Your website is your first impression and it can be a path to increase attendance to your church. It’s the place people go to discover who you are, where you are, what you offer, and if your website offers what they are looking for. For churches, the website is not only the first impression but it’s also a key component for information, updates, and marketing outreach. Turning website visitors into attendees or church members takes some finessing and a few marketing tips.
Something every church should do is periodically update or test your website’s user experience (UX). How the user navigates around the website may seem intuitive but plan to give it extra time during website development and website updates to ensure the paths your users take make sense, are seamless, and get the users to their destination quickly. When thinking about what will increase engagement on your site and increase attendance to your church, consider the following ideas:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a clear way to bring more traffic to your website and increase attendance to your church. Once you’ve updated your website, and updated and simplified the UX of the site, you can then update SEO settings to bring more organic (free) traffic to your website. SEO can be complicated but we laid out a few steps you can easily take to improve your site’s SEO.
Increasing attendance to your church through your website entails making a connection between you and the visitor. Website visitors are looking for information, and church attendees are looking for connection. Bridge the gap by being as accessible as you can to those who are on your site. Some ideas on how to create connection points on your website include:
Humans are visual, to leave an impact quickly takes a visual effect. The easiest way to leave a quick impact on a visitor to your website is a profound and engaging header image. You want your visitors to feel welcome and moved to act. Here’s some ideas to accomplish that:
These days visitors, especially to churches, have a lot of opportunities, and they want to be able to get a sample of the messages and pastor’s work in advance. One way to increase attendance is to showcase the sermons. Sampling the sermons is an easy first step. It’s also an easy item to check off your to do list if you’re already recording or streaming sermons due to Covid. Be sure to make a place on your site to host the video and audio files so visitors can try out the messages and weekly members don’t miss out if they can’t make it due to illness or vacations.
Your website is your church’s central hub location for information, first impressions, and it serves as an interactive digital hospitality volunteer. It needs to be ready to be all of those things. We must guide and welcome visitors through our websites.We must take advantage of the possibilities technology offers us to be able to make this possible. A well-thought-out website with an effortless and attractive UX will make all the difference when new visitors find you, as you show them who you are and why checking out and attending your church will benefit them. Take some steps toward making your website a really great handshake.