2025 Nonprofit Website Performance Report
Fundamentals still fuel engagement
A lot has shifted in the digital space over the past two years. With the adoption of AI into major Search platforms, users are rapidly changing their search behaviors, Google's algorithm continues to evolve, and answer engine expectations are higher than ever.
Despite the pace of this change, there’s still one core truth: Your nonprofit’s website performance is crucial.
If your site is slow, hard to use or lacking in technical basics, it creates friction—not just for donors, but for anyone trying to engage with your cause. That friction can cost you visibility in search and trust with your audience.
In this year’s Nonprofit Website Performance Report, we looked at how nonprofit websites are performing across five key areas: speed, accessibility, SEO, best practices and backlink strength. The short version? There’s been some real improvement, especially on mobile and in technical SEO. But many sites are still falling short on fundamentals.
There’s still work to do. Remember: Your website isn’t just where people find you, it’s where they choose to get involved.
—Mitchell Chokas, SEO Supervisor, RKD Group
Findings summary
The fundamentals of website performance and SEO play a big role in how donors navigate nonprofit websites. That, of course, impacts how (and how often) people give online.
Two years after RKD Group published the industry’s first Nonprofit SEO Benchmark Report and Nonprofit Website Performance Report, we’re checking back in to see just how much progress our sector has made in these technical areas.
Well, there’s good news and bad news:
- The good news is that 67% of nonprofit sites received a "poor" rating on mobile performance. Yes, that sounds bad, but consider that this is great progress from a mark of 80% in 2023.
- The bad news is that 87% of nonprofit websites "need improvement" on desktop performance. That number is almost identical to what we saw in 2023 (86%)—in other words, zero improvement in two years.
Read on to see how different nonprofit sectors stack up in key website performance areas, as well as related areas like accessibility, SEO and best practices.
About the research
The charts below include data from more than 2,500 regional, national and international nonprofit organizations across the nation and are broken out by different nonprofit causes. The data includes scores and statistics from both Ahrefs and Google’s PageSpeed Insights tools.
It's important to note that while conducting our research, five nonprofits stood out far above the rest: Mayo Clinic, Planned Parenthood, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, AARP Foundation and American Cancer Society.
Because these organizations had significantly higher rankings and therefore skewed benchmark findings, we have removed them from the charts below.
Before we dive into the results, here are some key terms you should know:
Key terms to know
Throughout the report, we'll utilize the following terms:
- Accessibility score: This measures how well a website works for the diverse needs of all users, including those with disabilities or impairments. Accessibility concerns include vision, motor/dexterity, auditory and cognitive.
- Backlinks: Also known as an inbound or incoming link, a backlink is created when one website links to another. Backlinks are crucial for organic search.
- Best Practices score: This is calculated through a series of mini-audits that look for script errors, cybersecurity measures, image ratios, font options and more.
- Domain Rating: Domain rating is a metric used by Ahrefs that shows the strength of your website's backlink profile. It is measured on a scale from 1 to 100, with 100 being the strongest possible rating.
- First Contentful Paint (FCP): This metric marks the first point at which the user can see anything on the screen, and it is one of six measurements in the Performance score. A fast FCP should load in 1.8 seconds or less.
- Keywords: Keywords are words and phrases that users input on search engines to find content. These words and phrases should be used frequently throughout the copy of your website to help ensure your page comes up when a user is looking for something specific, for example, "food bank near me."
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric marks the point at which the page's largest content has likely loaded, and it is one of six measurements in the Performance score. A fast LCP should load in 2.5 seconds or less.
- Organic Traffic: Organic traffic is all unpaid traffic to your website that comes from a search engine like Google, Bing or Yahoo!.
- Performance score: This averages five key metrics to measure the speed with which a webpage loads. Included in this score are First Contentful Paint, Speed Index, Largest Contentful Paint, Total Blocking Time and Cumulative Layout Shift.
- Referring Domain: A referring domain is when another trusted website links to yours, improving your SEO rank. Nonprofits should strategically partner with news outlets, industry publications or sister organizations for referral links for improved rankings.
- SEO: Search engine optimization is the strategic process of making improvements and optimizations to your website to improve visibility on search engines like Google.
- SEO score: This checks that your page is following basic SEO advice, like having proper meta and alt tag information, a valid robots.txt file and crawlable links.
- Speed Index: This metric shows how quickly the contents of a page are visibly populated, and it is one of six measurements in the Performance score. A fast Speed Index should load in 3.4 seconds or less.
Overall Page Speed Performance
Google's Performance Score weighs five metrics to calculate a score out of 100 for each webpage it evaluates. Much like school grades, 90 and above gets an A. Sites scoring below 90 need improvement—and if your site scores below 50, it gets a failing grade of Poor.
Unfortunately for the industry, nonprofits have made no progress in desktop performance in the last two years. In fact, they’ve taken a small step backward:
When we look at mobile performance, however, we see some noticeable improvement:
Still not great, but it’s getting better.
Performance by Nonprofit Cause
When we break it down by cause, we see that Missions (17.1%) and Ministries (17.1%) score the highest on Good desktop performance. Animal Care (28.2%) and Ministries (25.2%) score the worst on Poor desktop performance.
For mobile sites, Health & Hospitals (4.0%) and Ministries (3.3%) scored the highest on Good mobile performance. Missions (81.1%) and Humanitarian Action (67.2%) scored the worst on Poor mobile performance.
Conclusion: With more and more people using their smartphones to browse the internet, it’s great to see so much progress in mobile performance in the last two years.
Accessibility
Web accessibility is a key score that shows how well a website fits the diverse needs of all users, including those with disabilities or impairments.
In 2023, just over a third of nonprofit websites received a Good rating for web accessibility. In 2025, that number has improved slightly on both desktop and mobile:
Performance by Nonprofit Cause
Not surprisingly, the Health & Hospitals cause is leading the way in accessibility—they have the highest percentage of Good ratings in both desktop (45.4%) and mobile (41.9%). Animal Care organizations are the farthest behind, with the lowest percentage of Good ratings in both desktop (23.0%) and mobile (21.2%).
Conclusion: We’ve made small progress in improving accessibility for those with disabilities and impairments. However, 62.3% of websites still need improvement on desktop and 63.4% on mobile. There’s still work to be done.
Best Practices
These Google scores look at a variety of technical measures to evaluate how up to date websites are in areas like script errors, cybersecurity measures, font options and more. Nonprofit organizations scored fairly well in this area.
Desktop scores took a small step backward from 2023 to 2025, with fewer sites ranking Good for best practices. Mobile scores stayed just about the same:
Performance by Nonprofit Cause
When it comes to best practices, the regional sites lead the way, with Missions, Food Banks and Animal Care leading the way on both mobile and desktop.
Conclusion: The more pages, scripts and moving parts a website has, the higher the chance for errors and outdated material. When is the last time you’ve done an audit of your website on the front and back ends?
Technical Performance
Google rates SEO best practices that are more on the technical side. Rather than examining referring links, quality content and keywords, this metric looks for whether a page has a meta description, crawlable links and images with proper [alt] attributes.
In this area, nonprofit organizations have made drastic improvements in two years. Good scores are up 13.2% on desktop and 16.1% on mobile:
Performance by Nonprofit Cause
Most causes are pretty even on both mobile and desktop, with a slight edge to Ministries in the top spot. Missions and Animal Care have the lowest scores—but not by much.
Conclusion: It’s great to see such growth across the board. The pessimist would say that more than half still need improvement, but we’ll stick with optimism here.
Domain Rating
Ahrefs scores websites’ external backlinks through a metric it calls “Domain Rating.” This score takes into account:
- The number of unique domain links
- The authority of those domains (high quality vs. spam)
- The number of unique domains those sites link to
Domain Rating is scored on a scale of 0-100, with 100 being the strongest.
It makes sense that larger organizations in the Health & Hospitals and Humanitarian Action causes would score higher here. They are generally more well known than regional organizations and have more domains linking to them.
Here is a breakdown by cause on the average Domain Ratings:
Average Backlinks
The number of quality backlinks has a direct correlation with strength of domain rating, which is why it's no surprise to see Humanitarian Action and Health & Hospitals sitting at the top of the chart.
What is surprising is that Food Banks have so few backlinks, despite a higher Domain Rating than Animal Care and Ministries. Missions have the most work to do, ranking last in both Domain Rating and Average Backlinks:
Average Organic Traffic
With the most backlinks in their pocket, Humanitarian Action and Health & Hospitals causes drive significantly more organic traffic to their websites. Animal Care comes in third and is the highest cause among regional organizations.
Food Banks and Missions show the greatest need for building backlinks that drive more organic traffic to their websites:
About RKD Group
RKD Group is North America's leading fundraising and marketing solutions provider to hundreds of growth-focused nonprofit organizations. With strategic expertise in advanced data science, direct response, digital marketing, omnichannel fundraising, award-winning creative and donor engagement, RKD helps nonprofits break through the noise, build lasting relationships and drive meaningful impact with the donors who support them.