WEBSITE PERFORMANCE
- Organic (non-paid) search traffic declined over the course of 2025, but still accounted for 39% of all visits.
- Nonprofits received donations from 1.6% of all website visitors, generating $1.33 per visitor.
- More nonprofit website traffic came from users on mobile devices (including both phones and tablets) than desktop users. Mobile users represented 52% of all visits, with 48% of traffic from users on desktop devices.
- Users on desktop devices made up the majority of donation transactions (57%) and revenue (72%).
- The average gift made on desktop devices was $168; for mobile users, the average gift was $88.
- PayPal was the most widely-used alternative payment method — 79% of nonprofits made this option available on donation pages. Google Pay (58%), Apple Pay (57%), and Venmo (44%) were also common.
Last year, 39% of traffic to nonprofit websites was organic traffic. That means about two out of every five times someone visited a nonprofit website, it went like this: they entered a term into a search engine, possibly scrolling past an AI summary and some paid results, and clicked on a link to that website.
For many users, that’s unremarkable. It’s pretty much how the internet has worked for years and years, a perfectly normal way of finding your way to what you are looking for. For others, it’s like riding a velocipede to the haberdashery, hopelessly out of date.
Internet traffic is increasingly mediated by AI summaries and social media, changing how (or whether) supporters encounter nonprofit websites. We have a lot more to say about how changes by providers, especially Google’s implementation of Gemini AI summaries, are affecting the search landscape. See our discussion of answer engine optimization. For now, our focus is on organic traffic volume, which showed a clear decline over the course of 2025.
Search providers, nonprofits, and users are still adapting, so we don’t know whether this trend will continue or how it will impact organizations. However, since organic traffic has been such a large portion of all visitors AND doesn’t rely on paid promotion, any decline is worrying.
Among website visitors from all traffic sources, 1.6% made a donation, and nonprofits received an average of $1.33 per visitor. Visitors to Hunger/Poverty nonprofit websites were especially likely to donate: 3.3% completed a gift, generating $5.58 in revenue per visitor.
Those figures include all website visits, but there were clear differences depending on the type of device. Mobile users accounted for 52% of all traffic, but 43% of donation transactions and just 28% of revenue.
This fits the pattern we have reported on in Benchmarks year after year: Desktop users were more likely to donate than mobile users, and had a higher average gift.
Overall, 11% of desktop users who landed on a primary donation page completed a gift, compared to 8% for mobile users. Small nonprofits had especially low conversion rates for mobile users, just 4%.
Adding more payment options is one of the most common ways for nonprofits to try to improve conversion rates, especially for mobile users. In addition to credit cards, 79% of nonprofits accepted PayPal, 58% accepted Google Pay, and 57% accepted Apple Pay.
As we noted above, the average gift for desktop users was significantly higher than for mobile users — $168, compared to $88. While average gift sizes varied between different sectors, in every sector desktop donors gave larger gifts than mobile donors.
It should be obvious by now that we believe the details matter. Every bit of incremental progress we are able to wrangle out of every last interaction helps build toward larger goals. At the same time, we can’t get so caught up in optimizing at the margins that we lose sight of the sea change happening all around.
Organic traffic numbers are one way we can clearly see how AI tools are reshaping online supporter engagement, but more subtle changes are happening as well. If many would-be site visitors are having their questions answered by an AI overview — what does that mean for the audience that still makes it through? Are they better informed, more motivated, demographically skewed? The answers to these questions may drive nonprofits to reconsider and reoptimize strategies that made sense in the old world (of a few months ago) but no longer match the current reality.
Homepage and donation page speed
Average load time for a nonprofit’s homepage and primary donation page has been a standard metric in M+R Benchmarks for a long time. To be honest, we’ve tended not to dwell on it too much. After all, what is there to say other than “faster is better”?
Well, for one thing, we always want to be working with the most accurate data we can, and that means accounting for real-world user experience.
This year, we’ve revised how we calculate load speed by switching to the “speed index” reported in Google PageSpeed Insights. This measures how quickly content is visibly populated above the fold during a page load. Our switch to PageSpeed Insights is due to its ability to calculate performance numbers by combining real-world user data along with virtualized testing. This means the new speed index we’re calculating is much closer to what visitors actually experience, and not what is simulated in a lab environment.
In any case, we just wanted to point out that we have changed how we calculate this metric for this year. As these numbers were drawn from Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, you can try it yourself at https://pagespeed.web.dev.
Give it a whirl and see how your pages measure up, if that sort of thing interests you. Which, given that you are reading all the way to the end here, seems like it might?
