What Small Nonprofit Websites Are Built On (2026 Count)

connectNPO · Updated September 2026

Ask a search engine what small nonprofits build their websites on and you get a ranked list of platforms, drawn from vendor pages and roundups. Ask where the numbers come from and the answer thins out: figures for the whole web, or for “small business”, stand in for a size band we could not find counted anywhere.

So we counted. On September 22, 2026 we opened the home page of 152 small California nonprofit websites and recorded what each one runs on, how heavy the page is, and what it links to. The method is below, every count behind every percentage is in the tables, and the figures are free to quote with their limits.

What do small nonprofit websites run on?

In this count of 152 small California nonprofit websites, self-hosted WordPress came first at 43.4%. Hosted builders together came to 39.5%, led by Squarespace (16.4%), Wix (10.5%) and GoDaddy (5.3%). 19 sites, 12.5%, carried no platform mark at all.

The count, platform by platform

Counting the platforms of small California nonprofits is like counting the cars on one street instead of reading national sales figures: it describes organizations of one size in one place, not the whole web.

152 home pages that loaded on September 22, 2026 and showed the organization’s own site, out of 159 with a web address on file. Shares are of the 152.

Two of those rows deserve a word. No platform mark at all means the page showed no signal we could read; it is a floor rather than a verdict, since some of those 19 sites may run on a named platform that did not announce itself. And a league platform appeared four times: software written for running a sports league rather than for building a website, which a general list of platforms would never show. The count records the platform, not what those organizations do.

How we counted

The sample is the one we drew for our count of out-of-date nonprofit websites: California 501(c)(3) public charities with revenue between $250,000 and $1 million, drawn at random from the IRS business master file. Of the 174 organizations, 159 had a web address on file and 152 loaded and showed the organization’s own site. Four did not load at all, and three loaded something else: two bot checks and one error page. Those seven are removed from the count altogether rather than counted as a “no”. The earlier study reports 21 of the 174 with no website of their own; the 159 here counts addresses on file, a few of which are a page on a parent organization’s site.

Each home page was opened once by a program that loads a page the way a browser does but without a screen, starting with no history and no login, from a computer in Los Angeles. Every platform leaves a small signature in the code behind a page, which a visitor never sees. Squarespace and Wix load their files from addresses of their own; WordPress uses standard folder names; Drupal and Joomla write their name into the page. That is what the count looked for. Page weight and request counts come from that same load.

Two checks followed. Twenty sites drawn at random were loaded again and identified a second time from a different signal: what the server sends back before the page itself arrives. Fifteen of the twenty carried a platform mark there, and all fifteen matched the first verdict. The other five showed only a web server or a delivery network, and none of the twenty disagreed. Then every financial link the script found was opened and read by hand, which is how three of nineteen turned out to be false positives, such as “Financial Aid” and “Financial Donations”. The remaining 16 are the figure quoted here. That is the one row in the second table that was hand-checked; the others are automatic counts, and the loosest patterns are the newsletter and staff rows.

The median home page weighs almost 3 MB

A page is a delivery, and weight is what the visitor pays for it. The median home page in this count weighed 2.93 MB, about the size of a photograph from a phone, and the median page needed 78 separate files to appear once. Both are medians across sites, from one cold load with the cache off, which is the heaviest reading a site gives. 73 of 151 were over 3 MB; one site’s weight could not be recorded, which is why that figure is out of 151 rather than 152. The heaviest was 81.4 MB. We measured bytes, not what visitors did next.

The comparison on the right is our own: the eight sample sites we run, measured the same day, load 228 to 673 KB, in 17 to 21 files with no third-party scripts. We did not measure why the gap exists: the count records bytes and requests, not what produced them. Our breakdown of what hosting can and cannot fix is in nonprofit website hosting.

What the home page carries

A home page is the front desk of the building. For a first-time visitor, what cannot be reached from it is easy to miss.

The second half of the count is what a visitor can reach from the front door. These are links on the home page, so an organization may well publish something on an inner page that never appears here.

Links on the home page itself, read on September 22, 2026. A page an organization publishes deeper in its site does not appear here.

The basics are in place almost everywhere: 98.7% served over https and 96.7% carried the tag that tells a phone how to size the page, which is the tag itself rather than proof the page reads well there. Two thirds carried a donate link, and 63.8% linked to events, which is where our earlier count found the most common out-of-date item.

The two rare ones: money and access

Two lines at the bottom of that chart are the interesting ones. 16 of 152 home pages, 10.5%, linked to anything about the organization’s finances, and three of those pointed only to a third-party profile rather than to the organization’s own site. 8 of 152, 5.3%, linked to an accessibility statement.

Neither number is a verdict on those organizations. A 990 is public whether or not a website links to it, and a site can be usable without publishing a statement about it. What the numbers say is that a visitor who wants either one has almost nowhere to click, which is worth knowing if you are deciding what to put on your own site. Examples of both are in what should be on a nonprofit website and nonprofit impact report examples.

What we take from it

Three readings, in the order we would trust them. First, no single platform dominates among nonprofits of this size, meaning revenue between $250,000 and $1 million: WordPress leads, hosted builders together are close behind, and about one site in seven shows no platform name at all. A guide written as though every organization were on one platform is describing a sector that does not exist here.

For scale outside this band: W3Techs counts WordPress on 40.2% of all websites it surveys and 58.8% of those whose software it can identify (read on September 22, 2026; the page is stamped the following day). Our 43.4% describes only the 152 California nonprofits counted here, not nonprofits everywhere. It sits close to the all-websites figure and well under the identified-software one, which is worth remembering when a market-share number is quoted at a nonprofit: it may be measuring a much larger and different population. The nonprofit counts we could find cover US nonprofits of every size, not this band.

Second, heavy pages turned up across the count, on builders and on self-hosted sites alike, so weight is worth checking whatever a site runs on. Third, the front door is where the gaps are: two thirds carry a donate link, about half link to the people, and a way into the money or a word about access is on one page in ten or fewer.

If you are weighing platforms yourself, the three we looked at in detail are WordPress, Wix and Squarespace — each with what its own documentation says about renewals and leaving.

How to use this if you are choosing

The practical use of a count like this is not to pick the winner. It is to ask better questions about your own site:

Open your home page on a phone away from wifi and time it. Then look at what a stranger can reach in one click: can they give, can they see what is coming up, can they find out who runs the organization, and can they get to your filings? On this count the first two are on about two thirds of home pages, the third on about half, and the fourth on one in ten. The eleven-item checklist goes through each one with a working example.

Frequently asked questions

Counted on September 22, 2026 from Los Angeles: 152 California 501(c)(3) public charities with revenue between $250,000 and $1 million, home pages only, one load each. Figures are aggregates; no organization is named. Method, checks and limits are published in full with the research. This guide is general information, not legal advice.