Last updated July 2026
The short version
- Seven pages carry almost all the weight: home, plan your visit, what we believe, staff, giving, events, contact. Ship those properly before building anything else.
- Service times and address must be visible without scrolling on a phone. This is the single most common failure on church websites, and it is the most common reason someone came.
- A first-time visitor is nervous, not curious. They want to know where to park, what to wear, what happens to their kids, and how long it lasts.
- Claim your Google Business Profile before you touch the website. It’s free and it is often more visible than the site itself.
Most church website checklists are a list of features a vendor would like to sell you. This one is ordered by what an actual first-time visitor needs, which is a much shorter list than people expect — and then everything else, honestly labelled as everything else.
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7
pages that do almost all the work. Launch these well rather than twenty pages badly.
Our build experience
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24%
of businesses in Google’s local pack had no website linked in their Business Profile at all — free visibility, wasted.
BrightLocal, June 2025
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<2.5s
target for Largest Contentful Paint on mobile. Above 4s counts as poor.
Google Core Web Vitals
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The non-negotiables
If a visitor cannot find these in ten seconds on a phone, nothing else on the site matters.
| 1 | Service times — as text, in the page, not inside an image or a PDF. Search engines and screen readers cannot read a graphic. |
| 2 | Full street address, linked to open in Maps with one tap. |
| 3 | What to expect on your first visit — where to park, which door, what people wear, how long the service runs, what happens with children. |
| 4 | A phone number and email that someone actually monitors. |
| 5 | What you believe — in plain language, near the top of the site, not buried three clicks down. People are deciding whether they belong here. |
| 6 | Photos of real people from your actual congregation. Stock photos of other people’s churches are obvious and they undercut everything else you say. |
Test this yourself, right now
Open your church website on your phone. Without scrolling and without tapping anything, can you see the service time and the address? If not, that is the whole project. Fix it this week and worry about the rest later.
The seven pages
| Page | Its one job | Most common mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Home | Answer when, where and what to expect — immediately | A rotating hero slider that says nothing and slows the page down |
| Plan Your Visit | Remove every reason a nervous person might not come | Doesn’t exist, or reads as though written for members |
| What We Believe | Let people self-select honestly | Either absent or written in seminary language |
| Staff / Leadership | Put faces to the place | Missing photos; bios written in the third person by committee |
| Giving | Make it work in three taps on a phone | Links out to a platform that looks like a different organisation |
| Events / Calendar | Show the church is alive | Last updated eighteen months ago — worse than having none |
| Contact | One obvious way to reach a human | A form that goes to an inbox nobody checks |
Worth having, once the seven are right
| ✓ | Sermon archive — migrate the last two years properly and archive the rest to a simple list. Nobody is listening to a sermon from 2013. |
| ✓ | Live stream, embedded on your own page rather than sending people to YouTube where the algorithm takes them elsewhere. |
| ✓ | Ministry pages for anything with its own audience — youth, recovery, food pantry, preschool. |
| ✓ | Prayer request form, with a clear statement of who reads it. |
| ✓ | Newsletter signup — the most durable asset you can build online. |
| ✓ | Volunteer signup for the roles you are always short on. |
| ✓ | An accessible design — real text contrast, keyboard navigation, captions on video. A meaningful share of any congregation needs this. |
Things you probably don’t need
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✓Spend the money here
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✗Not yet
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Before you launch
| 1 | Every page loads in under three seconds on a phone on cellular data, not office wifi. |
| 2 | Service times and address appear in the page text, and in your Google Business Profile, identically. |
| 3 | The giving flow has been tested end to end with a real card, on a real phone. |
| 4 | Someone who has never been to your church has read the Plan Your Visit page and told you what was still unclear. |
| 5 | The domain, hosting and Google accounts are registered to the church — not to a volunteer’s personal email or the designer’s agency account. |
| 6 | Someone specific is named as responsible for updating the site, and they know they are. |
Keep reading
Want a second opinion on your church site?
Send us the URL. We’ll tell you what a first-time visitor can and can’t find, in plain language, with no obligation — and if it’s in good shape we’ll say so.