8 Ways to Fix a Bad Church Website

Your church website can be a powerful tool for mission.

A great website will strengthen interest and put someone at ease about coming to church. A bad website will hamper interest in coming.

If we’re going to reach Australia with the gospel, we need to make it as easy as possible for them to come to our churches. Your website is a front door to communicate clearly to people.

With attention to a few simple things, most churches can turn their existing site into a powerhouse for getting people through the door.

Here are eight things you could improve:

#1 Mobile Friendliness

Users expect your website to work well on their phone. They are looking for:

Easy to read info
Images and videos that fit the screen properly
Easy navigation
Clear action steps

It sounds simple, but achieving this takes effort and attention. Rarely will a website maintain perfect mobile-friendliness as you add pages and swap content. So keep this as a priority.

And a little tip: Whenever you launch a new page, or prepare to post a link on socials, always pull open the page to check it on your phone.

Hunter Bible Church and The Village Church TX both do this well.

#2 Directing users

Directing users across your site is critical to helping them take the action steps you want them to take.

There are two key elements to this:

1) Your main navigation menu should have 5 pages or less immediately visible. Any more and you’re asking users to think too much. Other pages should fit under these pages and show on hover/tap. The Kitchen Principle can help you organise your navigation menu.

2) Simple, relevant links to other parts of the site within your pages are essential in getting people where you want them to go.

See this in here on Grace City‘s homepage:

#3 Design Freshness

The freshness of your website design communicates a lot to potential visitors. An old, outdated design tells people that you’re an ageing church that doesn’t care about connecting with young people. A fresh design will inspire confidence that you’re a vibrant and current church that is sticking around for the long term.

Key elements of a fresh design:

Colours (check out trending colour palettes here or here – updated regularly)
Fonts (avoid these fonts and try these instead – they are free from Google)
Page layouts (some out-there ideas here, and church inspiration here)

If your website needs a refresh, you can either:

1) Chat to the person who looks after your website about updating the fonts, colours and the layout of a few key pages (this would go a long way for little cost)

2) Build a new website!

#4 Decent photos

Decent photos are incredibly valuable on a church website. It’s one thing to tell someone about your church, but photos let you show what church is like. Photos help you put someone at ease about coming along: they can see what the space looks like, accessibility info and what to expect. Invaluable for getting someone through the door.

We always recommend focusing on faces. Someone should see a whole bunch of faces when they go to your website. People talking, people laughing, and people praising God.

Check out these examples from Christ Church Gladesville.

Another good example is Hunter Bible Church. Lots of faces and great photography.

#5 Communicating to new people

We’re convinced that a church website should speak directly to the non-Christians. If we’re going to reach Australia with the gospel, we need to make it as easy as possible for them to come to our churches.

Church can be a daunting and mystifying thing for people, and your website is an opportunity to communicate clearly to people.

Vine Church is doing a great job of this if you want to take a look.

#6 Website speed

Website users expect your website to load in a reasonable time. And if it doesn’t, they’re out! They won’t explore your site, and they won’t take the action step you want them to take (this is called ‘conversion’ on websites).

#7 Findable

Like your family home, people need to be able to find it. For your website, this is all all about Google Search. The order your website appears in the Google Search results (called ‘ranking’) is impacted by a whole bunch of things. As someone looks for a church, the higher up your website appears, the more people will visit your website and hopefully your church.

To test this:

Using a “private” or “incognito” window in your web browser, search Google for Churches in your area. eg. “churches in Glenvale” or “church Glenvale”. How high does your website appear in the search results?

At the very least, your website needs to be findable when someone searches the name of your church. If you’re not even showing up then, there’s possibly a problem with your website.

Beyond that, try and get as high in the search results as you can. Here’s a helpful little guide if you want to learn more. If you want to skip the queue (so to speak), you could use Google Ads to have your website shown at the top of the search results. It wouldn’t cost that much to achieve this, but it’s a bit of work to set up.