You know how it is: We’re all going along, minding our own business, looking stuff up, maybe even working, and then, blam! BuzzFeed! Twitter buzzes, Pandora plays an ad, the microwave beeps. “Squirrel!”––anything can be a distraction. Visitors to your church website are no different.
As we’ve talked about before, your website may be the first thing a potential member sees of your ministry. Not your mission statement, not your church leadership, not your fancy lights, or the children’s play area. If you’re lucky, new visitors might know a member, or have heard of a program your church puts on. But usually, a quick click to your homepage is all you get. As much as you want this page to represent everything your community stands for, even more so, it needs to welcome, inspire, and engage online visitors.
Because your website is so important, we’ve collected some ideas to keep your website looking fresh and exciting. Updating consistently is one way to keep visitors interested.
3 Ways to Keep Your Website Up-to-Date
1. Update the Look
There are probably many graphic elements on your homepage: logo, featured image, navigation bar, or calls to action (like a ‘new here’ button). Some of these elements, particularly the featured image, should change with the season or coincide with special events your church is hosting. Others, like the logo and navigation bar, should always be consistent with your brand and style guide.
Updating the featured image is a perfect opportunity to show the many sides of your congregation. Capture some sincere moments in small group prayer. Or promote the fun your vacation bible school students have with a short video in place of the image. Your featured image is where you can showcase your church––and keeping it updated shows that you care about growth, not just stagnating in outdated photos. Breathe new life into your website with the simple idea of keeping the picture fresh. Avoid being static, and strive to always be thinking of the next way to graphically update your church website. How can you show what your church is up to right now?
2. Update the Content
Improving your website is not synonymous with adding to your website. The phrase “less is more” is a great advice, generally, but even more so online. Website clutter can come in many forms:
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Outdated or irrelevant blog/resource/event content.
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Language around processes or ministries your church no longer uses.
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Social media accounts that aren’t used or receive no engagement.
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Old contact information, staff pages, or member directories.
Having this outdated content on your website can give visitors and members the impression that your ministry isn’t modern, or that it’s not dedicated enough to technology for future generations. Try an informal audit from the user’s point of view. Not from inside the CMS tool, itself. Pretend you’re a visitor to your website. What are you looking for? This exercise can help you see areas you might otherwise overlook. Check for broken links, click through possible paths, and see what you find.
There are two other ways to ensure your church website is constantly improving and that the content is meeting the needs of your congregation:
1) Perform basic monthly data analysis to track page views, engagement rates, conversion rates, and contact churn. The real numbers of how many people are using certain parts of your site may surprise you––and show you where you may be putting a disproportionate amount of effort. Also, performing more in-depth quarterly analytic reviews can be very helpful to learn how to improve your church website.
2) Ask around. No surveys needed here! You simply want to make this an informal conversation to get a more honest and raw idea of how your members use your church website. What’s working? What’s not? Are there certain features they can’t live without? Or ones they’ve never even noticed before? This is an unprecedented level of user feedback that many for-profit companies and corporations even don’t have the opportunity to assess. Happily for us, the community nature of churches allows ministry communicators to be more involved in and know more about the “customer” (member) experience.
3. Update the Experience
When you have a beautiful, visually updated website without empty, outdated, or unused resources, you can turn to the next steps for improvement: additions. Many churches have fantastic features or content on their websites––but they forget to ask, “What’s next?” Where should your user go after they finish listening to online sermons? What follows when one of your members registers for a service event? It’s this idea of creating a second layer to your church communications that will add usefulness to your church website. It takes the experience one step further.
However, you want to be wary of adding just for the sake of adding. Build on what your congregation is already really excited about. Examine the elements of your online ministry that are already thriving, and figure out how to guide your members further down that path. For example, if your congregation is actively viewing and downloading your sermons, consider live-streaming or adding discussion question follow-ups to each sermon. These give everyone a next step in a direction they’re already showing great interest in.
These possible expansions would be a better way to use your communications time and resources than a new feature that your specific church hasn’t shown a great deal of interest in, such as a Snapchat account or a small group finder. Those features can be wonderful additions, but your time is better spent focused on improvements that will serve your community best.
