Must-Have Content For A Church Website (And Important Questions To Ask Before A Redesign)
Must-Have Pages
Home
This is likely the first page someone who has never heard of or interacted with your church will see. This is your chance to make a good first impression, and communicate who you are, but more importantly what you do and what you have to offer. Is your church focused on family activities and have many student ministries? Then you could consider focusing on using photos of families from your church on your home page and highlighting ministries. Is your church big on missions either local or abroad? Great! Make that very clear on your home page.
You’ll also want to have the most important information about your church on your home page, such as service times, location, and a minister bio. I also recommend having a handful of your most recent sermon recordings on the home page (or on your new visitors page) to allow people to hear arguably the most important part of your services to learn if your sermons are what they are looking for.
New Visitors
This is your chance to provide detailed information to potential new visitors of what to expect, why they should choose your church, and how to take next steps. Gone are the days where people simply show up to a new church with their family without doing any research onto your church or having an invite from a friend (although that’s certainly still a possibility). By using a new visitors page, you have a chance to speak directly to your “target market” and help answer any questions they may have, as well as provide enough details to them to make it feel like they’ve been to your church before when they first set foot through your doors for the first time.
About Us
This likely won’t be the most trafficked page on your site, but this is an important section to have for people who may be on the fence about attending your church or for simply giving some important background on your church, such as if your church has a deep and colorful history that could be of interest to potential new visitors. This page is also good for featuring staff information, a mission and vision statement, and a “what we believe” section.
Contact Us
This page is fairly basic in most cases, but still extremely important. This page typically features an interactive map, your address, phone number, email, and a contact form for people to get in touch easily through your site. This page acts as an information hub to allow people to do exactly what the page is called, which is to contact your church.
Ministries
What is a church without at least a few core ministries? Your ministries are going to be your biggest selling point for new visitors, so you shouldn’t skimp on putting effort into these pages. If you are blessed to be a church with a ton of ministries, you may be tempted to have a specific page for every single ministry. While this is not inherently bad, the two biggest things you have to consider are 1) Will I be able to keep each page updated? And 2) How can I make sure people can find the specific ministry information they are looking for easily?
One of the best ways to do this is having a main “Ministries” page that then has a short summary on each different ministry and categorizes them into different sections, such as seasonal ministries, missions, and weekly or monthly ministries. Without organizing your ministries in an easy to understand way, you risk both members and potential new visitors not being able to find the information they are looking for. Each short bio on the individual ministries can then direct the viewer to the separate page for that specific ministry, if applicable. If you have a ministry such as an angel tree ministry, but you only have a short paragraph of content for it, it’s likely best to skip the separate page for that ministry and simply use that content as the short bio on the main ministry page.
Also, an important addition to each ministry page is implementing a contact form that is connected to a ministry lead’s or church staff’s email that allows people to ask specific questions about that ministry.
Good-To-Have Pages
Events
This was more relevant before the COVID pandemic, but even still, an events page can be a great information hub for churches to showcase what they have going on, whether virtually or in-person. This page is less about highlighting your weekly bible study, and is better suited toward highlighting your larger, often seasonal events such as a Christmas Nativity or an Easter celebration. This content is best organized similar to the ministries page. The main event page is best for highlighting each upcoming event with a short bio and important info such as date and time. Each event bio can then link to a page for that specific information, although some events may not need their own page if they don’t have a lot of information that needs to be shared.
One thing I recommend doing, especially for bigger events that require either people to sign up or for people to volunteer is to have a contact/sign up form on the event page. This would feature a drop down menu asking people to select if they’d like to learn more information, volunteer, or have a general inquiry, that will then be automatically sent to the event lead/organizer to take note of or follow up on as needed. This is a great way to streamline interactions with both visitors and members while making it easy to track information.
News
Most churches are familiar with the Sunday morning newsletter in the bulletin, but not all churches are able to effectively convey this information on their websites aside from the easy and over-used method of scanning the print newsletter and uploading it to your website each week as a pdf. While this is one way to include this important information on your website, you’re not likely to have many people looking at your scanned bulletin online.
One alternative is to have an e-newsletter that is put together and formatted to be shared in a more visually aesthetic way online. While this may not be the page on your site that gets the most traffic, it can be a good addition to a church website if the church has a lot of news to share. It’s important to note however, that a frequently updated news page and a regular newsletter should not be used as a substitute to updating the rest of your website regularly. Many people that are new to your website and/or your church will not inherently go to your e-newsletter for information, just as you wouldn’t go to a retail store’s e-newsletter to buy a newly released product. Instead, you’d likely see it featured on the store’s home page or a products page where you’d learn more about it and decide whether or not to buy it.
The same goes for churches. If someone wants to know when your next committee meeting is, or what time your upcoming event is, they’re likely going to go to your calendar or events page instead. This leads us into our next section.
