Published August 2026·last updated 21 September 2026·crawl of 23 August 2026
A measured census of 73,687 charity websites across the UK - every charity on the three UK registers (CCEW, OSCR and CCNI) with a usable recorded website, every income band; grant-making trusts excluded, excluding the religious-causes population (sectors.yml 2026-08-19.1; 73,687 of 99,606 sites). Every figure was read directly from the sites by NebulaBot, our crawler, and everything here is aggregate only - no charity is identifiable. The statistics cover the 34,843 sites that engage with donations online - see Understanding the data. This is a census, not a sample: every registered UK charity whose recorded website answered, measured in one pass. Every detector's error rate is measured against a blind hand-labelled sample - see Validation in the method section.
We wanted to answer a plain question: if you decided today to give money to a UK charity, could you? So we sent NebulaBot, our crawler, to look - not at a sample, but at every charity on the three UK registers with a website address on file, 73,687 of them, read once each in a single pass.
55,300 of those sites answered with a real page; the rest were dead, parked, or wouldn't let NebulaBot in - a finding in itself, and one the register paper takes up separately. Of the sites that answered, 20,457 neither take donations nor mention them - churches, village halls, clubs funded by their members. Not seeking donations online is a choice, so this paper measures the 34,843 sites that engage with donations at all. Understanding the data explains the cut.
Of those 34,843 donation-engaged sites, 20,556 - 59.0% - showed a visible way to give: a donate button, a link out to a giving platform, or a donation form. The other 14,287 - 41.0% - ask for donations but give a donor no way to act. That gap is what this paper is about.
When charities do take money online, most of them send you off to another website to do it. 13,270 sites hand the donor to an external platform rather than taking the gift themselves, and 5,671 of those - 42.7% of them - use JustGiving alone.
The bigger the charity, the likelier you can give. Among the 9,871 sites in the micro (under £25k) band, 49.0% had a route we could see; among the 2,960 in the large (£2m+) band it was 63.4%. Which is to say the charities with the least money are also the ones finding it hardest to be given any.
One pattern stood out. 7,357 of the 18,111 WordPress sites that answered - 40.6% - send their donors to a third party, on a platform that can take the donation on the charity's own page. Most of those platforms take a cut or charge fees, and the donor's details stay with the platform unless the donor chooses to share them - at the exact moment someone decided to give.
One caveat before you quote anything: 14,287 of the sites scored as having no route do mention donations somewhere on the page. Some genuinely can't take a donation online; for others, NebulaBot read the homepage and one donate page and may simply have missed it. Section 8 sets out how far that could stretch.
We fetched 73,687 sites. 18,387 gave us nothing usable because the site was dead, parked, or behind an anti-bot check; 55,300 answered with a real page. Of those, 20,457 neither take donations nor mention them, so they sit outside the question this paper asks. Every percentage on this page is based on the 34,843 donation-engaged sites, unless it says otherwise - Understanding the data explains the cut. For scale: the three UK registers list 203,701 charities between them, and only those with a usable recorded website could enter this page's population - no figure here says anything about the charities with no website at all.
This paper asks how charities take donations online, so its statistics cover the 34,843 websites that engage with donations at all: a visible donation route, or a mention of donating without one.
The 20,457 answering sites that neither take donations nor mention them are excluded from every share unless a section says otherwise. Most are small member-funded organisations - village halls, scout groups, sports clubs, local societies - that raise money in other ways. Not seeking donations online is a choice, not a gap, and counting them would make every figure here say less about the charities the topic is actually about.
Two honesty notes. The engagement boundary is itself detected from page text - a site that asks for donations only in an image, or only on a page we never read, can be missed - and the mention signal is not separately scored in the Validation table. And §7 (affiliate shopping) deliberately covers every answering site, because affiliate schemes matter most on exactly the sites outside this cut.
The chart below covers every donation-engaged site. The most common way the UK's charities take donations online is through somebody else's website.
| Route | Sites | Share | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sent to an external platform | 13,270 | 38.1% | The donor leaves the site for JustGiving, CAF (the Charities Aid Foundation), Enthuse and the like. |
| A payment button on their own page | 4,941 | 14.2% | PayPal, Stripe or similar bolted on. They can take a card; there's no donation experience around it. |
| A WordPress donation plugin | 1,611 | 4.6% | A donation plugin already in place. They've already decided they want on-site donations. |
| A hand-rolled form | 734 | 2.1% | Posts to a donation-shaped URL on their own site, with no platform we recognise behind it. |
| Nothing found | 14,287 | 41.0% | Not on the homepage, and not on the one donate page we followed. |
03 · The platform league table
13,270 sites send donors to an external platform, and most use one of a handful of big names. Another 20 platforms sit below the chart, each used by 194 sites or fewer.
958 sites link to more than one platform and are counted once per platform, so the rows sum to more than 13,270 and the shares to a little over 100%.
| Platform | Sites | Share of offsite sites |
|---|---|---|
| JustGiving | 5,671 | 42.7% |
| CAF | 1,795 | 13.5% |
| Enthuse | 812 | 6.1% |
| PayPal Giving Fund | 764 | 5.8% |
| Donorbox | 633 | 4.8% |
| Beacon | 575 | 4.3% |
| Localgiving | 575 | 4.3% |
| GoFundMe | 552 | 4.2% |
| Give as you Live (donate) | 469 | 3.5% |
| Crowdfunder | 355 | 2.7% |
| Stripe (hosted donate page) | 267 | 2.0% |
| Peoples Fundraising | 226 | 1.7% |
| Fundraise Up | 194 | 1.5% |
| Givey | 171 | 1.3% |
| Virgin Money Giving (closed February 2022) | 167 | 1.3% |
| TotalGiving | 164 | 1.2% |
| Wonderful | 149 | 1.1% |
| Big Give | 122 | 0.9% |
| KindLink | 120 | 0.9% |
| Blackbaud | 115 | 0.9% |
| Now Donate | 96 | 0.7% |
| Raisely | 81 | 0.6% |
| GoodHub | 71 | 0.5% |
| Give A Little | 64 | 0.5% |
| Stewardship | 46 | 0.3% |
| MuchLoved | 30 | 0.2% |
| Dona | 17 | 0.1% |
| Donr | 14 | 0.1% |
| Classy | 14 | 0.1% |
| CharityExtra | 12 | 0.1% |
| Chuffed | 11 | 0.1% |
| Parish Giving Scheme | 1 | 0.0% |
The league counts only sites whose route is an external platform. This counts every signal on every route - which is how the generic gateways become visible: PayPal and Stripe together appear on more sites than any named platform except JustGiving, and neither is a donation product.
| Technology | Route it implies | Sites |
|---|---|---|
| JustGiving | External platform | 5,784 |
| PayPal (button) | Payment button | 4,184 |
| CAF | External platform | 1,818 |
| Stripe (JS on their own page) | Payment button | 1,811 |
| GiveWP | WordPress plugin | 1,232 |
| Enthuse | External platform | 829 |
| PayPal Giving Fund | External platform | 776 |
| An on-site form we could not identify | Their own form | 734 |
| Donorbox | External platform | 639 |
| Beacon | External platform | 597 |
| Localgiving | External platform | 585 |
| GoFundMe | External platform | 563 |
| Give as you Live (donate) | External platform | 478 |
| Crowdfunder | External platform | 363 |
| Stripe (hosted donate page) | External platform | 271 |
| Charitable | WordPress plugin | 234 |
| Peoples Fundraising | External platform | 228 |
| SumUp | Payment button | 218 |
| Fundraise Up | External platform | 206 |
| Givey | External platform | 174 |
| Donorfy | Payment button | 173 |
| Virgin Money Giving (closed February 2022) | External platform | 170 |
| TotalGiving | External platform | 168 |
| Wonderful | External platform | 152 |
| GoCardless | Payment button | 131 |
| Big Give | External platform | 128 |
| Square | Payment button | 122 |
| KindLink | External platform | 122 |
| Blackbaud | External platform | 119 |
| A WordPress donation plugin | WordPress plugin | 116 |
| Now Donate | External platform | 96 |
| Raisely | External platform | 82 |
| GoodHub | External platform | 73 |
| Give A Little | External platform | 64 |
| CiviCRM | WordPress plugin | 48 |
| Stewardship | External platform | 46 |
| MuchLoved | External platform | 30 |
| WP Simple Pay | WordPress plugin | 20 |
| Worldpay | Payment button | 19 |
| Dona | External platform | 17 |
| Donr | External platform | 14 |
| Classy | External platform | 14 |
| CharityExtra | External platform | 13 |
| Chuffed | External platform | 11 |
| Parish Giving Scheme | External platform | 1 |
Donation routes climb steadily with charity income up to the mid band (£100k-2m); the large band (£2m+) sits level with it rather than above. Bigger charities are also likelier to have chosen a proper platform rather than a bolted-on payment button. The large band covers 2,960 sites - far fewer than the others, simply because few charities are that big.
| Income band | Sites | External | Payment button | Plugin | Own form | None | Any route |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Micro (under £25k) | 9,871 | 2,764 | 1,517 | 405 | 147 | 5,038 | 49.0% |
| Small (£25k-100k) | 7,509 | 2,743 | 1,125 | 298 | 99 | 3,244 | 56.8% |
| Mid (£100k-2m) | 13,261 | 6,257 | 1,784 | 694 | 262 | 4,264 | 67.8% |
| Large (£2m+) | 2,960 | 1,193 | 337 | 137 | 211 | 1,082 | 63.4% |
| Income unknown | 1,242 | 313 | 178 | 77 | 15 | 659 | 46.9% |
Donation plugins are almost exclusively a WordPress story - the cross-tab below shows a handful of installs on Drupal, Joomla and bespoke sites. On most other platforms, a charity can either send the donor to an external site or add a payment button. Squarespace charities take donations at lower rates than WordPress (55.7% vs 66.0%), almost entirely by sending donors elsewhere. The quiet outlier is Webflow, highest on the board at 73.7% of its 358 sites - small numbers, best read with care.
| Platform | Sites | External | Payment button | Plugin | Own form | None | Any route |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 18,111 | 7,357 | 2,583 | 1,577 | 435 | 6,159 | 66.0% |
| Other or bespoke | 6,991 | 2,258 | 1,030 | <10 | 224 | 3,470 | 50.4% |
| Wix | 4,322 | 1,449 | 576 | <10 | <10 | 2,293 | 46.9% |
| Squarespace | 2,493 | 1,177 | 210 | 0 | <10 | 1,104 | 55.7% |
| Drupal | 546 | 151 | 108 | 17 | 41 | 229 | 58.1% |
| GoDaddy Website Builder | 538 | 185 | 153 | 0 | 0 | 200 | 62.8% |
| Weebly | 436 | 150 | 84 | <10 | 0 | 199 | 54.4% |
| Webflow | 358 | 204 | 60 | 0 | 0 | 94 | 73.7% |
| Google Sites | 335 | 126 | 44 | 0 | 0 | 165 | 50.7% |
| Joomla | 322 | 114 | 61 | <10 | 19 | 126 | 60.9% |
| HubSpot | 163 | 30 | 10 | 0 | <10 | 122 | 25.2% |
| Shopify | 101 | 36 | 10 | 0 | <10 | 54 | 46.5% |
| SharePoint | 56 | 16 | <10 | <10 | <10 | 32 | 42.9% |
| Umbraco | 36 | <10 | <10 | 0 | <10 | 19 | 47.2% |
| Everything else (4 platforms) | 35 | <10 | <10 | 0 | 0 | 21 | 40.0% |
WordPress has well-established donation plugins, but most WordPress charities don't use them. Instead they send donors to external platforms that mostly take a cut or charge fees, and where the donor's details stay unless the donor chooses to share them. For some charities that will be the right choice - but the numbers suggest many have never compared the options.
Disclosure: Nebula Design builds a WordPress donation product, so we have an interest in this comparison - the method section says how that is handled in these figures.
Unlike the rest of the paper, this section covers all 55,300 answering sites - an affiliate footer is often the only money-shaped link on exactly the sites outside the donation-engaged population.
3,046 sites (5.5%) carry an affiliate shopping scheme - a supporter buys something elsewhere and a commission arrives later. No donor ever gives through these, so they're recorded separately and never counted as a route. 1,240 of them have a passive scheme and no detectable donation route at all. A site can carry several schemes (328 do), so the bars sum to more than the site count.
14,287 of the 34,843 donation-engaged sites
scored none: they ask for donations on the page, and NebulaBot
could not find a way to act on it. Some genuinely have no online
route; for others, the crawler missed it.
Our blind sample scores the route detector at 0.66 agreement across 87 hand-labelled sites, the weakest detector behind this paper. That is a bound on how far this figure could move, not a correction to it: the agreement is measured across every route, not on this category alone. A score of none only
means we found nothing on the homepage or on the one donate page we
followed - so a form three clicks deep, or a widget drawn by JavaScript,
ends up in this category.
A verdict from a followed donate page is stronger evidence than one from the homepage alone: a donate page that named no platform leans towards the route genuinely not being there.
| Verdict came from | Sites | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| No donate link on the homepage | 7,310 | Weakest evidence - we never looked past the homepage. |
| We followed a donate page and still found nothing | 6,977 | Strongest evidence - a donate page that named no platform, read fresh or from our cache. |
Feel free to copy and share these. All figures come from our UK-wide census (September 2026) - please credit Nebula Design and link back to this paper.
41.0% of the UK charity websites that ask for donations offer no visible way to give - 14,287 of the 34,843 sites that engage with donations online (September 2026).
59.0% of the UK charity websites that engage with donations online show a visible way to give - a donate button, a link to a giving platform, or a donation form (20,556 of 34,843 sites). Sites that neither take nor mention donations are excluded - see Understanding the data.
38.1% of the UK charity websites that engage with donations online send donors to somebody else's website to give - 5,671 of them to JustGiving alone.
The top three donation platforms are used by 62.4% of the UK charity sites that send donors offsite; JustGiving alone is 42.7%.
40.6% of WordPress charity sites that engage with donations online send donors to a third-party donation platform, even though WordPress can host the donation form itself.
483 UK charity websites still link to AmazonSmile, which closed in February 2023.
167 UK charity websites still send donors to Virgin Money Giving, which closed in February 2022 - a visible donation route a donor can no longer give through.
14,287 UK charity sites mention donations on the page, but no donation route NebulaBot could detect.
Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Webflow, Google Sites and ChurchSuite load Stripe and PayPal for their own shop or ticketing. The first hand-labelled validation case is exactly this - the detector said gateway/Stripe, the human said none, and the human was right: that Stripe is ticket checkout. This is our largest known source of false positives, and we've deliberately not patched it yet: writing a rule now would swap a measurable error for an unmeasurable one, and the validation sample already includes enough of these cases to measure the effect properly.
A page about how supporters raise money links to JustGiving because that's where supporters set up their pages. We use link ranking and a weak_link flag to catch this, and any platform attributed to a flagged site should be treated with caution.
The single biggest limitation on this page - see §8 above.
Virgin Money Giving closed in February 2022. The link is visible, so the route counts as visible - the measurement is honest - but a donor following it cannot give. These sites stay in the totals because the page measures visible routes; this note is here so nobody quotes the headline as working routes.
Every detector behind this page was scored against a blind, hand-labelled random sample of 102 sites drawn from the Bristol pilot crawl (labels fixed before scoring; scored 2026-08-18). The detectors are unchanged between that crawl and this one. A dash means the statistic is undefined on the sample, not zero.
| Detector | n | Score | Statistic |
|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress detection | 87 | 1.00 | precision · recall 1.00 |
| Platform identification | 87 | 1.00 | agreement |
| Donation platform naming | 57 | 0.93 | agreement |
| Donation route | 87 | 0.66 | agreement |
| Cookie analytics | 98 | 0.93 | precision · recall 0.83 |
| Cookieless analytics | 79 | — | precision · recall 0.00 |
| Consent tool | 101 | 0.79 | precision · recall 0.83 |
Every figure was computed from pages already in the local cache - at most
the homepage plus one donate link that actually appears in that homepage's
HTML. No path is ever guessed, robots.txt is honoured, and opted-out domains
are never fetched. A site's route is the strongest signal found, in the
order wp_plugin, offsite_platform, onsite_gateway. Affiliate
shopping schemes are recorded separately and never scored as a route.
We made no attempt to detect Gift Aid capture, so no figure here says
anything about it - a candidate for a future pass.
The population is every charity on the three UK registers (CCEW, OSCR and CCNI) with a usable recorded website, every income band; grant-making trusts excluded, excluding the religious-causes population (sectors.yml 2026-08-19.1; 73,687 of 99,606 sites), whose recorded
website answered: 73,687 fetched sites, 34,843 of which answered with a real page.
Cross-tab cells below 10 are suppressed. Disclosure: our own
donation product is detected by the same pipeline; sites running it are
counted in the route aggregates like any other plugin, but the brand is
not named or ranked anywhere in this report.
What comes next: the same crawl measured more than donations. Two companion papers are live: Can you trust email from the UK's charities? (SPF, DMARC and MX for every domain here) and Cookies, consent and the UK's charity websites (analytics and consent tooling on every readable homepage). The basics of accessible markup are also recorded for every site and will publish as their own paper. The aggregate table behind every figure on this page is released under CC-BY (see How to cite) so anyone can recompute them.
Quote any figure freely with credit. For a formal reference:
Nebula Design (2026). How the UK's charities take donations online: a census of 73,687 charity websites. Nebula Design Research, August 2026. Version 2.0, crawl of 23 August 2026. https://nebula.design/research/uk-charity-donation-platforms-2026/
The aggregate table behind every figure is data.csv - every number on this page can be recomputed from it.
All aggregate figures are released under CC BY 4.0; register data is used under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (Crown Copyright). This page carries no information about any individual charity.
