bolt and v0 generate a working web application from a text prompt. Describe what you want, and twenty minutes later there is something real on screen. For prototypes, internal tools and short-lived campaign microsites, this is genuinely brilliant, and we would encourage charities to experiment.

As a permanent home for a charity website, two things should give you pause.

The first is security. In May 2025, researcher Matt Palmer disclosed CVE-2025-48757: across a sample of 1,645 Lovable-built applications, 170 projects (around one in ten) exposed 303 database endpoints that anyone on the internet could read without logging in. Exposed data included names, email addresses, home addresses and API keys. The flaw was not exotic. The AI simply generated apps without switching on the database’s access controls, and non-technical builders had no way of knowing. Lovable’s position was that securing the database is the developer’s responsibility, which is precisely the problem: on an AI builder, the developer is you. A charity holding supporter and donor data is exactly the organisation that cannot afford those odds, and under UK GDPR the accountability for a breach sits with you, not the tool.

The second is accessibility. WebAIM’s 2026 report recorded the first regression in six years, with 95.9% of the top million home pages failing basic WCAG checks, and its conclusion points partly at the rise of automated, AI-assisted “vibe coding”. Generated code optimises for looking right, not for working with a screen reader. For a sector legally and morally bound to be accessible, that is not a footnote.

To Lovable’s credit, it can sync your code to GitHub, so unlike the closed builders you can take the code with you. But run the test honestly. What you own is an AI-generated codebase that nobody in your organisation can read or maintain. Ownership without stewardship is just a different kind of lock-in. Use these tools for the sprint. Do not move in.

WordPress: ownership with downsides and all

Here is the case for WordPress in one paragraph. It is open-source software, licensed so that the code, the database, the media library, all of it, is yours. You can move it to any hosting company, hand it to any agency, or run it on your own server, without asking anyone’s permission. It powers over 40% of all websites, which sounds like a bragging statistic but is actually an insurance policy: it means every donation tool, CRM and payment provider integrates with it, every problem you hit has been solved publicly by someone else, and there will always be another developer who knows it. For charities specifically, it means donations taken on your own site rather than a third-party redirect, proper CRM integration, and full control of the code, which is the only way a genuine WCAG 2.2 AA build is possible at all.

Run the test. Content: exports, and more importantly never needs to, because the site itself moves. Design: comes with you. Data: yours, in a database you control. Capability: transferable to any competent provider. WordPress is the only option here where the honest answer to “what can you take?” is “everything, including the site itself”.

Now the downsides in all honesty.

The maintenance is yours. Security firm Patchstack’s State of WordPress Security in 2026 counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities across the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, up 42% on the year before. Read the next sentence before closing the tab: 91% of those were in third-party plugins, 9% in themes, and exactly six, all rated low risk, in WordPress itself.

The platform is not the problem. An unmanaged pile of plugins is, and the risk is not theoretical: 46% of disclosed vulnerabilities had no fix available at disclosure, and the most heavily targeted flaws saw their first exploitation attempts within a median of five hours. Patchstack’s own conclusion is that site owners cannot treat plugin updates alone as a security strategy.

Our translation: if your charity cannot fund ongoing maintenance, whether in-house or through a support retainer, do not choose WordPress. A locked platform you cannot leave is safer than an open one you neglect.

The averages will be quoted at you, so here they are. In that same WebAIM study, WordPress home pages averaged 52.8 accessibility errors, notably worse than Squarespace’s 33.0 or Wix’s 33.3. This is worth understanding rather than explaining away. Closed builders control every line of code they output, so they set a decent floor nobody can fall below, and a hard ceiling nobody can rise above. WordPress sets no floor at all. The 252,302 WordPress sites in WebAIM’s sample include every quality of build by every quality of builder, and the average shows it. But it sets no ceiling either, which is why the properly accessible charity sites are overwhelmingly built on it. The platform gives you the ceiling. The build determines whether you reach it. Encouragingly, the same report found charity and non-profit home pages average 43.0 errors, the second-best category on the entire web after government. The sector already takes this seriously. Choose a builder who does too.

The politics are real. WordPress’s ecosystem has spent two years in a public governance dispute, with litigation between Automattic and the hosting company WP Engine still working through the courts in 2026. It has been ugly, and anyone telling you open source is drama-free is selling something. But notice what the drama has not touched: because the licence guarantees it, every site owner’s code and data remained theirs throughout, portable to any host, whatever the companies involved did to each other. That is the exit clause doing its job under the worst conditions the ecosystem has produced.

What you can actually take with you

So which should your charity choose?

Honestly, then.

Choose Squarespace if your website is a brochure: who you are, what you do, how to get in touch, a blog. If there is no budget for ongoing support, no complex donation journey, and no CRM to connect, Squarespace will serve you well, and a well-kept Squarespace site beats a neglected WordPress one every single time.

Choose Wix on the same logic at the smallest scale, when speed and the lowest possible entry cost matter more than anything else, and the site’s ambitions are modest and likely to stay that way.

Use the AI builders for what they are superb at: testing an idea, building an internal tool, spinning up a campaign microsite that holds no personal data and retires in three months.

Choose WordPress for almost everything else. The moment your website is infrastructure rather than brochure (it raises money, recruits volunteers, delivers services, feeds your CRM), or you simply expect it to still matter in five years, ownership stops being a technical preference and becomes the sensible default. You are not choosing a feature list; the closed platforms have features too. You are choosing the right to change your mind later, about your agency, your hosting, your design, your donation setup, without starting from scratch. The one condition is upkeep: put maintenance in the budget from day one, the same as insurance. That is the whole price of ownership, and it is a good trade.

If a decision like this is on your desk, this is what we do all day, and we will tell you straight if WordPress is the wrong answer for you. We have moved plenty of charities off closed platforms. We have also told a fair few they did not need to move at all.

The exit clause: nine questions before you sign anything

Put these to any agency, platform or freelancer before money changes hands. Put them in writing.

1. If we leave in three years, exactly what exports, in what format?
2. Does our design come with us, or is it rebuilt from zero?
3. Where does our supporter and donation data live, and can we extract all of it, including form submissions and mailing lists?
4. What happens to our images and video on export?
5. Can we change hosting provider without changing platform?
6. If you (the agency) disappeared tomorrow, could another provider take over without starting again?
7. What will years two to five cost, at renewal prices rather than promotional ones?
8. Who is responsible for updates, security and backups, and is that written down?
9. Does this meet our accessibility obligations, and who is verifying that against WCAG 2.2?

If a provider is evasive on question one, you have learned the most important thing about them before spending a pound.

Quick answers

Nebula Design is a Bristol WordPress agency working with UK charities and mission-led organisations. If you want a second opinion on a platform decision, book a discovery call. No sales deck, promise.