How to upgrade your church website
Your church website is your digital front door. It's how most people find out about your ministry and learn how to get involved.
But perhaps it needs a little work, maybe quite a lot!
So where do you start with upgrading it and what should you prioritise when budgets are stretched?
Here are seven things to consider as you work towards getting your church website as attractive, inviting and helpful as possible.
1. Start offline
Before you launch into buying a shiny, new template, or downloading the latest, super-duper Content Management System (CMS), get some basics down on paper, including:
What is your church’s vision and mission?
What is your existing branding and tone of voice and how is this going to be migrated or will you start from scratch?
What do you need to promote and inform people of (e.g. Sunday services, toddler groups, community initiatives, safeguarding policies etc)?
What budget do you have for upgrading your site?
Who will be responsible for what and when?
Don’t ignore this initial discovery and planning phase as it’ll help you to start in the right direction and avoid the risk of spending more than you need to or being unclear to visitors about who and what you are as a church.
2. Step outside your bubble
It’s important to build any website with your users front and central. Remember, you’re not building a site just for your church’s staff. And it can be very easy to find yourself in a bubble, not focusing on your primary audiences.
Think how you can best serve every typical visitor (or persona), from students arriving in your city for the first time to people exploring what it means to be a Christian, and so on.
As you design your new website consider the ‘intent’ that these audiences have when searching for and (hopefully) finding your church.
Can they easily find answers to their questions, such as:
‘What time does the service start?’
‘Is it OK to bring my kids?’
‘When is the food bank open?’
Put simply, when you put users first, you are able to make better decisions about what to include on your website and serve them better.
3. Make it a good experience
First impressions really do last. If it’s within your budget, it’s well worth hiring the services of a professional designer and expert in user experience (UX). They will be able to help you have a consistent and attractive look and feel to your site and to make the journey through it simple and intuitive.
If this isn’t feasible for you, think about these principles:
Stick to a consistent and complementary colour palette and fonts.
Avoid using too many stock images, which tend to stand out and lack authenticity.
Have a clear and intuitive menu structure and hierarchy for your site’s pages.
Understand and implement accessibility best practices (see below).
4. Be accessible
According to the Web Accessibility Initiative, websites should be designed and developed so that all people, with and without disabilities can use them.
So use a mobile-friendly, responsive design which features alt text on images, subtitles on videos and transcripts of sermon audio.
Approximately 60% of internet traffic is from mobile devices (Statcounter). If your website isn’t mobile friendly, you may be losing out on a large number of potential visitors – people who may visit and end up joining your church.
And use language which your audiences (and search engines) will be able to read and understand easily. Avoid too much church jargon… remember: you’re not upgrading this website for the in-crowd, but instead for your audiences.
5. Be found
When someone searches online for ‘churches in [your town or city]’, what comes up? Hopefully your church will be top or high up on the search results page. But if not, there are a few things you can work on to help it perform better.
Make your site technically sound, adhering to SEO best practices.
Claim your local business (or in this case, your church) listing. Here’s how to for Google.
Write relevant, high-quality and ultimately helpful content.
Combine good SEO with an engaging and informative social media presence and you will give yourself more of a chance of being found online.
6. Keep it going
You probably already know this but updating your site regularly is crucial.
Whether that’s making sure your service times and dates are accurate, your policies and staff pages are up to date, and your sermon podcasts, articles or newsletters are current. It all matters. And it all helps to bring people back to your site and improve its ranking on search engines.
It may be helpful to put in your calendar a regular time to check on your site’s page accuracy and also to produce a content strategy, which will tie into your use of social media channels.
7. It’s OK to ask for help
You may have no choice but to take on this project yourself or with help from other members of your church. If that’s the case, keep to the principles outlined above and you’ll be doing well. Also remember there are loads of great free resources and courses in blogs and on YouTube for example where you can get tips and walkthroughs.
Some of the best out there at the moment are…
The HubSpot blog is great for reading and their training is top-tier too
The Squarespace blog is great for top tips on how to customise the platform
But it may be that you have the resources to hire an external agency to help. This will mean you can hand over much of the project to a specialist team, who will project manage and deliver the site upgrade to your specification.
Building a website can be a long and exhausting process. So we recommend getting any help you can. So if you’d like a no-obligation consultation with us here at Wild SEO Agency, we’d love to hear from you. We are experts at this.