Your charity is drawing down reserves to survive. But is your website actually earning its keep?
It’s an uncomfortable question. It’s also one I keep finding myself asking, more often than I’d like.
I’ve had a version of this conversation with three different charity directors in the last month, and it always ends the same way. We’re looking at their website. The donate flow is broken on mobile. The homepage hasn’t been touched since 2021. Nothing dramatic. We’ve worked out what would actually help and roughly what it would cost.
Then it lands.
‘I’d love to, Louise. But we’re drawing on reserves to keep the lights on this year. The website will have to wait.’
I genuinely understand. When cash is tight, the website is one of the easier things to defer. It still works (sort of). The donate button still does something when you click it. Compared to staff redundancies or service cuts, putting off the redesign feels almost responsible.
But if you’re drawing on reserves to survive, every asset you own should be earning its keep. Especially the one that’s quietly running 24 hours a day.
What the numbers actually say
The squeeze is real, and it’s properly documented. A few figures worth knowing, although you probably already feel them.
The Charity Commission’s first-ever annual Charity Sector Risk Assessment, published in 2025, found that 22.5% of charities reported an operating deficit in their 2023 Annual Return. That’s up from 20% the year before. Cases of charities in insolvency or financial distress nearly doubled, from 98 to 184 in a single year.
Research from the Nottingham Trent VCSE Data and Insights Observatory found that 69% of voluntary organisations are now drawing on reserves to fill funding gaps. NCVO has estimated that the April 2025 rise in employer National Insurance contributions added £1.4 billion in costs across the sector. And the CAF Charity Insights Report 2025 found that only 30% of charity leaders consider the sector to be in a healthy financial position.
(None of this will be news to you. But I think it helps to see it written down.)
Meanwhile, charities are still expected to raise money, recruit volunteers, communicate impact, and look credible enough that funders feel confident writing the next cheque. The Charity Digital Skills Report 2025 found that 69% of charities cite organisational finances as their main barrier to digital progress. Fair enough. But it also means lots of charity websites are quietly being asked to do more with less, while the people who could improve them are busy keeping the boat afloat.
Why does the website get cut first?
When budgets need trimming, websites are an easy target. They’re not staff. They’re not the rent. You can defer a refresh for another year, and nobody will notice on Monday morning.
That logic isn’t unreasonable. But it misses something.
Your website is one of the few things you own that works without anyone clocking in. It’s open at 3 am. It doesn’t take annual leave. A reasonably good charity website is quietly talking to donors at 11 pm on a Sunday, taking volunteer applications during your trustee meetings, and answering basic questions before anyone has to pick up the phone.
When income drops, that’s exactly when you want it to do more of those things, not less.
There’s a second problem, too, and I’ve watched it play out plenty of times. When a website gets cut from the budget two or three years running, it doesn’t stay still. It gets quietly worse. Plugins fall out of date. Content goes stale. The donate page breaks on iPhones and nobody notices for six months. By the time it comes back onto the agenda, the answer isn’t a fix any more. It’s a rebuild. And rebuilds cost five times what a refresh would have cost two years ago.
Saving money on the website often costs more money in the end.
What ‘earning its keep’ actually looks like
Most charity websites I review are doing some of the work, but not all of it. Before anyone has a conversation about fixing things, I think there’s an honest test worth running. Ask what your website actually did for you in the last 90 days.
Specifically:
- How many donations came through it?
- How many email signups did it generate?
- How many volunteer enquiries landed?
- How often did funders or partners look at your impact page before a meeting?
- How much staff time did it save by answering common questions before someone had to email or pick up the phone?
If you don’t know the answers, that’s the first problem. (And not a small one.) If the answers are ‘very few’ or ‘I’m not sure’, the website isn’t pulling its weight.
A website that earns its keep doesn’t need to be flashy. It needs to be easy to find when people search for what you do, quick to load on a basic mobile phone, clear about what you do and who you help, and simple to use when someone wants to give, sign up, or get in touch. That’s the whole job.
Most charity websites I look at fail on at least two of those. Often more. The gap between ‘broken’ and ‘earning its keep’ is usually smaller than people think.
What to do when you can’t afford a rebuild
Here’s the thing. Most charities I speak to don’t actually need a rebuild. They need a few specific things sorted, or a maintenance plan that stops things falling apart in the first place. Here’s what I’d suggest if a full project isn’t on the table.
Start with an honest audit
Before spending anything, work out what’s actually wrong. There’s a real difference between ‘the website is broken’ and ‘the website is tired’. Tired sites can usually be improved for a fraction of what a rebuild would cost. Broken ones need different things, fixed differently.
Questions worth working through:
- Does it actually work on a phone? Open it on yours. Try to donate. Notice what’s annoying. (You will notice things.)
- How fast does it load? Run it through Google PageSpeed Insights. It’s free and takes 30 seconds.
- Is the homepage clear about what you do and who you help, in the first 5 seconds?
- Are the most important pages (donate, contact, services) easy to find?
- Is the content still accurate? Old staff names, finished projects sitting on the homepage, broken links.
You can do most of this yourself in an afternoon. The findings will tell you whether you need a few targeted fixes, a refresh, or something bigger. If a fresh pair of eyes on the wider site would be useful, you can book a complimentary 15-minute website review.
When one or two things are letting you down
If the audit turns up two or three specific problems (a donate page that doesn’t convert, a slow homepage, a contact form that’s mostly bots now), you don’t need a redesign. You need someone to fix the specific things properly, and leave the rest of the site alone.
That’s what my Targeted Improvements service is for. I work on the specific issue, get it sorted, and hand it back. No scope creep, no surprise quotes. For most charities, this is the cheapest way to get a meaningful improvement without committing to a big project.
When neglect is the actual problem
Plenty of sites are in decent shape underneath but haven’t been touched for two or three years. The fixes are small on their own, but they pile up. Outdated plugins. Slow page loads. Broken links. Security warnings. The kind of thing that creeps up quietly until something snaps.
This is where a Care Package makes more financial sense than another one-off fix. Monthly care from £195 catches the small stuff before it becomes the expensive stuff. WordPress and plugins stay updated. Backups happen. Security gets monitored. When something does break, it gets fixed quickly without an emergency call-out fee.
The maths is straightforward. A year of care typically costs less than one emergency rebuild after a major plugin failure.
When the design is the problem
Sometimes the bones of a site are fine, but it looks 5 years old, uses an outdated theme, and doesn’t reflect how much the organisation has grown. A full rebuild might be £10,000 to £15,000. A Website Refresh sits in the middle. Keep what works, update what doesn’t, and end up with something current without the cost or disruption of starting over.
This is what most charities actually need when they tell me, ‘We need a new website’. A refresh, not a rebuild. From around £3,000, depending on what’s involved.
Where to start with £500, £2,000 or £10,000
I’ll be honest about what each of these actually buys.
£500. A small bit of focused work. One specific thing done properly. A homepage tidy, a donate page sorted, or the worst of the content issues addressed. It won’t transform the website. But it can move one important thing from ’embarrassing’ to ‘working’.
£2,000. A meaningful improvement to the parts of the site that matter most. Donate flow, homepage, top few pages. The bits funders and donors actually look at, brought up to a standard you’d be happy to send the board chair to.
£10,000. A proper refresh covering the whole site. New design where needed, content rewrites where useful, an honest look at what the site is actually for and who it’s serving. Not a rebuild, but a meaningful step forward that should last 3-5 years before needing serious work again.
The point isn’t that you need any particular budget. It’s that you can make a sensible decision at any of these levels, as long as you start by asking the right question.
What’s the smallest amount of work that will get this website earning its keep?
The honest test
If your charity is using reserves to keep going, your trustees are right to scrutinise every line of the budget. The website absolutely should be on that list.
But scrutiny means asking better questions than ‘can we put this off another year?’ Better questions look like this:
- What did the website bring in last year that paid for itself?
- What is it costing us in hosting, software, staff time, and missed opportunities?
- What’s the smallest, cheapest fix that would change those numbers?
A website that earns its keep is a quiet income generator. A neglected one is a quiet drain. The difference is usually a few hundred to a few thousand pounds of focused work, not a £15,000 rebuild.
If you’d like a second opinion on which category yours falls into, I’m happy to take a look. No pitch, no obligation. Just an honest read on whether your site is helping you or quietly costing you.
