7 best church website builders in 2021
Coronavirus has made our lives go haywire wherein we were almost locked in the house for a year and everything around us was virtual and even our religious places weren’t spared. Prayer meets, services started to be held online and that is when it became necessary for the churches to have a website.
The church website does a whole lot of things at once and there are some tried and true techniques to spread the community-oriented messages to the audience at once. Webezoid guides you as well as allows you to get the best website appealing to the members.
The website must be responsive and they need to be fresh, current, and updated all the time as it is the centerpiece of information it is the front door of the guest experience as it needs to serve visitors who aren’t aware of the location and service of the church and at the same time give information to the existing members about donations, events, small groups, ministries, and more.
The best church website needs to be unique showcasing the personality and demonstrating a unique perspective that doesn’t rely on cookie cutting templates to convey their message with multiple nuances that add to our experience of viewing the website and the features that are engaging, direct, and appealing to the target audience.
While making the church website we need to consider the following points:
- Know the audience – The common mistake a church website is bound to make is they do not have a clear audience in mind but the basic factor here is great marketing starts and ends with the audience. The more focused you are about the target audience the more clear your church website can become.
It is necessary to identify the audience and stick through the entire design process. This may mean that you need to create another website for other member-centric processes or create a page with a specific URL on your main site. One that isn’t navigable from the home page.
Understanding the basic queries of the primary audience such as what issues they are facing, what they need to know, meet up, and helping to answer any of their queries when they visit the website.
If the visitors are from the community then look at the area demographics, survey the neighbors, fellow community members about their needs. Have a session with the members who recently visited your church website and find the reason for their visit and you will come to know the purpose of the visitors making it easier to connect with the audience.
- Calls-to-action – The home page must provide the essential information the audience wants to know but make sure not to overdo it as the homepage must be simple but appealing with one or two call-to-action buttons. The homepage must draw the attention of the audience but at the same time, there must be an urge to want more information.
An effective call-to-action button provides the next step to the visitor to know more about the church by directing the visitor to a deeper page on the website. Once it is identified the most essential calls-to-action for the audience prepare a mock page and test it with the primary audience.
- Realistic Expectations – Make sure whatever information is put up on the website is authentic reflecting your identity as a church. Be true to who you are as a church as people are bound to appreciate your honesty and make sure never to convey the message that you aren’t.
The best church website builder must make a website that is quicker and the easier way to communicate with the people on what they want from the church website is by visuals but not using any images instead use real photos from real church. A picture of worship must show what they can expect from the church, demographics, worship style, and dress code.
- Evaluate – You must regularly evaluate and update your website as if it is static, people will immediately notice it and make an impression (the bad one). The key to success lies in just not updating things but establishing a schedule for evaluation and updates.
Certain parts of the website are updated weekly while the front and navigation page isn’t altered often however you still need to evaluate it quarterly or every six months. While evaluating, check on the target audience to know how well you are performing and ask them what can you improve? What is working well for them?
Do not take the reviews from the church members about your website as if they aren’t your target audience you may get skewed data. You just need to get an idea about the performance of the website who can give honest feedback.
How we chose the best church website builders:
When building your church website, we must know how to choose the best church website builder. We at Webezoid believe in catering to the needs of the church and nonprofit and help you to choose what to consider when choosing the right and best church website builder.
- Know your needs – You can be mesmerized by the great-looking websites but remember more features means more complexity and a higher price tag so it’s good to know what you need before you start to build the website.
- Budget – The most important factor of the website is budget as it not only involves ongoing fees but also the maintenance part in the future. Do not overdo it as it may later become difficult to manage.
- Community – Instead of a marketing place, think about it as a religious place for the members to connect on social media for them to share their religious ideas and be the torchbearer to get more people into it by having complete faith in God.
It is necessary to understand how effectively and efficiently the audience can get connected to the church and the community with the help of the best church website.
There are 3 point structures to know what exactly your website needs.
- Focusing on new guests – Though the regular followers are going to visit the website but it is the primary audience that makes the difference especially to the homepage. Make sure it is simple with video, images of the community conveying the message about the aspects of the church worships and gatherings, and make a contact form for the guests to plan a visit to the church by following up with them.
- How does it feel visiting your church – Infuse the website with different aspects for the guests to get a feel of your church by dedicating the page to sermons, events, and mission efforts. Include the pages that showcase how children, youth, and adults gather for discipleship programs. Give details about how the church works and how it is involved in the surroundings by creating an impact on the world.
- Get connected – Make sure that the guests plan the visit to your church with the help of the church website but all the required information must be provided on the site to ensure their visit. Mention your address and contact number on the footer so that it is easily accessible from any page.
If you are creating small groups or recruiting volunteers then give a call-to-action so that the website visitors can know how they can get connected. Add an online form to allow them to share their contact details.
The homepage/welcome page for the guests must be sharing a glimpse of your church world and community and provide ways to connect with the ministry for deeper relationships with the guests and members.
Our list of the best church website builders
We hope that the following list of the 7 best church website builders in 2021 will help you to select the best one to design your website.
- Webezoid – It should be no surprise that we here at Webezoid have created what we believe is the best church website builder around. Webezoid has been in the market for a long time and is one of the most recommended to build the best church website. We build an affordable church website which in turn helps us to build communities. The team at Webezoid is thoroughly professional and prompt, giving the wow factor to the client as well as the viewers of the website.
Webezoid the best church website builder creates content that is responsive and can naturally adjust itself to the device you use be it laptops, computers, or mobiles. The website is SEO friendly increasing engagement, traffic, and conversions. The SEO package involves tracking google analytics and Facebook pixels.
Webezoid allows you to choose the plan that suits you best for building your new affordable website. We promise to deliver the website in 14- 30 days and assure that it is done in the same time frame with the best quality as we are aware that the website is the face of the church and it must make the client as well as the community happy.
Indeed we are more than website builders as our mission is not just making the website but creating fresh and modern solutions for the churches, ministries, and not-for-profit organizations. We believe in giving hope to the families who are living in addiction, abuse, and poverty. When you partner with Webezoid, you are partnering to our mission in Puerto Rico. You can learn more about A Puerto Rican Dream and https://apuertoricandream.com/.
Ready to choose Webezoid to be your church website builder? Reach us at https://webezoid.com/.
- WordPress.org – The most popular of all website builders across the world is designed majorly for commercial use. WordPress.org is even recognized as self-hosted WordPress means you are responsible for web hosting and domain name and handling the security on your own.
On a positive note, WordPress can be customized and someone having very little knowledge can still build the website using templates, features, and widgets. With a skilled developer and unlimited potential the WordPress, you can make the website you dream of.
WordPress supports the open-source content management system supports other web content too including mailing lists, media galleries, learning, management systems, and online stores.
WordPress is free of charge but you need to pay for the domain name and hosting services with your security updates and depending on the maintenance of the website the charges may shoot up.
- Gator – The all-in-one website solution though isn’t designed specifically for church websites but with its approach, it makes a good choice for congregations who don’t want on-demand tech support. Gator, the website builder has the fastest way to make the website look simply amazing.
You get to build the website in minutes with their easy website builders by following the below steps:
- Answering few questions
- Inserting a logo
- Adding images
- Making changes and,
- The website is ready to launch.
Gator is not a typical website as it automatically creates an optimized layout with industry-specific design with multiple features including unlimited bandwidth, unlimited pages, 24×7 support via online chatting, phone, email, and 200 templates to choose from.
No free options are available here but we do get a Gator suite of options wherein the pricing is as per the use. There is no built-in donation portal for the church unless you opt and pay for the e-commerce plan by donating a product in the store.
Gator is one such website that doesn’t require coding with overall less work, time saver, and easy website builder. With Gator you get a website mega fast but with WordPress, there is a learning opportunity through that you can build whatever website you want.
- Weebly – This is again an all-around website builder and is very much popular with small businesses who require a personal website. Weebly has lots of designs and templates to work from with an easy drag and drop feature.
Weebly isn’t specifically designed for church websites because the lack of a sermon app is evident. However, with the audio clips, it can be fulfilled with this missing feature. Donations for the church website can be made through with e-commerce facility but Weebly charges 3% for that.
Weebly apps are limited unlike others so if you are looking for something grand and extravagant then Weebly isn’t the choice for you but if you are planning to get small and a beautiful website then do opt for Weebly. Pricing for Weebly starts at 6$ per month and to remove ads with unlimited storage charges would be 12$.
Weebly automatically generates mobile versions for each website and its client gets the option to have any URL ending in .weebly.com, .com, .net, .org, .co, .info, and .us. The availability of this website is in 15 languages such as English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Polish, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Turkish.
- WordPress.com – 42% of the web runs on WordPress.com isn’t it amazing. They allow you to build a site, sell your stuff, start a blog, and much more. It offers dynamic functionality however .com was dedicated to personal websites having fewer features than commercial sites found on .org.
If you wish to update it at a later time then it is easier to port to WordPress.org. This website doesn’t offer a drag and drops feature so it becomes difficult to set up but the setup here doesn’t require HTML training or even advanced programming skills too.
The free plan available with WordPress.com is very limited and hence cannot be used for church websites. However, they offer the plans starting at as low as 4$ every month and get a chance to include one free domain name with 24×7 support. The premium plan with WordPress.com gives you access to more templates, themes, uploading a video at 8$. It even offers a business plan which allows installing plugins and you get to customize your website at a higher level with the charge of 25$.
WordPress.com stands out from others with the professionally designed themes for whichever website or styling you require and that too without a designer.
- Squarespace – Another huge option to make a designer website but again they are not specifically church website builders. Squarespace has the option of drag and drop that allows you to create a beautiful website.
Squarespace is very popular and hence there are plenty of designers who work in this space and an additional benefit would be a tech-savvy person to build more advanced features.
Squarespace can even provide the facility of porting the website. For church websites to accept donations directly through Squarespace they will need the plan starting at 18$.
The USP of this website is big photos, clean designs, and bold typography. With Squarespace, you just get started in 3 steps to grow your business online by creating a website from the templates, designer fonts, and color palettes that fit best to your style and professional needs. You get to sell anything by adding the tools of either online store, booking services, or third-party extensions.
You can stand out in any field, inbox, and social feeds with its on-brand email campaigns and social feed to retain the customers and grow the audience.
- Sharefaith – Sharefaith is designed specifically for the churches with partnering over 1,00,000 churches globally. Sharefaith believes to serve and teach with excellence.
Sharefaith has a mission to provide outstanding software to churches, ministries, and Christian-faith-based organizations. We effortlessly pursue improved ways to connect the church with the people in its sphere of ministry.
The templates, free images, plugins available to the customers were designed for the churches. Sharefaith permits you to test check the website builder before committing to buy. Event calendars, media libraries, and giving are all free basic support for setup. Though the tailored approach isn’t cheap with plans starting at $45 and since it has a smaller platform it won’t have the same functionality as of WordPress website.
Sharefaith is the church website builder with all-in-one church worship, outreaching resources to engage and to grow disciples they deal into church websites, apps and giving to kids, worship media, and even live streaming software. The pages for the church website include tithing and donations, church mobile apps, and church graphics.
Before your website is even completely loaded the visitor has already formed an impression for it and they make up their mind whether to continue engaging with you or move away to the next church website by continuing on the Google search results page.
Tips to enhance church website
- The biggest fix on the website is to add an action button. People visit websites to interact or they are looking for something so place a button or two where you can interact with the visitors.
- Give away as much knowledge as you can as visitors are typically there to understand what church is about and what separates it from others. Place the information in a flyer or a PDF that visitors can download and you will be amazed to see the difference what the information can make.
- Even the best of the wordings cannot overcome the problem of the layout as studies show when a human eye looks at the website it scans the content in a ‘Z’ pattern so make sure to organize the matter in the ‘Z’ pattern.
- A visitor will leave the webpage or scroll down faster if there is a scrolling picture gallery that rapidly switches. If there are rotating images then increase the time between each picture and ask the coworker to change the picture when it feels right.
- For viewing the website nothing would be equivalent to the mobile through the fantastic view can be seen from the desktop but if it doesn’t automatically format to the phone then the church will look incompetent. A website that is not mobile responsive is out of touch and lower in search by google so make sure to check how the website is displayed on mobile.
Having a great website is an add-on to engage the client, communities, and ministries. Take an hour and go through the list of the church websites and have the best shot to make it an amazing view.