Donation Page Checklist: Fixes Before You Spend on Traffic

Fix the donate page before you pay for ads, mail an appeal or chase search rankings. Every visitor you earn or buy ends up there, and a slow page, a long form or a missing monthly option loses gifts no matter how good the traffic is. The checklist below takes about an hour with your phone in one hand and a notepad in the other.

A quick bit of hypothetical math shows why the order matters. Say your donate page gets 300 visits a month and 2% of visitors give: that's 6 gifts. If you fix the page and 3% give, that's 9 gifts from the same 300 visits, with no new spending. Finding 150 more visitors a month would take real work; fixing the page uses traffic you already have. Plug your own numbers into the donor value calculator to see what one more gift a month is worth to you over a few years.

1. It loads fast on a phone

• Open the donate page on your own phone, on cellular data, not office wifi. Count the seconds until you can tap an amount.
• Run the page address through PageSpeed Insights, Google's free speed test, and read the mobile result.
• Check what sits above the form. A full-width photo, an image slider, a video or a popup asking for an email address all slow the page or push the form down.

The usual fixes are dull and effective: compress or remove the big top image, drop the slider, and remove tracking scripts nobody looks at anymore. If your form is embedded from donor software, test the page with the form in it, because the embed itself can be the slow part.

2. The form asks only for what you need

Write down every field on the form. Next to each one, note whether you need it to process the gift, send a receipt or thank the donor. Amount, name, email and payment details are needed. A mailing address may be needed if you send paper acknowledgments or your accountant wants it on file.

• Make phone number, employer, title and "How did you hear about us?" optional, or move them to the thank-you page.
• Remove any requirement to create an account or password before giving.
• Check that the form remembers what people typed if they make a mistake, instead of clearing every field.

3. Suggested amounts are set on purpose

Default amounts are often whatever the donor software shipped with. Pick yours deliberately.

• Offer three or four amounts plus an "other amount" field.
• Base them on gifts you actually receive. Your donor database will show the amounts people tend to give online.
• Where you can say honestly what an amount covers, say it next to the button. Only use costs your finance person can back up. If gifts go to general operations, say "supports the whole program" rather than inventing a precise item.

4. Monthly giving is visible

• The choice between one-time and monthly sits next to the amounts, not in a checkbox at the bottom.
• If monthly is selected by default, it's obvious. The button should say "Give $20 monthly," rather than a bare "Give." Surprise recurring charges lead to refund requests and unhappy donors.
• The page says how to change or cancel a monthly gift: an email address or a link in the receipt.

5. Trust lines are on the page

A donor who has never heard of you wants quick reassurance before typing a card number.

• Your full legal name and a line that you're a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, with your EIN.
• A physical address or a link to your contact page, and a link to your annual report or financials.
• The page runs on HTTPS (the address starts with https and the browser shows no security warning), on your own domain if you can manage it.

If you use Google Ad Grants or plan to apply, these lines matter there too. Google's Ad Grants website policy asks for the whole site on HTTPS, a physical address, an EIN and/or an annual report, working donation buttons, and donation links that go to a secure page dedicated to donations.

6. The page says what the gift does

• One or two plain sentences above the form about what gifts pay for this year.
• One photo, used with permission. For programs serving vulnerable people, use photos of volunteers, supplies or places, and change names in any story.
• No long history of the organization. That belongs on the about page.

7. Receipts work and say the right things

The IRS says a donor can't deduct a single contribution of $250 or more without a contemporaneous written acknowledgment from the organization. IRS Publication 1771 explains the rules for charities.

• Make a small test gift and confirm the receipt email arrives within minutes, not days.
• Check it shows your organization's name, the amount and the date, and that it doesn't land in spam.
• Ask your accountant exactly what your acknowledgments must say, especially for larger gifts and for anything donors receive in return. That's their call, not your web person's.

8. The thank-you page does a job

A generic "Transaction complete" screen wastes the moment when a donor is most interested in you.

• Thank the donor in plain words and say when the receipt will arrive.
• Offer one next step: sign up for updates, see the volunteer schedule or read a recent program story.
• Keep the thank-you page out of your site's menu and out of search results (a "noindex" setting in most site builders), so only real donors reach it. That keeps your tracking honest.

9. You can tell which gifts came from where

• In Google Analytics 4, mark the thank-you page view or the form's completion event as a key event, so you can see gifts by source: search, email, social, direct.
• Add campaign tags to the links in your emails and appeals, so those gifts aren't counted as "direct."
• Each month, compare the number of gifts Analytics reports with the number in your donor database. If they're far apart, something is double counting or missing.

Without this step, you can't tell your board whether search, email or the spring appeal brought in the money, and you can't judge whether new traffic is worth what you pay for it.

10. People can find the page

• The donate page lives at a simple address on your own site, such as yourorg.org/donate.
• Its page title includes your organization's name and the word "Donate," so a search for "[your name] donate" lands on it.
• Your program pages, about page and annual report each link to it with plain text, not only a button in the header.

Do it in this order

If you only have one afternoon, do items 1, 2 and 9 first: speed, form length and tracking. Speed and form length affect every visitor. Tracking tells you whether the other fixes worked. Then work down the list over the next few weeks, one item at a time, and note the date of each change so you can compare the months before and after.

The donate page is part of the website, not a separate fundraising tool, and most of these fixes are site work rather than fundraising work. If yours needs more than a few tweaks, our nonprofit website design page explains how we build donate pages and the pages that lead to them.