Why WordPress is the best CMS for charities and non-profits

When running a charity or non-profit, having a reliable, well performing website is essential for reaching the people that matter. However, finding the right platform to build and manage that website can be overwhelming, especially if you’re working with limited technical knowledge.

As one of the most widely used content management systems (CMS) in the world, WordPress has become the stand-out solution for charities, non-profits, and NGOs.

Having worked with many organisations, including The NHS, to transform their ideas into fully functional WordPress websites and empower them to manage their own content, we have longstanding firsthand experience of how effective WordPress can be. But what is it that makes WordPress the right option for organisations within the sector, and what gives it the edge over other options?

One of the key advantages of WordPress is that it’s open source, allowing for full customisation to meet the unique needs of each organisation. For charities and non-profits, this flexibility means we can focus our efforts on designing and building bespoke websites that maximise both functionality and creativity. As your digital partner, we take full advantage of WordPress adaptability to create beautiful, tailored websites that align with your goals, whether that’s raising awareness, maximising donations, or building a community.

The open-source nature of WordPress also gives us an edge over more rigid platforms like Wix and Squarespace. For example, we were able to achieve highly complex functionality for the Consortium for Street Children by creating an interactive legal atlas map. This tool showcases the status of laws protecting the rights of street children across the world, allowing users to visualise and compare how countries are performing against certain laws. The map presents a view of regional patterns and enables comparisons between countries, all within a user-friendly interface. Achieving this level of complexity and customisation would have been impossible on more restricted platforms. WordPress’s flexibility, combined with our expertise, allowed us to build a powerful, data driven tool that most importantly met the client’s needs.

While WordPress offers many plugins, the real value comes from how these tools are customised and integrated into a website to fit each organisation’s specific needs. We specialise in creating tailored solutions that go beyond simple plug and play setups, ensuring your site not only functions smoothly but reflects your brand’s identity and goals.

For example, we implemented the GiveWP platform for Ecosystems Knowledge Network, integrating it with Stripe to provide secure, user friendly donation options. Not only customising the donation system to fit their branding and ensure a simple and cohesive user journey, we helped them maximise their fundraising potential by allowing them to take both one time donations and recurring donations.

Some examples of the plugins we set up, use and customise for clients are:

A strong online presence is massively important for any charity or non-profit, and search engine optimisation (SEO) plays a key role in ensuring your website is easy to find. Out of the box, WordPress is already optimised for search engines to a basic level, for example, it automatically uses page names as slugs in the URL. However, SEO can be taken to the next level with tools like Yoast SEO, which we use to help fine tune your site’s optimisation.

We always build our websites with SEO and performance in mind from the ground up. This means implementing best practices during development, from clean code to fast loading times, to ensure your site is optimised from day one. Slow websites can harm your SEO rankings, and Google has long been penalising poorly performing sites, especially with their 2018 update that now also penalises poor performance on mobile. A slow website not only affects SEO, but also has a knock on effect on conversions and engagement, and can even put off potential donors or volunteers. To prevent this, we use tools like WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache (W3TC) to improve your site’s speed and performance, ensuring a smooth, fast user experience.

But we don’t stop there, for our Bureau+ partners, we regularly track SEO performance for our clients and make improvements where needed. By doing this, we are continually improving the chances of our partners ranking higher in search engine results, making it easier for potential donors, volunteers, and users to find their website without them needing to invest in costly SEO services.

Whether your organisation is just starting out or already well established, WordPress has the flexibility to grow with you. It’s designed to handle everything from small sites to those with significant traffic and complex functionality. With the right setup, a WordPress site can easily accommodate increasing demands as your charity’s online presence expands, ensuring that your site remains fast and reliable no matter how large your audience becomes.

We specialise in creating websites that can grow alongside your organisation. For example, we recently built a website for First 5 Lambeth, a new consortium, where we integrated a customised events calendar to fit their specific needs. As their organisation continues to grow, their website has the ability to handle the increased demands. With our development expertise, we have ensured that their site can expand effortlessly, allowing them to add new events without any technical headaches.

We ensure that your site is not only robust enough to handle large amounts of traffic but also flexible enough to grow with your needs, allowing you to focus on your goals while we take care of the tech. Read more about how we helped First 5 Lambeth achieve their goals:

Our active involvement in the WordPress community means we’re always on top of the latest updates and improvements. This ensures that we’re able to work together to improve WordPress for our clients, who benefit from continuous, informed support without needing to navigate through the technical details themselves.

We provide our own service tailored to your needs, through Bureau+. Through this service, we offer a flexible support package that ensures your website stays in great shape. Bureau+ covers everything from ongoing maintenance updates to handling ad hoc tasks, whether they’re design tweaks or technical fixes.

But we’re not just doers, we’re thinkers. As your expert digital partner, we’re always thinking of new ways to work with you to shape your digital strategy in a way that supports your organisation’s growth and evolving needs. With us, you can be confident that your site will be kept secure, up to date, and regularly reviewed to ensure it remains aligned with your goals.

For charities and non-profits, security is essential, especially when handling sensitive donor information and user data. WordPress stays ahead of potential threats by regularly releasing security updates, ensuring that your website is protected.

We take security seriously from the start, integrating two-factor authentication (2FA), hiding your login page, and other safeguards right from day one. To ensure full protection of your site, we use and properly configure plugins like Solid Security Pro to add an extra layer of defence, and we set up security monitoring on our end so we can quickly respond to any potential threats as they arise. These tools help us protect your site from hacking attempts, malware, and other online threats.

For charities and non-profits that operate internationally, this sometimes means needing to cater for a wide range of languages. WordPress is an excellent option for this because it supports multilingual websites through powerful plugins like WPML or Polylang. These tools make it easy to offer your site in multiple languages, ensuring you can communicate with your audience, no matter where they are.

We’ve previously worked on an application for ECPAT which covers global issues, and therefore one of the main necessities was to ensure their website can disseminate important information in multiple languages, allowing them to effectively engage with communities across the globe. By integrating multilingual support seamlessly, we ensure that language barriers never stand in the way.

Social media is a powerful tool for charities and non-profits to connect with a wider audience. WordPress makes it simple to link to your platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X (formerly Twitter), and to easily share blog posts, news articles, and updates across your social networks. By keeping your blog or news sections up to date, you’ll always have fresh content to share, helping you stay active and visible to your supporters.

At The Idea Bureau, we ensure your website is fully set up to make social sharing easy. Links to your active socials will be clearly visible, and we can add social sharing functionality so your users can easily share your latest updates. Additionally, we use Yoast to ensure that when your articles are shared, the right image is automatically added to the shared link, boosting engagement and ensuring your content looks its best across platforms.

We believe that every charity and non-profit deserves a website that not only looks great but performs beautifully too, helping you make a bigger impact. From ensuring your site is SEO-optimised and secure, to integrating powerful features like donation systems and multilingual support, we’re here to bring your vision to life.

We’d love to work with you to turn your website ideas into a reality. Whether you’re looking to build something new or improve on what you already have, we’re ready to help you create a site that adds impact to your message and engages your audience. Book a consultation with us today and let’s explore how we can take your website to the next level.