How to Fix Your Donation Page (and Stop Losing Gifts at Checkout)
Every nonprofit has one page that handles more money than any other page on the site, and almost nobody on staff has opened it in a year. It is the donation page. Somebody built it during a website project. It worked well enough the week it launched, and it has been running unattended ever since while the team moved on to appeals, events, and grant deadlines that all came with dates attached.
I understand how that happens, because a donation form never puts itself on a calendar. What I have learned is that an hour spent on this quiet page usually pays better than an hour spent almost anywhere else in a development office. The people who land on it have already decided to give. They typed your name into a search bar or clicked a link in your email. They are supporters partway through a decision, and what they need from you is a form that stays out of the way.
What Your Donation Page Is Probably Doing Right Now
The 2026 M+R Benchmarks study found that 11% of desktop visitors who reach a nonprofit's main donation page complete a gift, compared with 8% of mobile visitors. For small nonprofits, mobile conversion falls to 4%. Read that from the other direction and the picture gets uncomfortable: roughly nine out of ten people who make it to the page where you ask for money leave without giving. Looking at all website traffic, only 1.6% of visitors donate, generating an average of $1.33 per visitor.
Those numbers are not a verdict on your mission or your writing. This is not a failure of effort. The person maintaining that page is usually the same person drafting the year-end letter, staffing the gala, and closing the grant report, and a checkout form is the least interesting item on that list. The distance between an 8% page and an 11% page usually comes down to a shorter form, a faster load, and two or three settings nobody has turned on.
It helps to put your own numbers on the problem. If 2,000 people reach your donation page in a year and 8% of them give, that is 160 gifts. Move the page to 10% and you have 200 gifts from the same traffic, without buying a single ad or writing one more appeal. At a typical online gift size, that difference funds a program line. Most giving platforms and analytics tools will hand you your donation page conversion rate in an afternoon, and it is the one online fundraising metric worth checking every quarter.
Most of the fixes below are the kind of small, repeatable maintenance that slips when the calendar gets loud — the sort of work good tools are built to keep on track.
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Where Donors Actually Quit
Donation form abandonment happens in four or five small places stacked on top of each other, and each one peels off a share of the people who meant to give.
The form asks too much. A gift needs a name, an email, an amount, and a way to pay. Every additional box — phone number, mailing address, salutation, employer, the how-did-you-hear-about-us dropdown, the optional comment field — asks a person to stop and answer something while holding a phone in one hand. Each one is a small toll. You can gather the rest later, in the thank-you email or the first stewardship call, when the gift is already safe.
The page is slow. M+R now measures donation page speed using the speed index from Google's own tooling, which reflects what real visitors experience rather than a lab simulation. You can run your homepage and your donation page through PageSpeed Insights in about two minutes and see exactly what a donor on a phone in a parking lot is waiting through.
The donor gets handed off. Someone clicks Donate on your site and lands on a page with a different look, a different logo, and a URL they do not recognize. That moment of hesitation is expensive, and it is usually fixable inside your giving platform's branding settings.
There is no way to pay the easy way. Among the nonprofits M+R studied, 79% offered PayPal on the donation page, 58% offered Google Pay, 57% offered Apple Pay, and 44% offered Venmo. A digital wallet turns a two-minute typing exercise into a thumbprint, and adding one is almost always a toggle rather than a project.
The fee question is left hanging. Processing fees make a lot of development directors nervous, but donors are far more willing to cover them than we assume — 55% of online donors will opt in to pay credit card processing fees when the page offers the choice. A single checkbox, worded plainly, keeps more of every gift where it belongs.
The Mobile Problem Hiding in Your Numbers
The device gap is the part that surprises most fundraisers. Mobile users make up 52% of all nonprofit website traffic and 43% of donation transactions, but only 28% of revenue. Desktop visitors account for 57% of transactions and 72% of revenue. The average gift completed on a desktop was $168; on a phone it was $88.
Part of that is real donor behavior — people do sit down at a desk for larger decisions, and they always have. But a meaningful share of that gap is friction wearing a costume. A form designed on a laptop looks fine on a laptop. On a phone it becomes a column of tiny boxes, a keyboard that covers the Submit button, and a credit card number typed one digit at a time while someone stands in a grocery line. What mobile giving mostly needs is a page somebody has actually tested on the device half your visitors are holding.
This matters more as your traffic shifts. When a supporter shares your campaign in a group chat or a volunteer raises money on your behalf through peer-to-peer fundraising, nearly everyone who follows that link arrives on a phone. The same is true of the traffic driven by social media fundraising. Every channel in a modern online fundraising program eventually points at this one page, which is why fixing the page comes before spending anything to drive more people to it.
Two Upgrades Worth Making This Week
Once the form is clean and fast, two additions change what a single visit is worth.
The first is a visible recurring option. In M+R's most recent benchmarks, monthly gifts made up 27% of all online revenue, and 59% of nonprofits now run a monthly giving program, with 36% using a prompt or pop-up to invite one-time donors to become monthly ones. The average monthly gift is about $30, which sounds small until you multiply it by twelve and then by the years a sustainer typically stays. Donorbox reports that asking a donor to upgrade a one-time gift at checkout produced a 64% increase in recurring donations across its platform. Putting a suggested amount next to that monthly option takes a few minutes and keeps working for years, and for most small shops it is the practical front door to starting a monthly giving program.
The second is making other ways to give visible. A matching gift search box belongs right on the confirmation screen, since 84% of donors say they are more likely to give when their employer matches. So does a short, plain line pointing to gifts of stock, donor-advised fund distributions, and legacy giving. Those donors are already on your list. They are simply waiting for a page that says such gifts are welcome here, and a donor who clicks that line is opening a conversation worth having in person.
Once a donor starts thinking past this year's gift, the conversation opens up to giving structures that can support a mission for decades rather than a single December.
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Where to Start
You do not need a redesign, a new platform, or a consultant to make progress here. Four steps will tell you more than another year of guessing.
1. Give your own page $10 from your phone. Start from a link in one of your own emails, the way a donor would, and count the taps and the fields. Whatever irritates you in that minute is irritating every mobile donor you have. Then refund yourself and write down what you noticed.
2. Run both pages through PageSpeed Insights. Check your homepage and your donation page, and hand the results to whoever maintains the site. Load time is one of the few fundraising problems somebody else can fix for you.
3. Cut the form to four fields and add one wallet. Name, email, amount, payment. Turn on Apple Pay, Google Pay, or PayPal — whichever your platform supports with the fewest clicks — and add the checkbox that lets donors cover the fee.
4. Make the monthly option impossible to miss. Put it beside the one-time choice with a suggested amount attached, not buried below the fold as an afterthought.
None of this is glamorous work, and that is exactly why it stays undone. What I keep coming back to is that the organizations quietly growing their online revenue are usually the ones who shortened the form, sped up the page, and made it easy to say yes twice. Step one takes ten minutes and $10 of your own money, and once the page is fixed, the traffic you already have starts converting a little better every week without anyone touching it again.
C.J. Bergmen is a pastor, licensed counselor, and fundraising strategist who helps organizations and generous individuals approach giving with honesty and long-term vision.