01 / Animal rescue
Free websites for animal rescue nonprofits
A rescue site is a listing that changes every week, three application forms and an appeal you have to publish at 9pm on a Friday. Free websites for animal rescue nonprofits have to survive that, not just look good on launch day. We donate the design and the build. Hosting is $25 a month for the first 12 months, then $50.
The offer
Donated build, $25 a month
- Build
- Donated. $0 upfront for design or development.
- Monthly
- $25 a month for the first 12 months, then $50 a month. Hosting and SSL only.
- Domain
- Registered in the rescue's own account, under the rescue's name.
- Leaving
- Stop any time. You keep the files and can host them anywhere.
02 / Daily use
Seven things a rescue site does
Almost all of it is intake driven. The site has to hold up on the week a hoarding case lands.
- 01 The adoptable list. Changing constantly. Name, species, rough age, weight, cats or kids or dogs, medical notes, adoption fee, current foster location. This is the page people arrive on.
- 02 The adoption application and the steps after it. Vet reference, landlord check, home visit, meet-and-greet, transport day. Applicants who cannot see the sequence read a two-week silence as rejection and apply somewhere else.
- 03 Foster recruitment. Foster capacity is the ceiling on everything else you do. The page has to answer one question in the first paragraph: what does this cost me. Food, crate, litter and medical are usually on the rescue. Say so.
- 04 Owner surrender information. Waitlist status, what you can and cannot take, the surrender fee if there is one, and the alternatives: behavior help, pet food assistance, rehoming listings, low-cost vet options. A good surrender page ends calls before they start.
- 05 Urgent medical appeals. Heartworm treatment, an amputation, a parvo litter. One animal, one total, one photograph, one button, published fast.
- 06 Spay, neuter and clinic dates. Voucher programs, low-cost clinic days, community cat and TNR guidance, trap loans. Half of this traffic is not adopters at all. It is neighbors with a colony and no idea who to call.
- 07 Transport partners and the run calendar. Pull partners, receiving organizations, dates, and the driver signup. Drivers are recruited from the website far more often than anyone plans for.
03 / The content gap
What you have, what is missing
Rescues produce more content per week than almost any other kind of small nonprofit. The gap is never material. It is structure.
You almost certainly have
- 01 Photos and video, constantly. Intake shots, foster updates, the video of the dog discovering stairs. More usable imagery than most paying clients ever supply.
- 02 An active Facebook page. Often with a larger following than the website has visitors. It is also where every adopter update and urgent appeal goes to be forgotten within a day.
- 03 Structured animal records. In a listing account, in shelter software, or in a spreadsheet that a specific volunteer guards. Either way, the data already exists in fields.
- 04 An application you wrote yourself. Usually a form on a free tool, or a PDF. The questions are right. The delivery is the problem.
You are usually missing
- Gap Adoption fees written down. By age or size, with what the fee covers: vaccines, spay or neuter, microchip, testing. Withholding the number does not increase applications. It filters out the people who budget.
- Gap Your actual adoption requirements. Fenced yard, no fenced yard, apartments, landlord approval, other pets, children's ages. Every rescue has these rules. Most publish none of them and then decline people who took time to apply.
- Gap An outcome archive. Adopted animals, kept up as a record rather than deleted. It is the closest thing a rescue has to proof, and it is what a first-time donor scrolls before giving.
- Gap A donate page that names the work. What a heartworm course costs you, what a spay costs you, what a month of boarding costs you. Your numbers, not invented ones. Sitting next to the legal name and the EIN.
- Gap Alt text on animal photos. A listing built entirely from images is unusable to anyone on a screen reader, and invisible to search.
04 / The page that matters most
The adoptable animals listing
Everything else on the site exists to send people here. It is also the page most likely to be wrong, because most rescues are maintaining it in three places at once.
- The three places
- Petfinder or Adopt-a-Pet, Facebook, and the website. An animal goes home on Saturday, gets marked adopted in one of the three, and is still listed on the other two in March.
- Pick a source of truth
- Usually the listing platform, because that is where your volunteers already work and where adopters already search. The website's job is then to reflect it, not to compete with it.
- The alternative
- A hand-maintained page on your own site. Cleaner to look at, and it is a standing chore for somebody. Choose it deliberately, and name who does it, before the site is built.
- What each animal needs
- Name, species and breed guess, rough age, weight, sex, altered status, good with cats, dogs, kids, medical or behavioral notes, the fee, and the date the record was last touched.
- Filters that earn their place
- Species, size, and good-with. Nothing else. A filter panel with eleven controls on a list of nine dogs is a worse experience than no filters.
- The empty state
- Rescues run empty sometimes. The page should say when it was last updated and what to do next, rather than reading as a broken site.
- One step to apply
- The application link belongs on every animal, carrying that animal's name with it, so nobody has to remember which dog they were looking at.
05 / Load
Built for kitten season
Most rescue websites are designed around a quiet week. Then May arrives, intake triples, and the site becomes the reason four volunteers are answering the same question by message at midnight.
- 01 Intake status, stated at the top. Open, waitlist, or closed for intake. One line, changed rarely, and it deflects more phone calls than any other sentence on the site.
- 02 A found-animal path that is not you. Stray hold rules, the county shelter, animal control, the lost and found groups. People send strays to rescues because nobody told them where else to look.
- 03 Foster signup that is always live. Not a seasonal post. A standing page, so a person who reads a bottle-baby appeal in June can act on it in June.
- 04 A supply list people can actually buy from. Formula, heating pads, crates, cleaner. In-kind giving is the easiest yes you will get all year and most rescue sites bury it.
06 / Questions
Questions from rescues
Will the site pull our listings out of Petfinder?
Tell us on the application where your animals actually live, and we design the listing around that system instead of against it.
What we will not do is build you a second database. Custom web applications and databases are outside the award, and we do not supply or pay for a listing account. If you would rather hand-maintain a page on your own site, we will build that instead, but say so early, because edits you ask us to make are billed separately at the normal rate.
Can we raise money for one animal's vet bill?
Yes, through the processor you already use. We connect Stripe, Givebutter or PayPal. We do not supply the processor or the account.
The practical build is a page shaped for an appeal, so that when a hit-by-car intake comes in on a Friday you are filling in a total, a photo and a deadline rather than inventing a page from nothing.
We are foster-based with no shelter building. Does that matter?
No. Eligibility is tax status and budget, not facilities.
It does change the site: with no address to visit, the pages that carry the weight are the counties you serve, how a meet-and-greet actually happens, whether you are open for intake this week, and where an adopter drives to. A rescue with no building has to answer more questions on the website, not fewer.
Do you photograph the animals?
No. Photography is not in the award and we do not run shoots. Send the phone photos you already have. Where you are short, the site uses illustrative imagery.
We will tell you the sizes and shapes we need so the intake volunteer can shoot to fit, and we write alt text for every photo so the listing is readable by somebody using a screen reader.
07 / Apply
Free websites for animal rescues
The design and the build are donated. Hosting is $25 a month for the first 12 months, then $50 a month. You own the domain and the source files, and you can leave with both. Rolling, no deadline, a decision within 2 weeks of a complete application.
The phone and the email are support channels, not a sales line. Nobody will call you to close a deal.
Related sectors
- 01 Environmental conservation Wildlife rehabilitation, habitat work and volunteer event calendars sit next door to this one.
- 02 Food security Pet food pantries usually live here. Same problem: hours and eligibility, correct on a phone.
- 03 All eight sectors The list is not a limit. Most US 501(c) organizations under a $1,000,000 budget can apply, including those awaiting IRS determination.