Earlier this year we started asking a very plain question: if someone decided today to give money to a UK charity, could they? Not in theory. On the actual website, on their phone, right now.
So we went and looked. Our crawler read every charity on the three UK registers (CCEW, OSCR and CCNI) with a website address on file: 99,606 sites, each read once in a single pass in August 2026.
36.1% of answering charity websites show a visible way to donate online.
74,548 of them answered with a real page. Everything we measured is aggregate only, no individual charity is identifiable, and the full findings are published as open research that anyone can quote.
This article is the short version: what we found, and what we think it means.
In short
- 36.1% of answering charity websites show a visible way to donate online.
- The most common donation route is somebody else’s website: 22.5% of sites send donors to an external platform to give.
- The top three platforms carry 56.5% of offsite giving. JustGiving alone is 37.9%.
- The smallest charities are the hardest to give to: 25.4% of micro charities (under £25k income) have a visible route, against 46.1% of mid-sized ones.
- 562 charity websites still link to AmazonSmile, which closed in February 2023.
Only one in three show you how to give
Of the 74,548 sites that answered, 26,943 (36.1%) showed a visible way to give: a donation platform, a payment button, a plugin or a form of their own. On the rest, we found nothing we could recognise as a donation route.
Before you quote the scarier version of that number, an honest caveat. Our crawler reads the homepage plus one donate link, so a form three clicks deep, or one drawn by JavaScript, gets missed. In fact, 20,074 of the sites we scored as “nothing found” do mention donating somewhere on the page. The real share of charities that can take money online is higher than 36.1%; how much higher is the open question, and the paper sets out exactly how far it could stretch.
But that caveat cuts both ways. If an automated crawler reading your homepage can’t find your donation route, plenty of humans won’t either. Donors rarely dig. The generous reading of our data is still this: a person landing on a typical UK charity website, ready to give, often can’t see how.
The most common donation route is somebody else’s website
When charities do take money online, the single most common route is to send the donor away. 16,752 sites (22.5%) hand the donor to an external platform, and the market behind that is remarkably concentrated. We detected 32 external platforms in total, but the top three carry 56.5% of all offsite giving. JustGiving alone accounts for 6,355 sites, or 37.9%.
To be fair to the platforms: they’re good at what they do. They handle Gift Aid, donors recognise them, and for event fundraising they’re often exactly the right tool. The problem isn’t that these platforms exist. It’s that for thousands of charities, “send them to JustGiving” appears to be the default rather than a decision.
And the default has a cost. Per-donation fees, yes, but also something harder to see on a balance sheet: the donor relationship changes hands at the exact moment someone chose to support you. The thank you page, the follow-up email, the donor’s details. Often, they’re not yours.
The charities with the least money are the hardest to give to
The likelihood of being able to give climbs steadily with charity income. Among micro charities (under £25k a year), 25.4% had a visible route. Small charities (£25k to £100k) reach 33.4%. Mid-sized charities (£100k to £2m) reach 46.1%.
That gradient runs exactly the wrong way. The organisations for whom a £20 gift matters most are the ones least able to receive it online.
We don’t read this as a competence story. Micro charities are usually volunteers, no budget, a website someone’s nephew built in 2016. It’s a capacity story. But it’s also the most fixable finding on this page, because free and low-cost donation routes exist at every level. What’s missing isn’t technology. It’s visibility, and an hour spent on the giving journey.
The WordPress paradox
WordPress is the sector’s most common platform by a distance: 35,528 of the answering sites run it, and at 43% they’re more likely to have a visible donation route than charities on any other major platform.
Here’s the odd part. WordPress is the one mainstream platform that can take donations on the charity’s own page, with mature plugins that have existed for a decade. Yet 25.4% of WordPress charities send their donors to a third party, while just 6.4% use a donation plugin.
For some of those 9,022 charities, offsite will genuinely be the right choice. But the gap between “could take the gift themselves” and “do” is wide enough to suggest most have never compared the options. They’re paying per-donation fees, on a platform that doesn’t require them to.
Full disclosure: we build donation tools for WordPress charities, so we clearly have a view here. It’s also why we counted instead of guessing, and the numbers are published in full so you can check our working.
The quiet sign of neglect
One small finding tells a bigger story. 562 charity websites still link to AmazonSmile, a scheme that closed in February 2023. And 1,471 sites carry a passive affiliate shopping scheme while having no detectable donation route at all: a way for supporters to generate pennies of commission, but no way to simply hand over money.
Dead links to a shuttered scheme, three and a half years on, mean one thing: donation and support pages nobody has looked at in years. Homepages get attention. The giving journey, apparently, doesn’t.
What we’d do with this
If you run a charity, or its website, four practical things fall out of the data:
- Try to donate to yourself. On your phone, from the homepage, right now. Time it. If you can’t find the route in under a minute, neither can a donor.
- Make the route visible. A donate link in the main navigation, on every page. Two thirds of the sites we read didn’t show us one.
- Know what your current route costs you. The fees, and who keeps the donor’s details afterwards. Sending donors offsite may still be the right answer for you. Make it a decision, not a default.
- Check the corners. Old AmazonSmile links, retired fundraising pages, a “support us” page written three website rebuilds ago. If 562 sites still link to a scheme that closed in 2023, it’s worth ten minutes to confirm yours isn’t one of them.
The wider point is one the whole sector could sit with. The moment someone decides to give is the single most valuable moment a charity website has. The census suggests that, across tens of thousands of organisations, it’s being treated as an afterthought: outsourced by default, buried below the fold, or missing entirely.
This is the first paper from our UK charity web census. The same crawl measured email security, analytics and consent, and the basics of accessible markup, and each will publish as its own paper over the coming months. All aggregate figures are released under CC BY 4.0, so you’re welcome to quote anything here with credit and a link to the full research. More at nebula.design/research.
