Running a non-profit website isn’t just about sharing your mission; it’s about making it easy for supporters to contribute to your cause. That’s where donation plugins for WordPress play a crucial role. A reliable donation plugin, when paired with professional WordPress themes allows you to collect funds securely, manage donors efficiently, and create a smooth giving experience that encourages repeat donations.
With so many options available, choosing the right plugin can feel overwhelming. Some focus on simple one-time donations, while others offer advanced features like recurring payments, multiple payment gateways, donor management, and fundraising reports. The right choice depends on your organisation’s goals, technical expertise, and budget.
In this article, we’ll explore the 6 best donation plugins for WordPress that are ideal for non-profit and charity websites. Whether you’re a small NGO, a church, or a large non-profit organisation, these plugins can help you boost fundraising, build donor trust, and grow your impact online.
Why Use the best donation plugins for WordPress Websites?
Using the best donation plugin for your WordPress website is essential if you want to collect funds efficiently, securely, and professionally. Whether you run a non-profit, charity, church, NGO, or fundraising campaign, the right plugin can significantly improve your donation results. Here’s why it matters:
- Makes Donations Easy for Supporters: A good donation plugin offers a simple, user-friendly donation form. When donors can contribute in just a few clicks, they’re more likely to complete the donation without hesitation.
- Secure Trusted Payment Processing: Top WordPress donation plugins integrate with secure payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, Razorpay, and more. This ensures safe transactions and builds trust with your donors.
- Supports One-Time Recurring Donations: The best plugins allow both one-time and recurring donations, helping you create a steady stream of funding for long-term projects and ongoing causes.
- Better Donor Management: Donation plugins help you track donors, manage donation records, and generate reports. This makes it easier to understand donor behaviour and plan future fundraising campaigns.
- Customizable Donation Forms: You can customise donation forms to match your website’s branding and fundraising goals, add suggested amounts, custom fields, or specific causes to increase conversions.
- Boosts Fundraising Conversions: Features like donation goals, progress bars, and call-to-action buttons motivate visitors to donate, directly increasing your fundraising success.
- Saves Time Reduces Manual Work: Automation features like email receipts, donation confirmations, and tax receipts reduce manual effort, allowing you to focus more on your mission.
- Scales with Your Organisation: As your non-profit grows, the best donation plugins grow with you, offering advanced features, integrations, and performance optimisation without needing complex custom development.
Factors to Choose the best donation plugins for WordPress
Here are the key factors to consider when choosing the best donation plugin for your WordPress website, especially if you’re running a non-profit, charity, or fundraising campaign:
1. Ease of Use: A good donation plugin should be simple to set up and use,both for you and your donors. Look for intuitive dashboards, easy form creation, and minimal technical hassles.
2. Payment Gateway Support: Ensure the plugin supports multiple trusted payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, Razorpay and Square. More options mean easier donations for supporters worldwide.
3. One-Time Recurring Donations: The ability to accept recurring donations (weekly, monthly, yearly) is critical for building long-term financial support and predictable funding streams.
4. Customizable Donation Forms: Look for plugins that let you:
- Customise form fields
- Add preset donation amounts
- Use your branding
- Embed forms anywhere with shortcodes or blocks
- Customisation helps improve donor engagement and conversion rates.
5. Donor Management Reporting: Good plugins offer tools to:
- Track donors
- Export donor lists
- View donation history
- Generate reports
This makes fundraising strategy and record-keeping much easier.
6. Goal Tracking Progress Bars: Visual tools like donation goals, progress indicators, and impact meters encourage donors to give more by showing momentum and milestones.
7. Security Compliance: Since donation forms handle sensitive data, choose plugins that:
- Use secure encryption
- Comply with PCI standards
- Support SSL
This protects donor information and builds trust.
8. Automated Emails Receipts: A great donation plugin sends automatic Thank-you emails, tax receipts and donation confirmations. This reduces manual work and improves donor communication.
Best Donation Plugins for WordPress - A Complete List
To help you choose the right tool for your specific needs, here is a curated list of the 7 best donation plugins for WordPress in 2025. This list covers everything from comprehensive fundraising suites to simple, lightweight forms.
WP Charitable
WP Charitable is a powerful and essential choice for those seeking must have wp plugins designed to help you create, manage, and optimise online fundraising campaigns directly from your WordPress dashboard. It lets you accept donations securely, build donation forms and campaigns, and grow your support base, all without relying on external fundraising platforms.
It is widely regarded as one of the most cost-effective and flexible donation plugins available for WordPress. It is the top alternative to GiveWP, specifically known for its "no platform fees" philosophy and high level of customisation. WP Charitable is a feature-rich and flexible donation plugin for WordPress that helps nonprofits and fundraisers build custom campaigns, accept payments securely, manage donors, and grow their impact, all without platform fees or complicated external platforms.
WP Simple Pay
WP Simple Pay is a WordPress plugin that lets you accept payments and donations using Stripe without needing a full e-commerce system like WooCommerce. It’s built to be simple to set up and use, so you can collect one-time or recurring donations straight from your WordPress site. The core idea is to make Stripe payments easy without extra bloat, perfect for nonprofits that want a lightweight, donation-focused solution.
It is the best choice for organisations that want a lightweight, friction-free way to accept donations without the complexity of a full-scale fundraising suite. Unlike other plugins that add dozens of new menu items and database tables to your WordPress site, WP Simple Pay keeps your site fast. It uses Stripe Checkout, meaning the heavy lifting of security and processing happens on Stripe's ultra-secure servers, not your website. WP Simple Pay is a simple yet powerful Stripe-based payment and donation plugin for WordPress. It’s ideal for organisations that want secure payment processing, flexible form building, and both one-time and recurring donation options without needing a full shopping cart system.
GiveWP
GiveWP is a full-featured and the best donation plugins for WordPress and a fundraising platform that helps you create powerful donation forms, accept online payments, and manage your fundraising efforts directly from your website. It’s built to give nonprofits and causes complete control over their online giving experience, without relying on third-party platforms.
With GiveWP, you can build customised donation forms that match your brand and campaign. You can embed these forms anywhere on your WordPress site using blocks, shortcodes, or widgets. To capture specific donor information, it pairs perfectly with WordPress custom fields plugins to ensure your database remains organized and actionable. It even integrates with gateways popular in India, like Razorpay, through add-ons, letting your donors pay via cards, net banking, wallets, and more without leaving your site. Whether you’re just starting with online donations or scaling a large nonprofit’s fundraising, GiveWP gives you the tools to raise money and manage donors effectively, all inside your WordPress dashboard.
WP CrowdFunding
WP Crowdfunding is the best donation plugins for WordPress that lets you turn your site into a crowdfunding platform. It’s built to work with WooCommerce, which means it uses e-commerce tools to help you manage campaigns, contributions, and rewards, but instead of selling products, you’re raising money for projects or causes directly on your site.
Since it’s built on WooCommerce, you can use WooCommerce payment methods to take contributions, giving you flexibility with payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal, and others supported by your store setup. WP Crowdfunding turns your WordPress site into a crowdfunding hub where multiple campaigns can run simultaneously, supporters can back projects, and fundraising goals can be visually tracked,all using WooCommerce’s payment infrastructure. It’s a great choice if your fundraising needs go beyond traditional donation forms and into project-based giving and rewards.
Donorbox
Donorbox is the best donation plugins for WordPress and a fundraising platform designed to help nonprofits, charities, and cause-driven websites collect donations online with minimal setup and maximum flexibility. It lets you embed customizable donation forms, pop-ups, or donate buttons directly on your WordPress site, which helps optimize WordPress for mobile to ensure a friction-free giving experience for supporters on any device.
You can easily install the Donorbox plugin from your WordPress dashboard and embed forms using shortcodes. The plugin supports multiple currencies and languages, making it ideal for international fundraising. Donorbox stores donor information and gives you the ability to track donation history, export data, and sort donors, helping you better manage your fundraising efforts. Donorbox Plugin is a versatile and user-friendly WordPress donation solution that helps you create attractive donation forms, support recurring giving, accept payments from multiple sources, and manage donors efficiently, all with minimal setup and no coding required. It’s a solid choice if you want to boost online fundraising with flexible forms and global donor support.
Donation Thermometer
The Donation Thermometer is a free and the best donation plugins for WordPress that lets you display a classic fundraising thermometer graphic on your site to visually track donation progress toward a goal. It’s not a full donation processing system on its own, but a visual indicator that shows your visitors how close you are to hitting your fundraising target.
The plugin is incredibly easy to use. You don't need to navigate complex menus; you simply drop a shortcode onto any page, post, or sidebar. Integrating it alongside a WordPress helpdesk plugin can further enhance transparency by allowing support staff to provide real-time updates to donors who inquire about the progress of specific campaigns. Overall, this lightweight, shortcode-based tool is ideal for boosting donor motivation, though it doesn’t handle payment processing itself.
Conclusion
Selecting the ideal donation plugin for your site can significantly impact how successfully you raise funds, connect with supporters, and grow your nonprofit’s reach. In 2026, choosing the best donation plugins for WordPress goes far beyond adding a simple Donate button; it’s about partnering with a solution that aligns with your organization’s long-term mission and goals. The right choice depends on your nonprofit’s size, your team’s technical expertise, and the type of giving experience you want to offer your donors.
By picking the tool that best matches your mission and budget, you’ll be better equipped to boost fundraising, build trust, and drive lasting support for your cause. Using a comprehensive WordPress bundle that includes these premium fundraising features is one of the smartest ways to scale your nonprofit’s online presence to the next level!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. What is a donation plugin in WordPress?
A donation plugin allows nonprofits and charities to collect online donations directly through their WordPress website. It helps manage payments, donors, and fundraising campaigns without relying on third-party platforms.
2. Are WordPress donation plugins safe to use?
Yes, most reputable donation plugins integrate with secure payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe and follow industry security standards. Using SSL and trusted plugins ensures donor data remains protected.
3. Can I accept recurring donations using WordPress plugins?
Many modern donation plugins support recurring donations such as monthly or yearly contributions. This feature helps nonprofits build consistent and predictable funding over time.
4. Do donation plugins work on mobile devices?
Most well-developed donation plugins are fully responsive and work smoothly across all devices. This ensures supporters can donate easily from smartphones, tablets, or desktops.
5. Are free donation plugins enough for small nonprofits?
Free plugins are often sufficient for small organisations with basic fundraising needs. However, advanced features like detailed reports, automation, and integrations usually require premium versions.
6. How do I choose the best donation plugins for WordPress?
You should consider ease of use, payment gateway support, donor management features, and scalability before making a decision. The right plugin depends on your organisation’s size, goals, and technical resources.