PayPal is one of the oldest and still one of the top online payment companies. In this tutorial, you will learn how to add a PayPal donate button to your WordPress site.
There is a caveat, if you are accepting donations you do need to be a charity. You can fly under the radar until your donation amount hits $10,000. At which point PayPal will reach out to you to verify your charity status.
So, if you’re not a charity your best bet is to create a regular PayPal button and have people send you a payment instead of a donation. Similar to what I do on this website where you can buy me a coffee if you find this content helpful!
But that’s for another tutorial. This tutorial for the PayPal donate button.
Another important note is that this process works for any site that allows you to add custom HTML code to a page, not just WordPress. So, let’s get started!
You can either watch the detailed video tutorial below or scroll below that to read the image/text version of the tutorial.
Log Into Your PayPal Account
What you need to do first is log into your PayPal account.
If you don’t have one, just create one. It’s free and it’s fast.
Create A PayPal Donate Button
To start creating the donation button, click on the My Business Setup link.
Next, you’ll need to select the payment button option and that’s option B in this screenshot.
Then, click on Create A Payment Button like in the next screenshot.
What you need to do next is choose the button type. You have many options from shopping cart to installment plan. However, we’re going to create a donation button so choose Donations from the dropdown menu.
Note: This menu may not be the same for you since the type PayPal of account determines which options you have. If you do not have the PayPal donation option, reach out to PayPal support and they’ll explain what to do for your specific account type.
After choosing Donations from the dropdown, enter the name of your organization and the donation ID. The latter is optional.
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Customize The Button
There’s not much to do here, but there are some useful options like changing the size, whether or not to display credit cards and the ability to upload your own custom button image.
Choose The Currency
This is pretty self-explanatory. There are lots of options for different types of currency.
Setting The Contribution Amount
Here, you can set whether you have a specific amount you would like people to donate or you can have an empty field and each person can donate as much as they like.
When you’re finished click on Create Button and you’re good to go.
I’m going to say this again because it’s important.
*The donation button is only for non-profit organizations. So, if you’re not a non-profit organization and you receive over $10000, you will have to prove to PayPal that you’re a non-profit. If you want to bypass this part, you can set that your button is a buy now button and explain the situation on the page where the button will go.
Step 2 of the process deal with some advanced options and customization including shipping information which you probably don’t need.
If you are an advanced user, in step 3 it is a good idea to create a Thank You page and a Why Have You Changed Your Mind page.
The Thank You page will be displayed after someone successfully donates.
The Why Have You Changed Your Mind page will be where people go if they do not go through with their donation.
Now that that’s as clear as mud, let’s move on to adding the donations button to your WordPress site.
Locate The Embed Code
Once you have created your button, it is time for sharing it with the world.
There are two boxes here, one is called Website and contains the embed code and the other is called Email and it has a link you can send via email. You can see the latter on the screenshot below.
The website embed code is displayed in the image below.
Select the entire code and copy it.
Now open the page where you want the donate button to live. This can be in your WordPress site or any other type of website builder or page that allows you to add an HTML snippet.
Next, paste the donation code into the page like in the screenshot below and click on Publish.
Visit the live page to see how your brand new PayPal dontation button looks. It should look similar to this.
This page just has the title of the page and the donate button. You should probably build some content around the button to maximize dontations.
You may even consider using a page builder like Visual Composer (link to CodeCanyon) that gives you access to all kinds of templates to quickly and easily build beautiful pages.
Using The PayPal Donate Button
After people click on the ‘Donate’ button, this page will appear.
Here, they can put in the donation amount to help your cause. I don’t know many people who would donate $15000, but I’m sure there are some out there.
Finally, there’s a payment type choice for the donors at the bottom part of the page. They can choose:
1. To donate via Credit card by clicking on the obscure continue link
2. To donate through PayPal by clicking on Login to PayPal button
In Conclusion
As you saw, it’s pretty easy to create a PayPal donate button.
It is much more difficult to get people to actually donate.
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