Website Health May 19, 2026

Free Nonprofit Website Audit Checklist (47 Items, DIY)

A printable, plain-language nonprofit website audit checklist. Forty-seven specific items across the six areas that actually move the needle for charities: accessibility, donation flow, performance, SEO, donor trust, and mobile. Every item includes how to check it — without a developer, without paid tools, in roughly two hours. Start with the five-minute quick check below if you only have a few minutes today.

The 5-minute quick check

If you only have five minutes, do these five things. They surface 80% of the damage on most nonprofit websites.

  1. Open your homepage on a phone. If the donate button isn’t visible within two seconds of the page loading, that’s your biggest problem. Fix it before anything else.
  2. Click “Donate” from your phone and try to give $10. Note every moment you hesitate. Each hesitation is a donor leaving.
  3. Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights. If the mobile score is below 50, performance is hurting donations.
  4. Google your nonprofit’s name. If your site isn’t the first result, your SEO needs work.
  5. Look at your homepage for your address and phone number. If they’re missing, you have a trust problem — especially for grant officers.

If any of those five failed, the full checklist below will tell you exactly where the damage is and how to fix it. Plan for two hours.

Accessibility (~25 minutes)

Accessibility failures exclude a portion of your audience and create legal exposure. Run all nine.

  1. Every image has alt text. Right-click an image, choose “Inspect” in your browser, look for an alt= attribute. Decorative images can have alt="". Missing alt text is the most common accessibility failure on nonprofit websites.
  2. Color contrast passes WCAG AA. Use the WebAIM Contrast Checker on your body text, headings, and button text. Body text needs a 4.5:1 ratio against its background.
  3. Heading hierarchy is logical. Your homepage should have exactly one H1, with H2s for major sections and H3s nested inside. Use the free HeadingsMap browser extension to visualize.
  4. Form fields have visible labels. Every input on your donate page, contact form, and newsletter signup needs a label above or beside it — not just a placeholder that disappears when typing starts.
  5. Focus order is correct. Open your homepage, press Tab repeatedly. The focus should move through the page in the order a sighted user reads it. If it jumps around, screen reader users will be confused.
  6. Page language is declared. View page source, check for <html lang="en"> at the top. Missing or wrong language attributes break screen reader pronunciation.
  7. Skip link is present. The first focusable element on the page should be a “Skip to main content” link. It can be visually hidden until focused, but it must exist for keyboard users.
  8. Videos have captions. Any embedded video on the site must have accurate captions. YouTube auto-captions don’t count for accessibility compliance — review and correct them.
  9. Animations respect reduced-motion preferences. If your homepage has scroll-triggered animations, parallax, or autoplay video, the site should detect prefers-reduced-motion and disable them for users with vestibular disorders.

If half of these fail, accessibility is your top priority. See how to improve accessibility without a redesign.

Donation flow (~20 minutes)

Run this section on a phone. This is where money is being left on the table.

  1. Donate button is visible above the fold on every page. Header, hero, or both. Not buried in the navigation menu.
  2. Donate page loads in under three seconds on 4G. Test with PageSpeed Insights mobile mode. Slow donate pages lose donors at every second past three.
  3. Form has five fields or fewer (excluding payment). Name, email, amount, optional message, optional recurring. Anything more, and abandonment climbs.
  4. Form works on a phone without zooming. Tap each field, make sure the keyboard type matches (number pad for amount, email keyboard for email).
  5. Recurring giving option is clear, not a dark pattern. “Make this monthly” should be a deliberate choice, not pre-checked by default.
  6. Trust signals appear on the donate page itself. 501(c)(3) status, address, impact stat, or board info should be visible on the page where money is being asked for. Not buried in /about.
  7. Post-gift confirmation is reassuring. A clear thank-you page with what happens next, an emailed receipt, and a way to share the gift on social. Cold transactional pages kill repeat giving.
  8. Third-party donation platform doesn’t add >3 seconds. If you embed DonorBox, Network for Good, Donorbox, etc., test load time with and without the widget. If it’s slow, ask the platform about lazy-loading.

See how to reduce friction on your donate page and why nonprofit websites stop getting donations.

Performance & speed (~15 minutes)

These six items map directly to Google’s Core Web Vitals ranking signals.

  1. PageSpeed mobile score is 50 or above. Below 50 is a red flag. Below 30 is an emergency.
  2. No single image is over 200KB. Inspect your homepage images in browser DevTools. Anything over 200KB needs to be compressed or converted to WebP/AVIF.
  3. Render-blocking resources are minimal. PageSpeed Insights flags these directly. Common offenders: Google Fonts loaded synchronously, large CSS files, third-party widgets in the <head>.
  4. Mobile load time is under three seconds on 4G. Use Chrome DevTools’ Network panel with mobile throttling to test honestly — not on your office wifi.
  5. Time to Interactive is under five seconds. PageSpeed Insights reports this. It’s how long until a visitor can actually click something.
  6. Cumulative Layout Shift is under 0.1. If your page shifts as it loads (images pushing content down, ads appearing late), users misclick and donors leave.

See how large images slow down websites and how slow sites affect donations.

SEO & search visibility (~25 minutes)

Without these in place, Google won’t send anyone to your site.

  1. Every page has a unique title tag, 50–60 characters. View page source, search for <title>. Duplicate titles across pages confuse Google.
  2. Every page has a meta description, 140–160 characters. This is what shows up under your title in search results — it determines whether anyone clicks.
  3. Every page has exactly one H1. Use the HeadingsMap extension. Multiple H1s, or no H1, confuses search engines about the page topic.
  4. Internal links use descriptive anchor text. “Read more” and “Click here” are wasted opportunities. Use the actual page topic.
  5. No broken internal links. Use a free tool like Dead Link Checker to crawl the site. Broken links signal abandonment to Google.
  6. Sitemap.xml exists and lists all key pages. Visit yoursite.org/sitemap.xml. If it’s missing or partial, Google can’t reliably find your content.
  7. Robots.txt doesn’t block important pages. Visit yoursite.org/robots.txt. Make sure no important pages or directories are accidentally blocked.
  8. Schema markup is present on key pages. Use Google’s Rich Results Test. Organization schema on the homepage and Article schema on blog posts are the minimum.
  9. Pages are actually indexed. Search Google for site:yoursite.org. The result count should roughly match the number of pages on your site.
  10. Canonical tags are set correctly. Each page should declare itself canonical via <link rel="canonical">. Wrong canonicals can deindex your pages.

See why titles and meta descriptions matter and why your nonprofit isn’t showing up on Google.

Donor trust signals (~10 minutes)

Donors and grant officers both scan for these. Missing ones cost real money.

  1. HTTPS is enabled (the URL starts with https://). Without SSL, browsers warn users and Google demotes the site.
  2. Real address and phone number are visible on every page. Footer is fine. PO boxes only signal “we don’t have an office” — if that’s the case, explain why.
  3. Staff or board page exists with real names and photos. Anonymous nonprofits read as suspicious to donors.
  4. 501(c)(3) status is mentioned prominently. EIN, status, and the year of incorporation give grant officers what they need.
  5. Privacy policy is linked from the footer and the donate page. Required for trust, sometimes legally required (California, EU visitors).
  6. Third-party validators are visible (Candid/GuideStar Seal, Charity Navigator). If you have any rating, display it. If you don’t, claim and complete your free Candid (GuideStar) profile.
  7. Most-recent content is within the last 90 days. Stale homepages (“last updated 2022”) signal an inactive organization.

See trust signals every nonprofit website needs.

Mobile experience (~15 minutes)

More than half of your traffic. Run all seven on an actual phone, not a desktop browser’s mobile preview.

  1. Viewport meta tag is set correctly. View page source, look for <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">. Missing or wrong = broken mobile layout.
  2. Tap targets are at least 44×44 pixels. Buttons and links shouldn’t be cramped. Tap each one with your thumb — if you miss, real users will too.
  3. Images load at responsive sizes. A 3,000px-wide hero image being served to phones is killing your speed and data costs.
  4. Forms use the right keyboard. Number pad for amounts, email keyboard for email, no autocapitalize on URLs or passwords.
  5. Donate button is reachable without scrolling on mobile. Either in the header or as a sticky bar. If a phone user has to scroll to find it, you’ve lost them.
  6. Mobile menu is obvious and works on first tap. Hamburger icons must be clearly tappable; menus must not require multiple taps to open subitems.
  7. Mobile load time is under three seconds on 4G. Yes, this duplicates item 21. Mobile speed deserves the second check — it’s where you bleed donors.

See mobile problems nonprofit websites miss.

How to score yourself

After running all 47, tally your results:

  • 40–47 passing. Your site is in good shape. Focus the remaining items as a quarterly polish list.
  • 30–39 passing. Solid foundation with real gaps. Fix the top three failures in each weak category over the next 30 days.
  • 20–29 passing. Significant problems likely costing donations and search visibility. Consider commissioning a focused paid audit on the weakest category.
  • Under 20 passing. A comprehensive paid audit is the right next step. Trying to fix this yourself without a roadmap will leave most problems in place.

If you’d rather have an experienced human run this for you — with a written report your board can read and a prioritized fix list — read the full guide on paid audits or see GoodSiteReport pricing. Paid audits start at $49.

When to escalate

Three failure patterns are worth escalating to a professional audit rather than DIY-fixing:

  1. Most of the accessibility section failed. The fixes often touch theme code, and incorrect fixes can make things worse for assistive tech users. A specialist saves you from breaking it twice.
  2. You failed the SEO indexing checks (items 30 and 32). Pages that aren’t indexed need diagnosis, not guesswork. Wrong fixes can deindex more pages.
  3. Performance score is below 30 and you don’t know why. Performance problems are often architectural and benefit from a real systems review, not item-level tweaks.

The short version

A nonprofit website audit checklist exists so your team can find the obvious problems on your site in roughly two hours, without paying anyone. Run the five-minute quick check first; if any of those fail, work the full 47 items. Score yourself afterward. Most nonprofits will surface 60–70% of what a paid audit would find — the remaining 30% is usually the highest-impact stuff and worth paying for once you’ve done the obvious work yourself.