5 Common Charity Website Problems (And How To Fix Them)

Your website is one of the most important tools your organisation has – and yet, for many charities and social enterprises, it’s also one of the most neglected. Not out of laziness, but because charity websites are hard to prioritise when it sits somewhere between a campaign (which has a deadline) and a staff member (who has a salary). It just… exists. And slowly, over time, it stops doing its job.

In a recent webinar, we walked through five of the most common problems we see with charity websites – and more importantly, what you can actually do about them. Fair warning: reading this may produce a list of things to action. We’d encourage you to see that as a good thing.

The Five Common Problems

Before getting into solutions, it’s worth naming the problems clearly. Most struggling charity websites fall into one or more of these five categories:

1. Relevance – the website is out of date or doesn’t reflect where the organisation currently stands.
2. Performance – the website loads slowly, breaks easily, and is difficult to manage.
3. Narrative – the website lacks a compelling story that creates emotional connection and builds trust.
4. Access – the website is difficult to use for people with physical or cognitive disabilities.
5. Identity – the website doesn’t reflect the organisation’s unique brand identity.

A useful exercise: score yourself 1–5 on each of these. Where are the gaps? That’s where to focus.

When we ran this exercise during the webinar, most organisations scored themselves in the mid-teens out of 25 — which is about right, in our experience. Relevance and narrative came out as the most pressing concerns, so let’s start there.

1. Relevance – Does Your Website Reflect Who You Are Today?

One of the most common things we hear from charity professionals is that they actively avoid sending people to their website. “It doesn’t reflect who we are anymore.” The message is three years old. The team has changed. The programmes have evolved. But the website hasn’t moved an inch.

It’s an uncomfortable situation, and a very understandable one. Websites don’t come with a flashing light that says update me. Here’s a quick checklist that helps:

Mission and messaging. Does your homepage reflect your current purpose and priorities? If someone landed on it today – someone who’d never heard of you – would they understand what you do and why it matters?

Services and programmes. Are all services up to date, accurate, and clearly explained? Outdated or vague programme descriptions don’t just cause confusion – they erode trust.

Impact data. Are your stories, stats, and outcomes current? This isn’t just a website task, but a mindset shift. Keeping your impact visible should be a proactive, ongoing activity, not something you scramble to update before a funding application.

Team and governance. Are your staff, trustees, and contact details still correct? It sounds basic, but we regularly see websites that list people who left the organisation months or years ago. We’ve all been there.

News and content freshness. Does the site look alive? A news section where the last post is from 2022 doesn’t instil confidence – even if the rest of your work is excellent. A casual, occasional update is genuinely better than nothing.

The good news: most of these are relatively quick wins. You don’t need to redesign your website to fix them. You just need to carve out the time (which, we know, is its own challenge!)

2. Performance – Is Your Website Actually Working?

Performance is the least glamorous topic in website development. It’s also the one most likely to make people’s eyes glaze over in a meeting. But it matters enormously – both for your users and for how search engines rank you.

Page speed. Large, uncompressed images, too many plugins, unnecessary scripts, and no caching are the most common culprits. The practical consequence: on mobile, a poorly optimised site can leave users staring at a white screen for three or more seconds before anything appears. That’s enough for many people to just give up and leave.

You can check this for free using Google PageSpeed Insights. Aim for a score of 90+ on desktop and as high as possible on mobile. If you’re in the 60s or 70s on mobile, there’s almost certainly work to be done.

Technical foundation. Where is your site hosted? Is it on a reputable platform with regular backups? Is there an SSL certificate (the padlock in the browser bar)? Are your WordPress core, theme, and plugins kept up to date? These things feel very “IT department” – but if you’re the person responsible for the website, they’re worth knowing about.

Content structure. Websites grow organically over time – pages get added, moved, and forgotten. Unless someone is actively tending to the structure, you can end up with duplication, orphaned pages, and navigation that no longer reflects how your organisation actually works. This is extremely common, and nobody is to blame for it. It just happens.

Maintenance workflow. Who owns the website? How easy is it to update? If the CMS is confusing or the process is unclear, updates simply won’t happen. A website that nobody feels confident editing will always fall behind – not because people don’t care, but because life is short and there are seventeen other things on the to-do list.

Reliability. Check for broken links, 404 pages, and forms that don’t submit correctly. Links to external websites go stale all the time. A quarterly check doesn’t take long and makes a real difference.

3. Narrative – Does Your Website Tell a Compelling Story?

This is where many charity websites let themselves down the most – and it’s also the area with the greatest potential for improvement. It’s also, if we’re honest, quite a big ask. Storytelling well takes time and skill, and most charity staff are already stretched thin. But even small improvements here have a disproportionate impact.

Clarity of message. Can someone grasp what you do, and who for, in six to eight seconds? This sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly hard to achieve. The larger an organisation gets, the more competing voices there are – and the more likely it is that the homepage ends up trying to say everything to everyone, which means it says nothing clearly to anybody. We’ve sat in enough website meetings to know exactly how this happens.

Start with one question: who is your primary audience? Not all your audiences – your primary one. And what do you do for them? Get to the essence of that, and your homepage becomes dramatically more effective.

Human stories. Real people, real outcomes, told concisely and emotionally. Beneficiaries, volunteers, staff – bring them into your website in a way that helps visitors feel what you’re about, not just read about it. We respond to emotion far more readily than to statistics alone.

Impact proof. Testimonials, statistics, before-and-after stories, photos. Keep these current and specific.

Tone of voice. Whatever tone suits your organisation – warm and conversational, authoritative and professional – make sure it’s consistent. Not just on the website, but across your emails, social media, and annual reports. When someone moves from your Instagram to your website and it feels like a completely different organisation, trust takes a quiet hit.

Calls to action. Stories should lead somewhere. A good story on your website opens an emotional loop – and then closes it by giving the reader something meaningful to do: donate, volunteer, get in touch, share. Without that, the emotional connection just dissipates.

A useful test: find someone who has never heard of your organisation and show them your homepage for eight seconds. Ask them: what do we do? Who do we do it for? What would you do next? Their answers will tell you more than any analytics tool.

4. Access – Can Everyone Actually Use Your Website?

Around one in five people in the UK lives with some form of impairment – visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive. And yet research consistently shows that at least 95% of websites fail basic accessibility compliance. That’s a significant portion of your potential audience being excluded, often entirely unintentionally.

Accessibility tends to fall off the radar because it’s technical, it’s invisible when it’s working, and it only becomes noticeable when it isn’t – usually by the people who need it most.

Navigation. Clear menus, predictable structure, logical headings. People expect navigation to be where it usually is. Innovation in layout is fine; innovation that leaves users confused is not.

Contrast and readability. The contrast requirements between text and background colours are stricter than most people realise. A colour combination that looks perfectly readable to you may be genuinely unreadable for someone with low vision. Tools like WAVE can flag contrast issues automatically.

Keyboard accessibility. Can users navigate your website using only a keyboard? Try pressing Tab on your site and see if you can reach every link and button without a mouse. This matters for users with motor impairments, and it’s often broken without anyone noticing.

Alt text and media descriptions. Every image on your website should have a brief description – a text alternative that tells a screen reader what’s in the picture. This is one of the most commonly skipped accessibility tasks and one of the easiest to fix. (AI tools are getting increasingly good at generating alt text automatically, so this particular burden should ease over time.)

Cognitive load. Simplicity, clear language, generous spacing. Avoid jargon and unnecessarily complex vocabulary. Content that’s hard to parse alienates users with dyslexia, low literacy, or cognitive disabilities – and subtly frustrates everyone else too.

One important caveat: automated compliance checks are just the starting point. The real measure of accessibility is getting people with lived experience of disability to use your website and tell you what doesn’t work. A tool can tell you a colour fails a contrast ratio. It can’t tell you what it actually feels like to use your site.

5. Identity – Does Your Website Feel Like You?

Brand identity isn’t just for large commercial organisations. Every charity has a personality – a set of values and beliefs held by the people who run and govern it. Your website should express that. And yet identity is often the last thing that gets thought about, usually because there’s whatever budget is left over after the “important” stuff.

Visual consistency. Colours, typography, spacing, and image styles should be coherent and deliberate. If your website was built using a generic theme or template, ask yourself: does this look like us, or does it look like a website that could belong to anyone?

Brand personality. Does the website feel like your organisation? Could your regular supporters recognise your brand voice in the writing?

Photography. Authentic imagery that genuinely represents your community is more powerful than stock photography – even if it’s less polished. If you’re considering AI-generated imagery, the question isn’t whether it’s “real” – it’s whether it authentically resonates with the people looking at it.

Differentiation. What makes you distinct from other organisations working in the same space? This is often uncomfortable to articulate – it can feel like it’s not the done thing to lean into what makes you different. But it’s one of the most effective things you can do, both for your website and for your wider communications. Don’t be afraid to delve into your teams values, perspectives and opinions – and share them. This is resonance is what rallies supporters.

A Few Perspectives Worth Holding Onto

Beyond the tactical, here are some mindset shifts that can make a real difference in how you approach your website over the long term. These are less about what to do and more about how to feel about it.

Websites are never done. They’re a living piece of infrastructure, not a project with a finish line. Accepting this means you stop waiting for the perfect moment to improve things, and start making incremental progress instead.

Think contribution, not attribution. It’s tempting to demand a clear input-output equation from your website – but for most charities, that’s just not how it works. Your website contributes to trust, to income, to supporter retention, to volunteer recruitment. The impact is real even when it’s hard to measure directly. This framing can also be useful when making the case internally to trustees or finance directors who want a simple return-on-investment figure. There isn’t one. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth investing in.

Don’t pursue perfection. Ship something good enough and improve from there. Websites that never launch because they’re not quite right yet help nobody.

Remain user-centric. When internal voices compete for space on your homepage – and they will – the question that cuts through the noise is always: what does the end user need from this page? Keep returning to that.

It works if you work it. Taking ownership of your website, chipping away at it consistently, keeping it user-centred and up to date – all of this genuinely pays off. It just doesn’t happen overnight, and that’s okay.

Where to Start

If you’ve read this far and now have a daunting list of things to fix – welcome to the club. The important thing is not to try to tackle all of it at once. Pick the area that scored lowest, or the one that feels most urgent, and start there. One thing at a time.

Small, consistent improvements over time will always outperform a single expensive redesign that then sits untouched for five years.

And if you’re not sure where to begin, tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and WAVE can give you a useful starting point for performance and accessibility without spending a penny.