We have tested more than 70,000 UK charity websites and ranked more than 45,000 of them in the UK charity website league. If your charity is in it, or you expected it to be and it is not, this post explains how the scores are worked out and where the data comes from. It also lists what the league leaves out on purpose.
The score comes from automated technical tests of a charity's home page. It says nothing about the charity itself or the quality of its work. A one-page site with little on it can score above a large, busy site that does a great deal.
Where the data comes from
The league uses two public sources and a short check of our own.
The Charity Commission register gives us each charity's name, registration number and the web address it has filed. The data is published under the Open Government Licence. The register covers charities in England and Wales [Mike: confirm whether Scottish and Northern Irish charities are included from OSCR and CCNI; if not, say so here]. If the register holds an old or wrong address for your charity, that is the address we tested, and you can send us the right one (see "Find your charity" below).
Google PageSpeed Insights runs the speed test. It loads the home page as a simulated Moto G Power phone on a throttled 4G connection, and returns Google's scores for performance, accessibility and SEO with the timings behind them. Anyone can run the same test free at pagespeed.web.dev, so you can check our working.
Our own site check is a crawler that fetches the home page once or twice as plain HTML, without running any JavaScript. It looks for four things: whether the page is served over HTTPS, whether it has a title and some content, whether it links to a donate route, and whether it is the charity's own site. A redirect to a Facebook page or a shared platform does not count as the charity's own site. The crawler names itself in its user agent and links to a page explaining what it is. We never publish the email addresses or social media links it finds.
The score out of 100
Each ranked site gets a whole-number score out of 100, made up of four parts. The weights are our judgement of what matters most on a charity website, and we have kept them simple.
Part | Points | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
Speed | 30 | Google's mobile performance score |
Accessibility checks | 30 | Google's automated accessibility audit |
Donations | 25 | Our site check's donate route test |
Search basics | 15 | Google's SEO audit |
Benefits of Ranking Well
When a charity website ranks well in search results, it enjoys higher visibility, attracting more visitors who could become supporters or donors. This increased traffic can pave the way for more engagement and contributions.
Improving user experience not only creates a more accessible site but can also lead to increased donations and aid. A streamlined and pleasant online interaction often motivates users to contribute or participate more actively.
Complying with accessibility standards ensures that all users, including those with disabilities, can navigate and engage with the website. This inclusivity broadens your support base and strengthens your organisation's reputation.
For the three Google parts, we take Google's score out of 100, scale it to the part's weight and round to the nearest whole point. A performance score of 72 becomes 22 of the 30 speed points. An accessibility score of 90 becomes 27 of 30, and an SEO score of 83 becomes 12 of 15.
Speed (30 points)
Google's performance score combines five timings. Three carry most of the weight: how long the page is too busy to respond to a tap (30%), how quickly the main content appears (25%) and how much the layout shifts while loading (25%). First paint and Speed Index make up 10% each (Google's scoring guide).
Google tests on a phone because many visitors use one. In the M+R Benchmarks 2025 study, mostly of US nonprofits, 53% of website visits came from phones and tablets.
Speed is where most sites lose the most points. Across the ranked sites, [Z]% take longer than Google's 2.5-second threshold to show their main content on a phone.
Accessibility checks (30 points)
The Equality Act 2010 requires service providers, charities included, to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people. Google's accessibility audit tests for common barriers, such as images without text descriptions, text with too little contrast, form fields without labels and links with no readable name.
The league page carries the same warning we give here: a high score is not a WCAG pass. Automated checks find some barriers and miss others. Nobody should treat 30 out of 30 as proof that a site works for everyone, but a low score is a clear sign that it does not.
Donations (25 points)
We think the main job of most charity websites is to let people give, so this part is a quarter of the score. It has three fixed levels.
Points | When it applies |
|---|---|
25 | We found a working donate route and confirmed it: a donation form on the charity's own site, or a link to a recognised giving service such as JustGiving, Enthuse, CAF Donate, Stripe or PayPal Giving Fund |
15 | We found a donate link but could not confirm where it led, usually because it goes to a provider we do not recognise or to a page we could not reach |
0 | We found no donate route on the home page, or the only one was broken |
A form on your own site and a link to a giving service score the same. Using a third-party service is a normal choice.
If your charity does not take public donations, it will lose these 25 points and the score will undersell your site. We accept that trade-off for a league that covers charity websites in general.
Search basics (15 points)
A supporter who hears about your charity needs to be able to find it in search. Google's SEO audit checks the basics that let search engines find and list a page: a page title and description, a page that loads without an error code, links that search engines can follow and that say where they go, text descriptions on images, and nothing telling search engines not to index the page.
The weight is small because the audit covers only these basics. It says nothing about whether the site ranks for any search.
A worked example
A site with a Google performance score of 72, accessibility 90, SEO 83 and a confirmed JustGiving link scores 22 + 27 + 25 + 12 = 86. That puts it in the Good band.
The bands
The league shows a band beside each score.
Band | Score |
|---|---|
Excellent | 90 to 100 |
Good | 75 to 89 |
Fair | 50 to 74 |
Needs work | under 50 |
The median ranked site currently scores [median]. [N] ranked sites are in the Excellent band.
Ties, and the top of the table
Many sites share a score. Within a score, sites are ordered by speed: first by how quickly the main content appears on a phone, then by Speed Index, first paint, blocking time and layout shift, in that order.
At the top of the table, the fastest sites are separated by a few milliseconds. One speed test is not precise enough to order them fairly, so any site scoring 90 or more gets two more runs and we use the median of the three. Until those runs finish, its row shows a "precise result pending" note.
Why your charity might not be ranked
We only rank sites we could check properly. Search for your charity on the league page to see which of these reasons applies. In most cases you can fix it.
Reason shown | What it means | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
Not tested yet | We have not yet run the speed test, the site check or both | Ask us to rank it from the search results. We email you once it is in |
Could not reach it | The register address did not resolve, returned a server error or a 404, showed a parked domain page or had a broken certificate | If the register address is out of date, send us the right one |
Blocks automated checks | The site returned a 403 or 429 error to our crawler. Some security services do this by default | Allow our crawler [crawler name] through your security settings. We never disguise it as a browser, so the site stays unranked until it lets the crawler in |
Could not read it | The home page had fewer than about 150 words, fewer than three links to its own pages or no page title, looked like a holding page, or asked search engines not to index it. For sites built entirely in JavaScript, we use what Google's test rendered | Add text and links to the home page or remove the no-index instruction, then ask for a retest |
Not secure | The site is not served over HTTPS, or a secure page loads insecure content. Browsers warn visitors about this, so we treat it as a hard stop | Move the whole site to HTTPS, then ask for a retest |
Sends visitors elsewhere | The address redirects to a different site, a social media page or a directory listing. We rank charities' own sites only | If the charity has its own site, send us its address |
Shares a page | Several charities' addresses land on the same page | Nothing. We rank that page once, under one charity, and the others show which charity it is ranked under |
Unranked sites are checked again on a schedule. The speed test runs roughly every three months for ranked sites and every six months for unranked ones. The site check runs roughly every month, and the whole table is re-ranked every night.
What the league does not measure
The league does not score design or the quality of the writing. The site check only confirms that the home page has some text. It has nothing to say about how well a charity is run or what it achieves.
It tests one page. A good donate page behind a slow home page still loses speed points.
Accessibility is covered by automated checks alone, so a score is not a pass. On donations, we confirm that a route exists but cannot tell you whether people use it. On security, we check for HTTPS and nothing else; we do not test for vulnerabilities.
If your site scores lower than you think it should, it may be doing things the league does not count. Look at the breakdown anyway. Slow pages and accessibility barriers affect your visitors whether or not anyone is keeping score.
Find your charity
Go to the league and type your charity's name or registration number into the search box. If it is ranked, you will see its score, its band and its position. Open the row to see the points for each part, the load time, its Core Web Vitals, the dates of both tests and how many ranked charity websites it is ahead of.
From there you can:
Open the free Charity Website MOT, a plain-English report on what we found and what to fix first.
Retest the site after making changes. Each site can be retested once a week, and results usually arrive within a day.
Tell us if the address, the result or anything else is wrong. We read every message.
Ask for the charity to be removed by emailing hello@nexusstudio.io. We will take it off the league and close its report link.
We built the league because data on UK charity websites did not exist in one place, and because the things it measures can be fixed. Common fixes, such as compressing large images or adding a donate link to the home page, are small jobs. If your charity is in the Needs work band, the breakdown shows where to start.
