How to Set Up a Club or Community Group Website in an Afternoon

Most club websites are built by whoever on the committee is “good with computers” – and then held together by that one person forever. This guide is written for exactly that volunteer: how to get a club, society or community group website live in a single afternoon, and – just as important – how to set it up so the next volunteer can take it over without archaeology.

What a club website actually needs (and what it doesn’t)

Five pages cover 95% of community groups:

1. Home – what the group is, who it’s for, when and where you meet, in one scroll;
2. Events / fixtures – the page people return for, so it must be easy for any committee member to update;
3. Join us – membership info, costs, and a form or contact;
4. News – even monthly updates prove the group is alive;
5. Contact – a form plus committee role emails (secretary@…, not someone’s personal Gmail).

What you don’t need on day one: member logins, payment systems, forums, or a design award. Add them later if the group truly wants them.

Hour 1: domain, hosting, WordPress

Domain: yourclubname.org.uk suits community groups nicely (.co.uk is fine too). Two rules: register it in the group’s name with a committee email address as the contact – not a personal account (our post on what happens when the person who set it up disappears explains exactly why) – and turn on auto-renew. Tip: open a Switchweb charity and non-profit account and your .org.uk or .co.uk domain is free; just use the code NONPROFITDOMAIN when you sign up.

Hosting: an entry-level plan is genuinely enough: clubs need reliability, not horsepower. Look for UK support, free SSL, daily backups, and email included, the criteria in our clubs and community groups hosting guide.

Our charity and non-profit plans are built for exactly this, and they are not just for registered charities: clubs, societies, community groups and CICs qualify too. The Entry Charity plan at £39 a year covers everything a club website needs: 10 x 10GB email accounts, daily backups with 30 days kept, free SSL, UK-based servers and one-click WordPress installs.

WordPress: install via the 1-click installer. Choose a simple, fast, free theme – the plainer the theme, the easier the handover.

Hour 2: build the five pages

Work from a template mindset: every page answers a visitor’s question in the first line. Concrete tips:

• Put meeting time, place and a map link on the homepage – it’s the single most-searched fact about any local group;
• Use the blog for news so updates take two minutes and old news archives itself;
• For events, a simple events plugin (or even a regularly updated page) beats an over-engineered calendar nobody maintains;
• Photos: real ones of real activities, with members’ permission – see our note on image sizes in the Core Web Vitals guide so galleries don’t slow the site to a crawl.

Hour 3: email, forms, and going live

• Create role-based mailboxes – secretary@, treasurer@, membership@ – so addresses survive committee changes. The Entry Charity plan includes 10 mailboxes at 10GB each, so the whole committee is covered at no extra cost;
• Add a contact form and test it end-to-end (send a message; confirm it arrives – our SPF/DKIM deliverability guide matters here too);
• Run the quick version of the launch checklist: SSL on, search engines allowed, form tested, phone check.

The hour that saves the next volunteer: handover-proofing

This is the part most club sites skip, and it is why so many die when a volunteer moves on:

1. Write a one-page “how our website works” doc: where the domain is registered, where the hosting is, who has logins, how to post news. Store it where the committee keeps minutes.
2. Two people hold every login, and credentials live in the group’s password manager or sealed record – never one person’s head.
3. Billing goes to the club – the group’s card or bank, renewal reminders to a committee address.
4. Check backups exist – automatic ones, restorable by whoever inherits the site: see snapshot backups. On Switchweb, backups run daily and 30 days are kept automatically, so if a new volunteer makes a mistake, the site can be rolled back to how it was before.

FAQs

What does a club website cost per year?

On a Switchweb Entry Charity plan, £39 a year, and your .org.uk or .co.uk domain is free when you open a new account with the code NONPROFITDOMAIN. That includes the website, 10 committee mailboxes, SSL and backups, comfortably within a subs-and-jumble-sale budget.

Facebook works fine for us – why bother?

Keep the Facebook group! But a website is findable by non-members on Google, doesn’t bury information in a feed, and belongs to the club rather than a platform. New-member enquiries overwhelmingly start with a search, not a social scroll.

Nobody on the committee is technical – honestly, can we do this?

Yes. Everything above is forms and typing, and the trickiest hour is the first one. A good UK host’s support team will walk you through it. That’s precisely what we’re for, and we already host a lot of clubs, PTAs and volunteer groups.