The Perils and Pitfalls of a Church Website
A website is the primary evangelism tool of today's church. Is your site in good hands?
Today, nearly every new member and visitor to a congregation arrives via its website. Consequently, an effective online presence is no longer negotiable, but what constitutes “effective” is the stuff of lore and legend (the unhappy kind that can shatter congregations and old friendships).
As most congregations suffer through the long unwinding we previously described, they face five main problems in managing their online presence: continuity, competence, capacity, content, and cost.
Continuity: Too many churches rely on the goodwill and generosity of a handful of members who do nearly everything (the Pareto Principle applies even in your pews…). For example, Uncle Gustav bought the domain name for his church in 1999 on his personal VISA card. However, he was welcomed to his heavenly reward a decade ago without transferring the domain or providing login access to the service provider (who ceased to exist, anyway). The domain registration went unpaid, and now it has been claimed by a porn operation in a reverse evangelism sting. Alternatively, the short and easy-to-market domain name was allowed to lapse through inattention, so the heterodox congregation in town grabbed it, and all the pastor’s e-mails exist only in the NSA archives.
Every church should have a master digital assets administration document that exists in perpetuity and is updated at least once a year. It will record where assets like domain names are housed, how to access them, and how to pay for them. That document is incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands (think about a bad actor getting hold of a pastor’s e-mail archive…) and should be treated better than a state secret. Never e-mail it around, and keep a printed copy in the church safe. Every asset should have two-factor authentication switched on but not tied exclusively to a single individual who may cease to be a member at any time for several reasons.
Competence: Websites are fundamentally simple if 1995 is your benchmark. Lycos Angelfire sites are still out there, and they are awful, as are the static HTML pages meticulously stitched together by a well-meaning member who found the first edition of Websites for Dummies at Barnes & Noble. Modern websites are still simple as a concept but are difficult to execute well to be durable, coherent, and attractive.
You get what you pay for. At a minimum, use a drag-and-drop service like Squarespace or Wix if your church cannot afford a custom solution from a reputable service provider. However, be warned that your website will look and function like every other formulaic and templatized church website.
Capacity: To some degree, a church website can be a set-it-and-forget-it operation, but change is inevitable and constant. There are new pastors, new events, new live streaming keys, new two-factor authentication, new patches and vulnerabilities to exploit, new online giving options, new whizbang, new deplatforming threats, ad infinitum. Someone has to be responsible for updating the online presence. The most fatal mistake is to make the pastor responsible for that task - it should never be in his job description, even if he asks for it.
Use a system permissions-based heirarchy to distribute administrative access to, and control over, your online assets to trusted members. Train more than one person to manage routine tasks like weekly service updates or taking care of staff changes / important announcements. The best option is to rely on a service provider to be your backstop for everything - let it manage the master settings as a “super admin” and prevent all sorts of dramas in the life of your parish.
Content: Too many church websites are personal vanity projects amounting to little more than out of date calendars and benign pew gossip. Visitors are not interested in fluff - they could care less that your youth group played ping-pong on Friday night and had a great time replete with photos of the pastor affecting a goofy pose. They want red meat, so you must be clear about what you believe, teach, and confess. If your church name has one of those cutesy nouns or verbs in it , like “Legacy,” “Elevate,” “Community,” “Abundant,” “Celebration,” “Cultural,” “Unlimited,” “Relentless,” etc., etc., you have already lost. Go back to basics, the fundamentals if you must.
Our home church, Trinity Lutheran Church - Denver, took an apologetic approach with its website content. The result was 12,000 words supplemented with art and to be further fleshed out with short video companion content. It provides an unambiguous picture of the congregation and the confession it adheres to. There is no attempt to lure anyone; visitors will get the same doctrine and practice in person as they do online. Furthermore, Trinity repurposed the content into a small book, currently generating adequate yearly royalties to pay for the website.
Cost: Website costs are an infinite elastic band. A reasonably well-managed and serviced website can cost as little as $150 a year, including the domain name and multiple e-mail boxes. However, being cheap with a church website is a bad decision given that 999/1,000 times, it is the first engagement with your pastor(s) and congregation for visitors and prospective members.
Encourage your congregation to treat the expenditure as part of the church mission budget and to spend appropriately. Your best evangelism opportunities are actually already searching for your church via Google and Bing. So, be present, and don’t bother with advertising since that never yields enough return on investment. Rather, rely on having so much good content that the search engines cannot avoid you. Purpose your content to the context - a Lutheran congregation in Fort Smith, AR should have a very different focus than one in St. George, UT because your neighbors are asking different questions and getting the wrong answers from ChatGPT.
We can help with Web design and hosting
Ad Crucem provides a referral service to a trusted partner in Nebraska. Ad Crucem receives no commissions or fees from the service, and your church maintains a direct relationship with the company. Our sole goal is to give LCMS churches the best advantage online possible.
Example: https://www.chicagolutheran.com/ which now ranks 8th on Google without any SEO spending if you search for Chicago and Lutheran, compared with a previous rank of about 800.
Learn more about the St. John the Divine project.
Budget Website with monthly payments
1. Design and development: 36-month contract at $125/mo. Does not require a renewal after 36 months.
2. Hosting: $35/mo.
3. Maintenance: (patching, security, etc) $75 every six months.
Advanced Websites with an upfront payment
Add monthly hosting and half-year maintenance costs (see above)
1. Simple design: no imported content: $4,500.
2. Standard design: with some prior content imported: $7,500.
3. Sophisticated design: with considerable prior content imported: $10,500.
4. Complex design: with all prior content imported: $13,500.