01 / Food security
Free websites for food security nonprofits
Free websites for food security nonprofits start with the question that outruns every other one on a pantry site: are you open, and where. 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 your organization's own account, under your own name.
- Leaving
- Stop any time. You keep the files and can host them anywhere.
02 / Daily use
What people look up first
Two audiences arrive at a pantry site and they want opposite things. One is deciding whether to come today. The other is deciding whether to give or volunteer.
- 01 Hours and distribution locations. The most searched thing you publish, and the thing most often wrong. It is usually right on the door, stale on Google, and printed on a flyer from three years ago that is still circulating.
- 02 Eligibility and what to bring. ID or no ID. Proof of address or none. Income self-attestation. A county line. If your answer is that nobody is turned away, that sentence has to be near the top, because people stay home over a requirement you do not even have.
- 03 How the distribution runs. Drive-through, walk-up, client choice aisle, pre-packed boxes, appointment only. Whether there is a line and when it starts. Whether you can pick up for a neighbor.
- 04 The mobile pantry schedule. Different site every week, changed monthly. This is the single hardest thing to keep accurate and the one most often left as an image nobody can read on a phone.
- 05 Volunteer shift signups. Sorting, packing, distribution day, gleaning, deliveries. Plus the parts groups always ask about: minimum age, how many people you can take at once, and whether a corporate team can book a Saturday.
- 06 Food drive instructions. What you need this month, what you cannot accept, where to drop off and when. Schools and offices run drives every fall and they will follow whatever list you publish.
- 07 Where else to go. Other pantries on the days you are closed, SNAP application help, WIC, summer meal sites, benefits screening. A referral list is one of the most used pages on a pantry site and one of the least often built.
03 / The content gap
What you have, what is missing
The information is rarely absent. It is trapped in a format that a phone, a screen reader and a search engine all read as nothing.
You almost certainly have
- 01 Accurate hours, somewhere. On the door, in a bulletin, on a food bank partner directory, and in the head of whoever answers the phone.
- 02 A Facebook page for closures. Which is where snow days and holiday changes get posted, and which is invisible to anyone who does not use Facebook.
- 03 Real numbers. Households served, pounds distributed, volunteer hours. Already reported to your food bank or your funders every quarter.
- 04 A volunteer signup tool. Usually a shared calendar or a signup site. It works. It is just three clicks deeper than anyone will go.
You are usually missing
- Gap Hours as text, not as a picture. A flyer saved as a JPEG cannot be read aloud, cannot be enlarged without blurring, cannot be translated and cannot be indexed. It is the most common single fault on a pantry website.
- Gap Which door. The side entrance off the alley, not the main sanctuary doors. Where to park. Which building on the campus. First-time visitors circle the block and leave.
- Gap A closure notice that can go up in a minute. Weather, holidays, a truck that did not arrive. Without a place for it, the news lives only on a social post and a taped sign.
- Gap A second language. Not the whole site. The hours, the address, the eligibility line and what to bring, in the languages actually spoken in your service area.
- Gap A page that loads on one bar of signal. Photo carousels and heavy scripts cost the visitor who has the least connection. This site has no CDN, no tracking and no third-party requests, and neither will yours.
04 / The page that matters most
Hours and locations, on a phone
Assume it is being read standing up, one-handed, on a bus, by somebody working out whether the trip is worth the fare. That is not a sad detail. It is the whole design brief, and it decides every choice on the page.
- One tap away
- Reachable from the top of the home page without scrolling. Not filed under About, not inside a PDF, not three menu levels down.
- Each site listed
- Name, street address as selectable text, days, times, and a map link that opens the phone's own map app. Every one of those is a separate line, not a paragraph.
- Notice at the top
- A slot for closures that sits above the hours and is empty the rest of the year. Somebody checking at 7am in the snow should not have to hunt.
- What to bring
- On the same page as the hours. Splitting requirements onto a separate page is how people arrive without the one thing they needed.
- The entrance
- Which door, where to park, whether there are stairs, whether a car can pull up. Bus route and stop if a route serves you.
- A tappable number
- A real phone link, with the hours a person actually answers it, and what the voicemail will tell them if they call outside those hours.
- Readable at 200%
- Full size text, real contrast, no fixed-height boxes that clip when the type is enlarged. Tested, not assumed.
- Both languages, same page
- Or one tap between them. Never a translated site that quietly stops at the page that matters.
05 / Build weight
Written for a bad connection
A pantry site is one of the few places where page weight is not a technical preference. The visitor with the worst phone and the tightest data plan is the visitor the page exists for.
- 01 No third-party requests. No CDN, no font service, no analytics, no ad pixels. Fonts and stylesheets are served from your own domain. Nothing about a person looking up a pantry is sold to anybody.
- 02 Text before images. The hours render before a single photograph has downloaded. Photos are lazy loaded and sized, so a slow connection costs a picture, not the address.
- 03 No PDFs for anything that matters. A schedule in a PDF is a download, a pinch-zoom and a fight. Same information as a web page costs a fraction and works in any language setting.
- 04 Works without JavaScript. Hours, addresses and phone numbers are plain HTML. If a script fails on a weak signal, the page still answers the question.
Plain-English summary
Put the hours in text. Put them where a thumb can reach. Keep the page light enough to open on a bus.
Everything else on a pantry website is secondary to those three things, and most redesigns get it backwards.
06 / Questions
Questions from pantries
Our hours change. Who updates the site?
Decide that before the build and tell us on the application. Content edits are not in the monthly. The monthly covers hosting and SSL only, and edits you ask us to make are billed separately at the normal rate.
What we can do is build so that a seasonal change is a small edit rather than a redesign: hours in one block, one closure notice at the top, everything in text. If nobody on staff will ever touch it, we design a page that stays true instead of one that needs weekly attention.
Can the site be in Spanish as well as English?
We will build the second version and the switch between them. We do not translate. Send us the translated text, from a person rather than a machine, and it goes in.
If translation capacity is limited, translate the four things that decide whether someone makes the trip: hours, address, what to bring, and whether ID is required. That is worth more than a fully translated About page.
We are a pantry inside a church. Are we eligible?
Very likely. Eligibility is a US 501(c) exemption, an application pending with the IRS, or fiscal sponsorship, plus an annual operating budget under $1,000,000.
A pantry operating under a congregation's or a larger nonprofit's exemption is normally covered by that entity. Apply, name the entity that holds the exemption on the form, and we will tell you plainly if it does not qualify.
Do you build online ordering or appointment booking?
No. Custom web applications and databases are outside the award.
If you already run appointments, client choice ordering or volunteer shifts in another tool, the site links to it and explains it in plain language, which is usually where those tools fail people anyway. What we will not do is put a booking system between a person and a distribution that does not actually require one.
07 / Apply
Free websites for food pantries
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 Community health Same reader, same page problem: hours, sliding scale, and a language they can read it in.
- 02 Youth programs Summer meal sites and after-school programs usually cross over with pantry work.
- 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.