Are you engaging your audience with your church website? Do you have the following common church website features in place? It’s important to incorporate these elements into your church’s website and online presence. You will certainly be missing out on potential if you don’t have these features!
Feature #1-Sermon Library
An online sermon library is important because it provides a fantastic resource to members and guests alike, while opening up doors for great SEO! This is a fundamental resource for discipleship. Congregants can use your sermon library to catch up on sermons they missed or to go back and review sermons through deeper study. Potential guests visiting your website can also utilize your sermon library to sample your teaching and preaching. It allows them to get acquainted with your church’s theology before even stepping foot in your door. This will enable them to get context when they visit on a Sunday morning.
A sermon library can also contribute to better SEO rankings. After all, it’s a form of media and can be found through search engines. Adding a text description to your sermons is also a great way to improve SEO.
Feature #2-Social Media Strategy
Social media is such a central reality to our 20th century lives. It’s essential that churches take advantage of all the tools at their disposal to connect with and engage their audience. Is your church following social media best practices?
Because outreach is social by nature, it’s important to have a well-developed strategy to use social platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, to build relationships with your audience. Elements to consider when developing a social media strategy would include: audience (who are you trying to reach specifically), location (where you can reach them online), and content (what kind of content they will engage with).
Feature #3-Online Giving
Whether you run a Christian nonprofit or lead a church, chances are high that giving is what keeps your efforts funded. Churches and nonprofits can proactively optimize their giving system by implementing online giving. This will allow donors to give easily and quickly straight from your website. The possibilities for building a robust giving system are endless. Online giving can be customized to include donor tracking, recurring donations, donation goal progress bars, and much more.
Online giving is a key element that churches should implement in their online presence. It offers a simple donation option for busy people who value ease of use and efficient ways to give to the churches and nonprofits they care about.
Implementing These Components
Of course, it’s easy enough to say that these elements are important for your online outreach and ministry. It’s an entirely different thing to actually implement these elements! The good news is that there are plenty of resources to get your started! Our blog includes an article about the best sermon audio plugins for your website. We can also point you to the best practices for churches diving into social media. And we can help with online giving too!
