How to get the most from your church website and stop alienating your most important audience!
Sadly most church websites have been wasting people's time. Not only the time of people visiting them, but the time of the people creating them.
If you have ever been involved in creating a church website you know the process can be pain staking and long. While most churches often desire to have these kinds of projects finished in just a few days or weeks, a large percentage of church web projects can take literally years to get up and running.
The time from inception to launch can be daunting, and even more frustrating is that 9 out of 10 churches we speak with are simply unhappy with the site they ended up with.
Part of the reason for this is that churches are focused on entirely the wrong things when it comes to church websites.
The big mistake staring us in the face
Way back in 2009 the guys at Monk Development did research on church website usage and found that two thirds of visitors reported the church website was an important factor in deciding to attend a church for the first time.
We know from more recent studies and the change in human behavior people rarely do anything these days without first looking at a website. People won't even get an oil change or visit a restaurant without first pulling out a smart phone (something that didn't exist like it does today in 2009).
Now in 2019 we have billions of smart phones sold each year, where back in 2009 apple only sold 24 million iphones. Needless to say even kids today have smart phones and the internet is with us all day long every day.
The real thing discovered in that study back in 2009 was not just that people visited church websites before they visit a church, it was that church visitors are the true audience for church websites!
Your church isn't using your website!
So if we have known for a decade that church members are not the primary audience, why are so many church websites still focused on them?
The most complex and time consuming content on a church website is the content focused on existing members, not the content meant for new visitors.
Not only that, but it has been a long term trend for church sites to do a very poor job of including even basic information about service times, maps to the church location, and contact information.
The most critical information for visitors is often an afterthought because the church website in many cases is being built by members for other members who will never really care about it.
Your ugly church website is keeping people out of your church 24/7 365
If you happen to have an ugly and outdated church website you have a true enemy. This enemy is never sleeping, they are never taking a break. They never call in sick, or take a vacation. Every day, every minute of every hour they sit and make your church look bad.
Imagine you had a person outside your church with a sign saying "don't come here, this is not somewhere you want to visit".
If you have an ugly dated church website, you have something entirely worse. You have something giving people a bad first impression of your church and you probably never got the chance to clear that up.
How many new people never set foot in your church because your website looks like it was created by a child ten years ago?
If your ministry had a sign that you knew for a fact was deterring visitors, or a smell that was keeping people from returning, you would do whatever it took to remedy the problem. If you had someone greeting visitors who was rude and had terrible breath, you would politely find a way to move them into a different direction of service. If you had a lack of seats or parking, you would start a building project and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or perhaps millions of dollars to make sure new visitors feel good when they attend church.
Without a steady influx of new families a church will not grow, and will eventually dwindle and come apart or fade into a shadow of its former self.
None of this is really news to church pastors we speak with on a regular basis, but it is good to remind us of why raising some money for building an effective church website is not only worth the expense, but critical for the future and health of our church.
How to build a site that is worth every penny and is an asset to Ministry
- Focus on the visitor of the church. Use big bold images and photographs with smiling faces of real people in your church.
- Make sure your website shows someone what its like to visit your church in person in an accurate and professional way
- Make sure your church website answers all the questions new visitors are likely to have
- Try to see your church website from the eyes of a visitor, and remember that the site is not for your members, anything the site does for them is just extra
If you would like to see how we handle church websites at TrueLife.org you can head over to TrueLifeChurchWebsites.com and see why our approach is entirely different than the norm.
