Ask a pastor who can change the service time on the church website and the answer is usually a name. One name. A member who set the site up, or their nephew, or a company that built it in 2017 and is hard to reach. That is a single point of failure, and it is why so many church websites still show last year’s Easter schedule.
The pattern, and how it ends
A volunteer with some technical skill offers to build the site. They do a good job. For a year or two they update it when asked. Then they get a new job, or their kids start travelling sports, or they move to Ohio. Nobody else has the login. Nobody knows where the domain is registered. The site keeps running, wrong, for years. We have been called in to more of these than anything else in church work.
What should be editable, and by whom
Split it into three tiers. The everyday things, which is service times, announcements, the weekly sermon upload, and events. That tier should be editable by whoever does the bulletin, usually the church secretary or an administrative assistant, with no more training than a twenty minute walkthrough. If they can send an email, they can do this.
The occasional things, which is staff changes, new pages, the giving setup. That tier can sit with one or two people who are comfortable with a little more, and it should be documented in a short guide that lives somewhere the elders can find.
The structural things, which is the design, the hosting, the domain, the security updates. That tier does not need to be in the church at all. It can be a care arrangement with whoever built the site, as long as the church owns everything and can move it if the relationship ends.
Accounts that belong to the church, not to a person
The domain should be registered to the church, at an email address the church controls, like office@ rather than somebody’s personal Gmail. Same for the hosting account and the giving processor. When a volunteer leaves, their access is removed and nothing else changes. When an elder retires, same thing. This sounds obvious and almost no church does it.
Two people for everything that matters
Every account should have at least two people who can get in. Not because you distrust anyone, but because people get sick and phones get lost. Write the list down. Review it once a year at a deacons’ meeting. It takes ten minutes.
What this means for how the site is built
A site that can be edited by a church secretary is a different kind of site than one built by a developer for other developers. The text has to live in plain fields, not in code. Adding a sermon has to be a form, not a file upload with a naming convention. The service times have to be one field that shows up everywhere they are needed. That is a build decision, made at the start, and it costs nothing extra if it is made early.
It is how we build every church site. Not because it is fashionable, but because the alternative is a website that is quietly wrong for years while everyone assumes somebody else is looking after it.