What should a mosque website include? A practical checklist for UK masjids

Search for most UK masjids and you find one of three things: a site last updated during Covid with a Ramadan timetable from three years ago, a Facebook page that only shows the latest post, or nothing at all. Meanwhile a visitor in an unfamiliar town just wants to know when Asr jama’ah is, whether there is parking, and where the sisters’ entrance is.

This checklist is for committees deciding what their website should contain, whether a volunteer is building it or you are hiring someone. It is ordered by what visitors actually look for, and it ends with the one decision that matters more than any page: who owns the domain.

Who visits a mosque website, and why

Before deciding on pages, picture the four or five people who will use the site most. A traveller looking for the nearest place to pray Jumu’ah. A parent asking about the weekend madrasah. A revert nervous about walking in for the first time. A donor during the last ten nights of Ramadan. A school teacher arranging a class visit.

Nearly all of them are on a phone, often in a car park. That should shape everything: the prayer times and the address belong on the first screen, without scrolling, and the site has to load quickly on a weak signal.

Prayer times done properly

This is the reason most people visit, and the page most often wrong. Get these details right:

• Show both start times and jama’ah times, clearly labelled. Visitors care most about jama’ah; locals checking the end of a prayer window care about start times.
• Show today’s times on the home page, with a link to the full month as a page and as a printable PDF. Plenty of families still pin the printed timetable on the fridge.
• Make Jumu’ah unmissable: the khutbah time, the jama’ah time, how many jama’at there are, and the language of the khutbah.
• Put the date the jama’ah times last changed next to them. When the clocks change at the end of October and March, people will check.

Be careful with automatic prayer time plugins. They calculate times from a formula, and in the UK summer the usual methods for Fajr and Isha break down, because across much of the country the sun never sinks far enough below the horizon for true night. Different timetables handle that in different ways. If your masjid follows a particular timetable, a plugin quietly calculating its own Fajr will put your website at odds with your noticeboard. Publish the timetable your committee actually uses, and type the jama’ah times in.

Ramadan needs its own page every year: suhoor and iftar times, Taraweeh times and the number of rak’ahs, i’tikaf arrangements, and Eid prayer times and locations as soon as they are known. Take it down, or clearly archive it, once Ramadan ends.

Getting there and getting in

• The full address with postcode, and a map link that opens the phone’s own map app.
• Parking: where to park, where not to, and a polite note about neighbours if Jumu’ah parking causes friction.
• The sisters’ entrance and prayer area, described plainly. If there is no space for women, say so, rather than leaving someone to find out at the door.
• Step-free access, accessible toilets and wudu facilities, if you have them.
• A short “visiting for the first time” section for non-Muslim visitors and new Muslims: what to wear, shoes off, and who to ask for.
• A phone number and an email address that someone actually checks.

While you are at it, claim or update your free Google Business Profile. It is what appears on Google Maps when someone searches “mosque near me”, and it can show your opening hours, photos and a link to your website. For many visitors it is the first thing they see, before your site.

Donations and Gift Aid

Online giving is where a website can pay for itself many times over, and where small details make a real difference.

• Use an established payment provider or donation platform rather than anything hand-built. Card details should never touch your own website or inbox.
• Offer one-off and monthly giving, and let donors choose a fund where you really do keep them separate: general, building, zakat, sadaqah. If zakat goes into a separate fund with its own distribution policy, say how it is spent.
• If you are a registered charity, add a Gift Aid declaration so UK taxpayers can add 25p to every £1 at no cost to themselves. HMRC sets out what the declaration must say, and you need to keep a record of it, so use a provider that handles this for you.
• Show your registered charity number on the donation page and in the footer. Charities in England and Wales with an income over £10,000 have to state that they are registered on documents that ask for money, and a donation page is the obvious place to show it.
• Show your bank details for people who prefer a transfer, with a reference to use.

Madrasah, classes and safeguarding

Parents comparing madrasahs want facts: days and times, age ranges, fees, what is taught, how to join the waiting list, and the term dates. A simple enrolment form saves a committee member hours of phone calls each September.

Publish your safeguarding policy and the name and contact details of your designated safeguarding lead. It reassures parents, and it shows anyone with a concern exactly who to tell. If you are recruiting teachers, our guide on hiring a Qur’an teacher covers the DBS checks and safer recruitment steps.

List adult classes, youth programmes, sisters’ circles and services such as nikah arrangements or funeral contacts too. A funeral contact who answers the phone at 11pm is one of the most valuable things a masjid website can list.

The legal and housekeeping pages

• A privacy notice explaining what you collect through forms and donations, why, and how long you keep it. Under UK GDPR this applies to a masjid as much as to a business.
• Cookie consent, if you use anything beyond strictly necessary cookies. Analytics and embedded videos are the usual culprits. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 relaxed the rules for some low-risk analytics, but check the ICO’s current guidance before you drop the banner.
• Your charity number, registered address and trustees’ contact route.
• A complaints or contact route that does not depend on one person’s personal phone.

Who owns it, and who keeps it up to date

This is the part committees regret most often. A well-meaning volunteer registers the domain in their own name, on their own card, and three years later they have moved away, the card has expired, and the site disappears. Nobody can log in to fix it.

Avoid that with a few rules:

• The domain and hosting are registered to the masjid, using a shared organisational email address, not a personal one.
• At least two trustees have the logins, stored in a password manager or a sealed record.
• If you hire a freelancer, the contract says the masjid owns the domain, the content and the site, and the freelancer hands over every login when the job is done.
• One named person updates prayer times and events each week, with a second person who can cover.

On platforms, there is no single right answer. A website builder like Squarespace or Wix is easiest for volunteers to update but costs a monthly fee. WordPress is flexible and widely understood by freelancers, and needs someone to keep it updated. A custom-built site makes sense if you need something unusual, such as a booking system for classes, and is the hardest to maintain without the person who built it. For a small masjid, a simple builder site that is kept up to date beats an impressive one that isn’t.

When you hire, write a short brief listing the pages above and who will update each one. Our guide to briefing a designer is written around posters, but the same principles apply to a website brief. You can browse web developers on DeenTask or post the job and let them come to you. Ask any developer you hire to send an invoice to the masjid rather than to a volunteer; if they are new to freelancing, point them at how to write an invoice as a sole trader.