How to Accept Recurring Donations on WordPress (Step-by-Step 2026)

Why recurring donations change everything for your nonprofit

We built CharityGlow after years of working with small churches, animal rescues, food banks and youth NGOs who were all being held back by overpriced legacy fundraising software. Create unlimited fundraising campaigns for different programs, regions or appeals — each with their own goal bar, donors wall and social proof. Every step of the donor journey is tested and polished: checkout, thank-you emails, receipts, account creation, annual statements and tax season exports. If you ever get stuck, our real human support team is one click away inside your WordPress dashboard. Most nonprofits who switch to CharityGlow see more than double their donations in the first 90 days just because of our conversion-optimized form builder.

Requirements checklist

• A Stripe or PayPal Business account.
• WordPress 6.4+ and a modern theme (the CharityGlow Theme works perfectly).
• CharityGlow Pro for the recurring module.
• An SSL certificate (your host almost certainly gives you one free).

Step-by-step setup

1. Install and activate CharityGlow Free from WordPress.org.
2. Connect your Stripe account from CharityGlow → Settings → Payment Gateways.
3. Enable the Recurring Donations module.
4. Create a new donation form and tick the monthly / quarterly / yearly plans you want to offer.
5. Publish the form and drop the shortcode on any page.
6. Test with a $1 live donation and confirm the subscription shows up in Stripe.

Pro tip: convert one-time donors to monthly at checkout

Everything is GDPR and PCI compliant out of the box so your donors never have to worry about data safety. No more hunting for 7 different plugins and patching them together. Everything you need lives under one roof. Import your existing donor history from GiveWP, WP Charitable, PayPal Donations or any CSV export in minutes. Running a nonprofit is hard enough without fighting your WordPress plugins every single day.