Animal rescue centres need to do a number of different things very well, including building brand trust, engaging the audience, achieving successful adoptions, facilitating easy, secure donations and of course they need to be accessible to all visitors. If your website isn’t delivering on any one of these outcomes, it’s likely to be holding your organisation back. As an animal-loving team, animal rescue centre websites are something we’re very passionate about.
Our furry friends
What most animal rescue websites get wrong
Animal rescue charities do incredible work on the ground, they’re working hard offline to get animals into loving homes. It’s our job to make sure that the websites are working just as hard online. Unfortunately, we often see the same issues:
- Lengthy or unclear donation journeys.
- Hard to browse or filter the animals.
- Poor brand presentation or visual clutter.
- Poor mobile experience.
- Confusing navigation.
- Substandard website hosting.
Individually these aren’t even minor, but the reality is a lot of websites fall over on more than one of these – which will be having an impact on applications, adoptions and donations.
What an effective animal rescue website actually needs
There’s no one-size-fits-all template (and that’s not how we do things) but there are clear principles that do work. Strong animal rescue websites consistently:
- Make animals easy to find, filter and fall in love with.
- Put clear calls to action in the right places.
- Keep adoption and donation journeys simple.
- Work seamlessly on mobile devices.
- Offer fast page load speeds.
- Build trust quickly through consistent, high-quality content and design.
Check out our work with Bristol Animal Rescue Centre for a great example of all of the above!
Which web platform is best for animal rescue centres?
Without doubt, WordPress. It is the world’s most popular web platform. It’s flexible and easy to customise, meaning it’s possible to create a truly tailored solution for you, rather than trying to bend pre-made templates to your needs. A proper WordPress build is search engine friendly, accessible, fast loading and future proof. There are infinite numbers of plugins available, the entire platform is open source and the community are constantly sharing ideas on how to make all aspects of it better. WordPress supports integrations with other platforms more widely than any other web platform, and the range of donation plugins available is vast (see our blog post about WordPress donation plugins).
Our clients consistently report that the interface is hugely intuitive and user friendly for teams, making it easy to manage content themselves, so less time worrying about website updates and more time getting animals out of rescue and into homes. How do we do it?
- We design is specifically for you, rather than trying to bend a pre-made template to your needs.
- We build it from scratch as a custom, future-proof WordPress theme.
- We consider your users and design the journey to be both fluid and streamlined.
- We deliver a highly relevant and professional donation solution, ensuring that visitors can donate as easily as possible, the way they want to.
- We customise the editing space for you, making it easy for your team to make updates confidently, quickly and intuitively.
- We host the site in a best-in-class hosting environment to make sure the site is secure, reliable and fast-loading.
If someone lands on your website today, would they adopt or make a donation?
When your site is clear, fast and easy to use, more people complete adoption applications, more visitors follow through with donations, and more of your work gets the support it deserves. Just as importantly, it needs to perform reliably day to day.
