In this article, I will be sharing my experience with various donation plugins for WordPress. Generally on internet, one can find a number of articles prescribing top 10 or top 15 donation plugins. This makes it very difficult to choose the right plugin as one cannot go testing each one. These articles generally just list attributes of these plugins without showing their behavior or end results, problem areas etc.
Give Plugin
Give is the most popular plugin if active installations are to be considered. However I found the plugin settings to be complex. One has to first set the various settings and then create a donation form.
The form can be published on website or it can be inserted in a page using shortcode. A sample published form is shown below.
As one can see the form for donation is taking a lot of space. Generally one has to use a separate page to seek donation in such a case. Hence this plugin is not suggested for those wanting to add a simple donate button on each page of the website.
PayPal Donations
PayPal Donations is another popular plugin for WordPress with a simple interface. One has to set few simple settings as shown below.
Once the settings are done, we have just place the PayPal Donations widget to desired place.
The cons with the plugin is that only widget option is possible with it. The donations made are not listed in the dashboard of WordPress. Also the recurring option for donation is not there.
PayPal Donation
PayPal Donation is a very good plugin though it has quite similar name with the plugin described above. Once installed and activated, it will have the following menu in the admin panel.
One has to create a donation button in order to use this plugin. This button can be placed anywhere by using the shortcode. To use it as a widget, one has to use Custom HTML widget and place shortcode in it. All the donations made using this plugin are listed under ‘donations’ option. Also the recurring donation open is available during payment. Thus all the drawbacks with the PayPal Donations plugin are no longer with it. I recommend this plugin for a website.
Beside the above plugins, I also attempted PayPal create button facility but found certain issues with it. PayPal individual & business account allow creation of ‘show now’, ‘add to cart’ etc buttons but not ‘donate’ button. The various links available on internet are no longer working. If someone is able to create donate button, then he has to paste the HTML code of it either in a page or in custom HTML widget. Thus the functionality is same as that by a plugin.
That was all I had about this topic. You can also visit my page “Essential WordPress Plugins List for a Website” to find a list of plugins which will enable you to build a secure, SEO friendly and functioning website quickly.
Have a nice day!