HomeDigital MinistryWebsites25 Features of a Powerful Church Website

25 Features of a Powerful Church Website

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The church website is still one of the most useful ways to draw in new visitors and reach the community. While social media gets most of the press these days, it's important to revisit your church website from time to time to make sure that it's meeting your needs and matching up with your goals for both inreach (within your church) and outreach (into the community).

Here's a list of 25 features of a power church website:

  1. Simple and clean design that is easy to navigate and nice to look at.
  2. Tools to customize and change the appearance of the site on a regular basis.
  3. Content Management Software (CMS) that is easy enough for the 65 year old non-techie volunteer to use.
  4. Simple interface that doesn't require needing to know HTML or CSS programming languages.
  5. Ability to add or remove pages and customize them at any time.
  6. Built-in photo editing so you can easily edit images and place them on your site.
  7. Web-based CMS that allows you to edit your site from any internet connection in real-time and see your changes immediately.
  8. Ability to customize colors and graphical features throughout your entire website simply and easily.
  9. CMS that constantly auto-saves so that you never loose your edits as you're working on your site.
  10. Ability to handle everything from language settings, date formatting, and search engine options to additional design settings and even your site's statistics.
  11. Ability to easily add any resources you want to your site: Embed or upload videos, add documents, link to anywhere.
  12. Customizable media player capabilities that allow  you to organize audio and video and share online.
  13. Photo album capabilities that allow visitors to view albums as a slideshow, full screen, and even download photos.
  14. Clean and simple online calendar capabilities.
  15. Form creator tools to create forms for your visitors to fill out for everything from the contact us page to event registration.
  16. Optional password protected pages of your church website.
  17. Social media integration features.
  18. Podcasting  and video embedding capabilities.
  19. Responsive website functionality so that your site is viewable on all devices.
  20. Search engine optimized site pages so that all search engines find your site content.
  21. SEO URLs and additional optional features.
  22. Robust amounts of storage online, with backup features so your data never gets lost.
  23. High-availability servers with optimized databases and automatic media conversion.
  24. Statistics functionality that allows you to see site stats including Google Analytics.
  25. Customer service that includes the ability to speak to real people over the phone.

Whew! That's quite a list. What would you add?

Lauren Hunter
Lauren Hunterhttps://laurenhunter.net
Lauren Hunter is a writer who loves the big picture of God’s journey we are all on together. In 2007, she founded ChurchTechToday, a website for pastors and church leaders to harness technology to improve ministry. Married to her high school sweetheart, Lauren lives in Northern California with her husband and their four children. Her latest book is Leaving Christian Science: 10 Stories of New Faith in Jesus Christ. She can be found online at https://laurenhunter.net.

9 COMMENTS

  1. Great list, Lauren! Having all of these would equates to a powerful church website. As, I read through your list, I was happy to see that we offer all of these to our clients through a WordPress platform. However, no matter the platform, #25 may be the most important!

    • Hi Onethia,

      I would love to chat more to see how we can serve your church along with get you accurate pricing information too. Click on my name and it will direct you to our site to get in touch! Hope to talk soon.

  2. Great list. This is spot on! This is exactly how we consult churches to get the best results possible. I specifically like what was mentioned in 25. in getting good customer service over the phone. We have a lot of churches who left another service because they could never speak with anyone or get timely help so we really focus our efforts to provide great hands on support. 13. is a big one right now too as having candid compelling photography throughout your site is effective to reach first time guests or the unchurched.

  3. Lauren, it was good to read this list. Mainly because it reassured me. I have most everything on it built into my church’s site. With the exception of the fact that it does use some features that would be hard to edit for a 65-something volunteer. It’s a good thing that I’m a 64-something volunteer.

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