Are you planning to build a church website to reach as many people as possible? You must ensure to have all the required features on your church website.
In this blog post, we have shared 7 essential features that a church website must have.
Let’s dive in.
#1 Service schedule
To let the new people know about the days & times of worship, you must have a page to showcase the service schedule.
Therefore, you must have a page on your website where you can list down the dates, times, and schedule of each day.
An important thing to note here is that your website builder must allow you to manage the service schedule on your website easily. In other words, you should not rely on a website designer to change the service schedule for you.
Sometimes, you may be required to make urgent changes in the days & times of worship, so you shouldn’t wait for your website developer. Instead, you must be able to log in to the CMS/backend of your church website and make the required changes instantly.
#2 Donation
Most of the churches are associated with non-profit organizations and seek donations regularly in order to expand the church’s mission.
Having a donation page on your church website can help you to automate the process of accepting donations, receiving online payments, and maintaining accounts/reports of all the donations.
To sum up, a donation feature on your website can really make your work easier and can help to reduce the excess manpower required for this matter.
Fortunately, if your website has been developed using WordPress CMS, there are several plugins that you can use with your church website to issue the receipts to the donators too.
Although you may need the assistance of a website developer to customize the donation feature, this feature is worth having on your church’s website.
#3 Social media integration
To spread the message of God among youngsters, social media is a must thing to have. You must ensure to integrate social media widgets with your church website so that your audience can share the content among their social networks.
There are no complications or additional effort that’s required to integrate social media widgets on your church website.
You can simply ask your website developer to use one of the best social media plugins available free of cost.
Although this job can be done in a matter of a few minutes, it can have a remarkable impact on spreading the word.
#4 Blog
Having a blog on a website can help in many ways.
Below are but few major benefits of integrating a blog with your church website:
- For those who can’t come & attend the church regularly, you can be kind enough to write about your insights based on your experience in the Lord’s services.
- A blog can enable you to share your stories with the people who don’t come to the church or aren’t religious. You can express your words through different blogs about how God’s messages can change their lives like they have helped others too.
- A blog helps you to gain credibility for your church. The more stories and insights you share on your blog, the more people start trusting you and your cause.
- Last but not the least, a blog can help your church website to rank on the higher positions of search engines which simply means more traffic to your website and more visitors to your church too.
#5 Sermons
Having a sermons section on your church website could be yet another must-have feature. There are multiple benefits that you get to adding a sermons section on your church website.
How does posting sermons on your church website help?
- Through sermons, you can give your website visitors a taste of the type of sermons that are common in the church.
- Every week, there may be some percentage of your congregation who couldn’t attend the church and would love to access the sermons online.
- Through your church website, you can also archive all of the sermons for months and years which will eventually help your website to accumulate a huge database. For those new visitors who are coming to your website for the first time, these archives can serve as a treasure.
- If incorporated & promoted strategically, sermon pages can drive hundreds if not thousands of visitors to a church website.
#6 News & Events Page
Yes, those who can attend the church regularly will always be updated on the upcoming events but what about those who missed out on a service?
With the help of an events page on your church website, you can keep everybody informed about upcoming events. Not only this, but events can also help your church website to secure higher positions on search engines. But the key is consistency.
Perhaps, it would be a good idea if you can assign somebody in your church the events posting job every week.
What else you can do?
You can also share these event pages on social media platforms like Facebook & Twitter.
#7 Information page
Those who are the existing visitors of your church, already know about the general information of your church. But what about the new visitors?
For the new visitors, you can create a page with all the general information of your church which may include:
- Service schedules
- Church’s directory of important contacts
- Timings
- Parking information
- How to reach the church
- & more…
