Free Websites for Nonprofits: What You Get and What It Costs Later

A free website is a fair way for a nonprofit to start, and for a new organization with one program it may be all you need for a while. The cost usually arrives later, in four places: who owns your domain, how fast your pages load, how many pages and features you get before an upgrade, and whether you can take the site with you when you leave. Check those four before you build and a free site can carry you a long way. Skip them and you may be rebuilding from scratch in the same month your board wants a capital campaign page.

Most small organizations take one of three free routes. Here is what each one gives you and where each one tends to break.

Route 1: A website builder's free or nonprofit plan

Drag-and-drop website builders host the site for you and hand you templates that already work on phones. Many have a free tier, and some run nonprofit programs. A volunteer can learn the editor in an afternoon, and nobody has to think about servers.

What tends to break:

• Your address. Free tiers commonly put you on the builder's own address, something like yourorg.buildername.com, often with the builder's banner on every page. Connecting your own domain is usually part of a paid plan.
• Limits. Page counts, storage, form submissions and payment features often sit behind upgrades. You find the ceiling the week you need one more page.
• Search controls. Check whether you can edit each page's title, description, URL and image alt text. Some tiers lock these or bury them.
• Leaving. Builders rarely hand you a copy of your site that another platform can import. You can copy the text and download the images, but the design and structure stay behind.

Route 2: The website that comes with your donor software

Some donor management and fundraising platforms include a website, or a set of pages, with the subscription. The appeal is real: donation forms connect straight to your donor records, event registrations land in the same system, and someone else keeps it running.

What tends to break:

• The site is tied to the contract. If you switch donor software in three years, find out now what happens to your pages. In many setups the site goes when the subscription goes.
• Control over pages is narrow. Templates may limit headings, page titles and URLs, which are the parts search engines read first.
• Speed depends on what the platform loads. Donation widgets, tracking code and styling files load on every page, and you can't remove what you didn't add.
• The address question again. If your pages live on the platform's domain, or your own domain forwards visitors there, that matters if you ever want Google Ad Grants. Google's Ad Grants website policy requires that the nonprofit owns the domain its ads point to and that the domain hosts the site directly, not by redirecting to another address or a third-party platform.

Route 3: The volunteer-built WordPress site

WordPress itself is free software. Hosting isn't, though it can be modest, and a volunteer with web skills can build something that does everything a small organization needs. You get full control: any page, any URL, any feature, and a complete export whenever you want it.

What tends to break is the arrangement, not the software:

• The volunteer registers the domain and the hosting on a personal account with a personal card. When the card expires or the volunteer moves on, the site can go dark and the domain can lapse.
• Updates get skipped. WordPress, the theme and every plugin need regular updates. Months of skipped updates are a common way small sites get hacked.
• Plugins pile up. Each new feature adds another plugin, and each plugin adds weight. The site slows down a little at a time until the donate page takes ages to appear on a phone.
• Nobody else knows how it works. There's no written record of logins, renewal dates or where the backups live.

The three routes side by side

These are patterns, not rules. Your particular plan, platform or volunteer may be better or worse on any row.

	Builder free or nonprofit plan	Donor-software site	Volunteer-built WordPress
Upfront cost	None or low	Included in the subscription	Hosting plus volunteer time
Your own domain	Often a paid upgrade	Check how the domain connects	Yes, if registered to the organization
Speed	Usually fine for small sites	Depends on the platform's code	Depends on hosting and plugins
Room to grow	Tier limits	Template limits	Few limits
Leaving later	Text and images, rarely the design	Check the contract	Full export
Biggest risk	Upgrades you didn't budget for	Losing the site when you switch software	One person holding every key

Four checks before you build or renew

1. Domain ownership. Register the domain in the organization's legal name, under an organizational email address such as a shared admin inbox, paid with an organizational card, with auto-renew on. If a volunteer or former staff member registered it, move it into an account the organization controls now, while everyone is on good terms. It's the cheapest fix on this list.
2. Speed on a phone. Open your donate page on your own phone over cellular data, not office Wi-Fi. If you're waiting, so are donors. Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool will show which files are slowing the page.
3. Page count for the next two years. List every page you'll need: home, about (with your mission and EIN), one page per program, volunteer, events, donate, monthly giving, annual report, contact. Count them. If the free tier stops short of that number, the upgrade is already in your budget whether you planned for it or not.
4. An exit test. Ask the platform, in writing, what you get if you leave. Then try it: export whatever can be exported today and open the file. If the honest answer is "your text and photos", you want to know that before you write 40 pages.

While you're checking, confirm you can connect Google Search Console to the site. If the platform won't let you verify the domain, you'll be working blind on search.

What "free" costs over three years: a worked example

Here is the math with made-up numbers. Replace them with real quotes for your situation.

Say, hypothetically, the builder plan you'd actually need (your own domain, no banner, enough pages) costs $20 a month. Over three years that's $720. Along the way, staff and volunteers spent hours building 25 pages. Now say that in year three you outgrow the platform. The design can't come with you, so you rebuild: you pay for the new site, someone re-enters every page, and someone sets up redirects from each old URL to its new one so the search visibility you built doesn't start over.

In that example the subscription isn't the expensive part. The rebuild is, and so are the hours behind it. A one-time build on a platform you control, plus hosting, can come out ahead over the same three years even when its first invoice looks bigger. Run both versions with your own quotes before you decide, and show the board both.

When paying for a build pays off

Free is often enough when you're new, run one program, need fewer than ten pages and have nobody to maintain anything. Paying for a build starts to make sense when one or more of these is true:

• You plan to apply for Google Ad Grants and your current site misses website policy points: domain ownership, HTTPS across the whole site, a physical address, EIN and/or annual report, and donation links that go to a secure page dedicated to donations.
• You have more programs than your plan has room for, or each program needs its own page to be found in local searches.
• Your donate page is slow on a phone and you can't change what loads on it.
• The volunteer who built the site is leaving and nobody else can maintain it.
• You're about to switch donor software and the website would leave with it.

If you do pay someone, ask for three things in writing: the domain and hosting accounts in the organization's name, a full export or copy of the site files, and a short handover document listing every login and renewal date. Our own nonprofit website design work starts at $400 one time, and those are the same three things we'd expect you to ask us for.

If you're not sure your current free site can last another year, send it in for a free nonprofit SEO audit and we'll tell you plainly whether to stay put, upgrade or plan a move.