Look at your church website’s visitors and most of them are on a phone. A good share of those visits happen Saturday evening and Sunday before nine. That tells you what the site is for. It is not a brochure. It is the thing people check on the way in, and the thing they come back to during the week for last Sunday’s sermon and for giving. Three jobs. Here is how each one goes wrong and how it should work.
Service times, above everything
On a phone, the service time and the address should be the first thing on the screen, before any photo, before the church name if it comes to that. Not in a menu, not two taps in. If your times change seasonally, the site has to show the current ones, which means somebody on staff has to be able to change them without calling the person who built the site. If nobody can, the Christmas Eve time from two years ago is still up there. We see this on roughly half the church sites we look at.
The address should open the phone’s own maps app when tapped. That is a one line change and it is the difference between a visitor arriving and a visitor circling Belle Vernon looking for a steeple.
Sermons that play with one tap
A member driving to work on Wednesday wants to hear Sunday’s sermon. That means: one tap on the site, and audio starts playing, in the browser, without an app, a login, or a download. The most recent sermon first, with the passage and the date, and the older ones below it.
Where this breaks: the church posts sermons on a third party platform and links out to it, and that platform wants an account. Or the sermons are only on YouTube and the video takes a full minute to buffer on the road between Perryopolis and Connellsville. Or the sermon page is a list of forty file names with no dates. Audio, hosted where the site can play it, most recent first, one tap. That is the whole standard.
Giving that works from the pew
Online giving on a church site needs to do one thing: let a person give, from a phone, in under a minute, through a processor the church actually trusts, and then get out of the way. A single Give button in the header on every page. A page that says what the money supports in two sentences. A form that takes an amount, a card or a bank account, and optionally a recurring setting.
What to avoid: a button that goes to a generic PayPal page with the church’s personal email on it. A giving page that asks for a login before anyone can give. Five funds to choose from before the amount. And, above all, a processor that nobody on staff can log in to, because the deacon who set it up moved to Ohio.
The thread through all three
Every one of these fails the same way. Not because the technology is hard, but because the site was set up by one person, once, and nobody else can change it. The times drift, the sermons stop being posted, the giving link breaks when the processor updates its terms. The fix for all three is the same: a site the church secretary can edit in twenty minutes on a Monday, with the giving and the sermons built in rather than bolted on.
That is what we build for churches, and it is priced to be affordable for a congregation of forty as much as four hundred. The point is not a fancier website. It is a website that is still correct next Easter.