The Free 10-Minute Website Health Check for Charities and Community Groups

If you run a charity, CIC or faith-based organisation, your website was probably built once, by a volunteer, a board member’s nephew, or an agency on a tight budget, and then left alone while everyone got on with the actual work. That’s completely understandable — but a website that hasn’t been looked at in a year or two often has small problems that quietly cost you donations, volunteers or funding applications. None of them need a redesign to fix. Most just need someone to notice them.

Here’s a free, honest, ten-minute health check you can run yourself, right now, with nothing more than your own website open in a browser.

Why this is worth ten minutes of your time

Funders increasingly check an organisation’s website before they check anything else. Volunteers decide whether to get in touch based on how easy the site makes it. And search engines like Google use basic technical signals — page speed, mobile-friendliness, working links — to decide whether your site even turns up when someone searches for a charity like yours. None of that requires a big budget. It requires a working website that does the basics well.

The checklist

1. First impressions and mission clarity

• Open your homepage on your phone. Can a stranger tell what you do and who you help within about five seconds, without scrolling?
• Is there a clear, single main action you want a visitor to take — donate, volunteer, refer someone, get in touch — or are you asking for six things at once?
• Is the most recent news or update actually recent? A “latest news” page from eighteen months ago undermines trust faster than almost anything else.

2. Getting involved and giving

• Can you find the donate button in under five seconds? Does it actually work, end to end, on a phone?
• If you recruit volunteers, is there a simple way to express interest that doesn’t require downloading a PDF form first?
• Are your contact details — email, phone, registered address, charity or company number — easy to find and correct?

3. Technical basics

• Click through your main menu and a handful of internal links. Do any lead to a “page not found” error?
• Does the site have a valid security certificate (the padlock icon and “https” in the address bar)? A missing one will actively warn visitors away.
• Load your homepage on mobile data rather than office wifi. If it feels sluggish to you, it will feel worse to a visitor with a weaker connection.

4. Trust and safeguarding signals

• Is there a visible privacy policy, and does it reflect what you actually do with supporters’ data?
• If your organisation works with children or vulnerable adults, is your safeguarding policy easy to find, not buried three folders deep?
• Are your trustees, governance information or annual reports available if a funder or major donor goes looking for them?

5. Accessibility basics

• Try navigating your homepage using only the Tab key on your keyboard, no mouse. Can you reach the donate button and main menu links?
• Do your images of events, volunteers or services have meaningful alt text, rather than being left blank or filled with the filename?
• Is your body text large enough and the colour contrast strong enough to read comfortably, especially for older supporters?

This isn’t a substitute for a full WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility review — that’s a more thorough process we’ve covered elsewhere — but these three checks alone catch a surprising number of the most common problems.

What to do with what you find

Be honest with yourself about the results. Most organisations find two or three things worth fixing, not twenty. Tackle the ones that touch money, safeguarding or a broken donate button first, since those carry the most immediate risk. The rest can go on a list and get picked off gradually, or form the basis of a conversation with whoever manages your website, whether that’s a volunteer, a trustee or an outside developer.

A website audit doesn’t need to be expensive or dramatic to be useful. Often the biggest wins are the smallest fixes — a dead link, an out-of-date phone number, a donate button that’s hard to find on a phone.

Livicode Tech Solutions works with charities, CICs and community groups across Bexley, Bexleyheath, Bromley, Dartford, Greenwich and Lewisham. If you’ve run this checklist and found more than you expected, or you’d simply rather have a second pair of eyes look at your site, tell us about it — no obligation, and no assumption that the answer has to be expensive.

Livicode Tech Solutions — Your Local Digital Solutions Partner
www.livicode.com · info@livicode.com · WhatsApp: +44 7708 803980